You won’t believe it when I tell you I waited more than sixty years for a murder, hoped as only a woman can hope that it might happen, and didn’t move a finger to stop it when it finally drew near. Anna Marie, I thought, you can’t stand guard forever. Murder, when ten thousand days have passed, is more than a surprise, it is a miracle.
“Hold on! Don’t let me fall!”
Mrs. Harrison’s voice.
Did I ever, in half a century, hear it whisper? Was it always screaming, shrieking, demanding, threatening?
Yes, always.
“Come along, Mother. There you are, Mother.”
Her son Roger’s voice.
Did I ever in all the years hear it rise above a murmur, protest, or, even faintly birdlike, argue?
No. Always the loving monotone.
This morning, no different than any other of their first mornings, they arrived in their great black hearse for their annual Green Bay summer. There he was, thrusting his hand in to hoist the window dummy after him, an ancient sachet of bones and talcum dust that was named, surely for some terrible practical joke, Mother.
“Easy does it, Mother.”
“You’re bruising my arm!”
“Sorry, Mother.”
I watched from a window of the lake pavilion as he trundled her off down the path in her wheelchair, she pushing her cane like a musket ahead to blast any Fates or Furies they might meet out of the way.
“Careful, don’t run me into the flowers, thank God we’d sense not to go to Paris after all. You’d’ve had me in that nasty traffic. You’re not disappointed?”
“No, Mother.”
“We’ll see Paris next year.”
Next year…next year…no year at all, I heard someone murmur. Myself, gripping the windowsill. For almost seventy years I had heard her promise this to the boy, boy-man, man, man-grasshopper and the now livid male praying mantis that he was, pushing his eternally cold and fur-wrapped woman past the hotel verandas where, in another age, paper fans had fluttered like Oriental butterflies in the hands of basking ladies.
“There, Mother, inside the cottage…” his faint voice fading still more, forever young when he was old, forever old when he was very young.
How old is she now? I wondered. Ninety-eight, yes, ninety-nine wicked years old. She seemed like a horror film repeated each year because the hotel entertainment fund could not afford to buy a new one to run in the moth-flaked evenings.
So, through all the repetitions of arrivals and departures, my mind ran back to when the foundations of the Green Bay Hotel were freshly poured and the parasols were new leaf green and lemon gold, that summer of 1890 when I first saw Roger, who was five, but whose eyes already were old and wise and tired.
He stood on the pavilion grass looking at the sun and the bright pennants as I came up to him.
“Hello,” I said.
He simply looked at me.
I hesitated, tagged him and ran.
He did not move.
I came back and tagged him again.
He looked at the place where I had touched him, on the shoulder, and was about to run after me when her voice came from a distance.
“Roger, don’t dirty your clothes!”
And he walked slowly away toward his cottage, not looking back.