The Clock Winder

11

Matthew sat by the hospital bed, looking at a Saturday Evening Post while his mother slept. He ran his eyes down a couple of lines, broke off in the middle, and turned the page. He glanced at a few more lines, turned another page. None of what he read was coming through to him. His mind was on his mother, who lay on her back with her hands by her sides. Her face seemed young and unlined. Her eyes moved beneath the veined lids, following dreams. When Matthew was small, coming in to wake her on a Sunday morning, he had watched her in just this way — jealous, back then, of her dreams, which might not be concerned with him at all. Now he hoped that he was farthest from her mind. “Don’t give her anything to worry about,” the doctor had said. “Let her sleep as much as she wants, keep her calm and quiet.” Which made Matthew consider, and reconsider, before he even opened his mouth. The most trivial small talk might lead to something disturbing. When she slept, he was relieved. He willed her into dreams of a long-ago time when she was young and untroubled. He sent her thought-waves of her youth, which for some reason he pictured against a sunlit, windy meadow sprinkled with daisies. “Before you were born …” she used to tell him, and that meadow would rise in front of him, with his mother running through it dressed in white and laughing, free of quarrels and tears and insufficiencies of love.

He glanced across the bed at Mary, who was knitting a child’s sweater. Every time she came to the end of a row she reeled more yarn off the ball with a long, sweeping motion and frowned into space a moment, as if she were trying to remember something. Once she sighed. “You must be tired,” Matthew said. “Why don’t you go on home?”

“Oh, no.”

And then she returned to her knitting. She had spent more time here than Matthew, even — two full days, planted in that armchair. And at night, when he took her home, her mind was still back with her mother. “If only I hadn’t quarreled with her,” she kept saying. “I mean, stated my case, but quietly. Put her off a little instead of coming right out with things. Do you think she blames me?”

“No, of course not.”

But there was no real way of telling. Their mother’s speech was difficult; she could talk, but only after false starts and hesitations. To save effort she kept to the bare essentials. “Water,” she said, and it could have been a polite request or a surly order, no one knew. Yet the doctor said she would be back to normal in no time. Already the paralysis was lifting. Her face merely had a numb look, as if she were under Novocain. Her hand was beginning to respond to massage, and she was anxious to try walking. “Your mother’s a remarkable woman,” the doctor said. Mary frowned, as if he had told her something she didn’t want to hear.

Margaret had come, but she had had to bring the baby. She only visited the hospital when Mary was home to babysit. And Andrew had arrived on the bus the day before, still pale and shocked over the news. “She’s fine, she’s going to be fine,” they told him. But he barely heard. In the hospital room he prowled nervously, stopping every now and then to lay a hand on his mother’s forehead, and finally they had sent him home in a cab. “But I want to be with her,” he kept saying. “Hush, now,” Mary told him, “you’ll only make her worse, going on like this.”

“Can I come back this evening?”

“She’ll be home day after tomorrow, Andrew.”

“Who will stay with her later on? Are you all going to leave her alone again?”

“No, no.”

“I’ll stay. I’ll come here to live, I’ve been meaning to for years.”

“No, Andrew.”

But who would stay with her? It was on all their minds. The girls had to go home soon. Matthew was planning to spend his nights there for a while, but his mother needed someone in the daytime. “Where is Alvareen?” Mary asked. No one had thought to wonder before. They looked at the house, which seemed stale and dusty. Not even Alvareen would have let it get that way. Had she quit? They asked Mrs. Emerson, who merely closed her eyes. “What’s her last name?” Mary said. “Do you have her phone number? We want her to come look after you.”

“No,” said Mrs. Emerson.

“No, what? You don’t have her number? Or you don’t want her to come.”

“I don’t want—”

“You don’t need a nurse, exactly,” Mary said.

“No.”

“Is there someone you can think of?”

Mrs. Emerson raised her good hand to her lips and frowned. She sighed, apparently about to give up, and then just as she was turning her head away she said, “Gillespie.”

Mary looked at Matthew, puzzled. “Gillespie?”

“Gil—” Mrs. Emerson struggled to a half-sitting position. She looked irritated. “Gillespie,” she said.

“Elizabeth,” Matthew said suddenly.

“Elizabeth? The handyman?”

Mrs. Emerson sank down again. Mary raised her eyebrows at Matthew.

“She’d be good if she’d do it,” Matthew said. “I saw her taking care of a sick old man once.”

“But you don’t think she’d do it,” Mary said.

“I don’t know.”

“You know better than anyone else.”

“What makes you say that?” Matthew asked. “Do you think I keep in touch with her or something?”

“Well, excuse me,” said Mary.

“Sorry,” Matthew said. “Well, give it a try, if you want. I don’t know what she’ll say.”

Mary tracked down Elizabeth’s parents right then, from the phone in the hospital room. She had the operator place the call person-to-person to Elizabeth. While she waited Matthew stood at the window with his back to the room, pretending to be looking at the view. He wound a venetian blind cord around his fist. “Lots of visitors today,” he told his mother. Mrs. Emerson made some small, impatient gesture that rustled the sheets. Then Mary tensed, listening. “I see,” she said. “Well, place the call there, then. Thank you.” She cupped the receiver and turned to Matthew. “They say she lives in Virginia now. They gave us the number to call her at work — some kind of children’s school.”

“School? Elizabeth?”

“They said—” She uncupped the receiver. “Yes? All right, I’ll hang on. They’re trying to reach her now,” she told Matthew.

But Matthew didn’t stay to hear. He had a sudden urge to get away, as far as he could from Elizabeth and even from the phone that connected her. “Think I’ll buy a cup of coffee,” he said, and he bolted from the room while Mary stared at him. Once he was outside he took several deep breaths. He pressed the elevator button, and then when it didn’t arrive immediately he pushed out the swinging door beside it and started down the stairs.

Elizabeth would never come. He didn’t even want her to. He had stopped thinking about her long ago. The hole she left, after the last time he saw her, had made him realize that he wasn’t happy living alone; and he had conscientiously taken out several other girls in that first empty year. One he had grown serious about. He had considered asking her to marry him. Then Elizabeth had unfolded herself from a dim corner in the back of his mind, shaken the dust off her jeans and stretched her legs. Her face was bright, threaded across with wisps of blond hair blowing in the wind. She was laughing with a careless kind of joy that took itself for granted. But once he had made his decision — broken off with the other girl, although he sometimes regretted it — he was no longer troubled by Elizabeth. His life had solidified. He was a man in his thirties who lived by himself, encased in a comfortable set of habits and a plodding, easy-going job. He liked things the way they were. Change of any kind he carefully avoided.

He bought a cup of coffee from a vending machine and drank it very slowly. Then he returned to his mother’s floor, using the stairs again, and when he got back Mary was peacefully knitting in her armchair. “Sssh,” she told him. “Mother’s asleep.”

He went over to the window. “Sun’s out,” he said.

“Is it?”

“The forecast was rain.”

“I talked to Elizabeth,” Mary told him. He stayed quiet. Mary untwined another length from her ball of yarn.

“I asked if she could come, but she said no. She’s not interested.”

“Oh. Well, then,” Matthew said.

“Then I thought of Emmeline. Remember her? Do you happen to know what her last name might have been?”

“Why are you asking me all these things?” Matthew said. “Ask Mother, she’s the one who keeps using people up and throwing them out. Wouldn’t you think she could just once keep someone?”

“There, now,” Mary said. “Keep your voice down, Matthew.” And she went on serenely knitting that endless sweater.

Mrs. Emerson came home in an ambulance, pale and mysterious on a wheeled stretcher. Mary rode with her; the others stayed at the house to meet her. As soon as the ambulance drew up to the curb Mary leaped out, all energy and efficiency. “Coming through! Coming through!” she called, and chased Matthew from the front door so that she could open it wider. “Is the room ready? Are the sheets turned down?” The men bore the stretcher up the steps. Mrs. Emerson stared straight into the sunlight with the corners of her mouth slightly curled. “Where is the doorstop?” Mary asked. Beside her, the others seemed drab and subdued. Margaret stood next to Matthew, with little Susan over her shoulder. Andrew waited just inside. His face loomed out of the dimness like a sliver of moon on a cloudy night. “Out of the way, Andrew,” Mary told him, but he paid no attention. “Should you be so loud?” he asked. “Mother? Are they going too fast?” The men navigated the stretcher through the house, calling out warnings and cursing newel posts and doorframes. Mrs. Emerson’s smile seemed to be apologizing for her sudden awkwardness. She had been so small, all her life. Now she had grown to the size of a bed, with four square corners to catch on furniture.

She was taken to the sunporch, which Mary had converted to a sickroom. Her twin bed filled one wall, with a table beside it already bearing a tumbler and a water pitcher, flowers in a vase, a pile of slick new magazines. At the other end were all the chairs that had once been scattered through the room. They were placed in a double row, as if Mary had planned on the family’s sitting there as rigid and watchful as an audience. Beneath one window was the television, its face newly Windexed, waiting to be depended upon.

“Easy, easy now,” one of the men said, and they lifted Mrs. Emerson from the stretcher. She held her neck stiff and clutched at her bathrobe. Matthew, watching her face, could tell when she tried to move her paralyzed hand and failed. There was a shift in her expression, a momentary distance in her eyes, as if she were surprised all over again at the failure and was just recollecting how it had come about. Then she was settled. Her lips moved, and firmed themselves, but instead of speaking she merely nodded to the men. They backed out of the room with the stretcher between them.

For the first hour, there was a concentrated flurry centered in the sunporch. A servant’s bell was brought in, and a reading lamp. Andrew put ice in the water. Susan was set on the bed but she cried and had to be taken away again. And everyone, without intending to, kept speaking for Mrs. Emerson. “How nice to be home!” Mary said. Then she caught herself, and laughed. Mrs. Emerson raised her head. “It fools—” she said. “Feels? Feels too hot?” said Matthew.

“Too cold,” said Mary.

“Strange,” said Andrew.

Mrs. Emerson brushed them all away. “Summery,” she said. Then she closed her eyes, as if she were disappointed at such a pointless remark after all that effort. Everyone rushed to make a fuss over it. “It does,” Mary said, and Andrew said, “It’s June now, you know. Good time to be on the sunporch.” They fell silent and looked at the slant of yellow light. “Tomorrow,” said Mary, “I’ll get the window washers in.”

Mrs. Emerson didn’t open her eyes.

Pianists, Matthew thought, are the ones that get arthritis, and artists go blind and composers go deaf. And his mother, who pulled all the family strings by words alone, was reduced to stammering and to letting others finish her sentences. All morning they supplied her words for her — never exactly the right ones, never in the proper tone. Tears of frustration kept slipping out of the corners of her eyes and forming gray discs on the pillow. Her chin trembled and her mouth turned downward. She gave her children the feeling that it was they who had failed.

They found her a memo pad, and closed her fingers around a ballpoint pen. But what good was that? Even writing letters to her children, she had preferred using a dictaphone first to try out the words on her tongue. She threw the pen away, with such a jerky movement that it landed in the bedclothes. Then she shook her head, over and over again. “Sorry,” she told them.

“It’s all right,” said Mary. “Nobody blames you at all. Do we? We know how hard it must be.”

Lunch was eaten in the sunporch, with Mary beside the bed helping her mother and the others in the lined-up chairs. Susan was put on the windowseat, where she popped all her peas with one finger and babbled to herself. Everyone was grateful to have her there. During breaks in the conversation they watched her intently, implying that there was much more they could be saying if only she hadn’t distracted them.

Supper was easier; their mother was asleep. But by then they were all exhausted. They ate sandwiches by a dim light in the dining room, on a table cluttered with bills and playing cards which no one had the energy to move. “How do nurses do it?” Margaret asked. “There are four of us. Wouldn’t you think we could manage better than this?”

Mary raised her chin from her hand and said, “Margaret, do you know Emmeline’s last name?”

“Emmeline. Emmeline — it will come to me. Why?”

“We figured she might take care of Mother after we leave.”

“Well, that’s a thought,” Margaret said.

“Mother knows her name, I’m sure of it, but she pretends she doesn’t. She’s latched onto the idea of Elizabeth.”

Andrew lowered his sandwich carefully to his plate, and Margaret shot a glance at him. “Then why not Elizabeth?” she asked.

“Margaret?” Andrew said.

“She won’t come,” said Mary, ignoring him.

“Did you try her?” Margaret asked.

“We called her this morning.”

“Really? Where’s she at?”

“Virginia,” said Mary. “I thought you kept in touch with her.”

“Oh, no. Not since, not for years. I wrote but she never answered. What’d you say to her?”

“This conversation is pointless,” Andrew said. “I would never allow her to come back here.”

“Well, she isn’t, so don’t go into a stew over it,” Mary said.

“Stew? Who’s stewing? I merely feel—”

“She isn’t coming, Andrew.”

“Can you guarantee that?” Andrew said. “She’s packing her bags right now, I can feel it. Wild horses couldn’t keep her away. Well, if necessary I’ll bar all the doors and lock the windows. I won’t allow it. Mother wouldn’t allow it.”

“Mother’s the one who asked for her,” Matthew said.

“There are other people she likes in this world.”

“But not that she asked for.”

“I’m surprised at her. I don’t understand her, she used to not even want to hear her name. Are you sure she said Elizabeth? Does she remember?”

“Mary,” said Margaret, “what did you say to her?”

“Just asked if she could help out with Mother a while. She said no.”

“Did you say it would only be for a short time? Did you tell her we’d just need her till Mother’s herself again?” “She didn’t give me a—”

“Did you say all we wanted was a nurse, pure and simple? No other problems dumped on her? Did you tell her we’d let her go back afterward to her old life?”

“Well, of course we’d let her go back,” said Mary. “Why should I bother telling her that?”

“You did it all wrong, then,” Margaret told her.

“I did the best I knew how.”

“We should call her again and give her a limit. Six weeks, say. Tell her six weeks is all she’d—”

“Margaret,” said Andrew, very quietly, “I’d like to state a preference, please.”

“You get sick and you can state your preferences,” Margaret told him. “This time it’s Mother that’s sick. Shall I call Elizabeth now? Matthew?”

“Babcock,” said Matthew.

They stared at him.

“I just remembered Emmeline’s last name. Babcock.”

“You’re right,” Mary said.

But Margaret said, “Emmeline’s not the one Mother asked for.”

“She’s much superior, though,” Andrew said.

“Emmeline wouldn’t even come! I’m sure of it! She never forgave Mother for firing her like that. Can’t I call Elizabeth?”

It was Matthew who settled it. “No,” he said. “I’m too tired. I don’t feel like any more complications.”

They finished their supper in silence. Even Andrew wore a defeated look.

At night they watched television. Mrs. Emerson had awakened but refused to eat. She stared at the ceiling while her children watched westerns they had no interest in, and when the picture grew poor no one had the strength to do anything about it. The frames rolled vertically; their eyes rolled too, following the bar that sliced the screen. “I’m sorry,” Mary said finally. “I seem to be sleepy. I don’t know why.” She kissed her mother good night. “Well, Susan will be up so early in the morning—” Margaret said, and she left too. Matthew followed shortly afterward. Andrew stayed behind, gazing at them reproachfully, but before Matthew was even in his pajamas he heard Andrew’s feet on the stairs.

Matthew slept in his old room on the second floor. He associated the room only with his early childhood; in his teens he had moved to the third floor with the others. The fingerprints on the walls here reached no higher than his waist, and the scars were from years and years ago — crayon marks, dart punctures, red slashes of modeling clay rubbed into the screens. Even the bed, which was full size, seemed hollowed to fit a much smaller body. He sank down on it and stretched out, without bothering to turn down the blankets.

There was some disappointment far in the back of his mind, a dull ache. Elizabeth. Had he really wanted her to come, then? But even thinking of her name deepened his tiredness. He pictured all the strains she would have brought — his own love and anger, knotted together, and Andrew’s bitterness. “I hate her,” Andrew had once told him. “She killed my twin brother.” “That’s ridiculous,” Matthew had said, but he had had no proof of it. He had spent years wondering exactly how Timothy’s death had happened; yet the one time Elizabeth seemed likely to tell him, down in Mr. Cunningham’s kitchen, he had been afraid to hear. Now he felt grateful to her for keeping it to herself. The worst strain, if she came, he thought, would be Elizabeth’s own. At least she had been spared that. Then he relaxed and slept.

When he woke it was still dark, but he heard noises downstairs. He switched on a lamp and checked his watch. One-thirty. Someone was running water. After a moment of struggling against sleep he rose, felt for his glasses, and made his way down the stairs. It was Mary in the kitchen, heating something in a saucepan. She looked blowsy and plump in a terrycloth bathrobe, with metal curlers bobbing on her head. “What are you doing here?” he asked her.

“Mother wants hot milk.”

“Have you been up long?”

“All night, off and on,” Mary said. “Didn’t you hear the bell? She wanted water, and then a bedpan, and then another blanket—”

“Why didn’t you wake me?”

“Oh, we’re all tired,” said Mary. “You too. And each time I thought it would be the last. It’s not even two o’clock yet. Do you think this will go on all night?”

“Maybe she’s uncomfortable,” Matthew said.

“She’s nervous. She wants someone to talk to. That water she didn’t even drink, and I bet it will be the same with the milk. Oh, I don’t know.” She slumped over the stove, stirring the milk steadily with a silver spoon. “I ended up getting cross with her, and now I feel bad about it,” she said. “There’s too much on my mind. I worry how the children are doing. And Morris, he can barely tie his own shoelaces, and his mother will be feeding him all that starchy food—”

“Go to bed,” said Matthew. “Let me take over.”

“Oh, no, I—”

But she gave up, before she had even finished her sentence, and handed him the spoon and turned to leave. Her terrycloth slippers scuffed across the linoleum, and the grayed end of her bathrobe sash followed her like a tail.

He filled a mug with hot milk and brought it in to his mother, who lay rigid in the circle of light from the reading lamp. “Oh,” she said when she saw him. Since the stroke, she had not spoken his name. She must be afraid that it wouldn’t come out right. She hadn’t said Margaret’s or Andrew’s names, either, and although he could see why — they were all such a mouthful — still he wished she would try. The only one she mentioned was Mary. Was there some significance in that? Was it because Mary was the only one who hadn’t eloped or had a breakdown or refused to give her mother grandchildren?

He propped up a pillow for her and handed her the milk, but after one sip she gave it back to him. “I hear you’re having trouble sleeping,” he said. “Would you like me to read to you?

She shook her head. “When—” she said, and then struggled with her lips. “When you were—”

“When we were children,” Matthew said, knowing how often she began things that way.

She nodded and frowned. “I, I read to—”

“To us,” said Matthew.

She nodded again.

“I remember you did.”

“I never—”

“You never?”

“I never—”

“You never refused?” said Matthew. “You never got tired? You never—”

“No.”

He waited, while she took a deep breath. “I never asked, asked you to—”

“You never asked us to read to you,” said Matthew. But that made so little sense that he was surprised when she seemed satisfied. He turned the sentence over in his mind. “Well, no,” he said finally, “you didn’t.”

“Money, Mary, Mary nooting, knitting—”

“Mary knitting,” said Matthew. “Beside your bed? In the hospital?”

“Gave my life,” his mother said.

“Oh. Saved your life. By calling the police.”

“Gave.”

“Gave your life?”

“Like a mud, a mother,” his mother said. Matthew puzzled over that for a long time. Finally he said, “Are you worried that it’s us taking care of you now?”

She nodded.

“Oh, well, we don’t mind,” he said.

His mother didn’t speak again, but she might as well have. The words locked in her head crossed the night air, crisp and perfectly formed: I do. I mind. But all she did was turn on her side, away from him. Matthew switched off the lamp, unfolded an afghan, and settled himself in an easy chair at the other end of the room. Shortly afterward he heard her deep, even breaths as she fell asleep.

In this sunporch, where the family had always gathered, Mrs. Emerson’s long-ago voice rang and echoed. “Children? I mean it now. Children! Where is your father? When will you be back? I have a right to know your whereabouts, every mother does. Have you finished what I told you? Do you see what you’ve done?” On Timothy’s old oscilloscope, she would have made peaks and valleys while her children were mere ripples, always trying to match up to her, never succeeding. Melissa was a stretch of rick-rack; Andrew’s giggles were tiny sparks that flew across the screen. Margaret only turned the pages of her book and tore the corners off them. She was a low curved line, but Matthew was even lower — the EKG of a dying patient. He pulled the afghan up closer around him. His mother slept on, her moonlit profile sharp and strained, her mouth pulled downward with the effort of accepting when she had always been the one to pour things out.

He slept, and she woke him three times — once for water, once for the sound of his voice, once for a bedpan. For the bedpan she insisted that he call one of the girls. He climbed the stairs in the dark, hesitated at Mary’s door, and then woke Margaret. While she helped her mother he stayed in the living room and kept himself awake by watching a pattern of leaves moving over the Persian rug. Then Margaret came back out and tapped him on the shoulder. “Do you want me to take over?” she asked. “You look dead on your feet.”

“No, I’m all right.”

“I called Emmeline. She won’t come,” Margaret said.

“We’ll find someone.”

“Matthew, you know that I could change Elizabeth’s mind. Mary didn’t put it to her right.”

“No,” Matthew said.

“I could have her here in an hour, if she took a plane.”

“There are agencies all over Baltimore that can help us out with Mother,” Matthew said.

He went back to the easy chair. Its rough fabric had started prickling through his pajamas, and he kept shifting and turning and rearranging the afghan while his mother lay tense and wakeful at the other end of the room. “I want—” she said. But in her pause, while he was waiting for her to finish, Matthew fell asleep.

He awoke at dawn. Every muscle in his body ached. “Oh, Matthew,” someone said, and for a moment he thought it was his mother, finally getting around to saying his name; but it was Margaret. She stood over him, fully dressed, holding Susan. Susan wore a romper suit and straddled her mother’s hip with small round legs still curved like parentheses. She looked down at him solemnly. “Hi there,” he told her. “Matthew, you look terrible,” Margaret said.

“I’m okay.”

He looked over at his mother. She was watching them out of eyes the same as Susan’s — round and pale blue and worried. “How you doing?” Matthew asked her.

“I fool—”

“You feel?”

“I fool I’m—”

She flattened the back of her hand across her mouth. Tears rolled down her stony face, while she stared straight ahead of her. “Mother?” Matthew said. He struggled up out of his chair, but then there was nowhere to go, nothing to say. He and Margaret stood there in silence, already defeated by the day that lay ahead of them.

Everyone agreed that Matthew should go to bed now — even Matthew himself. But first Mary brought him a breakfast tray in the sunporch, and while he was buttering a roll his head grew so heavy that he laid his knife down and leaned back and closed his eyes. He felt the tray being lifted from his knees — a falling sensation, that made him jerk and clutch at air. “You should go upstairs, Matthew,” Mary said. But he only slid lower in his seat and lost track of her voice.

He dreamed that he was in a forest which was very hot and smelled of pine sap. He was walking soundlessly on a floor of brown needles. He came upon someone chopping wood, and he stood watching the arc of the axe and the flying white chips, but he didn’t say anything. Then he felt himself rising out of sleep. He knew where he was: on his mother’s sunporch, swimming in the bright, dusty heat of mid-afternoon. But he still smelled the pine forest. And when he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was Elizabeth in a straight-backed chair beside his mother’s bed, whittling on a block of wood and scattering chips like fragments of sunlight across her jeans and onto the floor.