Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe? Read online

  But my aunt didn’t ask me to tell the story again. She asked, “What were you so scared of?”

  “I’d just buried my mother!” I said, and my aunt adjusted her glasses again, and I wondered if she knew that that wasn’t the truth, or the whole truth. “He was an unknown caller,” I said, talking about the man on the phone.

  “Oh, there are no unknown callers,” my aunt said in her usual cheerful way, and if I were more awake, I might have wondered how it was she thought she knew that.

  “You’re surprisingly bald, Calvin,” my aunt added. Again, she said this brightly. My aunt had a knack for saying insulting things in a way that made them sound like they were happy points of fact, not insults at all.

  “I shaved my head,” I told her, and explained that a year or so earlier I had become highly conscious of the fact that I was losing my hair and that the hair I still had was gray and that this made me look older than I was or than I wanted to be. So as a corrective I shaved my head completely and grew a beard, which, I was now admitting for the first time, even to myself, was grayer and grizzlier and patchier than the head hair had been.

  When I was through talking, my aunt said pleasantly, “I have never understood men.” I waited for her to say more, but no, that was apparently all she had to say on that subject, and she was ready to move on to the next one.

  “I thought you and I might take a little trip,” my aunt said.

  “I’d like that,” I said. Maybe I even meant it. I had never been much of a traveler, not as an adult, and certainly not as a child. During the week my mother prepared for her sermons; on the weekend she delivered them. During the week my father prepared for his teams’ games; on the weekend he coached them. The life of the cloth and the life of the whistle aren’t so different. “Where?” I asked. I was thinking of somewhere close by, something that wouldn’t be too tiring for an old lady: a day trip to a lake or a mountain; lunch at a historic inn in a nearby small town that compared to Congress was a somewhat bigger small town.

  “Stockholm, Sweden,” my aunt said.

  “Where? ” I said. My aunt adjusted her sunglasses and cocked her head in a way that I guessed was meant to say that she’d just told me where. “Why?”

  Aunt Beatrice ignored this question. Maybe her sister’s death had given her the right not to answer questions she didn’t feel like answering. Did surviving give you rights? Only later did I begin to wonder what mine were.

  “I’ve already bought the tickets,” my aunt said. She reached into her back pocket and produced a ticket, which she handed to me. It was a real ticket, too—a stiff piece of off-white paper the size and shape of small envelope—not just a piece of paper you print from your computer. I looked at it. There was my name. The ticket said I was flying from Boston to Stockholm tonight.

  “I can’t,” I said. My aunt didn’t say anything. No doubt she was waiting to hear my reasons. I decided to try, at first, the most practical one. “I don’t have a passport.”

  My aunt smiled as she reached inside her other back pocket and handed me my passport, too. “Tuck your ticket inside it,” my aunt said. I did that, and she drew a deep, satisfied breath. “I do like to see an airplane ticket sticking out of a passport,” she said.

  19.

  Later, it would seem ridiculous that I’d actually believed that someone who had gone ahead and gotten my passport without my Social Security number or signature or presence or permission had then so easily taken no for an answer.

  “I’m sorry, I just can’t,” I said to my aunt. My aunt pursed her lips and nodded, as though I’d given her the expected answer. For a second it made me want to give her an unexpected answer. But only for a second. “I have so much to do.”

  “I understand.”

  “There’s my job.”

  “Of course.”

  “And I have to get the house ready. I’m going to put it on the market once I get it ready.”

  “I understand,” my aunt said again. I felt strangely accomplished. I’d given this excuse to Dawn many times, and not once had she said she’d understood.

  “Well, you’ll at least drive me to the airport,” my aunt said, and then she held out her hand until I realized what she wanted—my passport and the ticket inside it—and I handed them back to her. Why she wanted the passport, I didn’t know: she couldn’t use it. But I know why I gave it back to her: because she had asked for it, and because if I didn’t have a passport, then I would have another excuse not to go somewhere I did not want to go.

  20.

  I wonder how different my life would have been if I’d said no to my aunt’s request. Very, probably.

  But it’s not easy to say no to an elderly relative’s request that you drive her to the airport, especially if you’ve already denied her much bigger request. I didn’t even attempt it. I said, “All right,” and asked my aunt if she wanted to wait inside her old house while I got dressed. But she just shook her head and said in her disarmingly upbeat way, “The house of horrors.”

  It took me several seconds to realize that she was talking about my parents’ house, which is to say, now, my house. When you are woken up in the middle of the night, you eventually make the trip from confusion through fear to annoyance. It had taken me five hours, but finally I’d completed the journey and was annoyed. I’d lived my entire life in this house. It was a perfectly all-right house. Nothing great had happened to me there. But nothing horrible had ever happened to me there either. “I saw a picture of you,” I said to her accusingly, although I had no idea what the accusation was supposed to be. Aunt Beatrice didn’t say anything to that. This annoyed me even more. Here she had appeared out of nowhere after being absent my entire life and then insulted my house, without even seeming to be curious about what it was like now or what picture of her I’d seen. “You had all your teeth then,” I said to her, annoyed.

  It was, up to that moment, the meanest thing I’d ever said. And do you know what it caused to happen? My aunt laughed, a laugh that sounded like a noise her dog would make. One sudden, sharp, hoarse ruff. It felt good being able to produce such immediate happiness. My blog certainly had never produced anything like that. I took silent note of what meanness could do. As John Calvin himself once said, “We must remember that Satan has his miracles, too.”

  21.

  I was just about to walk into the house to get changed when my aunt called from behind me, “And who is Dawn?”

  “Dawn is the other blogger for the pellet stove industry,” I told her, perhaps too quickly, and without turning to face her. Aunt Beatrice said nothing to this. The silence was like a command to turn around. I did that. My aunt was leaning against her truck, arms crossed over her chest. “If you’re ever at a weekend party with Dawn,” I told my aunt, “don’t ask her what’s so wrong with the conventional woodstove.” And then I told my aunt why not to ask Dawn this, and my aunt said in her happy way, “She sounds wonderful!” and then I turned and went back into the house, feeling like I’d gotten away with something.

  22.

  I came out of the house five minutes later, still stuck on what my aunt had said about it being a house of horrors. “She wasn’t a bad mother, you know,” I said to my aunt, who was still leaning against her truck. I was thinking of the time, right after I began blogging for the pellet stove industry, when I overheard my mother talking with one of her fellow writers and ministers. He wasn’t from Maine. These people would come from all over the country, so eager were they to talk with my mother about how beautifully she wrote about how beautifully John Calvin wrote. Anyway, he and she were in the church, sitting side by side in a pew. I was in the balcony above. It was quiet in the balcony. I often liked to sit up there and think about pellet stoves and then with my thumbs type my blog on my cell phone. My mother and the minister had no idea I was sitting right above them. This is a good thing to remember in this life: no one ever looks up.

  The other minister was asking about me. He had a slender, bent neck. S
loped shoulders. Terrible posture. I don’t think I’d ever seen such a question mark of a man. “How’s your boy?” he said. His accent was flat, and I assumed he was from somewhere flat, too.

  “He’s just started writing for the pellet stove industry,” my mother said. I did notice that she said “writing” and not “blogging.” But I also noticed some color in her voice, as though she were pleased enough to be reporting this news.

  “He has,” this man said in his flat, flat voice.

  My mother gave me, as a child, an illustrated Old Testament, and in that book there is an illustration of the Garden of Eden, and in that illustration the serpent is looking menacingly at Adam and Eve with its neck flared out. Well, my mother’s neck flared like the serpent’s as she spat this quote from John Calvin at the flat-voiced minister: “There is no work, however vile or sordid, that does not glisten before God.”

  23.

  “And your father?” my aunt said.

  “My father was a good guy,” I said. I believed this to be true. Also, this was what most people said about him. For instance, his former athletes and fellow coaches at his funeral: Roger Bledsoe was a good coach, they said, but more than that, he was a good guy.

  “Have you ever noticed,” my aunt said, “that whenever someone says someone else is a good guy, then no one ever wants to know anything more about it? But when someone gets called a bad guy, then that’s not enough. We want to know exactly how and why.”

  I had not ever noticed this. It was probably worth noticing. But I was wondering about something else. “How well did you know my father?”

  “Well enough,” my aunt said.

  “Did you know his sayings?”

  Aunt Beatrice smiled and said, “This isn’t my first rodeo, you know.” Her expression was fond, and far away, very much like those people at my father’s funeral, and I expected her to say that my father was a good guy, but she didn’t.

  “When was the last time you were . . .” And here I paused, because I’d been about to use the word “home,” but I had the strong feeling that “home” wasn’t the right word to describe the place I was about to ask her about. “In Congress?” I said instead.

  “Around the time when you were born,” my aunt said.

  “Why didn’t my mother ever tell me about you?” I asked my aunt.

  “Because I was a bad guy,” my aunt said, looking directly at me. Her expression wasn’t at all far away anymore. Her mouth was closed, but I could picture her missing tooth.

  My aunt was right: now that she’d said she was a bad guy, I wanted to know more. I wanted to know exactly how and why. “All right,” I said instead, and we changed the subject.

  24.

  When did I begin to suspect that my aunt was really my mother and that the woman I’d thought was my mother was really my aunt? I don’t know if it was right then, when my aunt said she was a bad guy. But I must have felt some sort of disturbance, because after this conversation I did something out of character. As I walked around the back of my aunt’s truck I felt a strong desire to pet the dog. He growled when I stuck out my hand for him to sniff, but then he did sniff it, and then he did let me pet him.

  Four

  25.

  We took my aunt’s truck to the airport. I’d assumed, since she wanted me to come with her to the airport, that she’d want me to actually drive whichever vehicle we were taking. Old people are famously afraid of highway driving, and in fact my mother hadn’t driven over forty-five miles per hour for the twenty years before she died. High speed was one of her few fears.

  But no, my aunt wanted to drive. The dog stayed behind. I mean that before my aunt drove off, she lowered the gate on the back of the truck and the dog jumped out, ran up my front steps, and sat on my front porch in front of the door, as though the house were his to guard. I supposed when I came back from the airport, he would be my dog until my aunt returned. What would I do with him? I was planning on installing a pellet stove, and I could picture the dog sitting next to it. But then, I’d already pictured me sitting next to it. I wasn’t sure if there was room enough in the picture for both of us.

  26.

  There, on the truck’s bench seat, between my aunt and me, was my mother’s famous book: When I Was a Child, I Read John Calvin. It was the paperback edition. On the back cover, I knew, was a photo of my mother shaking hands with the president of the United States of America. It was the president who’d said, upon first meeting my mother minutes before the photo had been taken, “So you’re the little lady who wrote the great book that got us all talking about John Calvin again.”

  27.

  I asked my aunt, “Did you read John Calvin as a child?” According to my mother’s famous book, my grandfather—who was also a minister in Congress, as was his father—had had my mother read John Calvin as a child, and John Calvin had taught her everything: how to love, how to talk, how to think, how to write, how to live. But of course my mother had not mentioned my aunt in her famous book. Or anywhere else, for that matter. “Did you read John Calvin as a child, too?” I asked her.

  My aunt answered by quoting John Calvin: “The effect of our knowledge . . . ought to be, first, to teach us reverence and fear.” Which I understood to mean “Yes.”

  Because I, too, had been made to read John Calvin when I was a child, and I, too, would have used that quote to answer that question.

  28.

  Just as we were about to pull away from the curb, the Otises walked by. I mentioned before how different they were from each other. But they had one thing in common: they were always chewing on something. This morning, black coffee stirrers, which were bobbing out of the corners of their mouths. Other than that, and as usual, they didn’t look like they could be related to each other. The morning light made Leland look drawn, weathered, and ancient, even more so than usual. I wondered if he was sick; he looked so thin in his tucked-in flannel; his shaved cheeks looked like they were being vacuumed from the inside. Charles, on the other hand, was full faced and unshaven and looked overstuffed in his enormous sweatshirt. His oversized sweatshirts always had outsized political messages on them. Today he wore a black sweatshirt. Its message, in large white block letters, read i’m 1776% sure i’m keeping all my guns’. There was usually something wrong on these sweatshirts, some typo or mispunctuation (in this case, the apostrophe at the end of “guns”), and these mistakes helped me hope that Charles meant the messages to be ironic. My mother, in her famous book, had made the famous argument that we should reject irony because irony is the death of hope. But one of the things my aunt taught me is that irony is essentially hopeful, especially if you need to believe that the things that other people think or say or wear are meant ironically.

  “Bea,” Leland said to my aunt around his coffee stirrer and through her open window. She didn’t say anything back. Just looked at him from behind the barrier of her very large sunglasses. “Sorry about your sister,” he added flatly, and still she didn’t respond. Maybe because he didn’t sound especially sorry. And in any case, my mother had never seemed especially fond of the Otises—they attended her church but always sat in the last pew, arms crossed, a picture not of devotion but defiance—and I wondered if my aunt disliked them, too.

  “Nothing left of her at all,” Charles said. He was on my side of the truck but seemed to be speaking not to me but to my aunt through my open window. I could smell a strong funk coming off him and I wondered if the skunk had gotten to the Otises after all, before the Otises had gotten to the skunk.

  “Never seen anything like it,” Leland agreed. They were talking about the manner of my mother’s death. Because they were two of Congress’s volunteer firemen who had gone to the scene of the accident and had discovered that there was nothing left of my mother to discover.

  My aunt didn’t say anything still. She fiddled with her glasses, and fiddled with them, but otherwise didn’t seem inclined to respond. The air was full of the tension between people who haven’t seen eac
h other in forever but who nonetheless have known each other for too long and too well.

  Meanwhile, Charles’s skunk smell was starting to overwhelm me. I considered telling him to take a step back, but we’d known each other all our lives—we’d even graduated in the same high school class together—and not once had I told him to do something, and I didn’t think I could start now. So instead I asked in a whisper, “Did you know I had an aunt?”

  Charles grinned around his coffee stirrer, which I took to mean yes, he did know.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

  Charles stopped grinning and shot me a hostile, confused look, the kind of look you might direct at a stranger, and all of a sudden the truck was full of the tension between people who see each other all the time and who nonetheless don’t know each other at all. “Why the fuck would I tell you that you had an aunt?” Charles said. He took a step back from truck as though I were the one who smelled.