Aunt Zariah
Elly had been there before. As it is written in the Epistles, Whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell. And neither could she. In the dream, the boy had waved to her from the porch. When she approached, he opened the screen door and invited her into the house.
Through the doorway on the left was the study, and that was where the boy led her. In the far corner of the room, an old man sat in an armchair. His eyes were shut and he had on a pair of Koss headphones, closing out the world.
The boy beckoned to her. He crossed the room and stood next to the armchair. He repeated the gesture and pointed at his grandfather, a universal sign language that said, “You speak to him for me.” The request made, he stared up at her, his eyes large and blue.
She asked instead, “Why don’t you talk to him yourself?” He shook his head. They couldn’t talk to themselves in their dreams. The thought occurred to her that this was simply a reflection of their real lives—their own selves couldn’t say what they didn’t yet know. Here is a page from my life, he was saying. Tell me what it means.
She feared she would have to read the entire book first.
The old man opened his eyes and took off the headphones. Notes of music escaped into the air like fireflies released from a bottle. It was the last act of the opera. Susanna is masquerading as the Countess—and the Countess as Susanna—exposing the Count’s attempted infidelities. The other day, Elly had skimmed through the libretto. She remembered only the verses from the very end, when everything is reconciled in a tender duet: “Contessa, perdono,” the Count sings. “My Countess, forgive me.” To which she replies, “In kindness, I shall say yes.”
The old man reached up and grasped her hand and held it tightly, much as she had held his once before.
Connor said, “Elly—”
She started, wondering how long she’d been standing there. “I was— thinking about something.”
“My grandfather’s study,” Connor said with a sweep of his arm.
The same armchair, the same double-pedestal rolltop desk. She ran her fingers across the scarred surface. Her attention was drawn to a framed photograph in one of the cubbyholes.
“Yeah, that’s me,” Connor said. “Uncle Martin, my dad, my grandfather.”
The three men leaned against the fender of the Mustang. The boy sat on the hood between the father and grandfather. His small arms were folded against his chest just as his grandfather’s were.
“You were a cute kid,” Elly said.
“All eight-year-olds are cute kids.”
Aunt Wanda poked her head into the study. “There you are. Quit hiding and come meet the rest of the family.”
Wanda had already broadcast the news of their betrothal, eliminating the need for embarrassing proclamations on their part. Elly, though, felt like a debutante arriving at a cotillion. “Isn’t she a pretty one,” said an older man she recognized from the photograph as Connor’s uncle, albeit carrying an extra fifty pounds and a shock of snow-white hair.
Mike greeted her with a laconic, “Hey.”
“You must have met in Japan,” said Lynne.
“When I was working for Elly’s uncle in Osaka,” Connor said. This explanation struck a sufficiently plausible chord.
“Dinner smells wonderful,” Elly said.
Honey-baked ham was the main course, along with gravy and string beans. The meal commenced as soon as Glenn got back from church. As the food was served and passed around the table, Wanda filled in everybody about the particulars of Elly’s biography. She clearly enjoyed boasting about her nephew’s fiancée.
“You’re embarrassing Elly,” Lynne finally objected.
“An aunt’s prerogative,” Wanda rejoined.
“Well,” Martin said, “a McKenzie with a General Authority in the family, that’d be a switch.”
Lynne asked Elly, “You lived in Japan when you were little?”
“A small town—well, small in comparison—called Hiratsuka.”
“I do wonder sometimes what it’d be like to live all over the world.”
“I used to wonder what it’d be like to live in one place,” mused Elly.
“Be careful what you wish for,” Wanda cautioned. “Once a McKenzie gets rooted, he’s plenty hard to get moving again.” She said to Connor, “You could have knocked me over with a feather when your parents sold the house in New York and moved to Maine. I guess some leopards do change their spots. Still,” she said to Elly, “best to keep the rock rolling while it’s still in motion.”
“Nothing wrong with being rooted,” countered Martin. “You build a strong house on a firm foundation.”
“And I’ve seen many a foundation waste away for lack of anything substantial to hold up. Muscles atrophy when not used. The better a life is exercised, the better it is lived.”
“That’s enough, you two,” said Lynne, as if scolding a pair of contrary children. She turned to Elly and said with a wink, “One last tired question and we’ll leave you alone: What’s your major?”
After dessert, Glenn left for a bishopric meeting. Mike got mustered into busboy duties.
“Aunt Wanda—” Elly said, as they passed their plates around so Mike could collect them at the end of the table. When Wanda turned to her, Elly asked the question that had been on her mind all that afternoon. She recalled the boy pointing from her to his grandfather and had begun to guess that it meant more than the relationship between the boy and the man. It was an inopportune question, to be sure, but she thought it better to ask the whole family.
She said, “Connor’s grandfather, was he a member of the Church?”
“No,” Wanda answered.
“I just thought he went inactive,” said Connor, clearly surprised.
Martin shook his head. “Goes back a long way.”
Wanda said, “Goes back to him and his sisters being orphaned. After his father was killed in a slide at Bingham Canyon mine, his mom moved the family back to Provo. Then two years later she died during the 1918 influenza epidemic. After that, the family was divided up among the relatives—that’s how it was done in those days—and Connor was taken in by his Aunt Zariah.”
“That’s the whole problem right there,” Martin said, in a tone of voice that revealed his low opinion of the woman.
“She was her father’s daughter. And as stubborn.”
“True, but it wasn’t her grievance. A grievance ought to die with the man who brung it upon himself. Zariah had no cause dragging our dad into it like it was the second battle of Falkirk. When being stubborn didn’t get her what she wanted, the woman got plain mean.”
Elly cringed inside. Wanda, though, ignored her brother and continued with the story. She said to Connor, “Now, you do know what got your great-great-grandfather excommunicated?”
“I’ve heard the story.”
“And George Q. Cannon was right about him, everything he said at his funeral.” This statement was directed at Martin, another volley in an argument skirted but not conceded. “He was a cantankerous Celt through and through. Worse when he got too much cider in him—the Word of Wisdom not being in those days what it is today. He’d marched with the Mormon Battalion and no doubt saw himself as William Wallace hemmed in by the conniving English. It would have been enough if he could have apologized afterward, but once the thing was said, it gained for him a whole new veracity in the saying, and defending it became a matter of principle, impossible to retract.
“He may have been done an injustice,” and again, this opinion she aimed laterally at Martin. “But I think even he would have admitted it was all pride and stubbornness that got him excommunicated in the end. George Cannon knew that as well, which was why he had his baptism and temple blessings restored.”
Martin said, “And if Zariah had simply let the matter drop, let those dogs lie, the matter would have ended right there.”
“Zariah is certainly culpable in the matter,” Wanda retorted. “She was young enough at the time to see only the best in her father, to idealize the injustices done him, real and imagined. She nursed them long after his reputation had been rehabilitated.”
“The woman wasn’t even married,” Martin said with a snort of disgust. “Don’t know what qualified her to raise our dad.”
“Don’t be a chauvinist, Martin. She had means. That’s what mattered. And she never stood in the way of our father getting baptized—”
“And did nothing to encourage it.”
Wanda explained to Elly, “In those days they didn’t have the church youth programs we have today, or home teachers. Or computerized membership records, for that matter. When Aunt Zariah and our dad moved to Salt Lake City, they fell through the cracks. You know that old Jesuit saying? Give me the boy till he is seven, and I will show you the man. He was seven when they left Provo. The die was cast.”
Martin grumbled something that drew a sharp expression from Wanda. Elly felt as if she’d made an illegal U-turn, resulting in a multi-car pileup.
The phone rang shortly after they got home. “That’s mine,” Connor said and hurried out of the room. Wanda put the plate of leftover ham on the table. Elly went down to the basement to see what Connor was doing.
The bishop, he mouthed. He was describing some aspect of the church financial software.
Back in the kitchen, Wanda was making a place in the refrigerator for the ham. Elly stood there for a minute in quiet apprehension. Finally she said, “Aunt Wanda, I’m sorry about this afternoon. I didn’t mean to start an argument.”
“Heavens-to-betsy.” Wanda laughed. “Start them as often as you wish. It greatly improves the after-dinner conversation.”
“But Uncle Martin—”
“Martin, pshaw. No offense taken, none given. I’ve been goading Martin my entire life, so believe me when I tell you that he enjoyed the exchange as much as I did. You know a McKenzie man is taking an argument too seriously when he doesn’t grumble and he doesn’t answer back. To tell the truth, we both know that Zariah was as much at fault in the matter as Martin says. Still, she was always my favorite aunt. She was a librarian at the University of Utah for many years. Her hard work and support made it possible for my dad to get his engineering degree in the middle of the Great Depression. It was thanks to her that education became such a priority in our family.”
Connor came into the kitchen. He explained, “The bishop needed to print out a tithing reconciliation for a student moving out of the ward.”
Wanda said, “We’ve been talking about your great Aunt Zariah.
“I was wondering,” Connor said. “If Grandpa wasn’t baptized when he was alive, why haven’t his temple ordinances been done for him?”
“He expressly forbade it in his will.”
“Why would he do something like that?”
“It is curious. My dad respected my mom and her convictions more than many men who’ve spent their whole lives in the Church. When she was a temple worker, after her eyesight got too bad for her to drive herself, he’d take her up there every morning and pick her up every afternoon.” She shrugged. “I’m sure he had his reasons. I hope to live long enough to find out what they were. That part of his will was sealed.”
“Sealed? How does that work?”
“With lawyers,” Wanda observed, “anything is possible.”
Wanda’s assurances hadn’t completely calmed Elly’s concerns. She asked as they walked back across the park to the condo, “Do you think I upset anybody, bringing up that business about your grandfather?”
Connor responded the same as his aunt had. “Dad says that when he was growing up, Wanda and Martin used to go at it like cats and dogs, Martin too often ending up the one treed.” He said, “Why did you?”
Elly hesitated. She hadn’t told him about her dreams. They seemed to her another part of his grandfather’s sealed life, and not her prerogative to reveal. “It’s just that the things you’ve said about him—I wondered. I mean, your grandmother and grandfather must have loved each other.”
“All my life, they were Grandpa and Grandma, two old people who lived at the same address.” He paused and said, “I never heard him say a cross word to her. Everybody else, yes, but not to her. And she’d holler at him. The thing is, I don’t ever think she took him seriously, not the whole brooding, Celtic thing. She saw through his tatemae.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“I was a kid who took everything too seriously. I think that’s why hanging out with Billy was so relaxing. He didn’t take anything seriously.”
“Then I won’t take you seriously.” She kissed him. “I’m going to ask my Grandpa Packard to marry us. It should go a long way toward making things right with the rest of the family.”
“The General Authority, you mean.”
“Yes. He’s great. You’ll love him. I’ll have to tell Uncle as well. Did you know he once suggested that you and I should date? No doubt he’ll take credit. Though only after the dust settles. He’ll be ducking and covering in the meantime.” She grinned. “There’s a little Aunt Zariah in all of us.” She frowned. “And a lot of my mom in me.”