Wait Until Tomorrow by Pat MacEnulty

that endangered place.
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    My mother’s depression stalks her like a big-game hunter in her apartment at the Landings. The doors to the outside are too heavy for her to lift, and the management is too cheap to get those automatic door openers for handicapped people. She feels trapped inside and she becomes alternately morose and frantic. Sometimes I come over and take her out in the car just to look at something besides the ivory walls. She loves the way the clouds bunch up on the horizon and turn psychedelic at sunset. Other times we’ll just go outside, sit on a wooden bench, and watch the sun set over the
water treatment plant just down the road. Charlotte has lovely skies, and bare black trees where you can occasionally catch a fleeting glimpse of deer. During these times we talk. When you spend a lifetime getting to know someone, you think there is nothing left, but she still has stories.
    One day she explained that Skipper, which is what we had always called my grandmother, was not known as Skipper when my mother was a child. She was called “Mrs. Field.”
    â€œI thought it was awful never to be called by your first name,” my mother mused. “It’s like she was anonymous.”
    Mrs. Field was the consummate “lady” in spite of her Girl Scouting. Being a lady didn’t mean girlie, prissy, or even snobbish. It was a certain way of carrying oneself. It meant being kind, courteous, and dignified. Skipper’s mother, Gammie, on the other hand, took her ‘ladyness’ to an extreme.
    â€œShe would never be caught carrying her own parcels. And she wouldn’t be caught playing cards on Sunday, especially since she always managed to slide them under the couch if company came,” Mother said with a laugh.
    Shortly after ice-cream cones came into vogue in 1904, Skipper played a not-so-ladylike joke on an insufferable relative by explaining that you ate an ice-cream cone from the bottom up.
    The thing my mother never mentioned until I finally asked about it (and I wouldn’t have known to ask if not for my cousin Roy) was that Skipper had had a boyfriend.
    â€œOh, yes, he was my organ teacher,” my mother said. “But she was only doing it to get even.”
    â€œHow old were you?” I asked.
    â€œOh, about eleven.”
    â€œAnd she was still married to Lewis?”
    â€œYes,” she said. Lewis, like my own father, was a philanderer, indulging in adulterous affairs without a qualm, and an alcoholic
who once showed up at a fancy social function in Washington without his trousers on.
    â€œOne time a little girl asked me if my father was Colonel Field. When I said yes, she responded, ‘Oooooh,’” my mother said, laughing. “His reputation was that bad.”
    â€œReally? I thought you meant she was impressed.”
    â€œNo,” Mother said. “Everyone knew about him.”
    My mother remembers overhearing her father on the phone, fixing a trial.
    â€œDon’t worry. I know that judge. We’ll take care of it,” he said.
    That was how she learned how the system worked. He was an influential man, a skillful attorney who became a judge at a young age. According to my mother, the world turned a blind eye to his behavior. Or most of the world did. Eventually, after his divorce from Skipper, he was strong-armed into marrying one of his mistresses, the sister of his mafioso chauffeur. Or so the story goes.
    One of her worst memories involves watching a boy drown. It was a summer day, and people had gathered at the river to swim and picnic. The little boy’s leg got caught in the lock under the bridge.
    â€œThe horrible thing is that there was a carpenter there who said he could break the mechanism, but the firemen wouldn’t let him do it,” she told me.
    â€œWhy not?” I asked.
    â€œI don’t know. I suppose they insisted on doing it their way. It seemed to me that the carpenter was the