Promises to Keep - Ann Tatlock [112]
It was when I put Valerie to bed one night that I understood what Tillie had been trying to tell me on the day I got my tonsils out.
“Tillie, how do you know if you’re going to end up in heaven?”
“Well now, that all depends on who your father is.”
When Valerie folded her small hands together and said – she was saying it correctly now – “Our Father, who art in heaven . . .” I thought, Oh. Of course. That’s what Tillie was talking about.
One more thing I should have seen earlier. But no one had ever told me God was a father. I had always simply thought he was God.
I had a suspicion, on the night she was shot, that Tillie had caught a glimpse of heaven. I asked her what it was she saw, and she said she couldn’t tell me.
“But did you see anything at all?”
She looked past me and smiled, as though she were seeing it all again. “Oh yes.”
“Why can’t you tell me?”
Her eyes snapped back to me. “Because I don’t have the words. I wouldn’t be allowed to anyway, even if I did have the words. But I can tell you this much. I don’t have to look back anymore. It’s all ahead of me, all the lost moments of my life . . . they aren’t lost. They’ve been tucked away for safekeeping, along with so much more.”
That’s all she would say. No matter how much I pestered her, she said I simply had to be patient and wait until the day I would find out for myself.
“But don’t worry,” she added. “You can trust God for what’s to come. He’s a good Father. Unlike some.”
Alan Anthony died in the summer of 1968, almost a year to the day we moved into the house on McDowell Street. Mom was already planning her wedding to Lyle when she came and told me Daddy was dead of sepsis. He’d developed a bedsore that got infected, and it was all downhill from there.
“I’m sorry, Roz,” she said.
“I’m sorry too, Mom,” I told her.
I allowed myself one good cry, and then I put it all aside, like closing a book when you reach the end and tucking it back up on the shelf. His memory faded over the years until it became little more than a distant ache.
Wally went off to college, Valerie started school, I became a teenager, and Ross had begun to walk and talk by the time Tillie stood up from the dinner table one evening and announced, “Janis, dear, you and Lyle can have the house now, free and clear. I don’t need it anymore.”
Mom looked up wide-eyed and sounded alarmed when she asked, “Why, Tillie? Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“But this is your home.”
“Not anymore, it’s not.”
That night Tillie lay down beneath her wedding quilt on her big brass bed and quietly slipped away. She got her final wish. She died in the house that she had built with her own two hands alongside her husband, Ross, the house that was happy when it had a family living inside.
Since then, the house on McDowell Street has always had a family living inside. I raised my three children there, and now my son, Ross Monroe Hillsdale, and his wife are raising their two children there. My son Ross was the second child in our family to be named for Tillie’s husband. The third was my grandson, Ross Theodore Hillsdale. And so the Monroe and the Anthony families continue to grow and intertwine.
Mara visited often over the years, first with her children and later her grandchildren. After college she moved to Chicago and went on to become the well-known playwright Beatrice Nightingale. Her most famous play, The Radio Man, had a thirty-six-week run on Broadway. Not bad for a kid from a small unknown town in flyover country.
Since Tillie died, I suppose I’ve thought about her every single day. I think of the way she showed up in our lives unannounced, blowing in like a nor’easter and yet doing so in a way that brought our family together instead of ripping us apart. I think of her eccentricities, her iron will, her gentle kindness that caused people to love her, in spite of herself. I think of the way her cries of “Merciful heavens!” echoed throughout