Ready for the Dealer

Judith Thearou had begun to notice that something in her mother’s and father’s household had no longer been operating according to its usual arrangements. While, in Reginald Brown, in 1954, had taken to seeing where everything become all deeply, unsettling, enough for his wife, Alice Francis, to see, and soon after their honeymoon, and after becoming betrothed. through an, entirely different modulations, it seemed, that ordinary conversations had mostly become complicated by many recollections.

And that Alice Francis, had o scarcely known though while staring out the window outside, and seemingly where’d see had forgotten many things, and how, she, even mentioned before howe she thought about the time, where, everybody had seemed to be, look at her like an eccentric clock lady and where the drudgery of her own eccentric behavior, had become one of toilsome banality alienating husband, that It was as though a door had been opened to a portion of her mother’s life that had remained deliberately concealed for decades.

At first, Judith regarded the matter as an ordinary consequence of looking backward. Her mother had always possessed a remarkable capacity for remembering the smallest details, particularly those concerning her marriage, her former acquaintances, and the places she had occupied before becoming accustomed to domestic life. But these latest recollections were different. Alice was no longer simply reminiscing about her younger years. She was returning to a particular winter, one that seemed to have acquired an extraordinary importance in her memory.

It was the winter of 1954.

Before the divorce, before the gradual disintegration of their marriage had become an unavoidable subject, Alice and Reginald had spent a winter together that she now described with an almost unsettling precision. She remembered the weather, the furnishings, the clothing, and the peculiar silence that accompanied their evenings. She spoke of the apartment as though she had only recently departed from it, recalling the arrangement of the sitting room and the sounds of the radiator struggling against the cold.

Judith listened, although she could not always determine whether her mother expected an answer.

There were moments when Alice would suddenly interrupt herself, searching for a particular name or attempting to reconstruct a conversation that had taken place more than twenty years earlier. Sometimes she appeared amused by her own recollections. At other times, she became unusually solemn, as if the memory had carried her somewhere she had not intended to visit.

Judith began to realize that her mother’s past was not as settled as she had imagined.

Reginald Brown had occupied a complicated position in Alice’s life. He was neither an entirely distant figure nor someone whose influence had disappeared with the marriage. His presence continued to emerge in unexpected places, in the records Alice played, the books she kept, and the occasional remarks she made about the difficulties of living with a man who had his own particular understanding of the world.

What troubled Judith most was the manner in which her mother had begun rearranging the chronology of events. A story that had once belonged to one year now appeared to have happened in another. People who had been absent from one account suddenly occupied a prominent place in the next. Judith found herself questioning whether she had misunderstood the family history altogether.

One evening, while the two women sat together, Alice mentioned something about a disagreement she and Reginald had experienced during that winter. She described it as a minor domestic incident, although her expression suggested otherwise. She remembered the cold outside, the hour of the evening, and the particular coat Reginald had worn when he left the apartment.

‘Your father had a peculiar way of making an ordinary evening feel like an occasion,’ Alice remarked.

Judith looked up from the magazine she had been reading.

‘What happened that night?’

Alice hesitated.

‘Nothing that couldn’t have been avoided.’

It was the sort of answer Judith had come to expect, but it did little to satisfy her curiosity. She had spent much of her life accepting the fragments her mother chose to disclose. Now, however, those fragments seemed to be multiplying, and each new recollection threatened to alter the meaning of the preceding one.

The household had become a place of interruption. Meals were delayed by conversations that wandered into the past. Telephone calls were occasionally left unanswered. Alice would abandon an ordinary household task to retrieve a photograph, a letter, or some other object that had suddenly assumed an importance Judith could not understand.

Even the smallest details seemed to have become evidence.

Judith began to wonder whether the winter of 1954 had represented something more significant than an unhappy period in her parents’ marriage. Perhaps there had been an incident that Alice had never fully explained. Perhaps the divorce had been preceded by a series of private disappointments that neither parent had ever discussed openly.

She had always considered her parents’ separation a matter of incompatibility, the inevitable consequence of two people who had gradually discovered that they could no longer occupy the same domestic arrangements. But her mother’s recollections suggested a more elaborate history, one in which affection, resentment, obligation, and regret had become hopelessly entangled.

As the days passed, Judith found herself looking at her mother differently. Alice was no longer simply the woman who maintained the household and recalled the occasional anecdote from her younger years. She had become an unreliable custodian of a history Judith had never been permitted to examine.

And Reginald, despite his absence, had somehow returned to the center of their lives.

Judith could not decide whether she wanted to know what had happened that winter. There was something disconcerting about discovering that the people who had raised you might have been living entirely different lives beneath the surface of their familiar routines.

For the first time, she began to suspect that the divorce had not ended the story between Alice and Reginald Brown.

It had merely interrupted it.

And now, in the peculiar atmosphere of the present, the winter of 1954 was beginning again.