begin a dialogue with such a person? Especially when she was such a different mother to Steve and me. Did she deserve a last chance to defend herself? Did the fact that she was such a recent widow entitle her to more consideration? Should I begin by telling her that things would be different between us from now on, I wondered, and that for one thing she would not be left alone with my children? Or should I not worry about it at the moment and instead start figuring out how I was going to get her and Caroline and me together, thus putting Caroline’s concerns first? Wasn’t it time Caroline came first?
I turned off the radio. “Mom?”
“Don’t let’s talk now,” she said. “Let me just get home first.” I thought I understood her need for the anchoring influence of one’s own things.
“Okay. But I want to tell you, we’re going to meet with Caroline as soon as we get there, you and I. It’s something she asked for, and we’re going to give it to her.”
“All right.”
I was shocked. I had expected anything but matter-of-fact cooperation. I snuck a look over at her: a faded beauty. A woman staring straight ahead seeing nothing. A woman whose hands were in her lap, fists clenched, waiting out the miles.
I turned on the radio again. Then I said, “I’m going to stop for gas soon. I’ll get us some sandwiches.”
“All right.”
“And I’m going to call Caroline to say we’re on the way.”
“Yes, I know. I know you will.” Her hand to her earlobe, checking for the diamond there. Her only ally on this her judgment day.
24
I ONCE WENT TO A PHOTO EXHIBIT AT A MUSEUM OF modern art. Included in it was a display of school photos taken in the early sixties, children mostly around the age of eleven who had been hauled out of class to line up and then sit on a chair before a school photographer, one of those skinny men with bad breath and a defeated attitude who ask kids over and over to smile without caring, particularly, if they smile or not. The pictures at the museum were framed, and there were yards of foil silver stars on wire wrapped around them and pinned up on the wall between them. There were tiny white lights everywhere, too, the kind you put on Christmas trees. Otherwise, the room was dark and the walls were painted black. I remember thinking that this worked well to contribute to the mood of going back in time, of feeling encapsulated. You felt yourself disappearing before all these photos of kids you didn’t know, yet did.
Most of the photos were funny, the kind of thing you point to and giggle: the goofy expressions, the cowlicks, the braces, the glasses, the collars with one side up and one side down. But there was one photo that stopped me in my tracks, that had me standing unsmiling before it for a long time. After I left the exhibit to go and look at other things, I went back to stand before that photo again. Then, as I was putting my coat on, getting ready to go home, I went to go and look at it for a third time. It was a little girl, straight-mouthed and clear-eyed. There was something so compelling in her expression, so deep in her eyes. Looking at her photo had a kind of pulling effect: Standing still, I felt as though I moved into her, then felt inside my own chest the weight of her great sorrow.
I know now—knew then too, probably—that that photo was Caroline to me. And now, years away from what happened to her and what I contributed to, I was ready to move forward in a way that might make a real difference. I felt a little—a little—like I did the time I signed up for tap-dancing lessons at age forty-seven. Not that I saw my intentions as trivial. It was just that I was so late, and I had so much doubt about my abilities.
ABOUT TEN MINUTES FROM CAROLINE’S HOUSE, my mother began to speak. “I read once about how anxiety on behalf of a child can transform itself into aggression against a child.”
I said nothing, but what I was thinking was, I read once about how the weakest of a litter is sometimes destroyed by its siblings. We are all guilty.
She said, “I don’t mean this as an excuse. But I was so brokenhearted