Visit with Mommy

Friday, 9 January 2009

I arose, happy with my resolve to go visit Mommy. I have not been up there since well before Thanksgiving and I have missed the quiet peace of that house and the view of the Bay. Daddy caught me however, at about 9.30 as I was descending in my jeans and leather patchwork jacket, and he saw I had my keys out. 'Where are you off to?' he asked, not to be nosy, you know.

'I,' I announced happily, 'am going up to see Mommy.'

He nodded, looking down then, and for a moment seemed to have no words. Well-- that was understandable. 'All right,' he said. 'But let Roger take you.'

I stamped my foot, still standing on the bottom step. 'Daddy! Jessy and I had a whole day planned!'

'All right, but just let him drive you. I have some stuff at the house he can check on for me anyway.' When I was ready to protest he said, 'Can you be sure you'll be back by dark? That's three-thirty today.'

My licence doesn't allow me to drive after dark for another few months yet. 'Sure,' I said-- and then I said a stupid thing. 'We won't have any trouble if we are, you know--'

'That is not the point,' he said. 'It's the law. You don't make excuses to avoid the law. And... it's going to snow.'

I think that must have been the settling factor.

I slumped down in the back of the Cadillac, not even glancing out at the passing landscape. It's dull here anyway. 'Well,' Jessy said, trying to cheer me up, 'it's at least safer, and we don't have to worry about running out of gas.'

I glared at her. Still I felt a little better by the time we had come into Delaware. Our old house is up on the Bay shore, at the very bottom of Delaware Bay, with an unimpeded view of all the shipping traffic and especially the Cape May Ferry route. How I loved hearing that familiar whistle again! The electric gates slid apart and Roger steered the long green Cadillac in to our old yard. The grass in the 'wilderness', the area we always left raw, is high but dormant, and the row of fruit trees to either side look dead and done, but all this will be in superior bloom by Easter again... and Mommy's birthday.

Roger reviewed the alarm codes with us and left Jessy and me to open up the house whilst he went round to the car yard. Inside, the air was stiff and cool-- the heating is set on 55 and we could just see our breath-- and dark, since all the storm shutters have been closed. As soon at the alarm was off we put on lights and ran up to look at our old bedrooms. Of course the bedclothes are off, packed away in plastic containers in the cedar cupboards up stairs, but we both bounced onto our unmade beds and giggled like little girls.

I know Jessy loves this place and sometimes she wishes, even more than I do, that we had never left. However we both understand, far more than Lisa and J.J. ever will be able to, why Daddy did not want to stay here with his new wife and his new children. This house is part of the loss of our mother, and like everything about her Daddy will keep it close to his heart forever. His new wife does not replace her-- they have a pact whereby they insist they will never try, for they both loved her in profound, life-altering ways. I have often said that their being married and beginning a new family is the best way to pay homage to what Mommy always wanted for all of us. But I know it must be different for Daddy.

We descended to the main floor again and slipped out the back doors into the brittle wind. Mommy's small but well-organised flower garden has seen better days-- everything here is dead and cold, but that is owing much more to the season than to any neglect. I know Roger visits this place regularly, just to keep in touch with it. He and Daddy rebuilt the small Buick here that eventually became the car for the girl who became our nanny and, eventually, stepmother, after she came to live with us and then went off to university. For a while she and her best friend stayed in the guest cottage, at the other end of the pool. Then she moved into what we always, so stiffly, called the maid's room, though we have never had a maid here. It was just a small room in front, behind the fireplace in the kitchen. The whole house was designed by Daddy to be an authentic 1740s country farm house, neither large nor fancy but so proper and elegant in its clean lines, slate-blue clapboards, bright white trim and accurate mullioned windows that more than one season the local Colonial society had asked us to let them include it on their old-house tour-- and it was built 250 years after even those architectural experts believed it was!

Mommy's ashes lie in a heavy stainless-steel canister inside a concrete tube in the midst of the tiger-lily beds along the northern side of the garden, under her bedroom window. From here she greets the morning sun as it comes over the beach grass. Some trash and leaves now clogged the ground cover and we both knelt there and cleared it, just the typical winter stuff that tosses up here from somewhere far up the Bay. Whilst kneeling we took each other's hand and said our prayers. Jessy wept. She always does. She was only seven when Mommy left and for a long time she believed it was because of something she'd done. Little kids often think that. But there was nothing she had ever done-- she was always a very good little girl and knew everyone thought so. It's only that when something like that happens when you are that young, you grow up away from that event with only that connection to it.

As we got up Jessy, still holding my hand, turned back to the little tablet in the garden and said, 'I promise to be good, Mommy.' It's what she has always said when she has visited this place ever since we moved away, because it's what Mommy asked her to promise when she lay in that hospital just hours from when she would leave us for good and every time we had visited up till then.

'You have to be good for your daddy and your sister,' she would say. 'They need you to be good.'

'I promise I will be,' she said then. And she always has been.

We went up stairs again and collected a few things from our childhood mementoes-- a collage I made for third grade, the big pink paper dinosaur Jessy made in second, the same year, early-reader books to lend to Lisa, and the big yellow-and-red tipper truck Daddy bought for me when I was J.J.'s age, like all our things lovingly cherished and preserved from then till now with sentimental gentleness by both our parents. This was to be our lifelong heritage home, the place we would always come back to, with our children and grandchildren, for Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter and Mother's Day and Father's Day and everyone's birthday. This whole estate-- if I may call it that, all eleven acres of it-- was planned by two young parents as an ideal getaway from public life and a perpetual home in which they would raise their two sweet, innocent girls. All that was lost one October evening eight years ago. Now it is, in some respects, just a house (sadly in need of new paint!) surrounded by fruit trees and tall grass. Secretly Jessy and I have discussed which one of us shall ask for it when the first of us is married. I have never thought Daddy would consider that either inappropriate or expensive. Indeed I believe that is the real reason he hangs onto both this one and the one up in Surf City.

If it comes down to that I would rather have the beach house and leave this place to Jessy. The beach house suits my attitude towards life better anyway. It is small, crowded sensibly but snugly on a small patch of land on which the dunes encroach year after year. There is one garage, no basement, a small parlour and a small square dining room that barely seats six of us to table. It is at the ocean, but this place is at the Bay and a two-mile walk through open beach park will lead to the ocean from here too. I will sit up in what used to be Daddy's library and write my novels, feed my cats, and take long walks on the beach in the off-season. And Jessy will marry someone young-at-heart like Daddy, and take good care of Mommy's gardens and Mommy's tablet in the tiger-lilies. It is what she thinks of when she promises to be a good child. And she will make sure all three or four of her cheerful children promise to be good too.

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