Many things didn’t measure up to Maude’s standards. If she didn’t like the way her daughter Janet made her bed Maude would remake it herself before Janet came home from school. When Maude retired to Florida and had a heart attack, Janet and I moved to live close to her. We spent the first weekend after Thanksgiving decorating her house for Christmas. The next time we came over we saw that all the decorations had been changed by her housekeeper. Maude explained it had to look just right in case her church friends came to visit.
When things didn’t go exactly the way she wanted, Maude’s feelings were hurt, although she always insisted nothing hurt her feelings. I pressed that I could tell something had gone wrong. She snapped, “Of course my feelings were hurt.” I should have had the good sense to know her feelings were hurt without forcing her to say so.
But she was haunted only one time, and the haunting lasted for years.
She and her husband Jim flew down to Texas for Christmas when our son Josh was about two years old. Janet and I found Tonka trucks on sale and bought two for him. They were almost big enough for him to ride. When Maude and Jim saw them, they had to buy three more.
Call me old-fashioned, but I felt like I was spoiling Josh by getting him two. Now he had five, and I don’t think he exactly knew what to do with them all. Janet, better acquainted with her parents better than I, gave me strict instructions to smile and thank them for buying him enough trucks to start his own landfill company.
Finally that blessed day came when we drove them to the airport. At the gate I handed Josh over to say good-bye to Grandpa and Grandma. I think he misunderstood my intentions because when he was ensconced in Maude’s arms he turned to look at me and, with tears in his eyes, said, “Good-bye.”
“Oh no, dear, you’re not saying good-bye to your mommy and daddy,” Maude explained. “You’re saying good-bye to us.”
When the situation was made clear, Josh leapt from her arms back into mine. He started stroking the back of my head. With a sweet smile he looked back at his grandparents and said, “Good-bye.”
Okay, I have to admit I liked having him pat and stroke the back of my head as we returned to our car. This was going to be one of those memories tucked away in the recesses of my brain and brought out when I needed a nice smile.
Of course, with Maude, that was not to be. For the next several years when we gathered together she would talk of the time when Josh was handed to her and he thought he was going home with them instead.
“Oh, the look in his sad little eyes,” Maude emoted, “and then the look of joy as he jumped out of my arms to his father. It just haunts me.”
A couple of years later when we visited them in Virginia, Maude purposely told Janet and me to stay at their home while she took Josh to her husband’s office. When they returned, Maude was elated. She told us that as they walked in, my son squealed, “Granddaddy!” and ran into his arms.
“The look on Jim’s face was pure joy. The women in the office ‘oohed” and ‘ahed’ about how much Josh adored his grandfather.” Maude inserted a dramatic pause worthy of any tragic actress. “That’s why I was glad Jerry wasn’t there. Otherwise, Josh would have stuck to his father and not gone to Jim.”
She repeated the stories of the haunting throughout the years until, against my better judgement, I asked her why it bothered her so much that Josh clung to me as a child.
“Oh, it didn’t bother me.”
“But the word you chose to describe it was ‘haunted’.”
“Well, I just meant it stayed with me.”
“That’s not what the word haunted means. Haunted means it covered you with gloom.”
As she often did when a conversation turned in a direction she didn’t like, Maude looked off into space as though she were talking to someone who didn’t exist.
“I just can’t say anything around him without him becoming upset.”