A BEECH BRANCH

by Anne Kaier

The realtor caught me stealing a branch of our beech tree the day after the family house sold. In her camel coat, she came up the long driveway as I stood on tiptoe to cut about six feet covered with winter-tight buds. As I dragged the bough away, it made crow’s feet across the snow. “Just a little memento,” I told her, wrangling it with my small hands. She looked smug: “A lot of people do that, actually.” I didn’t want to feel like a lot of people. By taking that branch I was trying to preserve the physical memory of my childhood, the brush of soft beech leaves on my arms when I hid under the low boughs among the fire-flies.

“I’m gonna take it home to the city, prop it up against my piano.” I rolled down both windows in my black Ford Escort, and somehow got it in sideways, only scratching my plump arm twice.

The house, made of Pennsylvania field stone in the 1920’s, stood behind the tree. My brother and I grew up in that house. My charming father died in it. For 22 years after his death, my mother stayed there in her adopted home in the Philadelphia suburbs. She entertained her friends, whacked golf balls in the backyard, dragged the long hose out to water her flower border. She made no changes except to refurbish the living room with yellow damask curtains when she gave a party to commemorate 50 years of living there.

Meanwhile, my life went on in Center City, although as a single woman, I was under pressure to show up for Sunday night suppers. She’d cook steak and salad with a Scotch in her hand, moving quickly on muscular legs. Then she’d put two red rag placemats on the long dining room table. I could never convince her to eat in the kitchen when we were alone. One February night the year before she moved, I jerked Sheraton chairs up to the table and sat in the dark candlelight listening again to her tales of Indiana where she grew up in a Catholic family in the 1920’s. She told these tales practically every time I saw her.

“You know my father died when I was only six months old.” I scored the edges of the placemat with my nail. I had heard this story a thousand times.

“My mother was left. Think of it. A widow with no money. All she had was $250 in life insurance. What could that do?”

“Not much.”

“My mother was everything. The things she did for us. They made her a partner in that Ford car agency.”

“Yep. Right.”

“In high school, Betty O’Hara and I used to ditch the Catholic kids at the gym door; we were the only ones who ran with the Protestant kids, prominent families in town.”

I truly think she has hardwired those stories. I don’t think she has any idea that she’s told them again and again. She has no sense of her audience, only that she has one.

She held forth at that table on all ceremonial occasions. When she was about 80, she finally gave up her hold on Thanksgiving dinner and my brother and sister-in-law took it over. But from the time they were born, my brother’s children celebrated every Christmas in that house. On Easter afternoons, they hunted for eggs where we had hunted thirty years before them, scratching around the same sappy pine bark, poking through the same daffodils down by the creek.

Nothing ever changed. For 30 years, orange towels with green daisies, bought new in 1974, hung above a claw foot tub in an upstairs bath. My brother, a soft-spoken Philadelphia lawyer, loved seeing his children run up the back stairs to that bathroom, which had been his. He played with his sons in the basketball net that still hung above the garage doors. He first made love to his fiancée in the Victorian guest room bed. I, however, felt that the layers of lives lived there obscured my memories of my own childhood in the same place. So I waited, trusting that a flood of recollections would finally rush in on me when the long senility of the house in my mother’s last years there had passed.

It had happened before. My father died upstairs in the blue bedroom on May 31, 1981 after three years of increasing dementia. On that sunny afternoon, as I turned away from a face already stiffened by rigor mortis, I felt the breeze blow hawthorn scent through crinoline curtains. Downstairs, I swung around the back porch lamp post.

Suddenly I saw my father came smiling through the kitchen in his panama hat, settle my pudgy seven year old’s legs on his shoulders, and sweep me outside to steady me on a low branch of the apple tree, scratchy beneath my cowgirl outfit. Surely, I thought, when mother leaves the house, the same kind of thing will happen again.

When I’m not here all the time, visiting her alone in an in tractable present, when I don’t have to hear her tell the same tales about this house, it will open again in my imagination. My earliest memories will stream into my mind: the flick of her foot on the Singer sewing machine pedal when she made dresses for me, the sound of the ball in Dad’s mitt when he played ball with us on summer nights, the smell of dust in the attic. But first, she needs to leave and I need to close the door.

On our last Easter in the house, thirteen of us, including our cousins, sat down to roast lamb, asparagus, and strawberries in the dining room, lit by fragile April light. My mother, upright in her purple dress, presided over Waterford glasses full of Cotes du Rhone. Her new calico kitten, Coco, was allowed into the dining room for this occasion and sat in her lap. After the demitasse, Mom and most of the cousins went into the living room while I did the dishes, helped, erratically, by my blond nephew Tommy, just 18. “What are we gonna do next year, Annie? I mean, like, it’ll be weird not being here.” He picked up the kitten and rubbed her belly. I handed him a salad bowl, pushing up the sleeves of my flowing summer dress.

“I dunno. Your Dad’s place maybe. Maybe mine. Maybe we’ll just bag the whole thing and go to Grandmother’s club.”

“Yuck.”

“Yeah, I know. How ’bout you clear off the rest of the table?”

When the dining room chairs were back in place against the walls, the candles blown out, and the pink table cloth smoothed of wrinkles, I saw the birds on the Chinese wallpaper rustle in their greenery. Then I turned off the light.

On moving day in May 2004, I came to take Mom to her club for lunch while the movers loaded her things into the van. That night she’d sleep in her own bed in a nearby retirement village. The old rooms were empty or filled with boxes. I felt no regret, no wrench. I wanted to get her out of there, to the club where she could have a drink and not watch the home of 55 years die in front of her eyes. I wanted to get her established in the new place, where new wallpaper hung in the kitchen and a pot of geraniums sat on the small balcony. By mid-morning, she was ready to leave. She got into my car clutching a bouquet made up of every single rose that was blooming in her garden. “I might as well take my roses.”

After she had left 803 N. Pennstone Rd., my brother drove by fairly often. A sweet and sentimental man, he hates change and was sad to report that the new people had cut down several of the pine trees near the house. He saw bulldozers in the back yard.

My solo dinners with my mother continue. Now we eat at the little card table in her
apartment. She still tells the same stories about Indiana. She still tells the same stories about 803 N. Pennstone Rd.

“We moved there in 1948, the summer my daughter was three. Mother died that year. You don’t remember her.”

“I remember she brushed my hair in the old yellow bedroom.”

“Mr. Kaier,” her name for my father’s father, “died later. I was young. I had two babies and all those old people. My house comforted me.”
As she ages deeper into her 90s, she has become an unreliable narrator. I’m not sure what

I’m dealing with - a dementia or just a quirk in the brain that’s occasionally irrational, strange. It’s confusing. I feel like I’m beginning to lose her. One day I asked how things were going and she talked about not really liking the new place and how she misses her house. I felt like she was real again. When I left her in that fluorescent-lit hallway in her pale blue suit, I flashed on leaving her at the back door at Pennstone Rd. I also feel guilty about seeing this as the beginning of the end of her life and in some ways really expecting, even hoping, that she will fade away quickly.

Back in my city house, the beech branch scratched up the paint on the wall next to my piano. It leaned over the sheet music. I couldn’t turn the pages. Finally, I cut it up, pasted a few inches of the utmost tip into my scrapbook and threw the rest out. Perhaps those physical memories of my childhood that I so long for are buried deep in my body. But as long as my mother lives, my mind seems blind to them. I have only glimpses of the child who hid beneath the beech tree. I’ll have to wait.