Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(2)

The New York I moved to eventually was empty of Sadie, though I’ve since walked by St. Vincent’s, the hospital where she worked, I don’t know how many times. She died in the influenza epidemic of 1918.

Phoebe, deathless, simply faded from public consciousness like a once-popular song. Anthracite, needed to fight the Great War, was not to be used on railroads anymore. The world changed, and Phoebe disappeared forever: On time the trip ends without a slip

And Phoebe sadly takes her grip

Loath to alight, bows left and right,

“Good-bye, Dear Road of Anthracite.”

*

But I never forgot her. I didn’t want to be her, so much as to have her—to create her.

Sadie led me to Manhattan, but Phoebe led me to poetry, and to advertising. So enrapt was I at her entrancing rhymes that when the time came to apply for jobs, I rhymed my letters and my samples alike: To work for you

Is my fondest wish

Signed your ever-true

Lillian Boxfish

*

Fifteen inquiries. Five favorable replies. Including one by telegram from R.H. Macy’s. This was the one I chose: my first serious job in New York City. A job which in some ways saved my life, and in other ways ruined it. What a smart girl.





2

New Year’s Eve

The only man I ever birthed, though not the only one I mothered, is on the other end of the line, and he is giving me news that is sad and bad and that makes me jealous. Julia, my ex-husband’s second wife, has been hospitalized after a heart attack, her third. She will likely not survive. She is much younger than I—fifteen years if you go by my age as I’ve been lying about it forever, sixteen if you go by my age as I am pretty sure is correct. Either way, she is 68.

Either way, it is 1984, and she is with them, and I am alone on New Year’s Eve in New York City, and it’s too warm. I wish it were snowing, but gently, gently, like sugar falling on a great, gray cookie.

Unlike Julia, my health is and always has been—physically—impeccable.

“She was struggling in all this Maine snow, when there’s none in California,” says Johnny, says Gianino, my Little John, says my son, says Gian, as he asked to be called back in junior high school, when it occurred to him that he had the wherewithal. “She collapsed coming up the driveway after taking the kids to the library. It’s pretty grim this time, Ma.”

“Ma,” he calls me—incongruous, ugly—but I enjoy it. Max, my ex-husband, taught him that: the harsh monosyllable sounding working-class, hardly our income bracket. But that was part of what I loved about Max. The blue of his collar to the white of mine. I was not entirely un-maternal toward Max. Of course when, finally, I needed his unconditional support, he could not afford the same care to me.

“Dreadful,” I say. “I hope the ambulance didn’t founder getting out to Pin Point.”

Gian spends his time between semesters at Pin Point, the summer home Max and I bought in the thirties; perversely, he likes it in winter, too.

“No, they made it all right,” he says. “I’m at the hospital now. Claire’s mom took the train up from Boston to help out with the kids so I can stay here with Julia. The university’s not back in session until the third week of January, so this honestly couldn’t have happened at a better time.”

This announcement that Gian is calling from the hospital forces me to revise the image of him in my mind, an image I wasn’t even aware of until I knew it was wrong. I picture him now in an overly bright lounge among grim institutional furniture, murmuring into an oft-disinfected courtesy phone. He rests his free hand atop his shaggy head in his distracted fashion—the absentminded professor, father of three, black hair threaded with gray at the temples, forty-three years old next month—and that imagined gesture recalls another, from what seems like yesterday: Gian placing a flat palm on the crown of his skull to measure his height against his bedroom wall.

The line goes quiet: He’s stopped talking, and I realize I’d stopped listening. “How are the kids taking it?” I ask. I picture the three as last I saw them, the day after Christmas, bundled up like ornaments in red and green coats, and boarding the train north. I want to know how they will react when I die.

“They’re upset. They’re old enough to understand that this is it. That death is it. They’re excited, though, that their aunt is going to fly in from California. We can’t move Julia back there because she’s too sick. She’s going to be buried here anyway.”

I imagine Gian’s much younger half-sister, the second child Max wanted, then got, standing graveside with him there in Maine. I’ll be buried in that same boneyard. On Max’s other side. It galls me to share. But where else would they put me? By then I won’t care.

“If you want to send the kids back down here while you’re dealing with this, you should,” I say, knowing he’ll never take me up on it, wishing he would. I only got to see them for a week at Christmas; there’s so much more I could show them in the city, and I like when this apartment feels crowded—when they stay here to save money and avoid the fleabag hotels.

“I think they kind of ought to stick around, Ma, since their grandmother is about to die. They’re grown up enough to go to a funeral.”

“Step-grandmother,” I say. I am interested in politeness; I am not interested in propriety. “And I don’t know how character building a funeral is for a young person, or how much that will help Julia, past help as she’ll be.”