the weather, the television news, which news was full of nothing—although only a day later, when the tsunami struck in Asia, it would be full of death. We labored jauntily through an enormous meal—the dry turkey I was involved in overcooking, the vast tray of candied yams, the bready stuffing and roast potatoes and the limp green beans—serenaded by the tinkling loop of Christmas carols from the Vienna Boys’ Choir that Aunt Baby had loved all my life.
Heavily jowled and powdered, physically so different from her birdlike sister, my mother, Aunt Baby, arthritic, limped in such a way that every step put me in mind of her unoiled bones grinding in their sockets. Even with, or perhaps because of, her carefully outlined crimson mouth, she looked like my dead grandfather in drag, had sparse white hair voluminously flossed to mask her scalp, and a scratchy deep voice. She smelled strongly of Yardley English Lavender, difficult, in the twenty-first century, to procure on the open market.
She’d never married, was devoutly Catholic, and what I most feared becoming: doughty, self-sufficient and utterly without issue. I sat on her pristine sky-blue couch and tried not to see, on every flat surface, the rows of framed family photos of my brother and me growing up, of my parents and grandparents, of my second cousins in Atlanta, her cousin June’s three kids, similarly recorded from layettes to graduations to weddings, and even the newest additions, my niece, my cousins’ kids, in frames as carefully dusted and apparently antique as the rest. It had always been faintly effronting to me, the way Aunt Baby claimed our family lives as if they were her own, as if Matt and I were her offspring instead of her sister’s. “Get your own life,” I’d wanted to say, “you can’t have mine!” But how could she have gotten her own life when she’d given it over to the care of others—her parents, her relatives, fellow parishioners. She’d always been the sidekick. Even in dying, my mother got to play the starring role. Now I would want to ask her where she stowed her fury and how she managed always to appear so calm, so humbly thrilled by the smallest attentions (I gave her an espresso machine that Christmas, and although I later discovered she never used it, she grew wavery and emotional when she opened the package: that I’d thought this much of her! That she’d been so valued!), but she is a casualty of these last five years, blessed, as she would have seen it, to suffer an aneurysm in the parish office and never to regain consciousness, a sweet death in repayment for her life of devotion, and a burden, mercifully, to no one.
I can imagine, now, what it cost her, to be our Aunt Baby, an over-aged infant to the last, instead of the grown-up named Cecily Mallon that she might have become. Knowing my own life and how little of what most matters in it is seen on the outside, how remotely my own outline resembles my reflection, I’m sorry to think that the real Aunt Baby is now lost forever. I, who so feared resembling her, couldn’t ask, and know that nobody else thought to, so brave Aunt Baby lived “as if” until the end. Although then again, maybe she followed my father’s precepts so assiduously that her soul and her self in the world became one.
At least Christmas in Rockport was quick. We went before noon, we helped to cook, we took a drive along the shore to watch the waves bash whitely on the rocks in their eternal rhythm; we ate, cleaned, left. By nine thirty on Christmas night I was back at my apartment, having dropped my father in Brookline on the way home. I’d done all of the dishes for Baby before we left, leaving her to sit in the overheated living room with her swollen feet up on an ottoman, gossiping languidly with my father about the ailments of their generation.
“You heard about Ruby Howard? Bernie’s wife? It’s not Alzheimer’s—it’s the worse one, the Parkinson’s one. Lewy Body? You know what that is? Terrible.” A long silence, during which time they might both have been napping, and then Aunt Baby again: “And then Pete Runyon—you remember him from your church? They moved up here when he retired, and his wife, Beth, developed emphysema—she’s home, mostly, now, with her oxygen tank on wheels. I’ve been round to see her a few