Steven Millhauser - Voices in the Night - Stories

I stepped quickly up to her. “It’s — me,” I said, holding out my arms, but her head was bowed, evidently the effort of walking absorbed her full attention, and I stood awkwardly there, with my arms held out as if in supplication.

Slowly my mother raised her head and looked up at me. It was like someone gazing up at a building. In the shadows her face bore an expression that struck me as severe. I could feel my arms falling to my sides like folding wings.

“I know you,” she said. She stared hard at me, as if she were trying to penetrate a disguise.

“That’s a relief,” I made myself say.

“I know who you are,” she said. She smiled playfully, as if we were in the midst of a game. “Oh, I know who you are.”

“I hope so!” I said, with a light little laugh. My laughter disturbed me, like the laughter of a man alone in a theater. Quietly I said, “It’s been a long time.” And though I had spoken truthfully, I disliked the sound of the words in my mouth, as if I were trying to deceive her in some way.

My mother continued to stare at me. “I heard the bell.”

“I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

She seemed to consider this. “Someone rang the bell. I was coming to the door.” She glanced toward the hall, then looked again at me. “When would you like dinner?”

“Dinner? Oh, no no no, I can’t stay, not this time. I just — I just—”

“I’m sorry,” my mother said, raising a hand and touching it to her face. “You know, I keep forgetting.”

When she lowered her hand she said, “What do you want?”

The words were spoken quietly, in a tone of puzzled curiosity. It wasn’t a question I knew how to answer. What did I want? I wanted everything to be the way it once was, I wanted family outings and birthday candles, a cool hand on my warm forehead, I wanted not to be a polite middle-aged man standing in a dark living room, trying to see his mother’s face.

“I wanted to see you,” I said.

She studied me. I studied her. She was paler than I remembered. Her grayish hair, shot through with a violent white I had never seen before, was combed back in soft, neat waves. A tissue stuck out from the top of her dress. She wore no watch.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” she suddenly asked, raising her eyebrows in a way I knew well, a way that pulled her eyelids up and widened her eyes. I recalled how, whenever I came home from college, and in the years afterward, when I came back less and less, my mother would always say, looking up at me with eyebrows raised high and eyes shining with pleasure: “Would you like a cup of tea?”

“That’s just what I’d like!” I said, immediately disliking my tone, and taking my mother by the arm, which had grown so thin that I was afraid of leaving purple bruises on her skin, I led her slowly to the swinging door beside the carved cabinet with the marble top.

The kitchen was so bright that for an instant I had to close my eyes. When I opened them I saw that my mother, too, had closed her eyes. I thought of the two of us, standing there with closed eyes, in the sunny kitchen, like children playing a game. But no one had told me the rules of the game, maybe it was a mistake to have entered the kitchen, and as I stood in the brightness beside my silent mother, whose eyes remained tightly shut, I wondered what I was supposed to do. I thought of our infrequent telephone conversations, composed of threads of speech woven among lengthening silences. On the refrigerator hung a faded drawing of a tree. I had made it in the third grade. The counters looked clean enough, only a few crumbs here and there, the stove-top unstained except for a brownish rim around a single burner. When I turned back to my mother, she was standing exactly as before. Her eyes were open.

“Is everything all right?” I asked, irritated by my words, because everything was not all right, but at the sound of my voice my mother turned to look at me.

“Where did you come from?” she said gently, with a touch of wonder in her voice.

I opened my mouth to reply. The question, which at first had seemed straightforward enough, began to feel less simple as I considered it more closely, and I hesitated, wondering what the correct answer might be.

“Oh now I remember,” my mother said. Her face was so filled with happiness that she looked young and hopeful, like a girl who has just been invited to a dance. Although I was moved to see my mother’s face filled with happiness, as if she had just been invited to a dance, still I could not be certain whether what she remembered was that her son was standing before her, in the bright kitchen, after all this time, or whether she was remembering some other thing.

She moved slowly to the stove, lifted the small red teakettle, and began to carry it toward the sink. She frowned with the effort, as if she were lifting a great weight.

“Here, let me help with that,” I said, and reached for the teakettle. My hand struck her hand, and I snatched my hand away, as though I had cut her with a knife.

At the sink my mother stood still, looked down at the teakettle in her hand, and frowned at it for a few moments. She began struggling with the top, which came off suddenly. She placed the kettle in the sink and turned on the cold water, which rushed loudly into the empty pot. She turned off the water, pushed the top back on, and carried the teakettle to the stove, where she set it carefully on a burner. She stood looking at the kettle on the burner, then began making her way to the kitchen table. I pulled out a chair and she sat down stiffly. She remained very erect, with her shoulders back and her hands folded in her lap.

I stepped over to the stove and gave a turn to the silver knob. It felt familiar to my fingers, with its circle of ridges and the word HIGH in worn-away black letters.

When I sat down at the table, my mother, who had been staring off in the direction of the washing machine, slowly looked over at me. “I don’t know how long it will be,” she said. It might have been the state of my nerves, or the rigidity of her posture, or the solemnity of her tone, but I could not tell whether she was talking about the water in the teakettle, or about how much time she had left on earth.

“You look younger than ever!” I said, in that false voice of mine.

She smiled tenderly at me then, as she had always smiled at me. And I was grateful, for if she smiled at me in that way, after all this time, then things must be all right between us, in one way or another, after all this time.

“Would you like to sit on the porch?” she said, looking over toward the door with the four-paned window in it. Then I remembered how, in summer, she always liked to sit on the porch. She would sit on the porch with a book from the library and a glass of iced tea with two ice cubes and a slice of lemon.

I turned off the stove and led my mother to the windowed kitchen door. The dark red paint on the strips between the panes had begun to flake away, and I recalled taking a chisel long ago and scraping off the new paint that had gotten onto the glass.

I removed the chain from the door and led her down the two steps onto the hot porch. Under the partially rolled-up bamboo blinds, through which lines of sunlight fell, the windows were glittery with dust.

“You ought to let me lower the screens,” I said.

“You know,” she said, “there was something I was going to say. It’s on the tip of my tongue.” She touched her face with curved fingers. “I’m getting so forgetful!”

On the chaise longue my mother lay back as I lifted her legs into place. “It’s so nice out here,” she said, looking around with a tired smile. “You never hear a sound.” She half-closed her eyes. “I could sit here all day.” She paused. “Oh now I remember.”