Local Souls by Allan Gurganus

Author:Allan Gurganus [Gurganus, Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Literary
ISBN: 9780871407276
Google: 2Ts3AAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-09-23T04:00:00+00:00

SINCE HER REBIRTH, I have been remembering my own first chances. I was once five, Cait’s age when Bongo very nearly made off with her. As a child I often found myself left safe at home, locked into our big 1939 Colonial at the best end of The River Road. Dad would drive off to his law office; Mother had just barked downstairs that I must bring her an iced drink. Mom, argumentative on principle, could never keep help. Instead she’d given birth to a live-in.

I knew the drill. Though physically clumsy, I fought with an old-timey ice-tray. It stuck to my short hands in such horrifying sucking ways. I loosened her ice, the required three cubes. Age five, I got up onto a chair, fetched down her favorite crystal glass; I found the oval silver tray inherited. (Another later Baby-Cait-Goodwill casualty). I folded diagonally a cloth napkin, creasing so it stood up like the Pope’s miter. Finally I filled Ice’s glass. Coldest tap water. Let it run three minutes. Then, with full tumbler and reflecting tray held precarious before me, I approached our carpeted stairs.

I understood that if I spilled, even a drop, she would send me clear back down. I must start over. I didn’t understand why, but these were her terms. I still recall the portrait-peculiarities of those twelve steps leading toward her sitting area in the bedroom’s brightest bay window. Stairs number three and eleven creaked. She would be stretched there, waiting, wearing white gloves filled with cold cream, cold cold cream; she’d be arranged just so, sometimes in a white satin robe matching the very upholstery of her pale chaise. Did she hope to make furniture more her outfit or turn herself into a luxury seating destination? Though prone, she showed me she had been waiting.

I remember counting those steps, trying—with my limited tongue-bitten motor skills—to keep the cool tray level. I hoped I had not underfilled the glass. (That was also cause for “a send-back,” as I’d pitifully titled it.) This drink was not even gin, which might have explained a lot. Just Ice water.

I picture that.

I see how different a mother I have been toward mine. A slob, you say? But at least an imaginative, passionate one. I had three children; their father left; but I stayed put. And stayed, and stayed. I offered them every scrap of my belief and much faith I couldn’t even claim yet. Much of it I simply faked, of course. But I offered them all that, on a tray, a silver oval one. The very one Cait would give to the poor. Fact is, all along, it was hers. Hers to give.

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