“Okay,” Tommy said quickly, a little gratefully.
Teddy cried a lot, but Tommy didn’t—he couldn’t. Later as they were all walking down the hospital sidewalk—all except the General, who had gone to the motel in a cab to nurse his cold-Tommy felt like he wanted to run back upstairs to his mother, but instead Teddy was babbling something about cub scouts and he suddenly said bitterly that he had never been a scout because his mother had been too lazy to be a den mother. He didn’t mean to say lazy, or to say anything bad, or even to speak. It just slipped out, and to everybody’s horror his grandmother turned and slapped him so hard that he fell down. It astonished everyone—Melanie, Teddy, Rosie, Vernon—and before Tommy could help himself he burst into tears. Watching his face finally open was a great relief to Aurora, and before he could run away she grabbed him and hugged him as he went on crying helplessly.
“That’s a boy,” she said. “That’s a boy. It just won’t do to criticize your mother around me.”
Then her own heart left her for a moment and she glanced around at the ugly brick hospital.
“She was always a proper daughter,” she said, looking up helplessly at Rosie and Vernon.
Melanie was the first to recover herself. She saw Vernon and Rosie smiling and decided it was some kind of joke. She ran to Teddy and slugged him with all her tiny might.
“Ha, Grandma hit Tommy!” she said. “I hit you, Teddy.” She hit him again and he wrestled her down on the cold grass and held her down while she giggled.
With her mother a few minutes earlier she had been equally gay. The hospital interested her. She had toddled off down several halls, and a nurse had let her try out some scales. A doctor had even lent her a stethoscope, and she sat on her mother’s bed, occasionally listening to her own heart. Emma watched her contentedly; even her little white teeth were adorable.
“How’s your dolls?” she asked.
“Very bad dolls, I spank them a lot,” Melanie said. She had always been a stern disciplinarian where dolls were concerned.
“I was in you,” she said suddenly, poking at her mother’s stomach.
“Who told you that?” Emma asked.
“Teddy,” Malanie said.
“I could have guessed. Teddy’s a blabbermouth.”
“Un-uh, you’re a blabbermouth,” Melanie said. “Tell me the truth.”
Emma laughed. “What truth?”
“I was in you,” Melanie said, nodding her head affirmatively. She was very curious.
“Yes, you were, now that you bring it up,” Emma said. “So what?”
Melanie felt triumphant. She had confirmed a secret.
“So what, so what, so what,” she said, and fell on her mother. “Let’s sing some songs.”
They sang some songs, and Rosie, walking in the corridor, heard them and began to weep.
EMMA WAS glad when the visits ended. The healthy didn’t seem to know what claims they made. They didn’t know how weak she was, what an effort it was to give them her attention. Dying took all her attention. The boys went off with Patsy on a ski trip; the General’s cold got worse and he had to retreat to Houston; Rosie settled down in Kearney to take care of Flap and Melanie; only her mother and Vernon stayed in Omaha.
“I wish you’d go home,” Emma said. “You’re losing weight.”
“It’s the one advantage to Nebraska,” Aurora said. “I can’t find anything to eat. At long last I’m becoming slim.”
“You weren’t meant to be slim,” Emma said. “I feel guilty thinking of you and Vernon sitting in some dinky motel playing cards every night.”
“Oh, no, often we go to films,” Aurora said. “Once we even went to the symphony. It was something of a first for Vernon.”
Her mother continued to come every day. Emma entreated her to go home, but in her weakness she was no match for Aurora. She always dressed in gay colors. In time, as Emma faded, her mother became lost in the Renoir. Often Emma couldn’t tell whether there were two shimmering women in the room or three. Sometimes she felt her mother hold her hand; other times she found herself talking and when her vision cleared found that her mother had gone and only the picture remained. On weekends she sometimes roused herself to Flap, but only briefly. She had stopped wanting to read, but she sometimes clutched Wuthering Heights. Sometimes she dreamed she was living in the picture, walking in Paris in a pretty hat. At times she felt herself awaking in it instead of in a bed covered with hair that had fallen out during the night. Her flesh was departing in advance of her spirit; her weight had dropped to ninety pounds. Aurora, for the only time in her life, ceased talking of food.
For a time Emma was ready but the cancer wasn’t. She had cut her ties, she was poised to leave, but the cancer retreated a step, became quiescent for a week or two. When she was rested and confused, it came back. Then she began to hate it, hate the hospital, hate the doctors, hate most of all the slavery of living when she had stopped wanting to. Her heart and her breath wouldn’t accept her weariness. They wouldn’t stop. She began to dream of Danny Deck. Sometimes she opened his book, not to read it, just to look at the pages or his signature on the flyleaf, to try and have him vivid again. Her mother noticed.
“I thought the boy was going to be your great romance,” she said. “He didn’t have much staying power.”
Emma declined to argue. Danny was hers, like Teddy; only those two had liked her entirely. As she slowly began to forget her life, his memory returned. In her dreams they began to have conversations, though she could never remember where they had talked or what they said.
The cancer went too slow, much too slow. When the drugs wore off she felt like she had inside her a diseased and aching tooth, only a tooth the size of a fist. In February she grew impatient with it. She began to nurse a vision. Outside the wind blew steadily from the north. Often there was snow but always there was wind. To Emma it became like a siren song. She could hardly tell her mother from the Renoir; she felt the wind had come for her, off the ice, over the barren lands, across the Dakotas, straight to her. She had thought perhaps to save enough pills to kill herself, but that was hard. Saving pills meant being in pain, and besides the nurses were too shrewd. They watched for such tricks. Anyway, the wind was more appealing. In pain, she told her mother of her dream. Some night she would get up, rip out all the needles and tubes, throw a chair through the window, and let herself fall. She was sure that was best.
“I’m not a person, I’m just an expense now, Momma,” she said.
Aurora didn’t argue. She was ready to see her daughter at rest. “My dear, you couldn’t lift a chair,” she said. “There is that practical aspect to it.”
“I could if it was the last thing I had to do,” Emma said.
She thought about it. She convinced herself she could do it. It seemed like something good, something with a little style. The part of the vision she liked best was ripping out all the needles and tubes. She hated them worst of all—they brought everything into her body except life. She was only a candle, a weak flame. If she could only break the window the wind might come in and blow her out. She could die like a winter traveler, blown over with snow.
She thought about it. She looked at the chairs a lot, looked at the window.
The thought of Teddy stopped her. It was a question of who determined, who had final claim: her children or the cancer. Teddy might go out a window himself someday if she gave him an excuse. He was so loyal he might even do it as a way of following her—or out of guilt.
Emma gave it up. She took her pills. Pain was easier to escape than parenthood. Even though their lives were lost to her, they were still her children. They got to have final claim. In clear moments she scribbled a few more notes to the boys, drew Melanie some funny pictures. Several weeks later she died in bed.
EMMA WAS buried in Houston on a warm, rainy March day. Mrs. Greenway and Patsy, smartly and almost identically dressed, stood together at the grave. Melba had come. In a desperate act of loyalty she had taken m
oney out of her family’s savings and risked both divorce and her life—by flying in an airplane for the first time—to pay her respects. Joe Percy had escorted Patsy. He was standing with Vernon, the General, Alberto, and the boys, telling the boys how movies were made. In that regard he had been very helpful. Flap sat in a limousine wiping his eyes. With her death he had recovered all his first feeling for his wife; he seemed a broken man. Melanie was chattering at a heartbroken Rosie, trying to get her in the mood to play. Patsy and Aurora both cast watchful looks in her direction, for Melanie was apt to dart off without a moment’s notice, and Rosie was too bereft to pay attention. Melba stood apart, almost as tall as a tree.
“I don’t know what we’re to do with that poor woman,” Aurora said.
“I’ll make Joe talk to her,” Patsy said. “Joe can talk to any woman.”
“I don’t know what you’re doing going around with him,” Aurora said. “He’s old enough to be one of mine.”
“Well, he takes care of me,” Patsy said.
Neither of them particularly wanted to move—to get on with it.
“She often made me feel I was faintly ridiculous,” Aurora said. “Somehow she just had that effect. Perhaps that was why I remained so unremittingly critical of her. Actually, I suppose I am.”
“Am what?”
“Am faintly ridiculous,” Aurora said, remembering her daughter. “Perhaps I felt she would have been a little happier if she had been… faintly ridiculous… too.”
“It’s hard to imagine,” Patsy said, thinking of her friend.
It had stopped raining, but all around them the great trees were dripping.
“There’s no point in us standing here like bookends, my dear,” Aurora said, and they turned and went to attend to the children and the men.
Larry McMurtry, Terms of Endearment
(Series: Terms of Endearment # 1)
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