A Commonplace Heritance

“Where are the boys, Charlotte?”

“They’re not here, Mum. It’s just us.”

The elderly woman leaned forward in her wheelchair. “I know they’re not here, Charlotte, as I can’t see them. What I want to know is where they are and when they’ll be home.”

Charlotte set the worn black book down and looked across the dim room at her mother’s drooping mouth. The lines of her face had deepened over the decades, but the way they all seemed to draw her penetrating eyes right through Charlotte’s best intentions had never changed. Her mother’s severity concerned her for different reasons these days. Tell truth to the woman’s ruthless confusion, or lie to assuage her concern? It was less a choice for her mother and more a choice for the tone of the final hours of Charlotte’s stay.

“Jay is at camp until Friday, and Marcus is working late.”

The elderly woman settled back into the chair stacked with pillows. “That wasn’t so hard now, was it Char?”

“Yes, Mum.” Charlotte opened her book and scanned the cramped lines of handwriting for her place.

“Did I tell you about the sprinkler that keeps hitting the window?”

“Yes, Mum.”

“Scares me each time! Quite a disruptive event. I have to have Fran take me to the bedroom. I can’t have these kinds of disruptions in my condition.”

“Sorry, Mum.”

“Don’t say sorry,” she scoffed. “Tell me when it’s going to be fixed!”

Charlotte pressed a finger onto the page to keep her place and looked up. “I told you, Mum, they can’t have anyone out for another week.”

Charlotte’s mother crossed her arms over the bulge of her baggy sweater. “Dear, if you’re not going to speak to me you might as well take me to bed.”

Charlotte closed her book again. “What would you like to do?”

“You could do something to entertain an old lady like me.”

“What, Mum? You didn’t want to read and you already took your walk.”

Charlotte’s mother’s eyes drifted out the window. Charlotte watched as her mother’s eyes glazed over and the moments multiplied. “Actually dear, I’d just as soon watch the television. You can take me to the bedroom now and help me to bed before you leave,” she finally uttered softly.

Charlotte wheeled her mother to the dreary papered walls of the bedroom, faded floral comforter on the hospital bed the only slight bit of cheer. “Here’s the remote,” she set it into her mother’s lap.

“Charlotte, you must put the movie on.”

“Which movie?”

“The one from the BBC.”

“Where is it?”

“Somewhere in the closet cabinet.”

“What’s it called?”

“Oh, you know. It’s the one about those poor orphans who grow up well even without their parents. You’ll see the BBC on the side.” Half of her mother’s films were BBC specials.

Charlotte spent every Sunday with her mother, the day the nurse took off. Each week was some permutation of tea, chicken supper she fixed for the two of them, and a final scene of struggling to make her mother comfortable in bed before she left for her own home to finish the chores staved off from another week, so she could begin collecting them anew the next morning.

The TV voices, distorted from the high volume and walls of separation, rang as Charlotte packed away the remains of dinner—boiled chicken (not too much salt), potatoes (no cream), and peas (always creamed)—and cleaned the kitchen. Then, she retrieved the small black notebook from the room her mother called the sitting room and paced through the creaking home. Her feet took her to her father’s den, a room of his dusty books and maps, her mother’s framed embroidery, and in the corner next to the window, his piano.

She sat on the dark wooden bench, set the book beside her, lifted the cover, and ran her fingers over the keys. Mum didn’t like her playing. “Don’t you know anything less morose?” she’d complain, or, “No noise now, dear,” and sometimes, “Your father did like that one, though I never did.”

Curiously, the only thing she could give her father in his last days was her music. “One more, Char?” he’d ask, wrapped in a blanket from the study chair. And then simply, “I heard,” when she returned to the bedroom from the den, whispered from the bony mouth on his husk of body in the hospital bed that had never left, only changed its occupant.

There had been no will. Everything had gone to her mother; and, it was just as well, everyone had said. Her brothers showed up for the first time in years, and while Charlotte was out at the shops and preparing for the funeral, her mother gave away her late husband’s most prized possessions to the boys. “They’re just boy things,” her mother had retorted in defense when Charlotte returned. “Besides, you were around. If he wanted to give anything to you, he already would have.”

Her brothers had done what they could. “Sorry about the piano, Char,” Marcus even said before he left.

“Just give Mum a bit of time. She’ll come around,” Jay told her later on the phone. Charlotte blamed herself. She should have known that bit of time would calcify into years of privation. There was little room in her townhouse, anyway, she told herself. She would have to change the furniture out to accommodate the large instrument, and that wouldn’t do.

Charlotte was no master, she had long regretted not spending more time practicing, but she could play all right. There had been hiatuses, but her whole life, she seemed to be finding her way back to her music.

All the children had been required to take lessons, but only the boys had been allowed to quit. The piano had been moved from the sitting room to the den when the boys switched to basketball and lacrosse and their mother grew sick of Charlotte’s “pounding.” Charlotte’s father encouraged her. He played a little, the same repertoire of movie themes and old-fashioned ballads each Sunday afternoon. Sometimes, on days she didn’t want to practice, he lured her into the study and played her music so poorly it made her laugh and prompted her to show him how it was done.

Charlotte stood, stepped to the bookshelf, and leafed through her father’s old favorites. She placed a sheet on the stand and pressed the keys so gently they did not make a sound.

When her father became ill, only Charlotte visited, and she came repeatedly. When he died just months after she finally gave up the commute and moved to be nearer, her mother fawned over the good boys who came to visit their poor Mummy. And, when the boys left a few days later, she told Charlotte what a shame it was they were gone.

Charlotte came for her father and ended up taking care of her mother. At first, Charlotte arranged for Fran to come a couple of times a week to help with housework and medications, then several days a week for showering and shopping, and then every day except Sunday.

It hadn’t all been bad. Her mother had softened as she lost her presence of mind. Typically, her confusion was easily allayed, and, maybe due to this cloudiness, Charlotte felt at times that her mother saw her separately from the compounded disagreement and disappointment of the decades before. She was a daughter now, not the daughter, and perhaps the affinity her mother had for her purely as daughter shone through when memory was suspended. There was recognition sometimes, moments of tenderness between them even. She could say, not without some sadness, that it was the best their relationship had ever been.

Charlotte lifted her hands from the piano keys and placed them in her lap, sighing out the angst that remained. She picked up the little black book once again, what her father referred to as his commonplace book. He carried this and a fountain pen in his jacket pocket, and often pulled out both to jot things down.

Charlotte had to go through her father’s old things sneakily, when her mother wasn’t looking. Everything made her touchy, everything could wait, she had insisted. But it couldn’t wait. Not to Charlotte. Everything was kept from her as a child and once her father died she realized she had been expecting a release or effusion of truth-telling. Instead, this possibility had disappeared entirely with him. There were just these black books full of life notes: reminders, schedules, phone numbers, book quotes, occasionally undecipherable sentences and uncontextualized complaints. Mostly, it was summaries of days that sounded much the same, more list than sentence, more droll than insightful, yet Charlotte wanted to read it all.

She resisted the urge to start at the end; she knew he hadn’t written much in his illness anyway. She wanted to do it right, and to her that meant starting at the beginning, which was nearly thirty years previous. She would pull a book out of the wooden beer box where he stored them, peruse it when she thought of her father or could not stand her mother, replace it when she finished, and pull another.

This was the final book, and she had been reluctant to finish. Though they had not offered understanding, they did provide something like closeness with his memory. She flicked open the cover, key scratched and worn at the edges from being kept in a pocket, and thumbed through to her place just before the beginning of the end where her father was worrying about an MRI and a dripping sink. She flipped one more page to writing different from the rest. It’s penned more neatly, like it might actually need to be read. “Final Will”. Her eyes blur; her head spins. Still, she is able to read her name and a figure: To my daughter Charlotte, $20,000”. The book slips from her hands and strikes the keys.

***

“Charlotte, I cannot understand why Fran is lying to me.”

Charlotte pressed the phone between her ear and shoulder and continued pulling the music books out of the box. “What is she lying about?”

“She is insisting she won’t be here tomorrow,” Charlotte’s mother cried angrily.

“Mum, we talked about this. I can’t come Sunday, so I’m coming Saturday instead.”

“You always come Sunday!”

Charlotte pressed her fingers to her forehead. “Yes, but I need to be home this Sunday. Fran will be with you, and I’ll see you tomorrow instead.”

“Why on earth would you need to be home?”

“I have a delivery.”

“What? What is it? What would you be buying?”

Charlotte gazed at the empty space she had cleared in the great room. “My piano.”

She hung up the phone and finished stacking the music books she had unpacked for the first time. She measured the gap in the corner once more, double checked her appointment with the delivery service, stood back, and smiled as she imagined how it would look there in the corner next to the window.