One True Thing Read online

  And my mother spoke, alive again inside my brain, edging out Becky Sharp and Pip and Miss Havisham and all the other made-up people I had learned so long ago from my father to prize over real ones. She spoke and I listened to her, because I was afraid if I didn’t her voice would gradually fade away, an evanescent wraith of a thing that would narrow to a pinpoint of light and then go out, lost forever, like Tinker Bell if no one clapped for her. I listened to her, because I loved her. She’d asked so little of me, over the course of our lives, and I wanted to do this one small remembered thing, to smile for the camera.

  At the end I always did what she asked, even though I hated it. I was tired to death of the sour smell of her body and the straw of her hair in the brush and the bedpan and the basin and the pills that kept her from crying out, from twisting and turning like the trout do on the banks of the Montgomery River when you’ve lifted them on the end of the sharp hook and their gills flare in mortal agitation.

  I tried to do it all without screaming, without shouting, “I am dying with you.” But she knew it; she felt it. It was one of many reasons why she would lie on the living-room couch and weep without making a sound, the tears giving her gray-yellow skin, tight across her bones, the sheen of the polished cotton she used for slipcovers or the old lampshades she painted with flowers for my bedroom. I tried to make her comfortable, to do what she wanted. All but that one last time.

  No matter what the police and the district attorney said, no matter what the papers wrote, no matter what people believed then and still believe, these years later, the truth is that I did not kill my mother. I only wished I had.

  PART ONE

  I remember that the last completely normal day we ever had in our lives, my brothers and I, was an ordinary day much like this one, a muggy August-into-September weekday, the sky low and gray over Langhorne, clouds as flat as an old comforter hanging between the two slight ridges that edged the town. We’d gone to the Tastee Freeze for soft ice cream that day, driving in Jeff’s battered open jeep with our arms out the windows. My brothers were handsome boys who have turned into handsome men. Brian has our father’s black hair and blue eyes, Jeffrey our mother’s coloring, auburn hair and eyes like amber and a long face with freckles.

  Both of them were tanned that day, at the end of their summer jobs as camp counselor and landscapes I was pale from a summer spent in a New York office on weekdays and house-guesting at Fire Island weekends, spending more time at cocktail parties than on the beach, where melanoma and Retin-A were frequent talking points among my acquaintances.

  Afterward I wondered why I hadn’t loved that day more, why I hadn’t savored every bit of it like soft ice cream on my tongue, why I hadn’t known how good it was to live so normally, so everyday. But you only know that, I suppose, after it’s not normal and everyday any longer. And nothing ever was, after that day. It was a Thursday, and I was still my old self, smug, self-involved, successful, and what in my circles passed for happy.

  “Ellen’s got the life,” said Jeff, who’d been asking about the magazine where I worked. “She gets paid to be a wiseass for a living. You go to parties, you talk to people, you make fun of them in print. It’s like getting paid to breathe. Or play tennis.”

  “You could get paid to play tennis,” I said. “It’s called being a tennis pro.”

  “Oh, right,” said Jeff, “with our father?” He sucked the ice cream from the bottom of his cone. “Excuse me, Pop? Mr. Life of the Mind? I’ve decided to move to Hilton Head and become a tennis pro. But I’ll be reading Flaubert in my spare time.”

  “Is it possible for one of you to make a life decision without wondering what Papa will find wrong with it?” I said.

  My brothers hooted and jeered. “Oh, great,” said Jeff. “Ellen Gulden renounces paternal approval! And only twenty-four years too late.”

  “Mom is happy with anything I do,” said Brian.

  “Oh, well, Mom,” said Jeff.

  “Jeffrey man,” someone called across the parking lot. “Brian!” My brothers lifted their hands in desultory salutes. “What’s up?” Jeff called back.

  “I’m history here,” I said.

  “You were history here when you were here,” said Jeff. “No offense, El. You’re a hungry puppy, always were a hungry puppy, and the world don’t like you hungry puppies. People are afraid you’re going to bite them.”

  “Why are you talking like a cracker radio commentator?” I said.

  “See, Bri, Ellen never relaxes. New York is her kind of place. An entire city of people who never relax, who were antsy in their own hometowns. So long, hungry puppy. Go where the dogs eat the dogs.”

  The light was dull yellow because of the low clouds, like a solitary bulb in a dark room. The asphalt was soft in the driveway under our feet, the smell of charcoal drifting over Langhorne the way perfume hung over a cocktail party in the city. Our father came in late in the evening, but we were used to that: he stood in the den for a time, leaning against the doorjamb, and then he trudged upstairs, oddly silent.

  Not odd for the boys, with whom he had the strained, slightly mechanical transactions that many fathers have with their sons. But odd for me. I had always felt I knew my father’s mind, if not his heart. Whenever I came home, from college and then later, on visits from the city, he would call me into his study, with its dark furniture and dim sepia light, would lean forward in his desk chair and say, simply, “Tell.”

  And I would spin my stories for him, of the famous writer I had heard read in a lecture hall, of the arguments about syntax I had had with editors, of the downstairs neighbor who played Scarlatti exquisitely but monotonously on the small antique harpsichord I had once glimpsed through the door of his apartment.

  I often felt like someone being debriefed by a government apparatchik, or like Scheherazade entertaining the sultan. And often I made stories up, wonderful stories, so that my father would lean back in his chair and his face would relax into the utter concentration he had when he lectured to his students. Sometimes at the end he would say “Interesting.” And I would be happy.

  Our mother was in the hospital that day, and as it always did, the house seemed like a stage set without her. It was her house, really. Whenever anyone is called a homemaker now—and they rarely are—I think of my mother. She made a home painstakingly and well. She made balanced meals, took cooking classes, cleaned the rooms of our home with a scarf tying back her bright hair, just like in the movies. When she wallpapered a room, she would always cover the picture frames in the same paper, and place them on the bureau or the bedside table, with family photographs inside.

  The two largest pictures in the living room were of my mother and father. In one they are standing together on our front porch. My mother is holding my father’s arm with both her own, an incandescent smile lighting her face, as though life knows no greater happiness than this—this place, this day, this man. Her body is turned slightly sideways, toward him, but he is facing foursquare to the camera, his arms crossed over his chest, his face serious, his eyes mocking.

  Back when we were still lovers, Jonathan had picked up that picture from the piano and said that; in it my father looked like the kind of man who would rip out your heart, grill it, and eat it for dinner, then have your wife for dessert. Allowing for the difficult relationship between Jonathan and my father, the relationship of two men engaged in a struggle for the soul of the same woman, it was a pretty fair description.

  I wonder if my father still has that picture there, on the piano, or whether it’s put away now, my mother smiling dustily, happily, into the dark of a drawer.

  Next to it was another picture of my mother hanging on to my father’s arm. Wearing a cap and gown, I am hanging on to his other one. In that picture, my father is squinting slightly in the sunlight, and smiling. Jonathan took that picture. I have it on my dresser today, the most tangible remaining evidence of the Gulden family triangle.

  My mother would be saddened by my apartment now, b
y the grimy white cotton couch and the inexpertly placed standing lamps. My apartment is the home of someone who is not a homemaker, someone who listens to the messages on the answering machine and then runs out again.

  But she would not criticize me, as other mothers might. Instead she would buy me things, a cheap but pretty print she would mat herself, a throw of some kind. And as she arranged the throw or hung the picture she would say, smiling, “We’re so different, aren’t we, Ellie?” But she would never realize, as she said it, as she’d said it so many times before, that if you are different from a person everyone agrees is wonderful, it means you are somehow wrong.

  My mother loved the hardware store, Phelps’s Hardware, and the salesmen there loved her. My father would always tease her: “Once again, she has paid the Phelps’s mortgage for the month and alone of all her sex has cornered the market on tung oil and steel wool!” My father always teased her. I was the one he talked to.

  It was a charmed day in the charmed life we lived, my brothers and I, that day we went to the Tastee Freeze. I see that so clearly now. We lolled on the grass in the backyard afterward, cooked and ate some hamburgers, watched television. And then the next morning our father came downstairs, his khakis wrinkled, his blue shirt rolled back from his wrists, and told us all to sit down. He leaned back against the kitchen counter as I sat opposite him, sipping a glass of orange juice. My two brothers sat in the ladderback chairs at either end of the kitchen table. My mother had caned the seats. I don’t include those details by way of description, but in tribute. Things like this were my mother’s whole life. Of this I was vaguely contemptuous at the time.

  When I was a little girl, she would sometimes sing me to sleep, although I always preferred my father, because he made up nonsense songs: “Lullaby, and good night, fettuccine Alfredo. Lullaby and good night, rigatoni Bolognese.” But my mother sang a boring little tune that was nothing but the words “safe and sound” over and over again. It put me right to sleep. My father always jazzed me up; my mother always calmed me down. They did the same to one another. Sometimes I think they just practiced on me.

  I remember. It’s what I do for a living now, how I earn my keep, make my mark, through memories. I remember well. I can remember the orange juice on the table, and Brian, his torso jack-knifed between his knees, throwing a ball into a mitt over and over. The glass was half full; the table was oak, a big round moon of a top on a sturdy pedestal with predatory claws at its base. My mother had rescued it from a junk shop, stripped and refinished it, waxed it with butcher wax until the muscles in her arms stood out like pale polished wood themselves.

  “Cancer,” my father said as we sat ringed around it. There had been certain vague signs, certain symptoms. She had felt sick for a long time. “Your mother procrastinated,” he said, as though she was somehow to blame. “First she thought she had the flu. Then she imagined she was expecting. She didn’t want to make a fuss. You know how she is.”

  The three of us looked down, all three embarrassed by the thought of our forty-six-year-old mother imagining she was pregnant. I was twenty-four. Jeff was twenty. Bri was eighteen. You looked at the numbers and you could tell we were planned children. We knew how she was.

  My brothers were leaving for college that weekend. Their stereos were packed up, their suitcases standing open in the center of their rooms. And I had come back from the city for four days for a visit. I hadn’t even unpacked, just pulled clothes out of a duffel bag on the chest at the foot of my bed, not putting anything away, leaving the drawers of my dresser empty and clean, lined with flowered paper. Four days seemed enough for the occasion. More, and I would miss a book party and lunch with the editor of an important magazine. A week in the hospital, she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female—a breast, a womb, a child, a man.

  Funny, how the imagined pregnancy jarred us at first more than the cancer, which we could scarcely comprehend. And how I suddenly realized why my mother had seemed so joyous the month before, in town to take me to lunch on my birthday, her pale translucent redhead’s skin flushed with pink. A forty-six-year-old woman aching to ask her sophisticated city-daughter where you could buy attractive maternity clothes. It makes me hurt now, just to think of what was going on in her head, before she finally discovered what was going on in her body.

  “Chemotherapy,” my father said. There were verbs in his sentences but I did not hear them. “Liver. Ovaries. Oncologist.” I picked up my glass and walked out of the room.

  “I’m still speaking, Ellen,” my father called after me.

  “I can’t listen anymore,” I said, and I went out and sat on the front porch, on a wicker rocker with a cushion that, of course, had been made by my mother.

  The things they sold at antique stores in my New York neighborhood were like things my mother had bought years ago—square old chests made of russet-colored cherry wood, patchwork quilts, wicker settees painted white. We lived on the nicest block in Langhorne but in the smallest house, a white clapboard farmhouse left over from the days when the surrounding hills were farms and the college was the estate of Samuel Langhorne, who had made his money in machine parts on the cusp of the industrial revolution.

  Our house looked like a pony that has somehow nosed its way in among the horses, a painted miniature to their murals. But it was as beautiful as any inside because of my mother’s hard work. She had married a man who would never be rich, but she said she had not minded, because she knew he had a vocation instead. Lapsed Catholic that she was—or perhaps not so lapsed, in her heart—she had said it exactly that way, as though my father had become a priest, or at least taken vows, when his seven sacraments were only “Introduction to Victorian Poetry,” “The Romantics and the Seasons of Love,” and other such offerings in the college catalogue.

  Even on its nicest block, where most of the residents were too rich to work at the college, Langhorne had the odd feel of a town that is about something other than itself. Washington is like that, and Orlando, Florida, which has Disney World. And Boston. When I went to college in Boston—or Cambridge, as all Harvard students learn to say—I was convinced it was because I wanted a larger pond, a more cosmopolitan setting, blessed release from the bell jar of Langhorne, where everyone knew my name and my class rank, which was number one. And of course I wanted to sleep with Jonathan whenever I could and he was at Harvard, so I went there, too. I was always afraid that if I wasn’t in bed with Jonathan, keeping his cold feet warm, it was a cinch someone else would be.

  But the truth is that Cambridge and Langhorne are in many ways very much alike, and not just because so many of my father’s spiritual colleagues are in Cambridge, roaming the streets with the Times tucked under their arms, in cuffed chinos with the knees bagged out. All college towns are essentially the same. There is something strange about the roots of people settled in a place where everyone else passes through.

  I sat on the porch and looked across at the Buckley house as I had done so many times before—Tudor, stucco, rhododendrons and a perennial garden fading fast, losing its pinks and whites and blues, nursery colors. They had gotten balloon shades in the living room since the last time I was home.

  There were no shades on the windows in my apartment in New York. When my mother had visited the month before, it had been not only to have lunch but also to figure out which items of furniture, stored in the cellar, would fit nicely in my two small rooms. “You have no window coverings!” she had said. “The whole world is watching you undress!”

  “Oh, Mama, big deal,” I said. “Everyone in this neighborhood is gay.” I was damned if I’d tell her that the first time I pulled off my shirt in my bedroom I’d looked across at the amber lamps lighting other people’s lives and clutched the cotton to my chest. Or that since then I’d dressed and undressed i
n my windowless bathroom, like a virgin on her honeymoon.

  But I was damned, too, if I’d put up balloon shades, or lace curtains, or those narrow venetian blinds. One of the things I loved about having my own place was the spill of white light across the scratched wooden floors each morning, the wave of mellow light that snuck slowly across the futon on my bedroom floor in late afternoon and early evening, the moon rising outside my window.

  The light and sun and stars belonged to me in that place where anyone, looking in the window, would find a stranger, an unknown. Not Ellen Gulden. Not little Ellen, who, when she was eight, was dressed for Halloween as a princess in blue net and star-shaped sequins. Not Ellen Gulden, who met Jonathan Beltzer in A.P. English and became inseparable from him when she was seventeen. Not Ellen, who graduated from Harvard with a magna—“Non sum summa est?” said my father, who did not speak Latin and had only been a magna himself, but I got the message anyhow—and then went to work for some big magazine in New York as an editorial assistant and sometime reporter.

  As I sat on the porch of my mother’s house I was in a place where almost everybody knew, not only my name, but all those things. A shadow crossed my lap, and I knew it was my father.

  “My train is at six-ten,” I said, my voice trembling.

  “Ellen,” said my father, “your mother needs you. She is coming home Tuesday and she won’t be well for long. The disease is apparently advanced. Soon she may not be able to bathe herself. In a month or two she will not be able to cook or clean.”

  “We can hire a nurse. That’s what the Beldens did when Mrs. Belden’s mother was sick.” But even as I said it I knew how preposterous it sounded. In the Gulden household, the ethos was do it yourself, for everything from Christmas gifts to floor sanding.