Grandma, for her part, had no use for my mama. I don’t think it was so much Mama’s personal atheism, because I don’t think it mattered a whole lot to Grandma what became of Mama’s eternal soul. Even though she never said so, I always suspected that Grandma felt Hell would probably suit Mama just fine. But what did matter to her was that Mama had taken my father away from the Church. And with him, Megan and me.
Despite my father’s threats about keeping me home, I went back to Grandma’s every July until she died, the year I was thirteen. Almost all I knew about my father’s youth came from those summers.
I think my dad, a quiet and undistinctive boy from the sound of things, might have escaped notice in the rough-and-tumble anonymity of such a large family, if it hadn’t been for his poor health: he had suffered a mild case of polio as an infant and later, scarlet fever, and these had left him with what Grandma called ‘a weakness of the chest’. Consequently, he had been sick a lot, often seriously, and much of his childhood was marked by long periods of isolation and convalescence. Because of these, he’d grown into a shy, introverted boy, not bookish, the way his brother Colin was, but just self-absorbed. Grandma said she’d never been much worried by that. With the casual certainty about destiny that is so common in devoutly religious families, it was assumed my father would become a priest, because he was the second son and that’s what second sons did. So Grandma was comforted by the knowledge that he was not inclined toward fast cars, parties and the high life, the way Paddy, Kip and Mick were.
Of course, my father didn’t become a priest. Nor did he achieve Grandma’s other aspiration for all her sons: a college education. When my dad finished high school, the Second World War had started and like so many other young men of his day, he’d ended up in that. What always went unsaid in these conversations with Grandma but was implied was that Dad had met my mother while he was in Europe. Grandma was capable of attributing virtually anything my father didn’t accomplish to the fact that he had married my mother.
So, my father had joined the army and was posted to England. He was only twenty-one when he married my mother, who was almost two years his senior. After that, he never found the time or the money or the energy to pursue a higher education. And frankly, I don’t think my father ever particularly minded.
What did bother him were the kinds of jobs he ended up with because of his lack of skills. What with moving so often and having no real training, my father had always done whatever he could find, taking dead-end jobs that were easy to get and easy to leave. They never paid enough money, and they usually required physical effort, which made him less employable as he grew older. When we’d moved to Kansas from our previous home in Nebraska, my father had been unemployed for over two months before he found work at Hughson’s Garage. No one was looking for a fifty-year-old unskilled labourer.
I knew he hated his jobs. He never said so but it was one of those things you could feel. He would linger a moment too long over his morning coffee. He would come home with his hands black and his clothes dirty and apologize to Mama even before he kissed her, although Mama never complained. But mainly it was the study. In every house we’d ever lived in my father had always insisted on having an extra room for his study. Even if it meant Megan and I had to share a bedroom. Someday, he told me once, he’d have a job where he’d have to bring home work from the office to do at his desk and he’d need a study – somewhere quiet to get away from the noise of the TV and Megs and me and Mama’s records, so that he could do his paperwork. So far he had never found such a job, but every night after supper he went upstairs and sat for a while behind the desk and waited.
While my father dreamed, my mother acted. We lived like Gypsies because of Mama. She pursued happiness down a real road. Wherever we were, my mother assumed peace of mind must be waiting over the next hill. Nowhere suited her for long. She wanted it cooler; she wanted it warmer. She wanted to be in the country; she wanted to be in town. Always searching, never finding.
There was a regular routine to our moves. First Mama would grow restless, pacing around the house, uprooting things and transplanting them in the garden, paging through Megs’ or my schoolbooks and constructing fabulous tales about what she imagined the places in the pictures must be like, while my sister and I would sit captivated, eating our afternoon snacks at the kitchen table. Then would come the depression. Any little thing my sister or I’d do would upset her, and she’d start having more and more spells. Her anxieties would increase, in particular her fear of leaving the immediate environs of the house and yard, because she’d begin thinking the people in the community didn’t like her any more. Then Dad and I would get stuck with all the grocery shopping and the errands. When those things started happening, I knew it was only a matter of time before we would head off for some new horizon.
I hated the moves. I hated the awful weariness right afterward when I would wake up in the morning and realize that all the people out there were strangers except for Mama, Daddy and Megan. I hated the discouraging task of starting over, of trying to make new friends, of even wanting to try.
My feelings, however, never appeared to make much difference. When my mother was in that state, she had no energy left over for other people’s feelings. As far as my father was concerned, relieving her discomfort was all that seemed to matter; he never questioned the process. If Mama wanted to move, we moved. If Mama thought we’d be happier in Yakima or North Platte or Timbuktu, then that was all it took for my father. He would drop everything, give notice at his job, sell whatever was necessary to raise the money, then pack up and go to wherever it was Mama believed she’d be at peace this time. And he expected the same devotion from Megs and me. We were not allowed even to question the move in front of Mama: this was just something you did when you were part of a family.
The guidance counsellor was waiting for me again when I came out of my calculus class on Wednesday of that week. She was leaning against the lockers on the other side of the corridor, and when I came out of the door of the classroom, all she did was nod and I knew the nod was meant for me. Without exchanging any words, we went back to her office together.
The counsellors, six men and Miss Harrich, were together in the new part of the school building. Each one had a little cubicle just large enough to accommodate a desk, a desk chair and a second chair and still have space to close the door. In Miss Harrich’s cubicle there was a large framed print hanging over her desk that said, in letters that were nearly impossible to read, ‘A wrongdoer is often a man who has left something undone.’ It took me the better part of three visits to puzzle it out.
Sitting down at her desk, Miss Harrich lifted a file with my name on it from a stack by the dictionary. For several moments she riffled through the contents, stopping to read occasionally with such absorption that it was hard to believe she had read it all many times before.
‘So, how’s it going?’ she asked me.
I shrugged. ‘All right.’
‘Are you thinking, as I asked you to? About where you want to go to college?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Have you decided?’
I shrugged.
‘Lesley, I hate to have to keep reminding you about this, but the time is coming. You’ll have to get an application in. You can’t procrastinate for ever.’
I nodded.
There