As Bright as Heaven(72)

My father said nothing. He was probably thinking, “But that’s not his mother.” He didn’t say that, though. He just nodded and then headed down the little hallway to his rooms at the back of the house. Alex still has that photograph on his dresser.

He knows Mama was not his mother, but he can’t remember anything about the woman who did give birth to him. Mama’s photograph reminds him he had a mother and she loved him. Sometimes you need a little help imagining something that used to be yours but which you have no memory of.

I, however, remember everything about my mother. Her voice, her fragrance, the way she swirled the cat-shaped tea infuser in her cup, the soft tap of her heels on the stairs, how much she liked birdsong and the color yellow, how she called Papa “Tom,” and the way she talked to the dead in the embalming room as she made them look beautiful again.

I suppose these are the reasons I also love the sound of birdsong in the morning, and sunny yellow hues, and tea made with the cat infuser, and why I chat to the people in the embalming room when I am getting them ready for their grand good-bye. All of these are echoes of Mama’s beauty and mystery. These things keep me close to Mama, close even to that part of her I hadn’t yet come to fully know because I was too young and we simply ran out of time.

I hear a man’s voice now beyond the kitchen as I step into the hallway that leads to the rest of the house—then the sound of the sitting room piano.

The voice is Palmer Towlerton’s, and my heart takes a little stutter step. Palmer is my current suitor. He works for the city as a facilities manager. He is from New Jersey and he’s tall like Papa but with darker eyes and hair and he’s five years older than me. I met him at the library on Locust Street on one of my trips with Alex to borrow books. It is one of the many city buildings over which Palmer’s department has oversight. We’ve only been courting for a couple months, but I like Palmer very much. So does Papa. Actually Willa likes him, too.

He is not like Jamie Sutcliff, whom I haven’t seen in six years. Palmer is talkative and energetic and spontaneous. Jamie Sutcliff is quiet and even-keeled and more thoughtful. At least he was. I guess I don’t know what he is now. He’s only come back to visit Philadelphia once, and I didn’t see him then because we were all in Quakertown for the holidays that year. Dora and Roland have traveled to visit him, sometimes having to go as far away as San Francisco. Dora has said that the war, just those few months Jamie fought in it, changed him. He doesn’t like being at home now or around anything that reminds him of home, which includes his parents and us and anything related to the man he was before he shipped to France.

I asked Evie quite a while ago what might have happened to Jamie in those few months that ruined home for him. At the time, she was in her last year of college before medical school to become a psychiatrist. She said it’s not how short or long an experience is; it’s the depth to which it touches the core of who you are that matters.

“You and I don’t have to be told how quickly one’s world can change, Maggie,” she’d said.

Palmer Towlerton had a draft number, but it had been issued in the last weeks of the war when the registration age was lowered to eighteen. He never got called. I’m glad he didn’t.

I’d forgotten now that Palmer had said he was going to try to arrange his Saturday afternoon so that he could join Alex and me on our outing to the park today. He knows how devoted I am to Alex, and it doesn’t seem to rankle him. I do wonder, though, if he understands that if we should marry, Alex surely comes with us. Papa can’t raise a seven-year-old boy with just Willa for help, and Evie is hardly ever home. And Alex thinks of me as a mother figure. He would miss me too much. I’ll need to be ready to work all this into a conversation with Palmer about our future together, if we are to have one.

I admit I have lain awake some nights imagining what it would be like to be Palmer’s wife. He is not the first man to want my affection—there have been a few others—but he is the first to capture it. He is the first to measure up to Jamie Sutcliff, or at least Jamie as I remember him. Every young suitor who has asked me to a dance or a concert or a party, I have compared with Jamie. And even though I wish I didn’t, the fact is, I do. I still have Jamie’s letters from France. There are only four of them, and goodness knows I wrote ten times as many to him, but they still whisper to me the kind of person he was before he left for the army, and the kind of person I still want to believe he is—underneath all those terrible memories of the war.

Palmer doesn’t remind me of Jamie, not in the least. But he does make me think less about Jamie. More so than anyone else ever has.

I make my way into the sitting room now. Willa is at the piano and she’s singing “Moonlight and Roses.” She is golden-haired and beautiful, and her voice is angelic. If she were a few years older, I’m sure Palmer would be positively smitten with her. I should be jealous of her constant flirtations with my beau. If she were seventeen and not fourteen, I no doubt would be.

Palmer stands just inside the sitting room, which I’m happy to say we updated with new furniture and decor a year after the flu. He is politely listening to my sister, who no doubt coquettishly asked him to listen to her play and sing. Willa began taking piano lessons the summer after Mama died. She caught on quickly. It was as if she had been born to excel at music. She can play and sing just about anything and rarely needs the sheet music. She is a natural, as Dora Sutcliff likes to say.