Page 79 - WTP Vol. V #5

“Here I am when I was a little girl,” she says to Aunt Kate. “And here’s one of Isabelle.”
room. Julia is taking in information like a social worker. She’s so good at getting the straight story from just about anyone. I watch her talking—so animated, her hands moving quickly to punctuate her words. Then she cocks her head fast, toward the door, to tell me it’s time to go.
“I lived with you for a bit when I was little,” I say. “ After Daddy had his fishing accident, when he was in the hospital. I learned to eat fresh peaches at your house, do you remember?”
“I want you to see one more thing,” she tells me. “The chapel. It’s beautiful.” We walk down the stairs and out the front entrance of the building, past the same smiling young receptionist who gave us directions a half-hour earlier. As we walk out into the cold air I start crying again, this time huge sobs and a seemingly unstoppable flow of tears.
Of course she doesn’t, and I don’t know why I thought I could jar loose a few cells in her crack-
“She looked okay, but not really asleep.
I kept telling myself, this isn’t really her.”
“I feel so empty, I feel like my whole life is falling away,” I say.
led brain so that she would reminisce with me. It strikes me that Julia and I are going through this exercise just to make ourselves feel better about Mom. I start to cry.
“No, it’s not leaving, it’s all still here, it will always be here,” she says, taking my arm and pressing it against her side. “Come on, this chapel is lovely, it will make you feel better to see it.”
“You were very good to me,” I tell her.
We enter an old stone building; it must be part of the old seminary. A couple of young guys are sitting behind a desk there too, and they point us down the hall to a new-looking door. There is a little vestibule with a plaque saying how some cardinal began building this chapel in the 1920s but ran out of money before it could be completed.
Aunt Kate studies the picture for a minute, then looks at me. “You are very big now,” she says slowly. “And you have such pretty...glasses.” I am puzzled, they’re just ordinary wire rimmed frames.
Inside the chapel is all little mirrors and tiles, on the fat pillars, on the altar floor, just thousands of tiles in mosaics. Statues of angels leaning out of the wall above the altar. Like the Roaring Twen- ties, all excess and wealth and showiness. I am still crying, and I sit and think about Mom. Yes- terday we went to the funeral home to identify her body before she could be cremated. Her body, her corpse I had to keep telling myself so I didn’t really believe it’s her, lay on a plain gurney, a burgundy blanket covering her up to her chin. We
“Eyes,” Julia whispers to me. “She means eyes.”
“Thank you,” I say and kiss Aunt Kate. She has almost no wrinkles. Her skin is smooth and tawny. It’s the Indian blood, I realize.
Julia tells Aunt Kate we must be going. We hug and kiss her again. Julia stops to talk to a nurse in the hall while I pretend to read the notices on a little bulletin board in the hall outside Aunt Kate’s
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