Winter Journal

  Some early glimmers, a few small islands of recollection in an otherwise endless sea of black. Waiting for your newborn sister to come home from the hospital with your parents (age: three years and nine months), looking through the slats of the venetian blinds in the living room with your mother’s mother and leaping up and down when the car finally stopped in front of the house. According to your mother, you were an enthusiastic older brother, not at all envious of the new baby who had entered your midst, but she seems to have handled the matter with great intelligence, not shutting you out but turning you into her helper, which gave you the illusion that you were actively participating in your sister’s care. Some months later, you were asked if you wanted to give nursery school a try. You said yes, not quite sure what nursery school was, since preschools were far less common in 1951 than they are now, but after one day you had had enough. You remember having to line up with a group of other children and pretend you were in a grocery store, and when your turn finally came, after what seemed to have been hours, you handed a pile of pretend money to someone standing behind a pretend cash register, who gave you a bag of pretend food in return. You told your mother that nursery school was an idiotic waste of time, and she didn’t try to talk you into going back. Then your family moved to the house on Irving Avenue, and when you started kindergarten the following September, you were ready for school, not the least bit fazed by the prospect of spending time away from your mother. You remember the chaotic prelude to the first morning, the children who ranted and screamed when their mothers said good-bye to them, the anguished cries of the abandoned echoing off the walls as you calmly waved good-bye to your own mother, and all that fuss was incomprehensible to you, since you were happy to be there and felt like a big person now. You were five years old, and already you were pulling away, no longer living exclusively in your mother’s orbit. Better health, new friends, the freedom of the yard behind the house, and the beginnings of an autonomous life. You still wet the bed, of course, you still cried when you fell down and cut your knee, but the inner dialogue had begun, and you had crossed into the domain of conscious selfhood. Nevertheless, because of the hours he put in at work, and because of his penchant for taking long naps whenever he was at home, your father was largely absent from the household, and your mother continued to be the central force of authority and wisdom for all things that counted most. She was the one who put you to bed, the one who taught you how to ride a bicycle, the one who helped you with your piano lessons, the one you unburdened yourself to, the rock you clung to whenever the seas grew rough. But you were developing a mind of your own, and you were no longer in thrall to her every pronouncement and opinion. You hated practicing the piano, you wanted to be outside playing with your friends, and when you told her that you would prefer to quit, that baseball was vastly more important to you than music, she relented without putting up much of an argument. Then there was the issue of clothes. You mostly ran around in a T-shirt and a pair of jeans (called dungarees back then), but for special occasions—holidays, birthday parties, the visits to your grandparents in New York—she insisted on dressing you in finely tailored outfits, clothes that began to embarrass you by the time you reached six, especially the white-shirt-and-short-pants combo with the knee socks and sandals, and when you began to protest, claiming that you felt ridiculous in those things, that all you wanted was to look like every other American boy, she eventually gave ground and allowed you to have a say in what you wore. But she was pulling away by then, too, and not long after you turned six, she went off to the Land of Work, and you began seeing less and less of her. You don’t remember feeling sad about it, but then again, what do you really know about what you felt? The important thing to keep in mind is that you know next to nothing—and nothing whatsoever about the state of her marriage, the depth of her unhappiness with your father. Years later, she told you that she tried to talk him into moving to California, that she felt there would be no hope for them unless he got away from his family, the suffocating presence of his mother and older brothers, and when he refused to consider it, she resigned herself to a marriage of no hope. The children were too small for her to contemplate divorce (not then, not there, not in middle-class America of the early fifties), and so she found another solution. She was only twenty-eight years old, and work opened the door, let her out of the house, and gave her a chance to build a life of her own.

  You don’t mean to suggest that she disappeared. She was simply less present than before, far less present, and if most of your memories from that period are confined to the little world of your boyhood pursuits (running around with your friends, riding your bicycle, going to school, playing sports, collecting stamps and baseball cards, reading comic books), your mother appears vividly in several instances, particularly when you were eight and for some reason joined the Cub Scouts with a dozen or so of your friends. You can’t remember how often the meetings were held, but you suspect it was once a month, each time in the house of a different member, and these gatherings were run by a rotating squad of three or four women, the so-called den mothers, one of whom was your own mother, which proves that her work as a real estate broker was not so crushing that she couldn’t afford to take an occasional afternoon off. You remember how much you enjoyed seeing her in her navy blue den mother’s uniform (the absurdity of it, the novelty of it), and you also remember that she was the den mother the boys liked best, for she was the youngest and prettiest of all the mothers, the most entertaining, the most relaxed, the one who had no trouble commanding their complete attention. You can recall two of the meetings she ran with utmost clarity: working on the construction of wooden storage boxes (for what purpose you can no longer say, but everyone applied himself to the task with great diligence), and then, toward the end of the school year, when the weather was warm and the entire gang had grown bored with the rules and regulations of scouthood, there was a last or next-to-last meeting at your house on Irving Avenue, and because no one had the stomach for pretending to act like miniature soldiers anymore, your mother asked the boys how they would like to spend the afternoon, and when the unanimous response was play baseball, you all went out into the backyard and picked up sides for a game. Because there were only ten or twelve of you and the teams were shorthanded, your mother decided to play as well. You were immensely pleased, but since you had never seen her swing a bat, you weren’t expecting her to do much of anything but strike out. When she came up in the second inning and smacked a ball far over the left fielder’s head, you were more than pleased, you were flabbergasted. You can still see your mother running around the bases in her den mother’s uniform and coming in to the plate with her home run—out of breath, smiling, soaking up the cheers from the boys. Of all the memories you have retained of her from your childhood, this is the one that comes back to you most often.

  She probably wasn’t beautiful, not beautiful in the classic sense of the term, but pretty enough, more than attractive enough to make men stare at her whenever she walked into a room. What she lacked in the way of pure good looks, the movie-star looks of certain women who may or may not be movie stars, she made up for by exuding an aura of glamour, especially when she was young, from her late twenties to her early forties, a mysterious combination of carriage, poise, and elegance, the clothes that pointed to but did not overstate the sensuality of the person inside them, the perfume, the makeup, the jewelry, the stylishly coiffed hair, and, above all, the playful look in the eyes, at once forthright and demure, a look of confidence, and even if she wasn’t the most beautiful woman in the world, she acted as if she were, and a woman who can pull that off will inevitably make heads turn, which was no doubt what caused the dour matrons of your father’s family to despise her after she left the fold. Those were difficult years, of course, the stretch of years before the long-deferred but inevitable breakup with your father, the years of Good-bye, darling and the car she wrecked one night when you were ten. You can still see her bloodied, banged-up face as she walked in
to the house early the next morning, and although she never told you much about the accident, only a bland, generic account that must have had little to do with the truth, you suspect that alcohol might have been involved, that there was a short period back then when she was drinking too much, for later on she dropped some hints about having been in A.A., and the fact was that she never drank any alcohol for the rest of her life—not one cocktail or glass of champagne, nothing, not even a sip of beer.

  There were three of her, three separate women who seemed unconnected to one another, and as you grew older and began to look at her differently, to see her as someone who was not just your mother, you never knew which mask she would be wearing on any given day. At one end, there was the diva, the sumptuously decked-out charmer who dazzled the world in public, the young woman with the obtuse, distracted husband who craved having the eyes of others upon her and would not allow herself—not anymore—to be boxed into the role of traditional housewife. In the middle, which was far and away the largest space she occupied, there was a solid and responsible being, a person of intelligence and compassion, the woman who took care of you when you were young, the woman who went out to work, who ran several small businesses over the course of many years, the four-star joke teller and crossword-puzzle ace, a person with her feet firmly planted on the ground—competent, generous, observant of the world around her, a devoted liberal in her politics, a sage dispenser of advice. At the other end, the extreme end of who she was, there was the frightened and debilitated neurotic, the helpless creature prey to blistering assaults of anxiety, the phobic whose incapacities grew as the years advanced—from an early fear of heights to a metastatic flowering of multiple forms of paralysis: afraid of escalators, afraid of airplanes, afraid of elevators, afraid to drive a car, afraid of going near windows on the upper floors of buildings, afraid to be alone, afraid of open spaces, afraid to walk anywhere (she felt she would lose her balance or pass out), and an ever-present hypochondria that gradually reached the most exalted summits of dread. In other words: afraid to die, which in the end is probably no different from saying: afraid to live. When you were young, you were not aware of any of this. She seemed perfect to you, and even during her first attack of vertigo, which you happened to witness when you were six (the two of you climbing up the inner staircase of the Statue of Liberty), you were not alarmed, because she was a good and conscientious mother, and she managed to hide her fear from you by turning the descent into a game: sitting on the stairs together and going down one step at a time, asses on the rungs, laughing all the way to the bottom. When she was old, there was no more laughter. Only the void spinning around in her head, the knot in her belly, the cold sweats, a pair of invisible hands tightening around her throat.

  Her second marriage was a grand success, the marriage everyone longs for—until it wasn’t. You were glad to see her so happy, so clearly in love, and you took to her new husband without hesitation, not only because he was in love with your mother and knew how to love her in all the ways you felt she needed to be loved, but because he was an impressive man in his own right, a labor lawyer with an acute mind and a large personality, someone who seemed to take life by storm, who boomed out old standards at the dinner table and told hilarious stories about his past, who instantly embraced you not as a stepson but as a kind of younger brother, which turned you into close, steadfast friends, and all in all you thought this marriage was the best thing that had ever happened to your mother, the thing that would make everything right for her at last. She was still young, after all, still not forty years old, and because he was two years younger than she was, you had every reason to expect they would have a long life together and die in each other’s arms. But your stepfather’s health was not good. Strong and vigorous as he seemed, he had been cursed with a bad heart, and after a first coronary in his early thirties, he had his second big attack about a year into the marriage, and from then on there was an element of foreboding that hung over their life together, which only worsened when he suffered a third attack a couple of years later. Your mother lived in constant fear of losing him, and you saw with your own eyes how those fears gradually unhinged her, little by little exacerbating the weaknesses she had struggled for so long to keep hidden, the phobic self that roared into full bloom during their last years together, and when he died at fifty-four, she was no longer the person she had been when they were married. You remember her last heroic stand, the night in Palo Alto, California, when she told jokes nonstop to you and your wife as your stepfather lay in the intensive care unit of the Stanford Medical Center undergoing experimental cardiac treatments. The final, desperate move in a case that had been deemed all but hopeless, and the gruesome sight of your mortally ill stepfather lying in that bed hooked up to so many wires and machines that the room looked like the set from a science fiction film, and when you walked in and saw him there, you were so stunned and miserable that you found yourself fighting back tears. It was the summer of 1981, and you and your wife had known each other for about six months, you were living together but not yet married, and as the two of you stood at your stepfather’s bedside, he reached out, took hold of both your hands, and said: “Don’t waste any time. Get married now. Get married, take care of each other, and have twelve children.” You and your wife were staying with your mother in a house somewhere in Palo Alto, an empty house that had been lent to her by some unknown friend, and that night, after eating dinner in a restaurant, where you nearly broke down again when the waitress came back to tell you that the kitchen had run out of the dish you had ordered (displaced anguish in its most pronounced form—to such a degree that the nonsensical tears you felt gathering in your eyes might be interpreted as the very embodiment of repressed emotions that can no longer be repressed), and once the three of you had returned to the house, the gloom of a house shadowed in death, all of you convinced that these were the last days of your stepfather’s life, you sat down at the dining room table to have a drink, and just when you thought it would be impossible for anyone to say another word, when the heaviness in your hearts seemed to have crushed all the words out of you, your mother started telling jokes. One joke and then another joke, then another joke followed by the next joke, jokes so funny that you and your wife laughed until you could hardly breathe anymore, an hour of jokes, two hours of jokes, each one delivered with such crackerjack timing, such crisp, economical language that a moment came when you thought your stomach might burst through your skin. Jewish jokes mostly, an unending torrent of classic yenta routines with all the appropriate voices and accents, the old Jewish women sitting around a card table and sighing, each one sighing in turn, each one sighing more loudly that the last, until one of the women finally says, “I thought we agreed not to talk about the children.” You all went a little crazy that night, but the circumstances were so grim and intolerable that you needed to go a little crazy, and somehow your mother managed to find the strength to let that happen. A moment of extraordinary courage, you felt, a sublime instance of who she was at her best—for great as your misery was that night, you knew that it was nothing, absolutely nothing compared to hers.

  He survived the Stanford Medical Center and went home, but less than a year later he was dead. You believe that was when she died as well. Her heart went on beating for another twenty years, but the death of your stepfather was the end of her, and she never regained her footing after that. Little by little, her grief was transformed into a kind of resentment (How dare he die on me and leave me alone?), and while it pained you to hear her talk like that, you understood that she was frightened, searching for a way to hazard the next step and hobble on toward the future. She hated living on her own, was temperamentally not equipped to survive in a vacuum of solitude, and before long she was back in circulation, quite heavy now, many pounds overweight, but still attractive enough to turn the heads of several aging men. She had been living in southern California for over a decade at that point, and you saw each other infrequently, no more than once
every six months or so, and what you knew about her was learned mostly through telephone conversations—useful in their way, but you seldom had a chance to observe her in action, and consequently you were both surprised and not surprised when she told you she was planning to get married again after just eighteen months of widowhood. It was a foolish marriage in your opinion, another hasty, ill-considered marriage, not unlike the marriage she made with your father in 1946, but she wasn’t looking for a big love anymore so much as a refuge, someone to take care of her as she mended her fragile self. In his quiet, fumbling way, the third husband was devoted to her, which certainly counts for something, but for all his efforts and good intentions, he couldn’t take care of her well enough. He was a dull man, an ex-marine and former NASA engineer, conservative in both his politics and his manner, either meek or weak (perhaps both), and therefore a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn from your effusive, charismatic, left-liberal stepfather—not a bad or cruel person, simply dull. He now worked as a self-employed inventor (of the struggling variety), but your mother had high hopes for his most recent invention—an intravenous medical device, both tubeless and portable, that would compete with and potentially supplant the traditional IV—and because it looked like a sure thing, she married him on the assumption that they would soon be rolling in money. There is no doubt that it was a clever invention, perhaps even a brilliant one, but the inventor had no head for business. Squeezed between fast-talking venture capitalists and double-talking medical supply firms, he eventually lost control of his own device, and while he walked off with some money in the end, it was hardly enough to roll in—so little, in fact, that within a year most of it was gone. Your mother, who was into her sixties by then, was forced to go back to work. She restarted the interior design business she had shut down some years earlier, and with her inventor husband serving as her office assistant and bookkeeper, she was the one who was supporting them now, or trying to support them, and whenever their bank account was in danger of dipping toward zero, she would call you to ask for help, always tearful, always apologetic, and because you were in a position to give that help, you sent them checks every so often, some large checks, some small checks, about a dozen checks and wire transfers over the next couple of years. You didn’t mind sending them the money, but you found it strange, and more than a little disheartening, that her ex-marine had given up on himself so thoroughly that he was no longer able to pull his weight, that the man who was going to provide for her and lead them into the bower of a comfortable old age could not even summon the courage to thank you for your help. Your mother was the boss now, and bit by bit his role as husband was turned into that of faithful butler (breakfast in bed, shopping for groceries), but still they forged on, it wasn’t so bad, surely it could have been worse, and even if she was disappointed by the way things had turned out, she also knew that something was better than nothing. Then, one morning in the spring of 1994, just after she had woken up, your mother walked into the bathroom and found her husband lying dead on the floor. Stroke, heart attack, cerebral hemorrhage—it is impossible to say, since no autopsy was ever performed, at least none that you are aware of. When she called your house in Brooklyn later that morning, her voice was filled with horror. Blood, she said to you, blood coming out of his mouth, blood everywhere, and for the first time in all the years you had known her, she sounded deranged.