10
HER mother's current apartment was in one of the newer high rises overlooking the Hudson River. Some women shift furniture; Anne Harald kept all the same pieces of furniture in approximately the same positions and restlessly shifted apartments instead. Her friends had long since learned to enter her new telephone and street numbers in their address books in light, easily erased pencil. Anne had inhabited Manhattan Island from the Battery to Harlem. She'd even crossed the East River once and tried Brooklyn Heights, but that was a short-lived experiment. Shorter still had been a sojourn in Connecticut. The U-Haul rental truck had deposited Anne and her chattels in a picturesquely rustic cottage on a Tuesday afternoon. An identical truck had carted everything back to Manhattan the following Friday morning.
These frequent moves had been so much part of Sigrid's childhood that she no longer recalled that they had begun immediately after Leif's funeral. By now it was just another quirk of Anne's personality; easier to shrug one's shoulders and accept it than to try to understand.
This year's building was all glass and steel, its ground floor as impersonal as a bank and quite bare except for the slight softening effect of low fern-filled planters along the front walls, a colorful mosaic floor and a few backless leather benches clumped together in the center of the lobby. At the rear were elevators and banked mailboxes. The whole place was as brightly lit as an all-night diner and even less inviting, but it was virtually mugger proof. To compensate for the lack of doorman, tenants could inspect everything behind those floor-to-ceiling glass walls before unlocking the street door and letting themselves in, and there were no shadowy culs-de-sac where a rapist could lurk undetected..
Closed-circuit televisions on the main door and in the elevator videotaped everyone coming or going, and it was useless to tell her mother that the tapes probably weren't checked unless a tenant actually got mugged. Anne was convinced that a watchman or somebody monitored them, and unless she were in a tearing hurry, she always blew kisses to the cameras or thumbed her nose or modeled a new dress.
"They must get so bored just watching people galumph in and out as if they're going to their own funerals," she would say.
Whenever her mother was brightening up a hypothetical watchman's day, Sigrid would stand to the far side of the elevator and pretend not to know her.
It was raining briskly when Sigrid slipped inside the lobby and paused long enough to empty Anne's mailbox. Some of the letters had been forwarded through five or six addresses. She took a self-service elevator to the eighteenth floor and let herself into a front apartment.
Anne Harald's image stood just inside the vestibule with arms outstretched. A fellow photographer had cleverly matched front and back views, blown them up, then laminated them together into a rigid sheet of acrylic to form a life-sized cutout doll who welcomed her visitors the way Anne welcomed life-with open arms; dimples flashing; short hair an exuberance of dark curls; her slender body still petite and shapely at fifty.
Anne herself used the thing as a hat stand, draping it in scarves, light meters and paraphernalia cases, but it was too lifelike for Sigrid's taste. She always hurried past it when making her tours of inspection.
Things were normal that evening. Nothing dramatic like burst water pipes or signs of forced entry, although a stranger might have had difficulty distinguishing between a burglar's ransacking and Anne's normal going-away clutter. Every drawer was slightly ajar, and every surface overflowed. Film cartridges were jumbled in with sliding piles of professional journals, unanswered letters, discarded panty hose, airline itineraries and butt-filled ashtrays. Anne's departures were perennially hurried. Schedules always surprised her.
"The plane leaves at noon?" she'd wail. "But it's eleven now! Who's got the car? Where's my coat? My camera bags?"
Some people found her disorganized, chaotic air appealing. Sigrid preferred order and calm; but because she'd lived apart from her mother since college, it was not a source of friction any longer. Now they could look at each other fondly-if somewhat quizzically-across the generation gap.
Like many untidy people, Anne Harald kept surprisingly meticulous records. Five large steel file cabinets followed in her wake wherever she moved. Couches, tables, bric-a-brac and rugs had become battered and shabby from occupying haphazard spaces on those do-it-yourself moves organized and executed by the youthful neophyte photographers who clustered around Anne; but the file cabinets were always the last on and first off those rental trucks. Admittedly Anne's filing system was peculiarly her own and not always logical; but sooner or later she could lay her hands on any of her negatives, or her magazine and newspaper articles from the last twenty-five years.
Under the S's was a file with Sigrid's name on it, begun in her fifth year because Anne had obtained and then managed to misplace three separate copies of her daughter's birth certificate, and the kindergarten wouldn't enter Sigrid without proof that she'd been born the proper number of years before. The folder still contained Sigrid's immunization and dental records and the pediatrician's careful listing of childhood diseases, report cards and-though Anne always denied being sentimental-every Mother's Day card Sigrid had ever labored over in grade school and all her letters from boarding school and college, which strangely touched Sigrid the first time she had stumbled upon her folder.
She located the old Life article on her first try, pulled it out and started to close the drawer when another folder nearer the front caught her eye.
It was labeled simply 'Leif', and it was not very thick. Inside were a couple of letters addressed to Miss Anne Lattimore in her father's masculine scrawl, a birth certificate, diplomas, a driver's license, a medal and its accompanying posthumous citation, some police-department forms dealing with death benefits and a handful of pictures.
Sigrid had seen most of the pictures before but not in several years. She had difficulty locating her father in a group-graduation pose, one skinhead rookie out of a whole class of uniformed look-alikes. There was a formal studio portrait-how very young he looked-and a close-up of herself at six months, sitting on his lap, wearing his patrol-man's hat and gnawing on the handle of his service pistol.
In the last picture he was as she could just barely remember him: laughing directly into the camera, his fair hair slicked back, tall and handsome and utterly self-assured. A man's hand rested on his shoulder, and a closer look revealed that someone had been cropped from the picture. Odd. Idly she wondered who it was, and why he'd been cut away. Along the right border was a date and in her mother's hasty script the words: 'First day in plain clothes."
Two months before he'd been gunned down.
It was disorienting to look at the date and suddenly realize that she was now older than he had been. Somehow one never expects to grow older than one's parents. It upset life's natural order. Then she remembered the time when she was still in uniform and had been sent to tell an elderly mother that her son had been killed in a car wreck that evening.
The old woman had just stared at her numbly, shaking her head over and over in mute denial that finally came out in soft bewildered cries, "But he isn't old enough. He's not old enough to die."
Sigrid knew it must feel much more unnatural to outlive a child than a parent; nevertheless, she gave a final uneasy glance at her father's unlined face before replacing the folder and closing the drawer. The Life article she kept out to take back to her own apartment, where she could relax finally with a bourbon and cola, her one southern mannerism.