The Clairvoyants(5)
After almost six months of unsuccessful family therapy sessions, I drove alone to the Institute of Living to visit Del. I was preparing to graduate. It was clear that Del’s participation in teenage milestones—the part-time job, the acquiring of a driver’s license, the various mortifications of high school from her sophomore year onward—would be cut short. By then she’d been transferred to a residential house on the grounds. It was a spring day, the dogwood was blooming, and I waited in the lobby for over an hour, only to be told Del didn’t want to see me. I was hurt, and furious.
I never tried to visit again. We wrote old-fashioned letters back and forth—a method of communication that let me couch my rancor in the false recounting of my life: details of shopping trips with our mother that I never took, a day with my father at museums in the city that never occurred, the date with a man I met at a play I never attended. I knew she’d see through my lies—lying was what we did best together, and so it was my best revenge to hide my life beneath a story of one. In truth, I rarely left the house. I’d gotten leery of the dead. They filled me with regret. And the living troubled me more. At least with the dead, there were no questions—just their longing, and my renouncing of it. I was an intermediary who refused to function in her role. Somewhere, grieving parents and siblings and lovers suffered, and I denied them any solace.
As I sat in the car, reassessing my earliest letters to Del at the Institute, my mother drove through Liberty, home of the old Grossinger’s Resort, where, I imagined, throngs of astral inhabitants reclined on dilapidated loungers. As we passed through the seemingly empty stretches of Binghamton and Lisle into Ithaca, my mother hummed along with a song on the radio, and I sensed she had hopes that I would make a new start, and the pressure of her hopefulness was yet another burden. Perhaps she knew I was fleeing, had sensed, as I did, that the detective’s questions seemed to have become more probing, more pointed, that his gaze had hardened, become almost wily, like a man who had a taste of something he liked.
He’d sat in a chair brought in from the dining room—he needed it for his back, he had said, and whenever he visited, my mother brought the chair into the living room, and he thanked her—“Ah, you remember”—as if her courtesy, too, were being cataloged in a file.
“I have a girl here, a Jane Roberts, who says you had a crush on David,” he’d said.
I’d leaned forward and smiled. “My old friend Jane said that?”
Detective Thomson leaned forward as well. He cradled his coffee in his two hands, the missing part of his finger camouflaged by the others.
“Well, she doesn’t want anyone to know,” I said, keeping my voice low, eyeing my mother on the couch, her knees pressed together at the hem of her Lilly Pulitzer skirt. “About us.”
“About who?” the detective said. “You and Jane?”
“Oh, good heavens,” my mother said, slapping her lap, rising to her feet.
Detective Thomson leaned away, a flush rising from his collar. I waited a moment, watching my mother. “It’s true,” I said. “We had a little crush on each other, Jane and I. Maybe it was more than that. Do I have to tell you everything?”
My mother’s jaw tightened and she sat back down, smoothing her skirt. “Is this what you wanted to know, Mr. Thomson? Is this what you’ve been digging around for? Some scandal? Some schoolgirl relationship between my daughter and her childhood friend?”
The detective had kept his eyes on me. Where once he might have smiled indulgently, this time he did not. “Are you saying you don’t like boys,” he asked.
“I’m saying if I had a crush on anyone, it was Jane. Not some boy I didn’t even know.”
“You’re a clever young woman,” he said.
It was July, and the drapes on the living-room windows blew in, carrying in the smell of salt, the tones of the Spiritualists’ organ. Detective Thomson shifted in the chair, and the antique joints groaned. Outside, the Sound broke forcefully against the seawall. A strange little bird chirruped in the crab apple.
“No,” I had said, cupping my upturned hands in my lap. “Del was the clever one.”
Now, beyond my mother’s profile at the wheel of the car, Route 79 wound alongside green swaths of hills still damp from the recent rain. This was an isolated valley with a poor yearly sunlight allotment and haphazard cell phone reception—another version of a sanatorium, a place my mother could tuck me away, the way you pressed a photograph into the back of a drawer—and be free of me. But I might be free of her, too, and I might find someone else to love me.
3
All the dorm rooms were filled by the time the university accepted me, so I’d rented an apartment in an old house, where a great elm cast a dark shadow over the porch. The house stood on a street of similarly grand old places, each shaded by a tree, their roots disrupting the cement sidewalks in front. Mine was a brick Italianate house with a wide cornice and elaborately carved brackets and window caps. The apartment was up a staircase that once might have been glamorous when the house was still a single-family residence. The place had been advertised as a “studio.” I would be living in one room with a twelve-foot ceiling, a decorative fireplace, and an efficiency-sized stove, sink, and refrigerator—so small they seemed like playhouse furnishings. My mother, decorator extraordinaire, seemed not to have found any inspiration in the room, or else she didn’t see the need to apply her skills to it. She scoped the space out, and then we left and found a used-furniture store nearby and purchased a couch that folded out into a bed.