Chapter 8 #5
“Start a box for him anyhow. I bet wherever he lives is nothing but bare walls.”
“I asked him yesterday,” Amanda said, “whether he had let his landlady know that he was coming back, and all he said was, ‘We’re working on that.’ ”
“ ‘Working on that’! What is that supposed to mean?”
“He’s so darn secretive,” Amanda said. “He pokes and pries into our lives, but then he gets all paranoid when we ask about his.”
“I think he’s mellowing, though,” Jeannie told her.
“Maybe losing Mom has done that. When I was taking down the wall of photos in his room, I asked him, ‘Should I just chuck these?’ All those photos of the Daltons, those chunky aunts from the forties with their shoulder pads and thick stockings. But Denny said, ‘Oh, I don’t know; that seems kind of harsh, don’t you think?
’ I said, ‘Denny?’ I actually knocked on the side of his head with my knuckles.
‘Knock knock,’ I said. ‘Is that you in there?’ ”
“Good,” Amanda said promptly. “Let’s give him these.” And she reached for a sheet of newspaper and started wrapping a photo.
“Denny’s getting nicer and Stem is getting crankier,” Jeannie said. “And Dad! He’s being impossible.”
“Oh, well, Dad,” Amanda said. “It’s like you can’t say anything right to him.
” She placed the wrapped photo in the carton Jeannie had just set up.
“He’s been fretting about the house so,” she said.
“How long it will take to sell it, how people might not appreciate it … So I asked him, I said, ‘Should we try and get in touch with the Brills?’ ”
“The Brills,” Jeannie repeated.
“The original-owner Brills. The ones who had the house built in the first place.”
“Yes, I know who they are, Amanda, but wouldn’t they be dead by now?”
“Not the sons, I don’t imagine. The sons were only in their teens when Dad was a little boy.
So I said, ‘What if all these years the sons have been pining over this house and wishing they still lived here?’ You remember what one of them said when their mother said they were moving.
‘Aw, Ma?’ he said. Well, you would think I’d suggested lighting a match to the place.
‘What are you thinking?’ Dad asked me. ‘Where did you get such a damn-fool notion as that? Those two spoiled Brill boys are not ever getting their hands on this house. Put it right out of your mind,’ he said.
I said, ‘Well, sorry. Gee. My mistake entirely.’ ”
“It’s grief,” Jeannie told her. “He’s just lost the love of his life, bear in mind.”
“Which loss are you talking about—Mom or the house?”
“Well, both, I guess.”
“Huh,” Amanda said. “I never heard before that grief makes people bad-tempered.”
“Some it does and some it doesn’t,” Jeannie said.
They had reached that stage of packing where it seemed they’d created more mess than they had cleared out.
Several half-filled cartons sat open around the room—the photos in a carton for Denny, blankets in a carton for Red, a mass of Abby’s sweaters in a carton for Goodwill.
With each sweater there had been a debate—“Don’t you want to take this?
You would look good in this!”—but after holding it up for a moment, one or the other of them would sigh and let it fall into the carton with the rest. The rug was linty, the floor was strewn with cast-off hangers and dry-cleaner’s bags, and a hard gray light from the stripped windows gave the room a bleak and uncared-for look.
“You should have heard Dad’s reaction when I told him he should maybe leave this bed behind and take a single,” Amanda said.
“Well, I can understand: he wants the bed that he’s used to.”
“You haven’t seen his apartment, though. It’s dinky.”
“It’s going to feel weird to visit him there,” Jeannie said.
“Yes, last night I had this peculiar moment when I was saying goodbye to him. He asked, ‘Don’t you want to take some leftovers with you?’ Mom’s thing to ask!
‘It’ll save you from cooking supper,’ he said, ‘one of the nights this week.’ Oh, Lord, isn’t it strange how life sort of … closes up again over a death.”
“Even the little boys have adjusted,” Jeannie said. “That’s kind of surprising, when you think about it—that children figure out so young that people die.”
“It makes you wonder why we bother accumulating, accumulating, when we know from earliest childhood how it’s all going to end.”
Amanda was looking around at the accumulation as she spoke—at the cartons and the stacked pillows and the tied-up bales of old magazines and the lamps with their shades removed.
And that was nothing compared with the clutter elsewhere in the house—the towers of faded books teetering on the desk in the sunroom, the rolled carpets in the dining room, the stemware tinkling on the buffet each time the little boys stampeded past. And out on the front porch, waiting to go to the dump, the miscellaneous items that no one on earth wanted: a three-legged Portacrib, a broken stroller, a high chair missing its tray, and a string-handled shopping bag full of cracked plastic toys with somebody’s small, clumsy pottery house perched on top, painted in kindergarten shades of red and green and yellow.