Sarah Phillips by Andrea Lee (beach books .TXT) 📗

air and the churning sound of the washing machine. From the dining room, where she liked to sit ironing and chatting on the telephone, came the fragrance of hot clean clothes and the sound of her voice: cheerful, resonant, reverberating a little weirdly through the high-ceilinged rooms, as if she were sitting happily at the bottom of a well.

My father left early in the morning to visit parishioners or to attend church board meetings. Once the door had closed behind him, the house entered what I thought of as its natural state—that of the place on earth that most purely reflected my mother. It was a big suburban house, handsomer than most, built of fieldstone in a common, vaguely Georgian design; it was set among really magnificent azaleas in a garden whose too-small size gave the house a faintly incongruous look, like a dowager in a short skirt. The house seemed little different from any other in my neighborhood, but to me, in my early-acquired role as a detective, a spy, a snooper into dark corners, there were about it undeniable hints of mystery. The many closets had crooked shapes that suggested secret passages; in the basement, the walls of the wine cellar—its racks filled by our teetotaling family with old galoshes and rusty roller skates—gave a suspicious hollow sound when rapped; and on the front doorbell, almost obliterated by the pressure of many fingers, was printed a small crescent moon.

The house stayed cool on breathless summer days when tar oozed in the streets outside, the heat excluded by thick walls and drawn shades, and the dim rooms animated by a spirit of order and abundance. When I came dawdling down to breakfast, long after Matthew had eaten and gone plunging off on his balloon-tired Schwinn, I usually found my mother busy in the kitchen, perhaps shelling peas, or stringing beans, or peeling a basket of peaches for preserves. She would fix me with her lively, sarcastic dark eyes and say, “Here comes Miss Sarah, the cow’s tail. What, pray tell, were you doing all that time upstairs?”

“Getting dressed.”

What I’d been doing, in fact—what I did every summer morning—was reading. Lounging voluptuously in my underpants on the cool bare expanse of my bed, while flies banged against the screen and greenish sunlight glowed through the shades, I would read with the kind of ferocious appetite that belongs only to garden shrews, bookish children, and other small creatures who need double their weight in nourishment daily. With impartial gluttony I plunged into fairy tales, adult novels, murder mysteries, poetry, and magazines while my mother moved about downstairs. The sense of her presence, of, even, a sort of tacit complicity, was always a background at these chaotic feasts of the imagination.

“You were reading,” Mama would say calmly when I stood before her in the kitchen. “You must learn not to tell obvious lies. Did you make up your bed?”

“I forgot.”

“Well, you’re not going outside until you’ve done something to that room of yours. It looks like a hooraw’s nest. Your place is set at the table, and the cantaloupe is over there—we’ve had such delicious cantaloupe this week! Scrape out the seeds and cut yourself a slice. No—wait a minute, come here. I want to show you how to cut up a chicken.”

Each time she did this I would wail with disgust, but I had to watch. The chicken was a pimply yellow-white, with purplish shadows and a cavernous front opening; my mother would set her big knife to it, baring her teeth in an ogress’s grin that made fun of my squeamishness. “You saw along the backbone like this—watch carefully; it takes a strong arm—and then you crack the whole thing open!”

In her hands the cave would burst apart, exposing its secrets to the light of day, and with another few strokes of the knife would be transformed into ordinary meat, our uncooked dinner.

It was easy for me to think of my mother in connection with caves, with anything in the world, in fact, that was dimly lit and fantastic. Sometimes she would rivet Matthew and me with a tale from her childhood: how, at nine years old, walking home through the cobblestone streets of Philadelphia with a package of ice cream from the drugstore, she had slipped and fallen down a storm drain accidentally left uncovered by workmen. No one was around to help her; she dropped the ice cream she was carrying (something that made a deep impression on my brother and me) and managed to cling to the edge and hoist herself out of the hole. The image of the little girl—who was to become my mother—hanging in perilous darkness was one that haunted me; sometimes it showed up in my dreams.

Perhaps her near-fatal tumble underground was responsible for my mother’s lasting attraction to the bizarre side of life. Beneath a sometimes prudish exterior, she quivered with excitement in the same way her children did over newspaper accounts of trunk murders, foreign earthquakes, Siamese twins, Mafia graves in the New Jersey pine barrens. When she commented on these subjects, she attempted a firm neutrality of tone but gave herself away in the heightened pitch of her voice and in a little breathy catch that broke the rhythm of each sentence she spoke. This was the voice she used to whisper shattering bits of gossip over the phone. “When Mr. Tillet died,” I heard her say once, with that telltale intake of breath, “the funeral parlor did such a poor job that his daughter had to wire her own father together!”

My mother, Grace Renfrew Phillips, had been brought up with all the fussy little airs and graces of middle-class colored girls born around the time of World War I. There was about her an endearing air of a provincial maiden striving for sophistication, a sweet affection of culture that reminded me, when I was older, of Emma Bovary. She and her cluster of pretty, light-skinned sisters grew up in