Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [55]
Then Linus would set the baby aside and the two of us would study my photo: some high school girl in Alberta’s sequined shawl, strung with loops of curtain-beads, holding a plume of peacock feathers and giving us a dazed, proud, beautiful smile, as if she knew how she had managed to astonish us.
In the fall of 1972, Alberta died. We got a telegram from her father-in-law. YOUR MOTHER DEAD OF HEART FAILURE FUNERAL 10 A.M. WEDNESDAY. When he read it, Saul turned grim but said nothing. Later he called Linus and Julian into the sunporch and they held a conference with the doors closed. I hung around outside, fiddling with strands of my hair. When it came to matters of importance, I thought, I was not remotely a part of that family. Here I assumed I had broken into their circle, found myself some niche in the shelter of Alberta’s shadow, but it turned out the Emorys were as shut away as ever and Alberta had gone and died. Underneath I had always expected her back, I believe. I wanted her approval; she was so much braver, freer, stronger than I had turned out to be. There were a thousand things I had planned on holding up for her to pass judgment on. Now it seemed that these things had no point any more, and I thought of them all—even the children—with a certain flat dislike.
I went to find my mother, who was knitting in front of the TV. “Alberta has died,” I told her.
“Oh, my soul,” said Mama, not missing a stitch. But then she never had thought much of her. “Well, I suppose the men will be going to the funeral.”
But they didn’t, as it happened. That was the subject of the conference. Saul had told them he wasn’t going, and he didn’t think they should either, but that was up to them. They discussed it carefully, examining all the issues. This was what they’d come to: her gloriously wicked sons, now aging and balding and troubled by pathetic, minor errors. In her absence, their colors had faded. People are only reflections in other people’s eyes, it turns out. In Alberta’s absence her house had crumbled and vanished, her belongings had taken on a rusty smell. (She told me once that the Emorys had always been killed by horses; that was their mode of dying. But in her absence it emerged that only one had been: a distant uncle. The others had passed away in their beds, puny deaths they would have been spared if Alberta had only stayed around.)
Julian said he wouldn’t attend the funeral either. That left Linus, the only one who might have liked to go, but everybody knew that he wouldn’t defy his brothers. (Linus had a beard because he never had shaved, not ever, since the day his first whiskers grew in. That was how little he fought things.) “I’ll just stay at home and say a prayer for her in my mind,” he told Saul.
“Whatever you like,” Saul said.
It was Linus I heard this from, of course. Never Saul. Linus sat on a kitchen chair later, sanding a piece of wood the size of a postage stamp. For a couple of years now, he had been building dollhouse furniture. I don’t know why. And all of a sudden he said to me, “In my opinion, he should forgive her.”
“What?”
“Saul,” said Linus, “should forgive our mother.”
“Oh well, let him have one sin.”
“On the sunporch he said, ‘What makes me laugh is, that crazy old man outlived her after all.’ Grandpa, he meant. Then he really did laugh. Threw back his head