The Clairvoyants(27)
The day Del was admitted to the Institute had been a dreary November one, wet and cold. I was a senior in high school. My friend Jane Roberts was driving me home from school, and we passed Del walking up the street in that same awful purple parka she’d shown up wearing in Ithaca, her hair and pants legs blowing back, the fallen leaves eddying around her feet. On her face was a look of purposeful concentration. Jane slowed, but I told her to keep going, and she drove up the hill to my house, and I got out. My mother was in the doorway wearing her cashmere car coat as if she were heading out to the store. My father’s car was there as well, which was unusual. After their divorce we rarely saw our parents in close proximity to each other, and our father never came to the old house. But that day he was there in the driveway, sitting in his new BMW with the engine running.
I’d heard our mother talking to our grandmother, and talking on the phone, endless days of consulting friends and doctors—a threat to herself or others, she’d said. So far, she’d been told that walking around town and refusing to bathe didn’t merit the kind of help Del needed. But I understood someone had “pulled strings,” and I saw what Del was walking into that day, and I let her walk.
Inside the house, brushing past our mother’s perfume, past her lipsticked mouth, I went upstairs to my room to discover Del’s clothes packed in a suitcase. Leanne and Sarah were away at school. They would find out later that Del was gone, and to them it wouldn’t really matter. It would be a relief to know they wouldn’t see her walking past the park where they hung out with their friends on their school breaks, wouldn’t have to hear our mother try each evening to urge Del out of her dirty clothes, to wash her face and hands. They wouldn’t wake in the night and find her sitting in their rooms, or wandering up and down the stairs. We had gotten used to these things, but it would be just as easy to become used to something else.
Our mother called me downstairs. I stood in the upstairs landing, and she begged me to come down. “You’ll have to convince her to go to the hospital,” she said.
I thought of her walking the neighborhood streets like one of the dead. I thought of David Pinney. I told Del I would ride with her to the Institute. That she wouldn’t stay long, and that when she came home we’d go to the beach, and take the gold bedspread to lie on in the sand. We’d spread on Bain de Soleil, and our lives would continue on much as they’d always been. I couldn’t know that too much time would pass for this to ever happen. I opened my father’s car door and she got in. Only the neighbors watching through their bay windows with their evening cocktails would have seen this—a father and two daughters going out late one afternoon to the drugstore, or for ice cream. In the doorway to the house my mother had turned away.
When I got home that night my mother was in the living room in the dark, with my grandmother across from her on the brocade couch. The regulator clock’s pendulum echoed. My mother still had on her lipstick, and her coat, tightly cinched. When I came in, she pushed herself from the chair and took off the coat. She went into the kitchen and emptied the dishwasher and put the dishes away. She climbed the back kitchen stairs, slowly, and shut the door of her bedroom. She’d remove her makeup with a special lotion and rub cream into her hands. She wouldn’t cry until she crawled into the big bed and covered her head with the woolen blanket. I had hated my mother then for loving Del more and for expecting me to be the stronger one.
Now, I watched Del pick the chocolate off her éclair with her fingers and eat each small piece, and thought of my mother, who’d called yesterday and left a long message imploring me yet again to talk Del into returning to Ashley Manor. “Maybe she seems to be doing well,” my mother said. “But just remember what used to go on. Do you want that responsibility?”
It wouldn’t be too difficult to convince our parents that supporting Del here was a better alternative to the manor. Del’s adventure the night of the party at Anne’s gave me a small twinge of apprehension. But Del was taking me up on my promise that day in the car, and she knew I wouldn’t refuse her.
“Maybe you can sign up for classes in January,” I said.
Hopeful and happy, Del bit into her éclair and licked her fingers.
11
William Bell came to my apartment on a Friday night in mid-November. I watched for him from my window, through the branches of the elm. Del had moved into the professor’s apartment, and the light from her window downstairs shone out onto the snow. Though I’d spoken to Geoff about the heat, the house remained cold. I had a fireplace in my apartment, and Del had one in hers, but Geoff had stated emphatically that we were not allowed to use them. I pictured hibernating bats with singed wings filling the winter sky above the house. We put large, lighted, pillard candles in the grates, and these gave, at least, an illusion of warmth.
The cold was bitter, different from New England’s. Outside the city the wind spilled across the sweeping, open land dotted with abandoned farm machinery and old houses buckling in on themselves. You wouldn’t think such houses were habitable, but once in a while there would be a tacked-up sheet in the doorway, or plastic nailed over the windows, and the trace of smoke from a chimney. William wasn’t from anywhere else. He was born in Tompkins County, and except for the time he spent in Buffalo, acquiring his degree, he’d lived here all his life—most recently in the house on Cascadilla Street, where he’d rented an apartment and had held the gathering the night I met him. His father, who’d died two years before, had sold and repaired lawn mowers in a shop behind their rented house in Milton, and before that he was a famed attorney with a drinking problem. They had an enclosed front porch with an air hockey game, and gnome statuary on the front lawn that William, an only child, believed came alive at night. His mother had been gone since he was four years old, but before she died she grew apples and sold them from a small roadside stand, Macoun and Winesap and Cortland, and William had made change from a small metal tin. I supposed, from these aspects of his life told to me over the telephone at night, I knew everything about him. “Mon pauvre orphelin,” I said to Del.