Voices in the Night Read online

  I sat on the hot porch with its dusty windows, beside the old wicker table with the two cork coasters rimmed with wood. I felt that I wanted to say something to my mother, something that would make her understand, though what it was that I wanted her to understand wasn’t entirely clear to me. And we didn’t have all day, time was passing, I was here for just a short visit. “Mom,” I heard myself say, in a low voice. The clear sound of that word, on the quiet porch, troubled me, as though a hand had been laid on my face. “Can you hear me?” In her chair my mother stirred slightly. “I know I haven’t been here for a while, things kept coming up, you know how it is, but you know—” It was really too warm on the porch, with the sun coming in and the windows closed. I considered opening one of the windows and lowering the screen, but I didn’t want to disturb my mother, who appeared to have fallen asleep. In a vivid slash of light, her forearm looked so fiercely pale that a vagueness or mistiness had come over it, as though it were evaporating in the heat. I glanced at my gleaming watch. The afternoon was getting on. Yet I couldn’t very well leave my mother asleep on the porch, like an abandoned child, I couldn’t simply tiptoe away, could I, without saying goodbye. And there were things I wanted to say to my mother, things I had always meant to say to her, before it was too late. In the heavy sunlight, which pressed against me like warm sand, I leaned back and closed my eyes.

  II

  Often I dreamed of walking through the rooms of my old house, looking for my mother, only to wake up and find myself in a distant city. Now as I woke up in my old house, on the familiar porch, I had the confused sensation of entering a dream. For how likely was it, after all, that I was sitting on the porch of my childhood house, on a summer’s day, like a boy with nothing to do? I saw at once that the light had changed. Though sunlight still came through the dusty windows, a brightness had seeped from the air. Heavy-looking branches pressed against the glass. I saw one other thing: my mother was not there. Ropes of cobweb stretched from the top of a window to the back of the chaise longue. How had I not noticed them before? I felt ripples of anxiety, as if I’d been careless in some way that could never be forgiven, and flinging myself up from the chair, so that the legs scraped on the wooden floor, I threw a glance at the dusty branches and hurried into the kitchen.

  She was not there. On the stove a dented teakettle, reddish black, sat on its unlit burner. In the changed light I saw thick streaks of grime on the stove, cobwebs in corners, a yellowish stain on the table. A square of linoleum curled back at the base of the refrigerator. Outside the dirty window, big leaves moved against the glass. The pane had a crack shaped like a river on a map.

  I pushed open the creaking door and entered the living room. It was much darker than before. I imagined the sunlight pushing against the front of the house, feeling for a way in. My mother was standing with her back to me, in the middle of the room, like someone lost in a forest.

  “Oh there you are!” I said, in a tone of hearty cheerfulness. She continued to stand there with her back to me. In the darkening room she seemed unable to move, as if the air were a cobwebby thickness tightening about her. I walked up to my mother, stepped around her as one might walk around a lamppost, and turned to face her.

  “I was worried about you,” I said.

  She raised her head slowly, in order to look up into my face. It seemed to take her a long time. When she was done, she frowned in perplexity. “I’m sorry,” she said, squinting up at me as if into a harsh brightness. “It’s hard for me to remember faces.”

  I bent my face toward hers, thumped a finger against my chest. “It’s me! Me! How can you—listen, I know I haven’t been out here for a while, it’s hard to explain, there was always something, but I’m here now and I—”

  “That’s all right,” she said, reaching out and patting my arm, as if to comfort me.

  I stood before her, uncertain what to do. It may have been an effect of the darkening light, in that room of heavy curtains and closed shades, but her hair looked thinner than before, a few strands came straggling down, one of her eyelids was nearly closed. A white gash of slip hung below her crooked dress. Her face now struck me as gaunt and sharp-edged, as though the bones of her nose and cheeks were pressing through her skin. I looked around the room. The edges of the fireplace seemed to be crumbling away, the couch was sinking down under the weight of the heavy afternoon, the piano keys were the yellow of October leaves.

  “Would you like to sit down?” I asked.

  My mother looked at me with a puzzled frown. Her eyes seemed dim and vague. “That would be a very nice thing to do,” she said. She reached out and touched my hand. “You know, I’m not as young as we used to be.” She laughed lightly and lowered her hand. She looked at me again. “It’s so nice of you to come.” She glanced down, as if she were searching for something on the rug. I followed her gaze, wondering whether she had dropped a ring or a coin. In the room’s darker dusk, the pattern of swirling flowers had melted away.

  When I raised my eyes, she was looking at me. “Such a nice boy,” she said, and touched the back of my hand with two fingers.

  Again I took her upper arm, so thin that it was like grasping a wrist, and began directing her slowly toward the armchair beside the lamp table. She advanced with such difficulty that it was as if she weren’t moving her feet at all, but allowing me to push her along the surface of the rug. My hand, heavy with veins, reminded me of an ugly face. As we drew closer to the chair, my mother began to move so slowly that I could no longer tell whether we were making our way forward, inch by inch, or just standing there, like people trying to advance against a gale. I urged her on with gentle tugs, but I could feel her pulling back against my fingers. Then I noticed that her mouth was taut, her arm tense, her eyebrows close together. “It’s all right,” I whispered, “we can just—” “No!” she shouted, in a voice so fierce that I dropped my hand and stepped back in alarm. “Is there something—” I began, and at once it came back to me, her refusal to sit in my father’s chair ever again, all those years ago, after the funeral. Once more I took her arm, this time turning her in the direction of the couch. As we came up to the shadowy coffee table I saw a shape that I remembered, and I bent down to look at the blue man with the blue bundle on his back. Dust lay on his blue hair. One of his blue shoulders was chipped. “Look at that!” I said, picking up the statue and turning him from side to side. “Old Man Blue. Remember how I used to think he was the oldest man in the world?”

  “Older and older,” my mother said.

  At the corner of the couch she sat down rigidly, as though she could no longer bend in the right places. Though the room was warm, I drew the red-and-gray afghan over my mother’s legs. “Here,” I said, turning on the table lamp. The dim bulb flickered but did not go out. On the lampshade I saw a faded woman with a faded parasol, bending over a faded bridge. “Now we can sit and have a nice talk.”

  “You can’t do that,” she said faintly. Her eyes had begun to close. I tried to understand why we could not sit and talk for a while, there were things I needed to say to my mother, even though I didn’t know what they were, and if we talked I would perhaps find what I was looking for. Then I saw my mother slowly raising a hand, as if she were reaching for something, though her eyes were closed. The hand rose to the level of her shoulder and continued higher, until it stopped between her face and the lamp. Her hand was so thin that the light seemed to shine through it.

  “Do you want—” I said, and with sudden understanding I bent forward and turned off the lamp. Slowly my mother’s hand descended to her lap and was still.

  I returned to my father’s sagging chair, in the silent living room, and sat looking at my mother as she remained upright and unmoving in her corner of the couch. Despite the change I sensed in her, since our time on the porch, she seemed calm, in her way, sitting there with the afghan on her lap. It was like the old days, when I would come home from wherever I was and my mother would take up her position exactly there, in the
corner of the couch, with a book and her reading glasses, while my father graded papers in his study and I sat in the armchair with a book of my own. I had liked coming home, liked sitting in that chair with the sound of pages turning and children playing in the street, liked, above all, the sense of something peaceful from childhood still flowing through the house, and I wondered how it was that I had let it all slip away. And as I sat there, in the drowsy warmth, I seemed to hear a humming sound, a spectral tune, drifting up out of my childhood. It was something my mother used to sing, a song from her own girlhood. “I remember,” I said, because I wanted to talk to my mother, I wanted to tell her that I remembered a tune she had once hummed, when I was a boy, but the sound of the humming crept into my words, and only then did I realize that my mother was sitting there humming that tune. And I was stirred that she was humming a tune from our two childhoods, as she sat in the darkening room with her eyes closed, a tune that ascended in three leaps and then came slowly down, like a feather falling, but at the same time I wanted her to stop humming that tune so that I could speak to her, before I was no longer there. After all, it was only a short visit. When my mother stopped humming I said, “I know I haven’t been back for a while, but if we could just talk a little, a little talk, talk to me—” The words sounded louder than I had intended, as if I had shouted them in an empty house.

  At the sound of my voice my mother seemed to start awake. She pushed the afghan from her lap and began struggling to get up. As if roused from a sleep of my own, I began to rise, so that I could catch her if she fell, and for a moment we were both half risen and leaning forward, as though we had both seen something dangerous in the dusky dark. Motionless in her half rising, my mother said, in a raspy whisper that seemed to come from the room itself: “Why are you here?” The question was like a rush of wind. It seemed to me that if only I could answer that question, then something in the day would be saved, and I tried to find the words that were lying deep within me, like blood. But already my mother had sat back against the couch, as if she had been pulled backward by a pair of hands. In the dissolving room a weariness came over me, like the tiredness of childhood, and I sank down for a moment into the armchair in order to gain the strength to rise.

  III

  When I opened my eyes the room had sunk deeper into darkness, it might have been sunset or midnight or winter or some other time, and I had the feeling that if I didn’t get up at once from my father’s chair and return to the outside world, I would become part of the dying room, like Old Man Blue or the faded woman on the lampshade. On the barely visible couch I could make out a crumple of afghan. My mother seemed not to be there. I pushed myself to my feet and made my way through the dark over to the couch, where I began patting the afghan as though my mother might have slipped under it, like a cat. Then I lifted it up, to make sure. Under the afghan I felt something smooth and hard. I could not understand what it was, under the afghan, my fingers kept pressing here and there, then suddenly it revealed itself to be an eyeglass case. For a moment I had the odd sensation that the eyeglass case was my mother, who had grown smaller and taken on a new form. And I felt a surge of guilty relief to think that my mother had become an eyeglass case, since then I might be able to take my leave without worry, knowing it was unlikely she would come to harm.

  Even as I pursued this thought I began to look about. Maybe she had strayed over to the piano, or maybe she was sitting quietly in the kitchen, waiting for her water to boil. As I stepped through the room, which seemed to be nothing but an expanse of darkness, I saw a figure standing not far from the rocking chair. I wondered where she was trying to go, in that all but motionless way of hers, but when I came close to her I saw that she was facing the corner where the vase had once stood. She was standing between the rocking chair and the piano, as if she were considering whether to advance into the wall.

  “Do you want to sit down?” I said, in a voice that might have been a whisper or a yell, but she stood fixed and immobile there. “I really have to be on my way,” I said, angry at the impatience in my voice, for what right did I have to be impatient, I who had not been out this way for longer than I cared to remember. Then I reached out to touch my mother, who was like someone lying on a couch, though she was standing upright before me. My hand came to rest on the lower part of her upper arm. It felt stiff as a stick. My mother seemed to be hardening, here in the dark. In the black air, her wisps of hair seemed pressed to her skull, the skin of her face wax-pale. “What do you want me to do?” I said, and I heard in my voice a petulance, as if I had been deprived of something.

  “Can you hear me?” I asked. “I’m right here,” I said. My mother said nothing. I stood there like a man in a wide field, standing by a tree. She was so still that it was as if she had come to the end of motion. I tried to look at my watch, but most of my arm had vanished. In the dark I began to pace tensely up and down, with a kind of ferocious wariness, fearful of crashing into an edge of furniture. The restraint of my furious pacing made me feel that I was fighting my way through a soft obstruction, as though the flowers in the rug had sprung up to the height of my thighs. I imagined the bushes outside, rising over the tops of the windows, bursting through the glass. In the cracked streets, weed-spears were springing up. Bony cats roamed the deserted houses. It seemed to me that if only I could get my mother to settle in one place, instead of drifting through the house like someone driven by a terrible restlessness, if only I could know that she was calm and still, then I might be able to take my leave with some measure of peace. For though I had not said to her all that I was hoping to say, during this visit, though I had said almost nothing to her, in the course of the afternoon, still we had sat together on the porch, as we used to do, we had sat together in the living room, just the two of us, and that was something, surely.

  It occurred to me that she might be better off on the sunlit porch, lying on the chaise beside a glass of iced tea on the wicker table, rather than standing here in the dark living room, and with that idea in mind I stopped pacing and began to make my way toward her. She was still motionless, but I had the impression that her position had changed in some way. As I drew closer, it appeared to me that she was leaning slightly to one side. I tried to make sense of her enigmatic posture, which might have been that of someone starting to turn around. Then I began to realize, in a slow and confused way, that my mother was falling. I sprang toward her but it was too late. She fell with a sharp knock against the arm of the rocking chair. I seized her with both hands. Her arms felt hard as stone. Something rattled as I lifted her up. The empty rocking chair swung back and forth.

  “Are you all right?” I cried, but she was locked away in a dream. The side of her hand, where it had struck the chair, seemed hollowed out, as if a piece had chipped off. I looked desperately about. In her rigid condition I could not place her in a chair. For a wild moment I considered laying her across the piano bench.

  I lifted my mother in my arms as if she were a young wife or a rolled-up rug and pushed open the door to the kitchen with my foot. The light had drained away. Gigantic leaves pushed up against the windows like hands. With my foot I dragged two chairs from the kitchen table and arranged them side by side. I laid my mother across the seats so that she was pushed up safely against the backs, then rushed over to the old phone on the counter. The line was dead. Dusty cobwebs stretched across the dial.

  I understood that it was imperative to remain calm, that a solution would present itself, but I found it difficult to concentrate my attention. My mother’s position on the chairs seemed perilous. When I bent over to make certain she was safe, I saw that her dress was twisted and the top buttons had come undone. A knob of collarbone thrust up like a knuckle.

  Carefully, tenderly, I lifted her in my arms. Her face was smooth and calm. In her hardened state, she seemed to be content. I looked about the kitchen, which was sinking out of sight. I had the sense of a forest springing up outside.

  Holding my mother tightly in my curl
ed arms, I returned to the blackness of the living room. I could see nothing. Her bed lay far away. I thought of the couch, which stood hidden across immense stretches of dark. Even if I could find my way there, even if I could lay her gently down, I imagined her rolling slowly off the cushions and cracking against the edge of the coffee table. Maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly, maybe I wasn’t thinking at all, but as I gazed frantically around the dark I found myself calling to mind the corner near the piano, where the tall vase had once stood. She had always loved that vase.

  Still holding my mother sideways in my arms, as if I were carrying her across a stream, I made my way along the rug to the space between the piano and the rocking chair. They rose up darker than the dark. “Are you all right?” I whispered. My mother said nothing. I tipped my arms to one side until I felt her foot touch the rug. Carefully I stood her upright. Gently I leaned her at an angle against the side of the piano. “There,” I said. I drew up the rocking chair so that it rested against the edge of her tilted foot, then stepped away.

  In the stillness of the living room my mother stood leaning against the piano, as though she were listening intently to someone playing the slow movement of a sonata. She seemed at peace, there in her favorite room, lounging against the old piano, as she used to do. It was she who had taught me to play the piano, when I was seven, and she often liked to stay quiet like that, listening to me play. She was safer here, it seemed to me, than anywhere else, I said to myself, at least for the time being, I thought. For a while I stood in the dark, watching my mother at rest in her corner. Then I came forward and kissed her stony shoulder. “It was good seeing you again,” I said. I would make the necessary calls, I would see to it that she was looked after properly. I stepped back and gave a little wave.