The Bird House A Novel

August 12, 1967

no bath



THE NURSING HOME SAID I should come right away. I dialed Aunt Caro and she offered to pick me up. I assured her that I was fine to drive, but she hesitated on the line, as if she didn’t want to hang up. Finally she added, “Ann, do you want me to call Frank?”

My father’s name was jarring and heavy in the air; no one had said it in years. My mother simply called him “your father.” Half name, half accusation. He belongs to you, not me. You’re responsible for him now.

“Wh—”

“Ann,” she said patiently, “don’t you think he’d want to know?”

“Why?” I spat through my tears. “So he can try to strip her of something else? So he could take her death away from her, too?”

She sighed a long sigh. It was heavy and full of something she wasn’t saying. “Maybe, dear, he’d like to clear the air.”

“Apologize?”

“Perhaps, or certainly expl—”

“He should apologize to you,” I said. Apologize to the woman who had to pay for the last round of cancer specialists, the nursing home, the clothes, everything, since he left.

“No, dear, to her, to you, of course.”

“You’re a very optimistic woman, Aunt Caro.” I sighed and hung up the phone. You had to be optimistic to lose both your sisters to cancer and not fall to the ground weeping. I called Betsy, then Theo, and to his credit, he didn’t mention meetings or clients, and said to tell Betsy he’d be back on the next train.

Outside my mother’s room, Aunt Caro stood in the corridor, looking intently at something on the wall. When I got closer I saw it was a watercolor of a cardinal in a tree.

“I guess you knew she loved birds.”

I nodded. “That’s why she wouldn’t let me have a cat.”

“She asked for this portrait to be moved here. It used to be near the nurses’ station.” She picked it up off the wall. “She’s already gone,” she said softly.

“Oh, no,” I sobbed.

She put down the painting and held me tightly. The gesture was kind and loving, but it only served to make me aware that she wasn’t my mother. No one holds you like your mother. No one ever will.

The door to the room was open an inch; I could see only a bedpost and a strip of wallpaper.

“Was she alone? I mean when—”

“The nurse claims she was with her.”

“Claims?” It was just like Aunt Caro to kick up a little trouble.

“I think they say that to make people feel better. I think it’s in the nursing home manual.” She sighed and looped an arm around my shoulder, releasing a puff of Chanel No. 5 mixed with hair spray.

“Do you remember those exquisite bird houses Frank made for her?”

“Please, Aunt Caro. I don’t want to—”

“She loved all beautiful things, which was her undoing.”

I squeezed her hand. Why is it that everyone labels something one loves as one’s undoing, when it’s only illness, betrayal, death, or divorce that truly undoes anything?

“My father was her undoing,” I said.

“Dear, dear Ann,” she sighed.

I went inside. The pink roses I’d brought earlier in the week were still fragrant at her bedside. Some of them were wilted, gone soft at the stem, and their petals littered the tabletop. But if I could still smell them, I hoped she could, too.

“Oh, Mom,” I whimpered, and a bolt of pain shot through my right side. It connected us, that pain, like a string of Christmas lights, an electric current. It went through us both, from my breast to hers, past her mattress, the floor, into the earth. My cancer was gone, but hers came back. She could have lived three more months or three more years, they’d told us. Nobody thought it might be three weeks.

When I brushed my lips across her cheek, she didn’t smell like herself, she smelled like the room, like roses. That was death, I thought; you became something else altogether, an envelope that held parts of other people, what they remembered of you, what they wished you were.

An hour later, when I stepped out of the lobby, grateful for air, my father was like a bear in the parking lot. My breath caught in my throat at the sight of his brown suit, his broad back, leaning against a burgundy Cadillac. No cigar, but when I got closer I smelled one in his pocket.

“It’s too late,” I said, and he turned around. His car was new and gleaming, recently polished. His suit, with its wide lapels and even wider tie, looked completely of the moment, which angered me. My mother had worn her sister’s handme-downs for years.

“Well, I tried,” he said.

“Where do you live that you arrived here so quickly?”

He opened his mouth and I held up a hand. “Don’t answer,” I said. “I don’t really want to know.”

“How are the children?”

“How are your grandchildren, you mean? They’re fine. They’re just dandy,” I said tartly.

“I don’t know why,” he sighed, “after all these years, you persist in believing only your mother’s version of the events.”

“Looked pretty black and white to me.”

“Did it ever occur to you that she—”

“That she what, Dad? That she was responsible? That she, I don’t know, cheated on you down at the club because you were a bastard and she was lonely? Yes, that occurred to me. But it’s not true. And even if it was, nothing gives you license to do what you did. Nothing. The woman is dead. And now I don’t have any parents.”

I turned away, taking long, half-running steps toward my car.

“Annie! Ann-o!”

“Don’t,” I said, whirling toward him. “Don’t ever call me that.”

“Let me explain. Now that you’re grown, perhaps—”

“Caro shouldn’t have called you,” I said. He was still standing in the parking lot, hands on his hips—like a fat, petulant child, like a little girl—when I pulled away.

When I got home the baby was napping and Emma was coloring in her room. When I asked if they’d been good for him, Theo said they’d been angels.

“Angels,” I repeated. It was an interesting choice of words. I looked up at Theo to see if he looked sorry for that misstep, and he did. His eyes were wide, and his mouth was pulled in a straight line—small and uncertain, as if he just didn’t know what to say.

“All things considered, your mother had a good life,” he said.

I shook my head. I knew he didn’t know what to say. But I didn’t believe that platitude; I never would. She was fifty-three and died with no money and no husband. She spent the last months of her life with a rotting body and a rotting mind, believing the nursing home was a pied-à-terre and that she would be going back to “the main house” any day. She thought I was her friend from college, not her daughter. When Aunt Caro visited, she called her Louise, the name of her maid, and handed her things that needed to be mended.

“She didn’t have a life; she had an existence,” I said. “She didn’t even have the memory of a life,” I said, tears streaming down my face.

Theo stepped in and hugged me hard. It felt strange to be held so tightly now, one breast crushed and the other side untouched. It was like being half held, not really held at all.





August 16, 1967

bubble bath



THE POST-FUNERAL GATHERING was supposed to be a lunch, but a dozen people stayed at Aunt Caro’s house until six, drinking all her scotch. Most of my friends, including Betsy, had left by three, so there was a long stretch of weary politeness. The tea sandwiches were long gone; the trays with only doilies and parsley looked naked and sad. Like seeing a kitchen’s skin and bones.

“We’re in danger of needing to make peanut butter sandwiches,” Caro said, sipping a vodka, and slid into her favorite wing chair, finally unoccupied. “Don’t you want a drink, Ann?” She clinked her ice cubes at me, as if to wake me up.

“If I start drinking,” I said, looking at my watch, “who will convince them to leave?”

“That’s twisted logic, Ann. What do sober people know about drunks?”

My mother’s old friends weren’t drunks, per se. They were drinking opportunists. A funeral provided a perfect storm of opportunity: a reason to toast, an open bar, and a perfect excuse if you happened to overindulge or misbehave.

“Has Theo gone as well?”

“He went home to spell the babysitter. She had to leave at four.”

She sipped her drink slowly and nodded. “I’m glad you found someone, Ann,” she said softly.

“What?” I said, startled.

“Someone to babysit.”

“Oh,” I said, and relief flooded me. “Yes, it’s that young woman from Emma’s school. The one who’s so good with her.”

“God bless anyone who works with children. I couldn’t do it.”

“I don’t think I could, either. Some days… well, just having two is too much.”

“From what I’ve seen of Emma, having one is sometimes too much.”

I sat forward in my chair. “What do you mean?”

“She’s a handful, is what I mean.”

“Do you think so? I mean, it’s not just me, she seems—”

“Difficult?”

“Well, yes. The pediatrician says she’s fine, the teachers say she’s intelligent, but…” I shook my head. “Everyone thinks she’s just jealous of the baby. Acting out, that’s all. The terrible threes, I suppose. This, too, shall pass, they say.”

She nodded and swirled the ice in her drink with one manicured finger. “Well, I only had one, and it was a boy, so what do I know?”

I nodded my head. My cousin William was athletic, smart, fun. He’d grown from a golden child into a golden adult—he was the head of a pharmaceutical company. Aunt Caro and Uncle Billy had never seemed to worry about him, although he wasn’t married and traveled constantly and was always going on vacations that sounded vaguely dangerous. I’d last seen him a few years ago at Uncle Billy’s funeral and my mother told me she was certain he was homosexual. I’d laughed at her. William looked like all the architects at Theo’s office—polished loafers, nicely cut suits. Shirts that coordinated perfectly with their ties. It sounded like a joke: what was the difference between an architect and a homosexual?

“But,” she added, “it’s no fun waiting for it to pass, is it?”

I shook my head. When I’d told Emma her grandmother had died she’d asked who killed her. A person didn’t kill her, cancer killed her, I said. I sat on the edge of her bed and waited for the questions a normal child would ask: What’s cancer? Where is Grandma now? But they didn’t come. No more questions, no tears. She stared at a spot on her wall, then reached up to pick it off. She seemed angry when she realized it wasn’t dimensional, pulling at it with her nail long after someone else would have given up. Well, I thought, she’s determined, anyway. After she fell asleep I thumbed through the picture book on her bedside table, scanning the pages about a family of flowers to see if the word “kill” was in it. To see if a vine strangled the baby rose. If an evil gardener chopped its blossomy head off.

Aunt Caro and I sat for a few minutes while she finished her drink, then she asked if I wanted to look at some old pictures, to reminisce, and I said no.

“It’s too sad looking at everything she used to have,” I said. “She was so happy in all those photos.”

“A person has to learn to be happy in all circumstances,” she said quietly.

“I think she did, to some degree.”

“I did what I could, Ann. Within sensible limits, I—”

“Aunt Caro, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying the photos make me sad, that’s all. It’s going to be years before I can look at them again.”

She nodded slowly. “If you look carefully, Ann,” she added, “you’ll see she’s not always happy in the photos.”

I blinked. “That can’t be true.”

“Look carefully,” she said quietly, and we watched her guests pick at the trays, as if they were considering eating the wet doilies, too.