Last year Mom had started imagining a future for us. In this future, she would pass the high school equivalency exam and we would “start college at the same time.” The more excited she got about this plan, the more conflicted I became. I began counting the years ahead of us: seventh grade through twelfth. I saw myself turning into my mother’s “own little husband,” as Wheezer had called me at school in front of our friends.
Mom would often say, “I may not be able to afford the best, but I do know what the best is.” And where I was concerned she did go for the best: the best dental treatment at a clinic free to children, but not open to adults (while sadly neglecting her own teeth), the best life insurance for $24 a month (a stretch when you’re making less than $24,000 a year). I kept hoping I would have an important dream about her. I had seen her in several dreams, but she was not at all like herself or else hurrying away in order to avoid me.
The weird thing was I regularly dreamed of Wheezer, who still lived in Forsterville. In the dreams I called him by his birth name, Shelby, and he was very much like himself. Occasionally he wore a patch over one eye. (“See what you did, you devil?”) In the patch dreams he really had lost sight in that eye but he had forgiven me. In the dreams we were closer than ever, learning about the world and growing up together.
VII.
The Aunt Charlotte I went to live with when I was eleven could have qualified as a hermit. She made use of modern conveniences, but lived the life of a solitary. And even after I came, she maintained most of her solitary ways. She called out on her land phone to order things but never picked up incoming calls. The caller was transferred to voice mail and could leave a message—or not. She often let days go by without checking her messages. She used the laptop computer that lay sleek and closed on the kitchen counter to look up information and weather and “to see if the world still existed,” as she put it. Much of her business was conducted online, between her website and potential customers. She also had linkups to local and online art galleries who liaised between her and potential buyers and charged finders’ fees. As I didn’t pine for it, she continued not to have cable television. So far, I had not seen her turn her old TV on. She usually retired soon after we’d had supper, taking her wineglass and the unfinished bottle to her studio with its sleeping quarters behind a curtain.
She could rise to most household emergencies: change a fuse, replace a washer on a leaky faucet, fix a misbehaving toilet, rewire electrical switches, unstop a gutter, replace rotting boards. Near the ocean, boards were always rotting. After buying her “beach shack,” she had required the services of professionals to add rooms (her studio and her bedroom, which was now mine, and an indoor bathroom) but she had done most of the finish work, teaching herself from books the way she had taught herself the basics of landscape painting. She could even do rudimentary carpentry and had built shelves and trestle tables to hold her art supplies.
She had no official religion and didn’t call on God or Jesus, either for help or as an oath. I think painting was the closest to any religion she had. For proof that she practiced charity, you had to look no further than myself. Of course there was the “nice stipend” attached to my person that she had been so “aboveboard” about at the start, but I soon dropped any notion that she had taken me only because of the money. If my mom hadn’t bought that policy, I believe that Aunt Charlotte, once aware that she was my only kin, would have welcomed me under her tin roof no matter what.
When I first laid eyes on her at the airport, she wore her wiry white hair in a very short brush cut. But in 2004 the shorn look was becoming fashionable for women, because of feminism or because they were cancer patients or because they wanted to announce to the world they were lesbians or because it made them look more dramatic. It made Aunt Charlotte look like a Roman centurion and emphasized her well-shaped skull. She cut it herself.
She had no love interests of either sex. Had the three good-for-nothing husbands in a row soured her on relationships altogether, or had there been intimacies during the earlier island years, when she was always in the company of carpenters and plumbers and electricians? After all, she had been in her early thirties when she moved here. My mother was already twenty-eight when I was born and was asked out by men until she died eleven years (five months and four days) later. Mom never went out with anyone more than a few times, but she would report on what she called her “dates” when she got home. “Never again,” she might say. Or, “He’s kind. When you get to my age kindness becomes a major attraction.” But no one lasted very long because, as she said, she could recognize the best and she had loved the best. The mere memory of my father would always outclass all living suitors. There was a quote she liked: “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” It was from a long poem Tennyson had written after the death of his beloved friend. It took the poet seventeen years to put down all the thoughts and emotions he felt about the loss of this friend.
After the remodeling of her house was finished, Aunt Charlotte had continued to work with men: first as a receptionist for a veterinarian on the island and then as a receptionist at a foreign car repair shop on the mainland. (“I also changed the oil and did other unladylike repairs when the customers weren’t present.”) Later she and the foreign-car man, a local old “scion” named Lachicotte Hayes (pronounced “LASH-i-cott”) became partners in a taxi service. They took turns picking up people in vintage cars. (“For a while we were driving a 1935 Rolls-Royce, until Lash got an offer for it we couldn’t refuse.”) Eventually, they sold their taxi business for a profit. (“My half provided me with an income until my paintings started to sell.”)
On the first day we had clear skies again, Aunt Charlotte finished her big McMansion painting. “Good timing,” she said. “Now I can examine it in natural light. Come into the studio, Marcus, I want your opinion.”
“Oh,” I said, when I stood in front of it.
“Oh, what?”
“It’s different from how I expected it to be.”
“And how was that?”
“You said it was a bread and butter commission, not one of your honest paintings. This looks pretty honest to me.”
She was standing right behind me, so I couldn’t read her face. But I could hear her indrawn breath and sniff the ferment-y smell of the red wine she sipped all through the day. I sensed that she really was anxious to have my opinion. The painting was different from what I had expected. It had the qualities of the ones I liked the most on her website. Actually, I thought it was wonderful, but wonderful was such a used-up word. “It has your mood,” I said.
“My mood?” she coaxed.
“It’s in your sky. It’s in the house, too. I mean, it’s more than just a painting of a McMansion. It’s saying something about how life is. I wish I could express myself better.”