Blood on the Stoop--Four Tales

by Evelyn Martinez

I

Fat maroon spatters cascaded from the second-story entrance of the Victorian house where I lived on 15th Street to the sidewalk, coalescing into a splashy blob at the front curb, almost dry and shockingly vivid against the grungy cement.

We lived one block from Notre Dame Grammar School. My guardian, Antonia, did not trust me to travel to and from school on my own. Class dismissed at 2:45 pm, and I’d shoot out the door, out the gate, and into the beige 1953 Mercury double-parked out front. While the other girls sauntered out in chatty clumps, I’d be tripping over Antonia’s sharp knees to slither into the back seat behind a grumpy Arturo Hill, her current husband. They were old. I was ashamed of them and of myself.

On that afternoon I skidded to a stop outside the school entrance, confused. Where were they?

I waited and waited. Something was wrong and I had no clue how to respond. Daring to walk home was risking Antonia’s rage.

3:30 pm. The last straggling student had rounded the corner. What should I do? Home was just a block away. I took off running. Running like Antonia’s friend Satan was after me. Panicked, almost sobbing, I arrived home to the maroon stain at the curb, more stains on the sidewalk, on the front steps, on the doorknob … there was blood everywhere. The house silent, forbidding, desolate, I banged on the door. I cried. I yelled, “Mama! Arturo!”

I rang the first-floor tenants. No answer. I shuddered on the bloody stoop sensing a brutal assault, a death, my abandonment. I was thirteen years old, but I had lived a regimented life Antonia controlled and had no decision-making skills. Who could help me?

Sister Catherine Dolores, our principal—she’d know what to do. I ran back to school, tore into her office, and blurted out my frantic story. She took my hand and listened. Alarm flickered in her gray eyes.

My emergency contact list contained one name, Dr. Jorge Arguelles, a dentist in San Francisco. Antonia claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of a prominent Nicaraguan politician, the father of Dr. Arguelles. She called Jorge her brother. “Not true,” he had once whispered to me. “Antonia is mistaken.” Nevertheless he “went along” with her story.

Dr. Arguelles and his wife appeared within the hour. We swung by the house—empty, its bloodstains blurred by darkness. They took me to their fancy home in Forest Hill and fed me a snack.

I had experienced their generosity previously, their gifts of beautiful books and art materials. On this evening they conversed quietly but nervously in the kitchen. I cringed under their curious pitying stare.

We knew what Antonia was capable of. I envisioned Arturo slashed to pieces in a knife attack and Antonia behind bars. The Arguelles’ first call was to SFPD. They tracked her to SF General Emergency where she had been treated for severe cuts to the hands. She’d lost considerable blood but refused admission. Once they’d stitched her up, she’d ordered her husband to take her home.

We got back to the old Victorian just as Arturo was easing a wobbly, shrunken Antonia out of the Mercury. His face was pinched and sad. His hands shook. The tale that emerged was grisly, but true to Antonia form. The two had been battling. As usual she grabbed her always-handy butcher knife and went after him. Fleeing Antonia’s crazed fury Arturo stumbled down the narrow stairwell to the front stoop. She caught him and attacked, jabbing at his face and chest—a scenario I was familiar with. But then he did something astonishing—he snatched the big knife out of her hand. Outraged, reckless, she seized it back with both hands, blade up. Antonia and Arturo grappled. She would not surrender her knife even as it sliced deep into both upper palms, nearly severing the fingers. Arturo let go, horrified as blood spurted over the two of them.

From that day on Antonia and Arturo shared a quiet truce. He nursed her with a tenderness that astounded me and made me jealous. Antonia never regained full arrogant control of the household.

Her hands lost the strength to grasp a knife. Her desire to clutch me tight slipped away and she even allowed me to walk to and from school by myself.

II

Two years prior it had been my blood splattering the front stoop, my ride to the ER. Once I was past docile childhood and capable of both talking back and running fast, the fights between Antonia and me turned vicious, loud, and physical. That evening Antonia locked everyone in for the night. As usual, Arturo was confined to his tiny room, while she and I were secured within the front rooms of the flat. Our area consisted of a living room and bedroom separated by French-style glass doors.

The fight was a typical exchange of threats and demeaning insults. She’d yelled something about my being “la hija de la puta mas grande” and “una maldita, una ingrata.” Storming out of the bedroom, she threw open the multi-paned door. I was at her heel cussing furiously back when she slammed it. Caught in the threshold I reared back, my left arm shielding my face. My arm shattered a glass pane and was slashed to the bone from wrist to mid forearm. I swooned at the gaping cut, the geyser of blood. Antonia grabbed a towel, wrapped my arm, and rousted Arturo out of bed.

The closest ER was at Mary’s Help Hospital a few blocks away.

Terrified, in shock, I barely heard Antonia concoct a story of innocent youthful rambunctiousness on my part. I did not contradict.

The stitching would be done under local anesthetic. As the masked and gowned surgeon approached, I started thrashing and yowling. Angrily he called out, “Hold her down!” They tried and I fought them. Then, gentle hands on my shoulders, a soft soothing male voice. It was a young doctor—an angel, I thought. He cradled my head and stroked my greasy hair. My body stilled and the testy surgeon finished his job. I spent the night at Mary’s Help. It was nice to be in a clean gown in a clean bed in a peaceful place.

III

Knife fights were routine occurrences during my grammar school years. Antonia kept a rough assortment of men in the house—generally either on their way to prison or just released. I confess the distinction of having visited every state prison in California by the age of nine.

Antonia’s men hung around the rear of the house drinking and smoking. They carried weapons, as did Antonia. She had a stash of knives, hatchets, lead pipes and at least one gun. She shared her arsenal with her male associates. The cops were frequent callers to our home—generally stomping through the front door while one or two of her friends climbed over the back fence and escaped via the neighbors’ yard.

16th Street in the Mission—especially the blocks between Guerrero and South Van Ness were notorious drug- and alcohol-fueled sites of gang and personal warfare amidst a string of sleazy bars and liquor stores. Families and decent folks stayed away after sunset.

We once had a young guy staying at the house—late teens, early twenties. He’d scandalously become involved with the mother of the downstairs tenant. The tenant and his wife were professionals working long hours and the tenant’s grandmother had come to help with their kids. But she spent more time canoodling in Antonia’s kitchen with our young guest—was she in her forties, fifties? One night this young guy succumbed to the temptations of 16th Street, left the house and Grandmother’s arms.

Late that night piercing cries for help from the sidewalk yanked us out of our sleep.

Antonia and I ran to the front window. The boy was crawling up the stoop, one hand pressed to his left side, a stream of blood in his wake. Antonia flung our door open. I crept down the steps and found Grandmother in her nightgown kneeling on the cement, embracing the boy. Perhaps she had tried to drag him up the stairs. I crouched alongside not offering much help.

Meanwhile, Antonia flap-flapped down to the street in her ratty “chanclas” and surveyed it right and left. Assured that no one had followed the boy, she dashed back up to call an ambulance. She forgot about me. I watched, fascinated as Grandmother/lover tried to comfort the whimpering boy.

Something thick and ropy slid out of a jagged hole under his ribs. Grandmother squealed, “Que es eso?” Que te metieron?” She pulled on what looked like puffy rolled cotton trimmed in bright red, and he screamed. Peering closer, “Hay—tus intestinos, mijo!” She quickly started shoving it back in.

Finally, the distant wail of a siren. Then a chorus of sirens. As the ambulance screeched around the corner, she kissed and soothed the boy now passed out in her arms. Antonia tromped downstairs briskly pushing men out her door, grabbed me by the arm, hauled me inside, and turned the bolt.

Stealing one last glance, I saw Grandmother clutching at the boy while her son pulled her towards their flat.

Cops were everywhere. The son—his English clear, precise: “We know nothing, officers. I have seen the young man in the neighborhood on occasion. Never talked to him.”

Antonia in broken, but highly indignant English: “Just a boy I helped out one time. He said his name was Juan. No, he doesn’t live here.”

He was taken to SF General Emergency. Grandmother visited him in the hospital. We heard he survived and was deported. Grandmother’s son sent her back to Nicaragua. The tenants divorced and moved out after a series of nasty scenes. I watched their two small kids being packed off somewhere. They looked lost and miserable, a feeling I knew too well.

IV

The bland faced Victorian on 15th Street thrived as a gang-related war bunker while Antonia lived and maintained health and cash. We who survived there were all battle-scarred, without mercy in our hearts. The most notorious incident—earning a shocking front page headline along with mention of our address—occurred on a Friday night in winter, on my ninth birthday.

Antonia and Arturo picked me up after school and we headed for Victoria Bakery in North Beach to buy my “special” birthday cake (actually Antonia’s favorite), rum with thick white icing. Pink green swirls and pastel rosettes wished me, “Happy Birthday, Abelina.”

Then we rushed home to tidy up the living room. Antonia had invited some of the neighborhood kids and their moms. I was dreading the whole thing and the crinkly too-big dress she’d bought me for the party.

The house, as always, was full of her men friends drinking and carousing in the kitchen and on the back porch. She ordered them to settle down and shut the kitchen door. Then she locked Arturo in his room. The party was a mild disaster. The few invited kids and I stared at one another. Nobody enjoyed the cake except Antonia. Loud rude laughter burst out of the kitchen. The parents looked at one another and hustled their kids home.

There we sat with most of a melting lopsided cake. I wrestled out of the hated dress and jumped under the covers with a book, grateful to be alone and confined to the front rooms. Antonia joined her men in the kitchen in the back of the house. I must have fallen asleep. Sirens wove through my dreams—an odd but familiar lullaby. My lullaby got wildly insistent and I jarred awake. The strident wails were converging on our street. Yet again, cops bashing open the front door. Followed by yelling, stomping up the stairs, the back porch door slamming open and shut. More thumping down the back stairs. Heavy boots running down the hall and out the back.

“Stop, you are under arrest. Stop or we’ll shoot.” I heard a crash in the backyard. Peeping out the side bedroom window overlooking the neighbors’ yard, I saw a man straddling the fence. He was quickly dragged down by half a dozen uniformed cops with drawn guns. The walls shook as they wrestled him down the hall, down the stairs, and out the entryway. I ran to the front window and recognized one of Antonia’s men, handcuffed and flung into the back seat of a squad car. Other cops stuck around talking to Antonia. There was no sign of the other men. Her English was extra poor that night, her voice deferential. “I know nothing.” “No se nada.” She shook her head. She shrugged dramatically.

It made the headlines on all three newspapers—Chronicle, Examiner, and Call-Bulletin. “Man Shoots and Kills Wife in Front of Six Children.” And the crime-scene photo—shocking, lurid. A small flat on Capp Street. A bleak, narrow, untidy room, a door framing tunnel-like darkness beyond. Two tousled beds on each side of the room. Five or six dark-haired children caught by the camera lens—a wide-eyed toddler in draggy diapers, small half-dressed bodies huddling on the cots, clinging to the walls. By the far door a girl about my age pressed against the threshold, eyes downward. On the linoleum floor, from behind the right bed frame sprawled two bare legs, one foot in a “chancla.” The edge of a flowered skirt peeked out. The rest vanished into the shadows.

The body on the floor was the mother of the children, shot to death by her estranged husband who gave his current address as our flat. After a night of drinking he had decided to “have a talk” with his wife, stopping to pick up a gun along the way. The wife became “unreasonable.” Enraged, he shot her to death in front of their children and fled back to our house. Back to 15th Street where he and Antonia were working out a plan when the cops showed up.

I was mortified—and still stunned—at school on Monday. The nuns were extra kind and patient with me that week. Antonia admitted without remorse that she had lent him her revolver: “Didn't think he would do something crazy. But that wife of his was a whore, and probably had it coming to her. Too bad about the kids.” That’s all she had to say.

Arturo, for once, expressed concerns about how his pension funds were being spent. Antonia may have listened. Fewer men came round the house. The murderer was sent to San Quentin. Antonia and I went to see him once or twice. He was released after a few years and headed to our house, but didn’t stick around. I don’t know what became of those orphaned children.

The rest of the blood stains on the plain-faced 15th Street Victorian—a victim in its own right—fell in drabs, dribbles, and smears. The house witnessed suffering—bludgeoned mice, impaled canaries, tortured chameleons, neglected dogs, cats, bunnies and turtles, aborted fetuses, abused humans. Much of it simply categorized as collateral damage in the ongoing war that was Antonia.

I have been drawn back to the house periodically. One day I encountered a young woman coming down the front stairs as I gaped at the dingy shingled facade. I blurted, “I grew up in that house” and joked about it being haunted. Neither of us laughed. She lived on the second floor—where the worst mayhem was enacted. Certain rooms felt oppressive, indeed haunted, she said. People refused to share the flat for more than a few months. She and her new roommate were trying to exorcise these brooding restless spirits, but they were tenacious. The young woman invited me up. I had last been inside that house thirty-three years previously. It could not hurt me. My body grew heavy and my gut twisted as she led me up those familiar grim stairs into the old bedroom, and to the closet that opens up into the attic. Malevolence and its unleashed anguish slammed into me. I knew that what the young women sensed was real. But I was useless to help and wished them luck as I fled down the steps and into the sun-washed street.

Epilogue

The house I grew up in was a two-story dour Victorian with faded tan shingles in San Francisco’s Mission District. My current home is a Hollywood-style bungalow painted a delectable orange sherbet with raspberry trim. It is a half a block from Ocean Beach in San Francisco. I was a helpless prisoner within the walls of my childhood house. I am a free individual within my home. I leave and return as I please.

The Victorian on 15th Street had seven rooms—high-ceilinged, narrow, with stained enamel walls. Its dusty, cluttered rooms had sharp, shadowy corners and lined a bleak hallway. The door to each room had two locks—a latch and a deadbolt. Doors remained shut and locked at all times.

Shabby nylon curtains drooped over the few tall, dirt-streaked windows. Delightfully, the back porch boasted the one large west-facing window in the house. I savored rare moments on that porch soaking in late afternoon sun and sky. My childhood house was bordered by cement cracked, chipped, and devoid of the tiniest green weed.

My home by the ocean is one wide, flowing, light-infused space with no staircases. The only locked doors lead to the outside world, to be opened at my discretion. My back wall is no wall but a series of windows that gaze upon and open into my garden. My front and back yards are lush with blooming succulents and flowering bushes.

Wood, shingles, and plaster do not utter words, but they remember. And if walls could talk? Might not the battered old Victorian groan and splinter into shivery fragments of misdeed and sorrow? My home by the ocean speaks softly, openly of peaceful things.

Evelyn Martinez holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of San Francisco and a Master of Nursing degree from the University of California, San Francisco. She has been a corrections officer, a theater usher, a quilt conservator for the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and a family nurse practitioner. She has traveled extensively, and her favorite place in the world is Antarctica. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Charles Carter, Entropy, Rougarou, and Your Impossible Voice. Her essay “If” has been nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize.

My Name Could Be Toby Gardner

by Ann S. Epstein

I lost my name. Perhaps the name was never mine to begin with. In which case, will I ever own one? Or, if the name was once in my possession, can I get it back?

People on intimate terms with their names stir envy in me. When I hear mine, no inner voice says “Me”. The roots of this dissociation sprout in a family soil that teems with multiple, secret, and lost names. Such history is common among immigrants who changed their names to assimilate. For me, not being my name also stems from my family’s particular pathology.

My late mother, for example, Kate Alsofrom Savishinsky, could be called Gussie Shirley Savage. Like many Eastern Europeans who came to the United States at the turn of the last century, names on both sides of my family were Anglicized or phoneticized. Thus, my father’s Polish surname “Czauczinski” became “Savishinsky” at Ellis Island. When my mother married him, she shortened it to “Savage” at work, which was also the name we put on the waiting list at the Chinese restaurant where, like other New York Jews, we often ate supper on Sunday nights.

The story behind “Gussie” is explained in this letter I submitted to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services with my mother’s Medicaid application:

The enclosed 1911 birth certificate erroneously lists my mother’s first name as Gussie rather than Kate. Her aunt, who was interviewed at the lying-in hospital, had limited English, and thought the official was asking for her name (which was Gussie) instead of the baby’s name. My mother’s Austrian maiden name, spelled “Alzufrumm” on her birth certificate, was later Anglicized to “Alsofrom”. I am also faxing a copy of my 1946 birth certificate, which lists my mother’s name correctly as Kate Savishinsky and her birthplace as the United States. I trust that with both documents, her citizenship will be established for Medicaid purposes.

“Shirley” was yet another twist in the Medicaid application, which also required a copy of my mother’s Social Security card. I found one issued in her work name, Kate Savage, but needed a card under her legal name, Kate Savishinsky. She’d owned one when I’d moved her into assisted living a few years earlier, but had soon lost it, along with her purse, and her mind.
Since my mother was a packrat, I asked my brother Steve (whose first name is Joel, but Joel is what we called an older cousin) to check for a Social Security card in the possessions he’d stored when we cleaned out her apartment. He discovered a card, but it identified her as Kate Shirley Savage. We’d never heard the name “Shirley” and assumed it was an error. But after phoning my mother’s sister Fae (called Fannie or Feigele as a child), I emailed my brother:

Dear JSS: [Note: He and I avoid the first-name problem by using our initials]

Shirley (surely) you won’t believe this. Mom’s real middle name is Shirley! When I shared my tale of woe with Aunt Fae, we had the following conversation:

Me: I know Mom used “Savage” in business, but who knows where “Shirley” comes from.
Fae: Shirley is your mother’s middle name.
Me: I thought it was Sheba, from her Jewish name, Kayla Shayva.
Fae: No, it’s Shirley, although she’d call me a liar for saying so. She wanted it to be Sheba.
Me: Huh? Mom hated that name on account of the Shirley Booth movie “Come Back Little Sheba.” Sheba was a runaway dog.
Fae: No, your mother always liked the name Sheba.
Me: Did my father know my mother’s real middle name was Shirley?
Fae: I have no idea what your father knew about your mother.


Love,
ASE

As my maternal grandmother Mindel (who was registered as Minnie at Ellis Island) used to say, “I’m glad I didn’t die yesterday or I wouldn’t have known that.” I was fifty-nine when I discovered my mother’s real middle name. She was too far gone by then for me to ask her why she claimed it was “Sheba,” but even if she’d been cogent, I doubt she would have told me the truth. In her typical long-winded fashion, she would have narrated a convoluted story in which she was the aggrieved party or the heroine. And, as my straight-talking Aunt Fae said, my mother would have called her sister a liar.

*

If learning my mother’s identity meant sorting truth from fiction in her nonstop chatter, figuring out my father’s entailed filling in gaps of silence. He was not just taciturn, like many men of his generation. When I was a graduate student in psychology, I recognized in him the classic symptoms of a schizoid personality, someone incapable of relating to others. As a child, however, I knew only that his muteness made me ashamed to invite friends to our apartment.

Despite his lack of connection to others, or perhaps because he lived inside himself, my father seems to have had a strong sense of who he was. Except for passively allowing my mother to use Savage at the office and Jade Garden, he refused to simplify his last name. On the other hand, in elementary school, he’d dropped his first name in favor of his middle one. He stuck with this choice, even when it was later ignored by virtually everyone, who called him by a nickname. My father was born Layzeh Dovid in the shtetl of Yadow, and called Louis David when he arrived in America as a boy. For untold reasons, he hated the name Louis and answered only to David. In his teens, friends nicknamed him “Cal” after President Calvin Coolidge, a man stingy with words, who the press had dubbed “Silent Cal.” The president’s reticence may have been a political choice. No one was aware, or admitted, that my father’s was a handicap.

As young adults, my parents met at a summer resort on the Jersey shore, where they’d each rented cabins with their friends. Urged by her bunkmate to check out a guy named Cal, my mother approached the man she hoped would be him, but was told by that man, “I’m not Cal. He’s the bum over there.” Redirected, she paired off with the guy who was Cal for the summer. Back in the Bronx that fall, my father phoned her to resume their courtship:

He: Hello, this is David.

She: David who?
He (annoyed): You know, David.
She: I don’t know anyone named David.
He: We’ve been dating for two months!
She: You mean Cal?

Friends and family never called my father anything but Cal after the nickname was bestowed in the 1920s. Yet he steadfastly thought of himself as David until his death in 1997. What they intended as a playful moniker was to him a painful reminder of his isolation. I never heard my father protest—he was incapable of direct confrontation—but “David” was how he always introduced himself and the name he signed on his anniversary cards to my mother.

My father was equally reticent about his own parents. He never spoke of his father, who died when I was a toddler. The story as reported by my mother—or invented by her; one could never be sure, especially about tales that cast my father’s family in a bad light — is that her father-in-law was an alcoholic who disappeared for long stretches of time when my father was growing up. As the oldest child, my father was pressured by

his demanding mother to become “the man of the house,” a worldly role for which he was ill-suited, and his shame and bitterness muted him for life. So total was his silence that my brother and I did not know our paternal grandfather’s name until we were in our 40s. We were gathered for the bar mitzvah of my brother’s younger son, Jacob, when my brother and I asked our father the name of his father. His reply: “Jacob. I assumed my grandson was named for him.” I don’t know which of us was more surprised at the other’s not knowing.

              Gussie, Cal, Steve, and Toby

           a.k.a. Kate, David, Joel, and Ann

The true name of our father’s mother was revealed even later, ten years after our father’s death. My brother, cousins, and I had called her Grandma Lillie, which we assumed was short for Lillian. But on my 61st birthday, my father’s sister told me that their mother was born Ruchel (Rachel) Leah. She reinvented herself in America, dropping her first name and applying the initial of the second to one that may have sounded less Jewish or more elevated than her peasant upbringing. My aunt, and the rest of my father’s family, assumed that my daughter, Rebecca, was named for her, this time repurposing the “R.” I informed my aunt otherwise, but perhaps I should have let the misconception survive. A lineage buried in silence deserves to create its own stories.

*

My full name is Ann Toby Savishinsky Epstein. When I married my first husband, few women kept their maiden names. Since I was not enamored of mine, and was years shy of understanding and loving my father, I took my spouse’s last name, which was Epstein. To preserve part of my identity, however, I began using Savishinsky as a middle name. Eight years later, when he and I divorced, I kept Epstein to maintain continuity for my young daughter and because I’d published under that name. I still sometimes think of myself as a Savishinsky, though. Whenever a group is split alphabetically into A-M and N-Z, my instinct is to head for the one that includes “S.”

Twenty-five years later, when I remarried, I continued to use Epstein. My daughter was grown, and my career was well established by then, as was the practice of women not changing their names. However, my second marriage raised the possibility of yet another name for me.

I was called by my middle name, Toby, until kindergarten, when I insisted on using my first name, Ann. I happily shed Toby because it was an easy mark for alliterative teasing. I was called “Toothless Toby” after a fall knocked out my baby teeth years before the permanent ones grew in. “Tubby Toby” didn’t fit the skinny kid I was, but amused my tormenters. Toby could also be a boy’s name (Toby Tyler and the Circus was a popular children’s book at the time). The final humiliation was a television show about an elephant named Toby. When I switched to Ann, teasing rhymes like A”, Ann, frying pan” sounded too impersonal to bother me. Perhaps it was also an early indication that I didn’t think of the name “Ann” as really belonging to me.

Despite my becoming Ann at school, to my family I remained Toby. So, when I married my second husband forty-five years later, my Aunt Honey, whose real name is Anita, sent us a check made out to “Gerald and Toby Gardner.” Our joint account was under Gerald Gardner and Ann Epstein. He endorsed the check and I went to the bank to explain the situation to the teller:

Me: My aunt thinks I took my new husband’s last name, which is “Gardner.” (As further proof that I wasn’t faking a family relationship, I pointed out that the middle name on my driver’s license, Savishinsky, was also my aunt’s last name.)
Teller: No problem, I understand. (Long pause …) Who’s Toby?

The teller’s perplexity mirrors mine. None of my names: Ann or Toby, Savishinsky or Epstein, feels like me.

*

Funny as name anecdotes can be, it is also tragic when ancestral names are lost. But in addition to this universal phenomenon, my personal disconnection is the legacy of my odd family history. I question whether I am alone in having a nameless self, or if others share my experience. Even people who dislike their names don’t necessarily question that they belong to them. And what of those who are adopted or assume a different name for fame, fortune, or fraud? Did Norma Jean think of herself as Marilyn? Did James Gatz fully inhabit the person of Jay Gatsby? Did Anna Anderson

believe herself to be Princess Anastasia? Or did they coexist with a stranger who posed as them?
Now in my mid-seventies (and single again), I occasionally braid my hair in the style I wore as a little girl. I wonder if I am not just attempting to recapture my youth but to become Toby again. Up until age five, I had only one name. I may have been haunted by an unhappiness I was too young to name—my father’s silence, my mother’s lies—but I knew who I was. Rejecting that name may have been a child’s way of rejecting that family. Decades later, with more wisdom and empathy, perhaps I am ready to reclaim as mine the family that made me.

One solution to my self-alienation is to think of myself as the name I like best. Each has something to recommend it. Toby is uncommon and cute. I value creativity and I’m small, so the name fits. Ann, Hebrew for grace, is reassuring in the face of aging and death. My signature initials also appeal. ASE is the suffix for enzyme or catalyst, and I like to see myself as an agent of change. Yet, there’s no satisfying click when I drop any of these names into the slot labeled “me.” I’m still unwilling to give up the hope that someday I will find, and know, my name, but I fear it is too late. Either our names become us when we are young or they are forever lost.

Ann S. Epstein writes novels, short stories, memoir, craft articles, and book reviews. Her awards include a Pushcart Prize nomination for creative nonfiction, the Walter Sullivan prize in fiction, and an Editors’ Choice selection by Historical Novel Review. Her novels are On the Shore, Tazia and Gemma, and A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. Her stories and nonfiction work appear in Sewanee Review, PRISM International, Ascent, The Long Story, Saranac Review, The Madison Review, The Minnesota Review, Passages North, Summerset Review, Red Rock Review, William and Mary Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and many other literary journals. In addition to writing, she has a Ph.D. in developmental psychology and a M.F.A. in textiles. Her stories often have historical settings that mix fact and fiction. Her nonfiction explores the people, places, and events that shape us, especially the residue left by family and friends. Her website is: https://www.asewovenwords.com.

Colonus

by John Donaghy

After Father died, Mother did not pine away; hers was not that kind of desolation. She lived for twenty-four more years. During that quarter century she elaborated a glittering vision of her marriage and fixed it in a set of canonical anecdotes which she told us over and over. We were to understand that she and Father enjoyed a passion that could only have developed long ago among people who were more vital and closer to the source of life than our own anemic generation with its provisional, little loves.

On her kitchen table she kept a pile of old letters in tattered and yellowing envelopes: they were all the letters she and my father had exchanged from their courtship onwards. "I don't know what to do with all these,” she would always say, “I don't know who would be interested in them," and I always said, who knows why, “I'd love to take care of them for you.” And she: "I don't know. There's awfully personal stuff in here. Some of these are the letters of a man who is totally gone on a woman. Maybe I'll have them cremated with me. And yet I hate to do that, someone might find them very interesting.”

           Within that pile of letters there was a smaller bundle bound with a purple ribbon. These were the letters that chronicled The Argument. The Argument was the central story in the canon, the one that she told us more often than any other: She had been head of pediatric nursing at the Mass General. He was doing his residency there. They had been going together for months. She did not drink and flirt like the other girls. He was crazy about her, and she was crazy about him. He would call her every night at ten. When he was away, he would write to her every day. Sometimes twice. He had to go away for three weeks. He was resting; he had been overworking. But he missed her. He had to give a lecture in Montreal. He had arranged to take her with him; he had arranged for them to share a hotel room. He had acted as though it were a fait accompli. He had assumed and had not asked. Well, she was furious. She wanted to know if this was his habit. She wanted to know if he thought she was like other girls. She would most certainly not go with him to Montreal or anywhere else for that matter. He was hurt. He behaved as though he were angry. She would have none of that. She would not listen to him. They were estranged for days, oh, it might have been two weeks; she heard not one word. Then one night at ten o’clock, the phone call came. She had won. It was a glorious love affair. It lasted a lifetime.

In advanced old age when the multiplying frailties of nature send most people collapsing into themselves, Mother’s vigor seemed divorced from her flesh. In her eighties and nineties she became tiny, bowed, seamed with wrinkles, dry as a cricket, but she stacked her own wood and pushed her own reel mower and took as many trips to the landfill as she could. She amazed people with her wit and her activity, and she took so much pride in their amazement that she developed a kind of geriatric bravado. At ninety-three she stood on the very top of her step ladder—the “This Is Not A Step” step—in order to prune her lilacs. The ladder was on uneven ground and it began to tip, “It was going to take me through the kitchen window,” she said, “So I jumped.” She hit the ground and rolled, breaking nothing but straining her coccyx. She refused the doctor. It only hurt, she said, whenever she tried to lift something heavier than thirty pounds.

I could not help thinking that she might grow in energy as she shriveled in mass until eventually, a century from now perhaps, she’d whirl up into the hungry vortex of herself and disappear. But at the age of ninety-seven she began to fail. Her eyesight grew worse; her hearing began to go; her gait became unsteady; her driving became lethal. She tore out the undercarriage of her car by driving, at speed, into a ditch. She emerged from that accident unscathed, angry and, she claimed, blameless. It would never have happened had the town made that ditch more visible. As soon as the car was fixed, she visited my brother’s law offices for a quick consultation. Leaving his parking lot, she stomped on the accelerator rather than the brake. She shot across the road, over the sidewalk and down a stretch of lawn before coming to rest wedged under someone’s front porch. Again she was unhurt though this time she conceded that the incident had quite taken her breath away. Still, it was the sort of thing that could happen to anyone.

My brother appropriated her car keys. One of her neighbors, an extraordinarily kind woman, offered to drive her whenever she needed a ride. But Mother did not want to be driven. She did not like the neighbor who seemed to want to become a friend. She had gone so far as to send a birthday card. God. Mother was not going to saddle herself with that bit of inanity. Her errands were her own damned business, and she could do them herself. She discovered a spare set of car keys, and after a few weeks, when the car had been repaired from its collision with the porch, she drove it to the grocery store.

She left early in the morning so that she would arrive while the parking lot was still empty. She did not like parking lots. When they were busy, they confused her, and because she feared that by the time she was ready to leave, the store lot would be swarming with other vehicles, she parked strategically—nose up to a short, ornamental hedge beyond which she could see, reassuringly, the sidewalk and the street. It was clever of her to do so, she told us later, for when she emerged with her groceries, the parking lot had become a madhouse. Cars were pulling into spaces and pulling out of spaces and driving around looking for spaces, bumper to bumper like salmon in a stream. There were people everywhere walking as though they hadn’t a care in the world right where she had to drive. She didn’t think it would be quite safe to back out into all that confusion. Instead, she put the car in drive and bulled her way through the shrubbery, across the sidewalk, and into two cars which were parallel parked in the street. These were an unexpected impediment. They had not been there when she had chosen her parking space, but she found that if she applied the gas, she could push them slowly outward, and so force her way between them and gain the open road and freedom and, eventually, home.

She suspected that some busybody might have seen her and assumed she was breaking the law. She was preemptive. She called the grocery store. “Hello,” she said, “This is Frances Donaghy. I’m afraid I may have damaged some of your lovely plantings as I was leaving your parking lot.” When the police showed up on Horn of the Moon, she was a very fragile, very old lady. “The officer was a woman and she was very nice. She asked if she could bring my car keys to anyone who might keep them for me. I didn’t want to argue, and I won’t go into it now, but apparently I did more damage than I had thought. I told her that it was all right and that I wouldn’t drive again.”

She never did. She stopped going out. She had no friends to visit and none who would visit her. Occasionally my brother drove her to the doctor, but otherwise she occupied herself at home as she always had when we were young—reading, listening to the CBC, cleaning the house, and brooding on her children. We were the mediators of her image and the guardians of her legacy, and yet, she knew, we were not true believers. She tried and tried to set us straight. She explained to each one of us, many, many times, that we were Superior People because everything she had ever done had been for us. Our childhood had been an idyll, really, the rococo dream of Watteau or Fragonard. She painted it for us. She put herself in the foreground as a set of allegorical figures: Wisdom, Discipline, and Benignity in stately dance, draperies billowing under a sky piled high with summer clouds. Her children were two happy little shepherds and two happy little shepherdesses piping on a distant hillside. We, the perfect offspring of a perfect union, had enjoyed a perfect upbringing.

The hardest point to revise was my sister Peigi. Mother had scrubbed and scrubbed her conscience, but some shadow of Peigi’s childhood years—years of unbroken rancor and derision, of slaps and blows and hair-pulling and starvation—returned and returned like Lady M’s damned spot. Part of the problem was that Peigi, who now lived far away in Oregon, had become very gracious. She had kept in touch. She called regularly. She did her best to see that Mother was as comfortable as she could be, that she was on the right amount of the right medications, that she would be able, if she chose, to die in her own home. Whenever she visited the east coast, Peigi stayed for a day or two on the Horn of the Moon even though the proximity of all those childhood artifacts could give her spells of dizziness and nausea which made Mother worry that she might be in ill health. Mother couldn’t understand it. Peigi had always been such a robust child. In fact, we all had been ridiculously healthy. We were never sick at all.

 “Well,” Mother said to me one day, “your sister is just a fantastic mother, and she has worked very, very hard. Her boys are doing well; she has a great reputation where she works. Wherever she’s worked. She’s really done something with her life.” This was delivered earnestly, reproachfully, as though she suspected I wanted to accuse Peigi of sloth and bad parenting. “I know,” I said. She was silent for a moment of dramatic consideration and then: “You know, I think she must have been bi-polar when she was in high school.”

It did no good to point out that bi-polar disorder is not like mono or that Peigi is essentially the same person she always was. “Oh, come on. She is absolutely not the same person. She is completely different. No one could have predicted how she would turn out. She needed a very firm hand. She calls me every day. I don’t know why. I suspect it’s good for her.”

This Grand Revision was somewhat undermined by the way she sought, as her widowhood advanced, to reclaim her ancient powers of command. Increasing frailty gave her a leverage she had not enjoyed for decades. She called us more and more frequently asking us to drive up to Horn of the Moon and help her with one thing or another.

We always went, and when we arrived, we discovered that help consisted not so much in accomplishing anything practical as in doing exactly what we were told. She was particular and insistent. She could take over a minute explaining exactly how to empty a barrel of weeds over the pasture fence. We were to do what we were asked and not one thing more; we were absolutely not to freelance. One late August day, after I had stacked a couple of cords of wood for her, I noticed that the catch on her wood stove door had rusted and seized up over the summer. I got a hammer and was just about to tap it free when she came into the room and asked, “What are you doing?” in a tone that suggested she had caught me with my hand in the till.

“I’m fixing your stove,” I said.

“That’s Pede’s job.”

“I’m right here. It’ll take less than a second.”

“You will not touch my stove with that hammer. You’ll shatter the whole damned thing.”

“Fuck you,” I thought graciously and tapped it anyway. Immediately the catch released and the handle was freed.

“See?” I said. “All better.”

“Thank-you,” she said crisply.

Gradually we became specialists, performing only those tasks she suspected we found most irksome. For me it was driving her places, especially to her hairdresser who lived forty minutes away and who, as he worked on her wisps, flattered her so relentlessly that she was compelled to disavow every unctuous word of it with breathless, elaborately artificial modesty all the way home. For Pede she reserved requests that were irritatingly vague or burdensomely trivial or which frustrated action. She might call him late at night to inform him that she thought she was having a medical emergency but that she didn’t want to go to the hospital; he was not to worry, and could be bring her more hand cream in the morning? But it was Betsy who stirred up Mother’s old blood lust. Betsy had always been the most responsible of us, the most easily moved to guilt; her vulnerability made her irresistible.

Mother wanted Betsy to touch her, to bathe her, to drive up to Vermont from Massachusetts to wash her hair. I once arrived at the Horn of the Moon unannounced in the middle of one of these shampooing sessions. Mother was standing at the kitchen sink and Betsy stood over her, gently massaging suds into her scalp, a pitcher of lukewarm water at her elbow. It sounded as though Mother were directing her own waterboarding. She groaned and spluttered, nothing Betsy did was right: she was being too rough; she was missing places; she wasn’t getting all the soap out; she wasn’t using enough water; she was using too much water; couldn’t she see she was getting soap in her eyes? Did Betsy think Mother had asked her to come all this way to drown her in her own sink?

Betsy looked at me over the top of Mother’s head and rolled her eyes. Mother did not immediately notice me; she was too lost in whatever was going on between the two of them. It wasn’t until Betsy was gently patting her hair dry with a towel, that she saw me, and then she lifted her head and stared like a lioness disturbed on a carcass. “Now,” she said to Betsy, “Upstairs for a bath.”

Mother’s hunger for attention was terrible. She could not find nourishment in the world as it is. She wanted us near her all the time, but as soon as we got close, she erased us. She could eat only the promise-crammed air of her own fantasies. She conjured an illusory empire out of darkness visible: Pandæmonium, palace and city, seat of power to rival the towers of Heaven, the trickster kingdom of narcissism, the old fabric of wind and shadow and wish and denial.

It is a week before Thanksgiving 2012. Mother is ninety-eight years old. It is early in the morning and the sun has not yet risen. The month has been unseasonably warm, but today is raw and windy up in the hills on Horn of the Moon. Overnight the ruts have frozen in the narrow road that runs by her place and gusts of snow sweep down the mountain, through the stunted upland orchards and over her little farmhouse. Today she is paying her bills. She works at the little kitchen table under a dim lamp writing checks and addressing envelopes in her quivery hand. She has boiled a sauce pan of coffee for herself on the woodstove, the door of which she leaves precariously open because she “likes to keep an eye on it”. A tinkling mound of coals throws a red warmth across the cobbled hearth and up the back of her chair. By the time the sun has come up she is ready to go to the mailbox down at the end of the drive. She does not bother with her overcoat or her blackthorn stick because they are a bother and because the stick makes her look like a crone.

She goes out the back door because both the heavy front door and the glass storm door stick. She has been having dizzy spells recently. Something the doctor has put her on, something that was intended to keep her heart from racing, makes the damned thing stutter and stop instead. When it stops, she faints. It always gets going again, but when it does, she generally finds herself on the ground. She is crossing through the woodshed with its uneven gravel floor when she loses consciousness, pitches forward and lands hard. When she comes to, she knows she has broken something and she appears to be bleeding from deep cuts on her forearms. Her knees too feel sticky with blood. She gathers the bills from where they have scattered, crawls to the woodpile, hauls herself upright and keeps going. Bleeding, in pain, with the world and its snow whirling around her, she makes her way down the driveway through the brown and blowing weeds to her mailbox. “They were bills”, she explained later, “I was going to mail them.”

A neighbor is driving up the hill in his pickup truck. When he sees her, he slows. She’s not dressed warmly enough; she appears to be staggering, and the sleeves of her sweat shirt are soaked with blood. He stops. He puts her in the warm cab, goes inside and gets a jacket for her and then takes her to the hospital. She has a broken pelvis and extensive lacerations on her arms and legs.

Within a few days she is in a rehabilitation facility. It’s actually quite a nice place. It does not smell like a nursing home. It’s quiet, with broad corridors and large, sunny rooms. When I drop in to see her, she is alone. It is odd to see her name plate on the door like a secret that should not be exposed: “Frances Donaghy.” She is lying on her bed before a big window; she looks as though she has been dropped there by a careless hand. Her head is thrown back, canted off to one side. Her mouth is open and dark, the upper lip drawn back from long, ochre teeth. I have never seen this woman before. That scant nimbus of gray hair. That small, high-shouldered bone-cage of torso. The arms loose jointed and thin like the arms of a child or a marionette, the palms upward, a final shrug. The old feeing again; it is not her, it is something else, it is uncanny, it’s a doll, a fetish; it is feathers and bones and leather and baboon-blood paste and teeth of old cowrie shells. “Mom”, I say, and then louder, “Mom.” Incredibly she stirs, shifts. Her sleep has been deep and she is confused, “Pete?” she asks. “No,” I say. “John”. “Oh,” she says, “John.” She struggles into a sitting position and finds her glasses.

She looks at me, and fills up with herself. “I’m glad I have lived so long,” she says even before she is all the way back, as though she were taking up a conversation we had been having when she nodded off. “It has given me a chance to review my life.” I wait and say nothing. “I’ve always been frugal. I’ve never asked for a thing. I never even asked for a job. I would never have asked for a job, but they wanted to give me one. And then my nursing classmates made me a class officer. Well, I was no more interested in that kind of thing than in . . . ” she pauses, unable to think of anything in which she could have comparably little interest. “Even with your father. I never pursued him. I was crazy about him of course but I never pursued. He pursued me. I count myself very lucky. And here. My God, any little thing I happen to say they think is the height of cleverness. The nurses, of course. And the psychologist was in here the other day testing my cognitive function. He gave me three words at the beginning of our conversation and told me to remember them because at the end he was going to ask me what they were—I remembered all but one, and that one I recalled immediately with a hint. He seemed to think that was extraordinary. Well, afterwards, he was no sooner gone than he was back again. ‘I forgot my clipboard,’ he said. ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘forgot.’ Well, he laughed and he said, ‘Give me a high-five. I guess there are no problems here.’”

          I have reviewed my life and discovered that from the day I was born everybody has loved me, wanted me. An offering from Pandæmonium; an exact untruth.  

Thus Mother announces herself to herself, standing at the entrance to the shack she imagines, in her terrible weakness and her terrible strength, is a palace. She is a plucky five-year-old in outsized livery—knee breaches with silk stockings, a frogged and brocaded coat, a cocked hat that comes down over her eyes. “Her most high and puissant majesty,” she declaims “Empress of Life, Queen of all Knowledge and of all Virtue; Singular and Flawless, Tower of Ivory,” and she ushers in something dark and bent, something with crooked little horns, with shit in its burlap pants and lice crawling under its blackened scales.

She died at the age of one hundred and one. When she went into hospice, I found myself afflicted with a kind of tenderness for what had never been. I wanted to read to her. I needed to read to her—a compulsive return, perhaps, to the best part of childhood, to the only intimacy that had not been dangerous. I found one of her favorite books—Cider with Rosie—a too-charming-to be-quite-true account of a rural English childhood by the poet Laurie Lee. I thought it might turn her mind fondly backwards. I tried to read to her several times, but she would have none of it. “What?” she’d say. “I can’t make heads nor tails of what you’re saying.” Why did she resist? That she could have listened if she chose is certain. After she died, when we were clearing out her room, the nurse—a big, gentle man with a full beard—came to me and said, “I want you to know how much I enjoyed taking care of your mother. Such an extraordinary woman. You know, I read to her almost every evening. It was so peaceful. She’d listen very carefully and say the most intelligent things.”

In her last two months she began to pass in and out of a terrible dementia that whittled her all the way down to her essential hunger. It was a madness that came upon her in fits. When she was in its grip, she’d call us from her hospice room. She wanted us to come visit. It did no good to remind her that one of us had been there earlier in the day or to reassure her that another of us would be there tomorrow; she lived only in the starving now. She saw no reason we could not sit by her in shifts, one after another for twenty-four hours every day. She wanted us to bring her things: Kleenex because “They told me here that they will charge me more if they supply it,” shampoo because “the stuff here makes my hair fall out,” clocks with extra-large numerals because “nothing you’ve given me is large enough.” She could be wheedling and tearful in one moment and choking with fury in the next. Sometimes she would fall into the very center of herself. Then she would believe, as I have always believed in my heart, that someone was missing. She did not know who it was. She was desperate to know, and she wanted us to find out. At the peak of these fits the calls would come every three minutes for an hour or more until the facility, at our request, replaced her room phone with one that had no keypad.

Two days before Mother slipped into her final coma, Pede and I visited her. Her thoughts lay, like Ozymandias, in blocky ruins that communicated a message she did not intend. Pede had brought her a new talking clock, a small box that spoke the time when you pushed a button on top of it. She had broken the old one in her palsied impatience; the new one was bigger and easier to operate; the button on top was so big and so red that it looked like it might launch missiles.

"What's this?" Mother asked when she saw it.

"It's your new talking clock," Pede said.

"Where's the old one?"

"It's broken."

"Oh, it's broken?" she looked at the new clock as if it were a large spider. “Then why give it to me?”

"No, the old one is broken."

"But this isn't the old one."

"No".

"Well where is the old one?"

"I took it. It was broken. I threw it out"

"It's in my bag."

"No, I took it," Pede said. "It didn't work. I tried to get you one just like it, but the Society for the Blind doesn't have them anymore. They have these instead. They’re better."

"My bag is on the floor,” she said “It’s in there. Get it for me."

“I took it home and threw it out. It’s not there.”

We are all silent for a moment and then with an angry bounce she said, "Just get me my goddamned bag!"

There was no clock in the bag, and her anger had exhausted her. “Wait a moment,” she said, “I have to catch my breath. I can’t be talking all the time although I know it’s good for you.” Pede and I looked at one another and kept still.

At last she said, “That other grandmother was quite a foul-mouthed old lady.”

“What other grandmother?” I asked.

“You know. Annie’s mother. Tay. That’s what I heard. I hope I may never stoop to such a low expediency.”

Another long silence while we all considered this. Pede grinned at me. Anne’s mother, Tay, was widely acknowledged as a kind of saint. At last Mother said, “I was always a leader.”

 “A leader of what?” I ask.

“A leader of mankind,” she said and fell asleep as though someone had hit a switch. When she woke up some twenty minutes later, she said, “I am about to deliver my last sermon. I will be dead in this many weeks,” she held up three fingers and looked first at Pede and then at me over the top of her glasses. “Then I will be alone, alone, alone—flat on my back, staring into the sky with open eyes, seeing nothing. Strangers will walk by me all day long.”

One night a few weeks before her one hundredth birthday Mother was seized by twelve violent hours of vomiting and diarrhea. She soiled her nightgown, her bedding, her bedroom carpet. She staggered to the bathroom where she lay until dawn, cold, filthy and wet, huddled on the floor next to the toilet. When the sun rose, she called my brother and asked him to come. She told him it was very important, but she did not tell him exactly what the problem was. When he was done cleaning up, he bought her a new nightgown and some new sheets and blankets, and when he put her to bed, she enjoined secrecy on him. He must tell no one, especially not his wife. Then she called Peigi to complain. No one has ever passed such a night. She had been dizzy; she had had no control of her bowels; she had been in pain; she had been dying. Peigi must not tell a soul.

Betsy, hearing of the episode from Peigi, drove up from Massachusetts the next afternoon to see how Mother was doing. She noticed the wood box was empty and offered to fill it. “No. Just leave it,” Mother said.

“Why?” Betsy asked, “It’s going to get cold again. You need it filled and I’m not sure you can manage it yet. I’m here and happy to do it.”

“Ne-ver mind. I have my reasons. You are not to touch a stick of that wood.”

When Betsy had gone, Mother called me. She told me that she felt fantastic. She had just awoken from the longest sleep of her life—almost eighteen hours. She asked me to come and fill her wood box for her. I was concerned. She had always taken great pride in filling the wood box by herself, but now she told me that, curiously, she seemed to have lost the strength of her hands. I imagined she was far worse off than she was letting me know. I imagined she feared the approaching cold snap, that she had no stove wood in the kitchen and no strength to fetch it from the shed. I imagined she was nearing the end.

But when, on the following day, I got to her house, I saw that she had not weakened in the least. There was a heavy, dark, antique bureau in her kitchen full of linens and old silver and candles and papers and photographs. It weighed considerably more than she did, but she had dragged it across the lumpy friction of braided rugs in order to get at the dust underneath it and in order to remove a heavy picture that had hung on the wall behind it. I saw that she had removed another large picture as well from an awkward spot over the sink, and she appeared to have carried them both off to some other room to dust them under better light. I was impressed: Stonehenge, the pyramids, the mysterious power of the ancients.

“Hello?” I called, doubting that she could hear me, but she emerged from the dim interior of the house, swaying stiff-legged into the kitchen doorway. She was very upright, barely five feet tall, and weighing considerably less than one hundred pounds. She was wearing black trousers and a short woolen coat with brass buttons that gave her a tin-soldier, military look. I thought of Hoffmann’s nutcracker.

          “Who’s that?” she said.

          “It’s me,” I said.

          “Who? John? You’re early.”

          “Did you move the bureau by yourself?” I asked.

          “Yes,” she said. “It wasn’t much. It was harder getting those pictures down.”

          “Good Lord” I said, “Like an ant carrying a cricket’s carcass. For all your faults you’re the strongest damned centenarian that ever lived.”

          “For all my what?” she asked. She was deaf, but she also feigned deafness.

          “Faults,” I said.

          “What?”

          “I said, faults.”

          “Oh, faults”. She assumed the arch expression that signaled she was about to make a serious joke. “I have no faults.”

          When I had filled the wood box and rehung the pictures and moved the bureau back against the wall, she said, “Okay, now. For God’s sake sit down and talk to me.” I removed a copy of the Times from a chair and sat at the table. She had something particular to say, and she wasted no time in saying it:

          “Your father and I always took such delight in you,” she says. “And we were proud of you. You never had to go to medical school, you know.”

          This again. “Mother, please,” I said, “drop it.”

          But she would not drop it. “You said such funny things when you were small and you were such a character all through high school. You made us laugh and whether you believe it or not we were proud of you.”

          A one-hundred-year old great-grandmother gaslighting a sixty-year old grandfather about events from forty-five years ago. There was something utterly unclean in the way she so relentlessly pried, though more and more weakly, at the heavy stonework of what was and is. And there was something utterly infantile and hopeless in the rage and exhaustion I felt when she did it.

           Let it go, I told myself. But I said, “You didn’t seem all that proud. Do you remember not going to my high school graduation because I wasn’t valedictorian? Do you remember asking, ‘How did it feel to sit among the idiots?’ when I got home?”

          “You didn’t need us to keep telling you we were proud of you did you?” she pursued. And when I didn’t answer, she tried a new line of attack—“You gave up an awful lot for Jesus.”

 “Well, I should get home,” I said and stood up.

           “Are you going so soon?” she said. And immediately she was no longer confiding and superior. She may have been acting, and she may not have been, but she seemed frightened. She did not want to be left alone. “Wait a minute,” she said, “there’s something else I’d like you to do for me. These things are driving me crazy.” She held up her thumbs; the nails were long and broken and notched. “They keep snagging on things,” she said, “I have an appointment next week with a podiatrist who will cut all my nails, but I can’t wait that long with these.” Her neediness felt like cobwebs in my hair.

She had no nail clippers and so I went into the pantry where she kept her first aid kit in a dim corner under some cupboards and next to an old-fashioned breadbox. I carried it to the window and rummaged through the bandages and rolls of gauze and antibacterial creams and discovered the same small, curved pair of scissors with which, when I was a child, she had cut my nails. She moved a standing lamp over next to the rocker on the hearth. “Do it over here,” she said, “where there is light.”

I would have rather not. I did not want to touch her, but I sat next to her. Through the window I could see the falling snow turning the afternoon to twilight. The woods were growing invisible along the far edges of the fields, and the old house was fading into its hillside. We were an aging man and an ancient woman bending our heads together under the yellow light of a small lamp. We were on opposite sides of the same void; we were infiltrated by the same dread. Her hand was small and parched, spotted and bruised, wrinkled as a sparrow’s claw. It was very strange, that dying flesh—twisted, stained,, halfway to mummification. But when I held her hand against my knee to suppress its tremor, there was a sudden bustling far off in the back of my mind—doors opening and closing, running footfalls in the corridors, hurried whispers, heads craning over the banister to see who it was who had returned after all those years.

Her flesh was full of many voices calling to me from many places: memories beyond memory, ghosts of the ancient needs and terrors too faint for words. There in that dim kitchen was the dark stream, the lustral basin, the brazen threshold and the downward stair. Mother wanted me to take her nails down as far as I could, but she feared I would cut her. She was on blood thinners and would not be able to stop bleeding. With each snip she flinched and hissed as though I were hurting her, but when I was done, she kept finding rough places and asking me to cut more. I insisted that I’d taken her nails down to the quick and could not safely go any further, but she did not want me to stop touching her. And when at last, desperate for the upper air, I stood and put the scissors away and shrugged on my coat she asked, “When will you be back?”

“Not for a couple of weeks,” I said.

“No,” she said, “You’ll come back sooner. You cannot get away so easily.”

John Donaghy spent twelve years teaching and coaching at a secondary school and twenty-six more serving as an adjunct in both the English Department and Institute for Writing and Rhetoric at Dartmouth College before he mustered the courage to drop it all and become a writer. At the age of sixty-seven he received his MFA from the Rainier Writers Workshop in Tacoma, WA. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife who is also a writer.