FIVE YEARS AFTER LILIA’S MOTHER married her father, an uncle of hers died and left her and all of her female cousins a small amount of money each. Long after the money was gone, Lilia’s father had still not tired of complaining. The uncle, who had never married and had not left Missouri for the west as several of his siblings had done, kept a tobacco shop and only sold it toward the end of his life. A bad deal, was what Lilia’s father called it, because no one would hesitate to cheat a dying man. At least he could have arranged for a family member or two with some brains to help him, Lilia’s father said. His audience all knew that he was thinking of himself as the ideal candidate, and they all knew that he had no business sense.
The money, equally divided among the old man’s nieces—he had not included any nephew in his benevolence—had not been much, and Lilia’s father had thought of that as an insult to the ones who could use some real help, Lilia’s mother among them. That money was only a pittance to Cousin Essie, who had married into a Greek family developing estates in Sacramento, so why include her? Or Cousin Maude who wasn’t even on speaking terms with most of the family? Surely it’s good for anyone to be thought of by a man who’s about to die, Lilia’s mother had replied once. He looked at her contemptuously, and she looked back blankly, as though to say she had given him a genuine answer to the questions he had asked.
Such a trick you could do with money. Lilia’s mother had met the uncle only twice when she was small, and she had had little recollection of him. But he had successfully turned himself into a residential ghost in Lilia’s family. Maybe in the families of other cousins, too. Money always makes a good ghost story.
What Lilia’s father had deemed unforgivable was that Lilia’s mother had kept the inheritance from their household, where every corner was in need of money, every child’s arrival a threat to the bank account. Without consulting anyone, Lilia’s mother signed up for a writing course at a correspondence school, with the hope of making some money if she could publish stories—at least that was what she had said to Lilia’s father.
Lilia was four then, Hayes two, the twins mere sucklings. Jack and Kenny would come along in a few years, and all of them would listen to their father’s lament until the woe became their own (Hayes and Jack) or a private joke (Lilia, Lucille, and Margot). Not Kenny, though. He had been eight when their mother died. Some people blamed this early loss for his going to the wrong side of life. But there are many motherless sons. Not every one of them rushes through life until landing behind the bars.
Lilia did not have any recollection of her mother’s literary pursuit, but she had saved the folder of papers before her father could burn them along with the letters her mother had received and bundled by year, most of them from two school friends. Lilia did not know the two correspondents. Perhaps those long letters from her mother to them had survived, though what could she have written? Lilia was not a sentimentalist, but even a sentimental woman had only so much to say about a ranch life that rarely changed from day to day, season to season. Husband and children? It was away from them that her mother had been running in her letters. Lilia thought about Peter Wilson’s complaint about Roland’s repetitiveness. Show me one person who has not lived in repetition. Only many people, unlike Roland or her mother, dare not keep a record.
It remained a mystery where Lilia’s mother had got the idea of taking the correspondence course. She had been a dreamer, no question about that, but why not dream about something more concrete. She was a handsome woman, and never went out to the vegetable garden or to milk the cows without combing her hair carefully and arranging a spray of bridal wreath or a cluster of asters in her hair. Her short-lived enthusiasm for writing stories was, for a time, replaced by an interest in sewing. She made clothes for herself and her children, a bit fanciful for anyone living on a ranch, and when the boys were old enough to grumble, she gave up sewing, becoming more distracted by the day.
What a bunch of disappointments they must have been for her mother. Someone—a ranch hand, a shop owner, a traveling salesman of ballpoint pens—should have fallen in love with her and provided her with another dream, but she had remained a faithful wife, ever impractical while enduring a practical husband.
When Lilia’s mother was alive, and especially when she was within earshot, Lilia’s father liked to repeat the tale of her literary failure. He acted out his agonizing over the monthly remittance to the school in Chicago. All humbug, he said, but she had become so absentminded. The way she fed her chickens while thinking about princes and castles, he said, he could’ve married another woman and had another litter of children and she wouldn’t have noticed.
I wish you had, Lilia’s mother once replied. Lilia’s father and his friends, who had been throwing horseshoes, all paused, while she placed a jug of punch on a bench, as though she had just made a comment about the weather.
Most men are undertakers of their women’s dreams. And, of course, most women are undertakers of their men’s dreams, too. But for Lilia’s father, there was the extra obsession that he kept exhuming what he had buried. He was never violent, and he did not drink excessively. A man with little capacity for joy or vice, he derived his only pleasure from tormenting his wife with a tale in which he did not have a place. And she did that to him, too.
“I’VE LIVED A LONG AND good life among husbands and children and gardens. I’ve lived a self-contained life. I’m what you call a happy woman.”
What nonsense! Lilia erased the words that she was writing in her mind. All good lives are self-contained. All happiness, too. Who wants to pull open that drawer called life for others to see? Here’s how I’ve bundled up some old flame in wrapping tissue. Here’s where I’ve placed husbands, separated by dividers. Here are children and grandchildren, all fitted together like Lego pieces. Parents and siblings? Their photos are stacked up there. The dried flowers covering them are forget-me-nots. And now, have you had enough of the view? Lilia laughed when she imagined herself shutting the drawer to a pair of gawking eyes. No, the better thing was not to open it for anyone.
Dolores had asked Lilia again to join the memoir class. Imagine what treasure you can leave to your children and grandchildren, Dolores said.
Other than her collection of baubles, Lilia had not much to bequeath to her children and grandchildren. Photo albums they could share among themselves, and Lilia suspected that one day, sooner rather than later, they—her grandparents, her parents, aunts and uncles, long-lost cousins, her siblings, and herself—all of them would end up in antiques shops. A customer might finger the pages while thinking about a lover or a family trouble. Another customer, out of habit, might look at the price tag and put down the album without opening it. In time the dead no longer remain individually dead. You’re all bundled together, and no one is deader than any other.