A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [45]
Angels ever round thee,
All through the night.
They should of all fear disarm thee,
no forebodings should alarm thee,
They will let no peril harm thee
All through the night.
I stared at the blurred words in the hymnal, hating the angels for taking my mother, and I thought then that I wouldn’t possibly survive to be an adult, that I couldn’t carry the thing in my heart that weighed so much and hurt, that I couldn’t possibly carry the load through all the years ahead of me.
At first I listened to the tape quite a bit. The flat black box on my dresser called to me. “It’s mother. I’m here.” I had to slide off my bed, had to pull the recorder to the outlet, and thread the brown ribbon through its slots. I knew that if I could look into the closet fast enough she would be behind the dresses, kneeling in the clutter of old shoes, with her arms outstretched. I flung open the door. Nothing. Nothing but the small thin words coming like worms out of the box in the corner of the room. The voice was out of breath, reading with forced expression. My mother hadn’t really been interested in the book after all. She had been in a wheelchair with a headband holding back what was left of her hair. The last time I’d seen her she had stretched out her veiny, trembling hand and then let it fall to her side, too tired, too tired to want me. It had been a trial to her to read the two chapters, each word an aggravation. I put the tape recorder in its yellow case at the back of the closet and shut the door. I sat on the bed and stared down the wall across the room. My mother was curled up like a cat inside the tape recorder, clawing at the holes, waiting for me to open the lid.
Aunt Kate, whom I had met briefly when I was four, was suddenly and improbably in our kitchen, cooking and quilting, making paper, doing our wash, working terrible jigsaw puzzles that were reproductions of Surrealist paintings. She wasn’t really my aunt, but a childhood friend of my mother’s. Years later I found out that she’d been living in Sweden and that she had not been told about my mother’s illness. She had no idea when she received an envelope in Stockholm that it was going to contain my mother’s last will and testament. She was fifty-one and half my size, with gray hair cut in a bob. The angels themselves could not have come up with a better replacement. She had been married once, very young, without success. Aunt Kate packed up her life in Stockholm, moved into the attic room in our house, and lived with us until she died of a heart attack, the summer before I went to college. It was an unlikely arrangement but my mother must have known that it would work. My father retreated into his gears and gadgets, into his study, where the liquor cabinet was kept. He was like a reclusive border, taking his meals on a tray in front of the news, ducking out in the morning to the office, coming home late. Aunt Kate treated me, not exactly like the daughter she’d never had, but like an old friend she’d traveled a great distance to find.
My freshman year in college I used to take the tape my mother had made for me to the music listening room. There the music students all sat in a row listening to Copland, Monteverdi, Handel, and Schubert, following their scores and chewing gum. I had been so lonesome and I wanted to hear from someone I knew. My mother’s voice came from the machine into my earphones. Her words, at full volume and in stereo, ran down my throat like water. I closed my eyes against college. I shut out everything in the present, waiting to be filled. All I needed was her voice to guide me through the darkness.
Chapter Seven
——
THE MORNING AFTER I’D met Theresa in the orchard Nellie got up at five o’clock, kissed Howard good-bye, and left for Minneapolis. She was admirable and courageous, going off to Rumania to tend sick babies for two months with a team of doctors and teachers. I had skulked around the back door the night before until she was out of the kitchen, and when the coast was clear I’d made a beeline for our bed.