Steven Millhauser - Voices in the Night - Stories

I waited. “You remember?”

“Of course I remember.” She looked at me teasingly.

“I’m not sure—”

“The room.”

“I still — I don’t—”

“I have to get the room ready. That’s what I have to do. The room. You remember.”

“Oh, the room, oh no no no, not tonight, I was just passing through. Let’s just — if we could just sit here and talk.”

“That would be very nice,” my mother said, placing one hand over the other, on her lap. She looked at me as if she were waiting for me to say the next thing. “If you see anything you like,” she said, raising a hand lightly and motioning at the furniture, the bamboo blinds, the framed grade-school drawings on the wall. “Anything at all.” Her hand returned to her lap. Slowly she closed her eyes.

I sat on the hot porch with its dusty windows, beside the old wicker table with the two cork coasters rimmed with wood. I felt that I wanted to say something to my mother, something that would make her understand, though what it was that I wanted her to understand wasn’t entirely clear to me. And we didn’t have all day, time was passing, I was here for just a short visit. “Mom,” I heard myself say, in a low voice. The clear sound of that word, on the quiet porch, troubled me, as though a hand had been laid on my face. “Can you hear me?” In her chair my mother stirred slightly. “I know I haven’t been here for a while, things kept coming up, you know how it is, but you know—” It was really too warm on the porch, with the sun coming in and the windows closed. I considered opening one of the windows and lowering the screen, but I didn’t want to disturb my mother, who appeared to have fallen asleep. In a vivid slash of light, her forearm looked so fiercely pale that a vagueness or mistiness had come over it, as though it were evaporating in the heat. I glanced at my gleaming watch. The afternoon was getting on. Yet I couldn’t very well leave my mother asleep on the porch, like an abandoned child, I couldn’t simply tiptoe away, could I, without saying goodbye. And there were things I wanted to say to my mother, things I had always meant to say to her, before it was too late. In the heavy sunlight, which pressed against me like warm sand, I leaned back and closed my eyes.

II

Often I dreamed of walking through the rooms of my old house, looking for my mother, only to wake up and find myself in a distant city. Now as I woke up in my old house, on the familiar porch, I had the confused sensation of entering a dream. For how likely was it, after all, that I was sitting on the porch of my childhood house, on a summer’s day, like a boy with nothing to do? I saw at once that the light had changed. Though sunlight still came through the dusty windows, a brightness had seeped from the air. Heavy-looking branches pressed against the glass. I saw one other thing: my mother was not there. Ropes of cobweb stretched from the top of a window to the back of the chaise longue. How had I not noticed them before? I felt ripples of anxiety, as if I’d been careless in some way that could never be forgiven, and flinging myself up from the chair, so that the legs scraped on the wooden floor, I threw a glance at the dusty branches and hurried into the kitchen.

She was not there. On the stove a dented teakettle, reddish black, sat on its unlit burner. In the changed light I saw thick streaks of grime on the stove, cobwebs in corners, a yellowish stain on the table. A square of linoleum curled back at the base of the refrigerator. Outside the dirty window, big leaves moved against the glass. The pane had a crack shaped like a river on a map.

I pushed open the creaking door and entered the living room. It was much darker than before. I imagined the sunlight pushing against the front of the house, feeling for a way in. My mother was standing with her back to me, in the middle of the room, like someone lost in a forest.

“Oh there you are!” I said, in a tone of hearty cheerfulness. She continued to stand there with her back to me. In the darkening room she seemed unable to move, as if the air were a cobwebby thickness tightening about her. I walked up to my mother, stepped around her as one might walk around a lamppost, and turned to face her.

“I was worried about you,” I said.

She raised her head slowly, in order to look up into my face. It seemed to take her a long time. When she was done, she frowned in perplexity. “I’m sorry,” she said, squinting up at me as if into a harsh brightness. “It’s hard for me to remember faces.”

I bent my face toward hers, thumped a finger against my chest. “It’s me! Me! How can you — listen, I know I haven’t been out here for a while, it’s hard to explain, there was always something, but I’m here now and I—”

“That’s all right,” she said, reaching out and patting my arm, as if to comfort me.

I stood before her, uncertain what to do. It may have been an effect of the darkening light, in that room of heavy curtains and closed shades, but her hair looked thinner than before, a few strands came straggling down, one of her eyelids was nearly closed. A white gash of slip hung below her crooked dress. Her face now struck me as gaunt and sharp-edged, as though the bones of her nose and cheeks were pressing through her skin. I looked around the room. The edges of the fireplace seemed to be crumbling away, the couch was sinking down under the weight of the heavy afternoon, the piano keys were the yellow of October leaves.

“Would you like to sit down?” I asked.

My mother looked at me with a puzzled frown. Her eyes seemed dim and vague. “That would be a very nice thing to do,” she said. She reached out and touched my hand. “You know, I’m not as young as we used to be.” She laughed lightly and lowered her hand. She looked at me again. “It’s so nice of you to come.” She glanced down, as if she were searching for something on the rug. I followed her gaze, wondering whether she had dropped a ring or a coin. In the room’s darker dusk, the pattern of swirling flowers had melted away.

When I raised my eyes, she was looking at me. “Such a nice boy,” she said, and touched the back of my hand with two fingers.

Again I took her upper arm, so thin that it was like grasping a wrist, and began directing her slowly toward the armchair beside the lamp table. She advanced with such difficulty that it was as if she weren’t moving her feet at all, but allowing me to push her along the surface of the rug. My hand, heavy with veins, reminded me of an ugly face. As we drew closer to the chair, my mother began to move so slowly that I could no longer tell whether we were making our way forward, inch by inch, or just standing there, like people trying to advance against a gale. I urged her on with gentle tugs, but I could feel her pulling back against my fingers. Then I noticed that her mouth was taut, her arm tense, her eyebrows close together. “It’s all right,” I whispered, “we can just—” “No!” she shouted, in a voice so fierce that I dropped my hand and stepped back in alarm. “Is there something—” I began, and at once it came back to me, her refusal to sit in my father’s chair ever again, all those years ago, after the funeral. Once more I took her arm, this time turning her in the direction of the couch. As we came up to the shadowy coffee table I saw a shape that I remembered, and I bent down to look at the blue man with the blue bundle on his back. Dust lay on his blue hair. One of his blue shoulders was chipped. “Look at that!” I said, picking up the statue and turning him from side to side. “Old Man Blue. Remember how I used to think he was the oldest man in the world?”

“Older and older,” my mother said.

At the corner of the couch she sat down rigidly, as though she could no longer bend in the right places. Though the room was warm, I drew the red-and-gray afghan over my mother’s legs. “Here,” I said, turning on the table lamp. The dim bulb flickered but did not go out. On the lampshade I saw a faded woman with a faded parasol, bending over a faded bridge. “Now we can sit and have a nice talk.”