The Hand That Feeds You

20

The nine-hour drive to Rangeley, Maine, gave me too much time to think about what I was headed into. I’d stopped alongside the Androscoggin River to walk for a bit, even in the cold, to try to summon compassion for Bennett’s mother before I got to the Lake House, the bed-and-breakfast she owned.

Rangeley in winter is a quiet, snow-packed small town, nothing like it would have been in summer, with tourists filling the small lodges and covering the lake in kayaks and sailboats.

I didn’t hurry to the Lake House. Bennett’s mother was not expecting me until evening, and I regretted having allowed her to insist that I stay there. When I told her on the phone that I had been engaged to her son, his mother — who had only been told ten days before that her long-missing son was dead — thought that I was calling about coming to his funeral. It was scheduled for this Sunday. I swallowed my surprise at what I had blundered into. I didn’t tell her the real reason I wanted to talk with her. She told me how much it would mean to her to meet me and have me at the service. I found myself relenting in the face of a mother’s wishes. I would use the occasion to find out as much as I could about her son as a child. I would conduct research.

I parked Steven’s used Saab a couple of blocks away and walked past the Lake House. I wanted to size it up before entering. I passed a couple of sporting-goods stores, a homemade-doughnut shop, and a pub with a couple of old men at the bar. Across the street, behind a strip of cafés and a gas station, was Rangeley Lake, iced over in patches, boathouses locked. I assumed his mother’s would be similar to the B&Bs Bennett had taken me to. But instead of lace curtains and lit-candle lamps, the windows of the Lake House were covered with dark shades. While I would not expect window boxes planted with flowers in early December, I was surprised that the flagstone path to the front door was not even marked by small lanterns in the dark. Nothing covered the glass front door, so I could see into the sitting room before I rang the bell. Nothing frilly, just knotty-pine paneling and utilitarian camp furniture.

A wiry, white-haired woman opened the door. “I’m Jimmy’s mother.” From there on, I made myself think of Bennett as “Jimmy.” Renee hugged me, whereas I had offered my hand in greeting. She put a hand to my back to urge me into the warmth of the parlor. She had a pot of water boiling for tea in the kitchen and asked if I’d eaten.

Had I?

“I’ll warm up some chicken soup someone brought over last night. People have been very kind.”

“Thank you.” I thought nothing she could tell me about Jimmy was worth this.

“You’ll have your pick of rooms tonight. I’ll show you the place after dinner. It’ll just be the two of us. Jimmy’s sisters can’t join us.”

Fuck me.

Instinctively, I looked toward the door, gauging an exit. I would rather have had the sisters join us than sit with the grieving mother through dinner. But was she grieving? She moved about the kitchen like an athlete — efficient and deft. She wore no makeup. She was maybe sixty-five, and her white hair was braided down her back. She wore jeans and a turtleneck, topped with a heavy, red plaid overshirt. She must have kept the temperature on the low side to save money, I thought. It was chilly. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her lids puffy, as though she had been crying — over her son’s death, or a lifetime of being wounded by him?

I wandered into the parlor and looked at the framed photos set about the room. Several were shots of what must have been the two daughters as young girls on a rocky beach. With them — a boy. Their brother, Jimmy. The girls are focused on something in the plastic pails they carry, but Jimmy is looking into the camera. I had to be careful not to project what I knew about his later behavior onto this image of a boy who looked to be no more than eight. Even so, his gaze had an intensity that I did not associate with a child.

Another family photo showed his sisters playing with a kitten. Beside it was a photo of the girls, looking no older, playing with a dog. What had happened to the kitten? Jimmy was not in either of these photos. I tried to rein in my worst-case scenarios, but why wasn’t he pictured with their pets? And where was their father? On the mantel was a photo of Jimmy as a teenager, maybe around seventeen. I would have had a crush on him in high school. He wore a leather bomber jacket over a white T-shirt and jeans — the universal bad-boy fashion he had continued to wear for years. His hair was long and he had an attitude; he had potential. I wondered if his mother always displayed the photo, or if she had brought it out when she learned of her son’s death.

Renee called me into the kitchen and asked if I minded eating at the small table there. She said it was warmer because of the stove. I had peeked into the main dining room for guests, and it was dark and uninviting.

Sitting inches from Jimmy’s mother, I was suddenly shy. I was glad that she jumped right in with a question about her son. “Can I ask you something? What was my son like?”

I couldn’t begin to answer that.

“I know, it’s too big a question. But I haven’t known him for twenty years. And here you are.”

The burden was outsize. I had contacted her, I reminded myself. I had sought her out. I owed her an answer. But did I owe her the truth?

“He was charismatic. He was adventurous. He loved Maine.”

“He was here in Maine?”

Anything I might say to her would be loaded, could bring her pain. I told her a white lie. “He only talked about it.” It seemed like a good save.

“Did he talk about his family?”

“Jimmy lived in the moment.”

“Didn’t he.”

I thought she had agreed with me awfully fast. I tried to head off another question for a moment. “What was he like as a boy?”

“He certainly was charming. He could talk his older sisters into anything. He once fixed a homemade parachute and had Vanessa test it by jumping off the roof of the garage. She was lucky she didn’t break a leg, or worse.”

Her tone told me it amused her to recall this event — but only because her daughter had not been hurt.

“He was the brightest of my children, but he hated school. He couldn’t abide teachers telling him what to do. I sent him to military school but he ran away. His father had been in the Air Force. Jimmy never met him.”

I wanted to know if the father had died or deserted the family, but I didn’t feel I could ask. “What did Jimmy want to do when he grew up?”

“Last I knew, he wanted to be an artist, or a musician. But I never saw him draw, and he didn’t have the patience to practice an instrument. What was he doing when you met him?”

The woman would be burying her son the next day. I told her he had had an art gallery and later represented musicians, the fiction that would give her some peace. But I wanted the truth from her.

“He was such a mystery to me,” she said.

That was the truth.

We finished eating, and I must have looked tired from the drive. Renee told me to follow her upstairs, where she gave me a choice of two similarly decorated rooms. “This one gets the morning light,” she said, so I chose the other, hoping to sleep in. The funeral wasn’t until one. We said good night to each other — no hug this time — and when I’d closed the bedroom door, I hung up the black dress I had brought for the funeral. I had worn it before to a cocktail party, but this time I’d wear it with black tights instead of lace thigh-highs.

• • •

I woke to an argument downstairs the next morning.

“How could you let her stay here?” The woman made no attempt to keep her voice down.

I heard Renee say, “It’s not her fault. She drove nine hours to attend his funeral. I have plenty of room here.”

“So now we have to make conversation with his girlfriend all day?”

“She was his fiancée,” Renee corrected.

“That’s her tough luck.” Which sister was it who was so angry that I was there?

“She’s actually quite nice. You’ll see.”

I chose this moment to go downstairs. I needed coffee, and I hoped that Renee had thought to make some, even for one guest. I braced myself to meet the sister.

“Morgan, meet my daughter Vanessa.”

Vanessa was the female Bennett. The female Jimmy. A few inches shorter than her brother, Vanessa had the same dark hair and blue eyes, even stood the same way, leaning on one hip. She was not yet in her funeral dress, or maybe she didn’t plan to change for the service. She wore basic winter gear via an L.L. Bean outlet store. Vanessa sized me up, not even pretending otherwise. I spoke first, telling her I was sorry about her brother.

“His first time home in twenty years,” she said. “I guess he can’t leave this time.”

I asked Renee if there was coffee in the kitchen, and when she offered to bring me a cup, I said I would get it myself. But Renee insisted, so I was left with Vanessa.

“What he put her through,” Vanessa said, not needing to continue. There was nothing to say to that. Especially without coffee.

I tried another approach. “When will I meet Lisa?”

“She’ll be along,” Vanessa said, not making anything clear.

Even though Vanessa was being rude, I was fascinated by how much she looked and sounded like Jimmy. I wanted to goad her, to see the likeness fully animated.

“You look like him,” I said, knowing she would refute this.

“You mean, he looks like me. Looked.”

“Does your mother know how he died?”

“It was your dogs, we heard. I guess it was guilt that brought you here.”

“I wanted to know more about the man I was going to marry,” I said, not taking the bait.

“So do we. But my mother can’t take any more bad news.”

Renee brought in coffee and a plate of store-bought cinnamon rolls. She apologized for not making a bigger breakfast, and Vanessa reminded her that it was the morning of her son’s funeral, and no one expected her to be bothered with anything else.

“Sit, sit, please,” Renee said to both of us.

I took a seat at the dining table, but Vanessa remained standing.

“Are you going to go change, honey?” Renee asked her daughter. “Have you decided to come to the service?”

I had not realized this was a possibility, that Jimmy’s sister might be a no-show at his funeral.

“Lisa will be here at noon. She can give us all a ride,” Renee said.

“If I’m here, I’m here.” Vanessa wrapped a cinnamon roll in a paper napkin to take with her.

“She’s protective of me,” Renee said, after Vanessa left. “I can’t be short with her for that.”

“I want you to know how sorry I am. Nothing could have prepared you for this.” I thought the word this was inclusive enough to mean as much or as little as his mother wanted to consider. I was not going to revisit the way he died. I would take my cue from her.

“I appreciate your coming all this way, but I’d like to be alone for a while.”

I grabbed my coat and gloves and made as graceful an exit as I could; I walked along the lake to the old-fashioned doughnut shop I’d seen when I drove in. I could tell I was the object of curiosity for the girls behind the counter. Was a stranger so uncommon in this place off-season?

No need to ponder this long, as a woman about Jimmy’s age offered me the empty seat at her table. “You here for Jimmy’s funeral?”

“You knew Jimmy?”

“Since grade school. So you’re the one who got him to settle down.”

The one?

“I had my eye on him back then, but I dodged a bullet.”

What had they all known about him that I had missed? “What are you talking about?” So far, everyone but Renee had been supremely nasty to me.

“Does it matter now?”

“It matters to me.”

“Maybe you dodged a bullet, too. He stole his mother’s savings before he skipped town.”

I remembered a wise friend once told me that if you want to know how a man will treat you, look at the way he treats his mother.

“That, and — I don’t know — he sampled every girl in town.”

I was both sickened and excited to have this information. I wanted to keep this woman talking, and I wanted to hear nothing more. She made the decision for me.

“Been a pleasure,” she said, rising. “Give my best to Renee.”

She left me with my untouched coffee and the feeling that I had chosen the wrong profession. I knew nothing about people.

• • •

Lisa picked us up in an old, black Jeep Cherokee. She gave Renee her arm as we walked to the car. Vanessa got out of the passenger seat to let her mother sit in the front, which meant that she and I would share the backseat. She hadn’t changed clothes for the funeral. Renee wore a black wool skirt and cardigan over a print turtleneck, black stockings, and flats. Lisa had made an effort. She wore a simple, fitted, black dress under a camel-hair coat, and black, knee-high boots.

Vanessa said, “Would you turn on the radio?”

Lisa sounded shocked. “Are you kidding?”

“What’s wrong with a little music?”

Renee said she didn’t mind if they put on a classical station.

“Then forget it,” Vanessa said.

My pulse sped up when she said that — it could have been her brother speaking.

We rode in silence after that, except for the sisters contradicting each other about the better route to the church. Bennett had told me he was raised Catholic, so I was not surprised to see Lisa turn into the parking lot of Our Lady of the Lakes in Oquossoc, an elegant red-brick Catholic church ten minutes from Rangeley. Inside it reminded me of a German beer hall with its Bavarian beams crisscrossing the ceiling.

I would not have been surprised to see every pew filled, nor would I have been surprised to see them empty. If it was the former, I felt the townspeople would be there for Renee, not her errant son. I was right: the congregation included only people Renee’s age, and most of them were women — and I was wrong: the pews were far from filled. An organist played “Be Not Afraid,” one of the standard Catholic funeral hymns, I knew. Give me a reason, I thought, to be not afraid.

“What did you spend on that casket?” Vanessa asked her mother.

Lisa shushed her, so their mother didn’t have to.

“Seriously,” Vanessa said. “You need a new furnace.”

Renee said, “Drop it.”

Then the priest approached. Father Bernard greeted the family and nodded my way when Renee introduced me. He held Renee’s hands and spoke softly to her, the time-worn words of solace. When he turned from her to walk to the pulpit, I debated whether I would kneel along with the congregants during the service or keep my seat. I wasn’t Catholic, but I didn’t want to draw any more attention in the small town. Even if I knelt, I would not be able to take communion. Damned if I did, damned if I didn’t.

The funeral mass was in Latin — Renee told me she had asked for that — and I let the sounds wash over me without meaning. I found the rituals soothing, even though they were not my rituals.

The last funeral I had attended was Kathy’s, a “green” funeral. No coffin, no headstone; we carried her shroud-wrapped body on a handcart deep into a forest in her native Virginia to a designated area where we, her friends, dug the grave. Kathy weighed practically nothing at the end. We lifted her off the cart and laid her in the ground. After we filled the grave, we scattered leaves over the freshly turned earth and brushed away our footprints with branches.

After this service, the priest summoned several young men from the congregation to carry the coffin out of the church. It was customary for the family to follow before everyone else, but was I family?

At the graveside service the priest invited the mourners to make “a suitable gesture of farewell.” Renee, crying quietly, threw a single white rose onto the lowered coffin. Lisa threw a handful of dirt into the grave. Vanessa looked down on her brother’s coffin. I had the terrible feeling that she was going to spit on it. But she simply turned away without doing a thing. I wondered if she would yank me back if I stepped forward to say a farewell. I had nothing to say, and nothing to scatter on his coffin.

Vanessa helped her mother leave the graveside. Lisa stood off by herself crying.

I was not a good enough actress to convince Lisa that I shared her loss, but I tried to express something along those lines anyway. She thanked me and said she would miss him, even though she’d already been missing him all those years since he had left the family. And then she said it upset her that his death was so violent.

“Can I ask you something? Was he ever violent?”

“What do you mean?” Lisa seemed surprised by my question. “Was he violent with you?”

I told her that the Boston police think he murdered a woman.

“No one told us that. Who do they think he killed?”

“His fiancée.”

“Then who the hell are you?”

“He had more than one.”

“I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

Vanessa noticed her sister’s agitation and left their mother surrounded by friends. She came over to ask what was going on.

“She says Jimmy’s a murderer,” Lisa said. “That he killed his fiancée. His other fiancée. How do you like that?”

“I don’t know who you are or what you want from us, but you can leave right now,” Vanessa said.

She looked and sounded so much like Bennett that it felt as though he were ordering me to leave his own funeral. It was the last time I would obey him.