Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

I turn back, ashamed, and more estranged from my situation than ever.

When I return home the tutor has left and Colson is putting his drawings in order, cataloging them by some method unknown to me. When my mother and father were taken from us so abruptly I knew that Colson was terribly bereaved. Still, he did not want my father’s safari hat or his water-bottle holster. He did not want his watch or his magnetic travel backgammon. Nor did he want my mother’s collection of ink pens, which I suggested would be ideal for his drawings. He wanted no mementos. Instead he went directly to communication channels that are impossible to establish.

“Where were you, Daddy,” Colson asks.

“Why, at work,” I say quickly.

Surely I am back at my usual time. I seldom lie, indeed I cannot even remember the circumstances of my last falsehood. Why would he ask such a question? I kiss him and go into the kitchen to make myself a drink but then remember that I have stopped drinking.

“A lady came by today but I told her I didn’t know where you were.”

“What did she look like,” I ask, and of course he describes Jeanette to a T.

I am so weary I can hardly lift my hand to my head. I must make dinner for us but I think the simplest omelet is beyond my capabilities now. I suggest that we go out but he says he has already eaten with the tutor. They had tacos made and sold from a truck painted with flowers and sat at a picnic table chained to a linden tree. I have no idea what he’s talking about. My rage at Jeanette is almost blinding and I gaze at him without seeing as he orders and then reorders his papers, some of which seem to be marked with only a single line. I feel staggeringly innocent. That is the unlikely word that comes to me. Colson puts away his papers and smiles, a smile so radiant that I close my eyes without at all wanting to, and then rather gently somehow it is day again and I am striding through the bustling wasteland to Come and See! The reflection concerns Gregory of Nyssa. He is a popular subject but I am forever having difficulty in recalling what I already know about him. Something about the Really Real and its ultimate importance to us, though the Really Real is inaccessible to our understanding. Food for thought indeed, and over and over again.

When the meeting concludes and we are dismissed I practically hurl myself on Jeanette, who has uncharacteristically contributed nothing to the conversation this night.

“Don’t ever come to my house again,” I say.

“Was I really there, then? I thought I had the wrong place. Was that your son? A fine little boy. He can certainly keep a secret, can’t he.”

“I’ll call the police,” I say.

“Goodness,” she laughs. “The police.”

It sounded absurd, I have to agree.

“I was concerned about you,” she says. “You haven’t been here for a while. You’ve been avoiding us.”

“Don’t ever again…” I say.

“A delightful little boy,” she continues. “But you mustn’t burden him with secrets.”

“…come to my house.” I couldn’t be more insistent.

“Actually,” she says, “no one would fault you if you stopped attending. How many times must we endure someone making a hash of Gregory of Nyssa? People are so tenacious when they should be free. Free!”

I begin to speak but find I have no need to speak. The room is more familiar to me than I would care to admit. Who was it whose last breath didn’t bring him home?

Or am I the first?

She had been living there for a few months when an acquaintance said, “I think you should meet this person. She’s new. She lives over by the conservation easement, the one with the moths.” She, too, was the mother of a murderer, that was the connection, but Emily and this Leslie didn’t hit it off particularly well, though they were both fiercely nonjudgmental, of course. But then another mother, well into her twilight years but unaccompanied by caregivers, moved down less than three months later, around the Fourth of July, the time of pie and fireworks and bunting-draped baby carriages. It was as though some mysterious word had gotten out. These things happen, like when highly allergic people, practically allergic to life itself, all gravitate to some mountain in Arizona, or when a bayside town in Maine becomes the locus for lipstick lesbians overnight. Penny arrived next, followed by a few more mothers in quick succession until the influx stopped.

Nobody had to tell them outright that they had better be model citizens. When a bear mauled a young couple out at the state park, the mothers worried that the incident might be perceived as their inadvertent doing for weren’t black bears shy as a rule? And this was an extremely aggressive bear and small, hardly more than a cub, but determined and deliberate.

One mother, Francine, thought a hunter had shot the bear with a hallucinogen prior to the attack, just for fun, to see what would happen. “It must get boring for them to just shoot something and have it die,” Francine said. “Someone shot it with a mind-altering drug.”

“Most everything around here has been shot out for years now,” another mother said. “Where did this bear even come from?”

“Exactly,” Francine said.

The eldest mother had the sugar and was so arthritic she had long enjoyed the awe of X-ray technicians. She was half blind too and described herself as dumb as a box of nails, but she knew how to keep on living. Whereas Penny, who wasn’t even forty — she’d had Edward when she was sixteen — died of lung cancer without having ever smoked a cigarette, even in the worst of times.

It was Penny’s death that brought them together, though they weren’t about to take up the task of writing to her boy in prison. Penny had liked to say there was a part in each of us that had never sinned and that was the part of Edward she addressed when she wrote to him. But as the eldest mother pointed out, that was the same part that was never born and will never die. It was thus irrelevant. Better to address a plate with a covered bridge printed on it.

They still thought of themselves as being seven in number even though without Penny it was six. In general they believed that the dead remained around, fulfilling all but the most technical requirements of residency on earth, yet relieved of the banality of daily suffering. In this respect, they could argue, though they never did, that their children’s victims weren’t as bad off as commonly assumed.

Fathers didn’t flock like this, they agreed. Leslie had stuck it out with a father the longest. Their boy, Gordon, had done something terrible, just terrible. And he had been one of those kids who had never caused a bit of trouble. This was scarcely believable given what happened but there was the record, their boy, Gordon’s record, or rather the lack of it. Leslie said that after the trial, the outcome of which was never in doubt, she and the father tended more and more to behave as though they were performing before an audience. Not a sold-out house, to be sure, but a respectable enough number in attendance to ensure that the show wouldn’t close for a while. When the lights dimmed and they were alone, except for the audience, the spectators and listeners, it became all choked poise and memory pieces between them, with the occasional brilliant burst of anger and loathing.

“It essentially became vanity,” Leslie said.

The eldest mother said, “But what can you expect from men? They’re like a virus with a penchant for the heart. They got a special affinity for attacking the heart. You can recover, sure, but the damage is done.”

The fathers, it turned out, had all gone back to work. To a man they had returned to their places of employment. And they were doing all right. I’m doing, they’d say, when asked. Some had remarried. One had had his impulsive vasectomy reversed.