Mr. Phillips had been dead for ten years and Mrs. Phillips was chained to him by her memory. That was the crux of the situation. And while I remember her as being incredibly old, she could not have been too much older than I am now.
We see the world differently when we’re nine.
My mom was absolutely certain on the cause of Mr. Phillips demise. “Ada (Mrs. Phillips) worried the poor man to death.” It had to be true. Mom was well connected with the neighborhood gossips and knew virtually everything about everybody.
I wasn’t exactly clear on what “worried to death” meant, but it sounded like Mrs. Phillips had a hand in it, which made sense to me After all, she was a witch.
And if her husband’s death was somewhat a mystery, his resurrection was positively astounding involving, as it did, numerous governmental agencies and an act of Congress. The greatest mystery of death is not the after life, but the paperwork.
That summer of ’61 my brother Allen developed a kind of a sixth sense. He had the ability to predict the weather. His accuracy was, and this is no exaggeration, miraculous. Each morning inspected the readings of his various pieces of meteorological equipment, looked intently at the sky, consulted his How And Why Wonder Book, and then announced his latest forecast over a bowl of Rice Crispies ®.
Among other things, Allen predicted a dry summer.
And dry it was.
I continued my employment as Mrs. Phillips’ all-round errand boy. I was sort of like Pepino on The Real McCoys, a smiling presence on which not much was expected. I was a salaried employee. No matter what I did, no matter how long I did it, my pay always remained the same: two shiny new quarters. I did not complain. Fifty cents wasn’t much but it kept me in Mad Magazines ® and pixie stix, the nectar of life for a young boy in the early sixties.
My relationship with Mrs. Phillips evolved during those months of servitude. Mrs. Phillips changed as well. Her facial expression slowly altered from her normal everyday hardened scowl to a softer, more sentimental hardened scowl. She also started calling me by my first name. No more did she yell, “Boy, get over here, now!” Instead she would yell, “Owen, get over here, now!”
Little things like that make a big difference.
Soon my list of duties expanded to include grocery shopping. Every Saturday I would follow Mrs. Phillips for four blocks to the corner grocery story lugging her collapsible grocery cart. Corner grocery stores have since disappeared. Gone are the narrow aisles, the creaky wooden floors, and the over priced canned goods.
And now that I think about it, we’re all better off without them.
Once, when we were in the fruits and vegetable section, I saw Mrs. Phillips secretly pop a grape in her mouth. I suppose she could have been checking for freshness, but she could also have been engaging in a bit of undetected pilfering.
That’s the thing about adults. They’ll talk all day on the Ten Commandments, but turn your back for a second and they’re stealing fruit. God found that out the hard way.
As summer progressed, I slowly made my way inside Mrs. Phillips house. When I first started, I was kept waiting in the backyard with the sunflowers. A week or so later I moved to the garage. And then I moved to the back porch. By the last week of August I was in her front room.
Mrs. Phillips was at odds with her furniture. Where Mrs. Phillips wore the same basic, drab outfit- gray dress, white socks, heavy black leather shoes- her furniture was stylish, ornate, even delicate. Everything smelled of lemon Pledge. Strangest of all, everywhere I looked there were framed portraits of Mr. Phillips.
There was a lesson here, but I was too young to recognize it. The prime motivator, the most important shaper of personality, and the single most cause of causes where human behavior is concerned can be summarized in one word: guilt.
It was about this time that Mr. Phillips literally rose from the grave. Highway construction had forced a local cemetery to exhume caskets and transport them to a new location. Although unusual, it does happen. The 1956 Interstate Highway Act demanded it.
Mrs. Phillips took the opportunity the exhumation offered and had the casket opened in order to view the corpse of her husband one last time. It was the scandal of the neighborhood. My mom harrumphed an entire afternoon over the story. My dad simply rolled his eyes mumbling something about that crazy woman.
It got me thinking, though. I was in servitude to Mrs. Phillips, but she, in turn, was enslaved by the memory of her dead husband. And she didn’t even get two shiny new quarters in the bargain.
By mid September Allen had abandoned his fascination with predicting the weather. His equipment quickly deteriorated into a pile of non-descript junk. His new passion, biology, took the form of collecting butterflies. This meant a whole new catalog of equipment and procedures: nets, killing jars and sticking pins into dead insects. To this, I could only say one word: neat! In short order we were traipsing through high weeds brandishing nets our fingers smelling of mothballs.
(It turned out that Allen never predicted anything. He merely listened to the weather forecast on the radio and parroted what he heard. I was impressed. Allen had taught himself the essential skill needed to succeed in this world- putting on a believable show also known as lying.)
Winter put an end to my work for Mrs. Phillip. When spring came I was off to a new endeavor: piano lessons. Though my mom never spoke of it directly, I suspected that I was removed from Mrs. Phillips influence because of the weirdness of viewing her deceased husband. That sounded completely unfair to me. I mean, how different was that from looking at my dad lying on the couch watching the Mike Douglas Show in his jockey shorts?
Years later, after we moved to the suburbs, I learned the final chapter in the story of Mrs. Phillips (My mom had remained in contact with the neighborhood gossips long after we moved away.) It turned out that Mrs. Phillips got herself a boyfriend and, if that wasn’t incredible enough, he actually married her!
My mom announced the coda of the story with a sense of triumph. As fate would have it, Mrs. Phillips did not marry the ideal man. He was something of a rogue. “He took her for everything,” she said smiling. “He took her for everything she had.”
The vicissitudes of Divine Justice is well beyond the ken of human understanding.
