The Cloisters(12)

“We’ll see what happens,” Patrick said. “Who’s to say what the future holds?”

I noticed then that Patrick was weaving something between his fingers, something he must have pulled from his pocket—a piece of red ribbon—a kind of reflexive habit, a meditation.

I took another look through the lists he had handed me.

“We need you here, Ann. We need the help,” he said, searching my face. “Don’t forget that. You’re not charity.”

I was, I think, a little in love with him right away. The way he solicited our opinions on his research, the way he valued my language skills, often handing off translations to me, fully confident in my abilities. Even the way he held the door for us and brought us coffees in the afternoon; it was the first time anyone in a position of power had been genuinely kind to me. And already, he paid me more attention than most of the boys I had known in college. When I finally got around to reading his essay on medieval calendrical systems, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find it completely groundbreaking, but I was. I tried to control the color that came to my cheeks every time he talked to me, but there was little I could do. I tried, in those early days, to figure out if he was involved with anyone—romantically. But the only evidence I ever saw was a soft arm on the metal windowsill of his car’s passenger seat. Just an arm, no face.



* * *



My mother’s voice came through the phone, edged with a familiar thinness.

“There’s no way I can manage like this any longer.”

The death of my father had unmoored her. After he was gone, the tight structure of our daily life got looser: the milk expired and was not replaced, our small patch of lawn overgrew, my mother stopped changing her sheets. And then, there would be a day during which she would whip everything back to the way it was before, a sudden tightening. But the loosening would come back. A slow easing at first, and then a swift, remorseless undoing—again and again.

Those days, the days of tightening, were preceded by my mother despairing over the state of the house. Why are there coffee cups here? Doesn’t anyone put anything away? How can you expect me to live like this? Only, my mother did expect me to live like that. Anytime I picked things up she would cry from the other room: What happened to that water glass? or, Why did you throw out the milk? It was as if, by leaving things, she could slow time, rein it in. But that was the hardest thing about death: the unrelenting march of time forward, away from the person you’ve lost.

“It’s everywhere, Ann,” she said, the pitch in her voice getting higher, tighter. “His stuff. His shirts, his clothes, his shoes, his papers. I can’t do it. It’s too much. This place is a mess. He left it a mess, you know?”

I was doing my dishes and drying them with the only dish towel that my sublet had provided, the phone cradled against my cheek. I was too cheap to buy paper towels.

“Maybe it’s time to donate some of it, Mom?” I had ventured this before. And while she always said yes in the moment, in the coming days, she would back away, leave everything as it had been the day he died. A memorial of half-used shaving creams and dirty socks.

“That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to donate it. All of it. And everything else, I’m going to throw away.”

“Mm-hmm.” I walked over to my air conditioner, which had developed a deathly rattle, and hit it on the side, hard. The force seemed to settle the frequency back to white noise.

“I don’t want you to complain when it’s all gone. When you come home and it’s all gone. I don’t want to hear about it.”

“You won’t, Mom, I promise.” I never wanted to see the house again.

“Maybe I’ll send you a few things in New York.” She was mostly talking to herself now. “I don’t even know what to send. It’s all junk, you know? He just left us with junk. Do you really want that? What do you want? Any of it?”

I thought about my dad’s things and how most of the time my mom moved through them silent and oblivious to their presence. It was only in these moments, when the house seemed to startle her awake, that she even noticed his books and papers and clothes, the way he still clung to our space.

“Sure, Mom. I’ll take some of Dad’s stuff. Send me whatever you think I’d like, okay?”

I could hear her on the other end of the line rummaging around: glass, paper, plastic, all pinging together somewhere in the house that had once been a home before it became a mausoleum.

It hadn’t always been this way. There had been a time when the house was full of conversation and warmth and my father’s low chuckle, full of humor and surprise. But my father was like the putty that had filled in the sharp cracks between my mother and me, the places where we didn’t fit, and without that putty, we kept running up against each other, all hard angles and brittleness.

“Mom, I have to go. It’s getting late. We’re three hours ahead, remember?” I waited for her to respond. But all I could hear was the rustling, her constant movement, her breath distracted and fast into the phone, and so, I hung up.



* * *



By the end of my second week, it was clear that no matter how much I tried to emulate the way Rachel dressed and the conscientious way she handled old texts, I wouldn’t measure up. For every beautifully unwrinkled linen jumper Rachel wore, I could barely pull together two items that matched. Against the luxury of her fabrics and accessories, everything of mine felt like a dull imitation. Even the gentle deference she showed to Moira and Louis, I couldn’t match without it ringing false in my own ears.