The landlord was shocked at what he saw. But he recognized soon afterward that they would be sent somewhere and that he would be able to charge a profitable rent, at last, with someone new.

A VISIT FROM MOTHER

(for Herry O. Teltcher)

By the marble fireplace in the main bedroom a discreet television set was playing. It sat on a Regency stool with inlaid legs. The program was a videotape of a ballet.

“My God,” Mother said, as he brought her and Daddy in. “It’s in color!”

Barney was flustered. They had been dead a dozen years and for a moment he had forgotten. “Sure, Mom,” he said. “Color TV’s been around for years…”

Mother’s face, bright for a moment, became wistful. “It’s a pity,” she said. “Your father would have enjoyed it so…”

Barney glanced at his father shyly, then glanced away. His father’s face was impassive; as always, he neither confirmed nor denied what Mother had said about him.

“Would you like something to drink?” Barney said to her. “Coffee maybe?” It was eleven in the morning.

“You go ahead, Barney,” Mother said, pronouncing his name with a kind of sigh. “I don’t want anything for myself.”

***

She was wearing the same J. C. Penney dress she had worn to Daddy’s funeral, the same black patent shoes. Daddy was wearing a blue serge Nixon suit and brown shoes. His hair was pale gray; his face was pained, as though his false teeth were hurting.

They were both Midwesterners and they looked out of place in this New York apartment. Somehow, Barney remembered, they had even looked out of place in their own Ohio ranch house, however much Mother had tried to possess the space of it by endless dusting of furniture, by the covering of its cheap parquet floors with her own hooked rugs. Daddy alone had filled and held one corner of the living room of that airless house with its pastel walls, its Currier and Ives prints, the hooked rugs everywhere, Grandmother’s sofa, Aunt Millie Dean’s cherry table, the coat of arms on the kitchen wall by the never-used copper molds—the curved fish, the decorated ring, the gingerbread man that might have formed mousses or cakes but never had. Daddy had made that dark corner his, sitting grimly in the overstuffed armchair with his Time or his crosswords or staring out beyond the pale curtained window at the nothing at all that surrounded them. As a child, Barney’s heart had moved toward that silent and frightened man with inarticulate love, unable to look him in the eyes.

Later, after his coronary, Daddy’s place had become the painted brass bed in the corner bedroom, where he lay and smoked Viceroys in a holder and continued his grim solutions to crossword puzzles in magazines and almost never spoke. Mother had completely become his voice: “Your father doesn’t think much of the fall programs, Barney,” or “Your father believes the economy is headed for a slump.” But he never heard Daddy say anything.