Still seated on his rolling stool, Doc Farrell leaned back against the sink; he folded his arms over his chest, and sighed. “She did come in for tests, Jenny, and we found rampant endometriosis, fibroids, and cystitis, and after that it was a routine hysterectomy. Everything went swell. But your mother never recovered from it emotionally or mentally. I’ll swear to this day I don’t know exactly what went wrong, although I suspect that the hormonal changes, combined with her essentially fragile nature, are what did her in.”
He paused, as if to give me a chance to comment, but I was silently reeling from the word hysterectomy. What hysterectomy? I wanted to shout, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, and thus admit to him the depth of my apparent ignorance and, worse, the extent of the failure of trust and communication in my family.
He said, “I don’t suppose it helped her state of mind, or her physical well-being, that your father was in the middle of the bankruptcy proceedings, not to mention—” Doc Farrell shifted his weight against the sink. “Well, I guess I should not mention it.”
“Doc, I know he was unfaithful to her.”
“Well, I’m sorry you know that,” he said gruffly. “It’s not the sort of thing that daughters ought to know about their fathers.”
“He’s never been exactly discreet.”
“Hmm. When your mother fell apart, your dad couldn’t cope. No surprise there. So I did what had to be done. I convinced him to commit her to Hampshire.” He cleared his throat, and looked away from me. “Jenny, I didn’t dream she’d still be there when she died. I don’t believe it was my fault, it was such a routine operation, we had such good people working it, but I’ll swear I’ve never been more sorry about anything in my life. She was a lovely woman.” He turned back to me, and frowned forbiddingly. “And you are the image of her. Or you would be if you didn’t look so scrawny and worried. You haven’t been eating or sleeping well since she died, have you? Well, that’s natural, I’d expect that. But I don’t want to have to worry about you, Jenny.” He winked at me. “I’m too busy for such nonsense. Here.” He reached out a long, white-clad arm and opened a drawer, pulled out from it a plastic bottle and threw it at me. “These are super-duper make-you-feel-better multi maxi vitamins. Take these home and take them, one a day.”
“Thanks, Doctor Cal.”
He clapped his hands, signaling the end of my appointment, and his voice turned familiarly gruff again. “And listen here, if you don’t take care of yourself, and you make yourself sick because of it, don’t call me. I’ll have no patience with you.”
Through teary eyes, I winked at him as he walked out of the examining room. I dressed quickly, then stopped by the front desk to pay my bill.
“You seem very tense, Jenny,” Marjorie Earnshaw informed me as I wrote out a check. “Understandable, of course, under the circumstances, but it won’t help matters to be upset about them.” She, too, reached into a drawer and brought out a plastic bottle. “These are Valium. It won’t hurt you to take one now and then when you can’t sleep or when you can’t eat for worrying.”
Rather than argue with her, I put the pills in my purse along with my checkbook. “Marjorie, would you please send copies of my mother’s medical records to me?”
“Those are confidential, Jenny.”
“Well, it won’t matter to her now.”
“If she were going to another doctor, I could send them to him, but I can hardly turn patient records over to just anybody who wants them.”
“I’m not just anybody, I’m her daughter.”
“It’s irregular.”
“Do you want me to get Dr. Farrell’s approval?”
“No, that isn’t necessary.”
I waited for her to tell me what was necessary. When she didn’t, I said, “They are part of her estate, which now belongs to Sherry and me.” It was a bluff, since I didn’t have any idea what my legal rights were to them. I faked a laugh. “Are you going to make me sue you to get them, Marj?”
“Why in the world do you want them?”
“Because I do!” I was damned if I would explain to this obstreperous woman that I had an insatiable curiosity about my mother that wouldn’t quit until I’d tracked down every bit of her history I could lay my hands on, medical and otherwise. “Will you do it, please?”
“I’ll check with Doctor,” she said grudgingly. “By the way, that was quite a nice turnout you had at the funeral, considering the weather.”
“You were there, Marj? I’m sorry, I didn’t notice you.”
It was an outright lie, of course. I had seen her with Doc Farrell at my sister’s house, but I wasn’t about to give her the pleasure of letting her know that I’d paid her the slightest notice. Damn, if the woman didn’t bring out the worst, most perverse side of me!
“Yes, I was there.” She looked offended, which pleased me. “I know this may sound odd to you, Jenny, but I feel that attending that sort of occasion is part of my duty to our patients. I help to usher them in and to—”
“Usher them out,” I said, dryly, and handed her my check. I patted my purse where her “prescription” lay. “Gee, I’ve always thought you should have been a doctor, Marj.”
“I would have been, too, if only—”
A ringing telephone distracted her, and delivered me from my own evil ways.
8
OUT IN THE HALL OF THE MEDICAL BUILDING, I SOUGHT OUT A bench to sit down. There, between a woman in a leg cast and a man with a bad cold, I took my notebook out of my purse. As I wrote down the words, I tried to digest what they meant: one, that my mother’s mental illness had appeared after a hysterectomy that nobody had ever before mentioned to me; and two, that her obstetrician had thought of her as a woman with an “essentially fragile nature.”
I closed the notebook.
My own nature felt a shade fragile at that moment.
I stared down into my purse at the vials of vitamins and Valium sitting on top. Maybe Marj Earnshaw had given me the tranquilizers to take the edge off my concern about my AIDS test. To paraphrase Doc Farrell: How very amusing, Jenny. I opened the cap of the vitamin bottle and shook out a beige pill. My throat closed at the sight of it. I slid it back into the bottle, and returned the bottle and the notebook to my purse. Later. I’ll take a vitamin later, I promise, Doc. I dug a quarter out of my billfold, and got up to locate a pay phone.
With shaking fingers—I was getting more and more resentful as the minutes passed—I dialed the home of my mother’s old friend, the woman who was supposedly also my old friend, Francine Daniel.
“Francie,” I said without preamble, “I never knew Mom had a hysterectomy. Did you know she did?”
“Well—”
“So you did. All right, so neither you nor anybody else ever saw fit to tell me or, I presume, Sherry. Talk to me now, Francie. What was the matter with her that she needed one? Just how sick was she? Why didn’t you or anybody else ever tell us about it? Was she depressed about it? Is that what set her off into mental illness?”
“Oh, Jenny.” For a long moment, Francie didn’t say anything else. When she finally spoke again, she didn’t sound defensive, as I expected her to; rather, she sounded nervous, and nearly as depressed as I felt. “You have to understand—”
“I want to!”
“—there were so many difficult things going on in her life at that time. Your dad was driving her crazy—well, maybe I shouldn’t put it quite like that, I didn’t mean that literally. The bankruptcy was incredibly traumatic for her. You were at college, so there’s no way for you to know what it was like for her on a daily basis. The world was collapsing around her, Jenny. Your dad was coming home every night—when he came home—with tales of woe. And then there were the newspaper articles. And the rumors. Oh, my lord, the rumors!”
“What rumors?”
“Oh, about fraud, mismanagement, you know—”
“I don’t know!”
“And the angry phone calls. She got simply desperate phone cal
ls from people who were losing their jobs, and they begged her to do something, to help them somehow. And there wasn’t anything she could do, and Jenny, you know what a sweet-hearted woman she was. It killed her, it just killed her to listen to them and to feel responsible somehow. Well, I don’t mean it actually killed her. And of course there was Sherry, she had to deal with your sister, too. It was humiliating for Sherry at school. And all over town, people that your parents had been friends with all of their lives began to snub them, and even to accuse them of all sorts of—” Francie took a deep breath. “You just don’t know how bad it was, Jenny.”
“Accuse who? Mom and Dad? Of what?”
“It was just so awful, there’s no way you could know.”
“That’s what I want to know. Everything. Please.” I tried not to beg, and I also tried to keep the growing anger out of my voice although I felt as if it were about to choke me, but I didn’t succeed at either aim. “What else do you know that I don’t, Francie?”
“All right, Jenny!” For the first time, I heard some spirit, maybe even some matching anger in her voice. But when she spoke again, she had her voice under better control. “I’m home, if you want to come on over. We’ll have a talk that maybe we should have had a long time ago.”
My hand was shaking even harder as I hung up from that call.
I was infuriated that she and my father had kept this information from me as if I were a child who had to be protected from “loaded” words like hysterectomy. “What’s a hysterectomy, Daddy? What’s a uterus, Daddy? What’s it for, Daddy? But how does the baby get in there, Daddy?” I was also frightened about what lay ahead of me in the next hour or so, and I was thinking: Now what have I done? Am I pushing Francie into telling me things that I don’t really want to know? Maybe Marj Earnshaw — and even Father Gower — were correct, and I don’t have the right to dig into the confidential records and memories of my mother’s past. Didn’t my mother have a right to privacy, even from her own daughter?
Of course, I drove to Francie’s anyway. I was exhausted, I was nervous, but I was also full of stubborn determination to uncover, at last, some of the mysteries of my own and my mother’s lives. There is a phrase to describe well-intentioned resolves like that; in fact there are two of them: one is looking for trouble; and the other has to do with the road to hell.
Francie and Duke Daniel still lived in the neighborhood where I had grown up. Their house was rambling and roomy, a three-story, wood frame Colonial, straight up and down, with shuttered windows that looked like friendly eyes gazing benignly out at the neighborhood. Inside, the house was comfortable with cushions and chintz and fireplaces. Duke was something of a collector of marine artifacts, and Francie collected Sandwich glass, so the windowsills were chock-full of ships in bottles and vases that caught the sun and cast fruit-colored shadows on the floors. There was an iron fence, painted white, around the house and a matching widow’s walk on top of it. I’d been in and out of the Daniels’ home frequently as a kid, playing with their children while our mothers talked about us; and again, several times as a grown child needing the companionship of the only one of my mother’s friends who had ever seemed to really understand. It felt like a second home to me.
When I parked in front of the Daniels’ old white Colonial home, I was surprised to see no welcoming smoke curling from their chimneys on this afternoon that begged for a crackling fire.
Francie worked part-time these days as a receptionist at the Harbor Lights Funeral Home, so it was no surprise to find her home on a late Monday afternoon. But Duke, her husband, was still a full-time architect with offices downtown, so I was startled when he opened their front door.
“Duke? Hi. I didn’t expect to see you, too.”
“I’m working at home this afternoon,” the big man said. His nickname derived from his slight resemblance to the late actor, John Wayne. I’d always thought it was wonderful that Duke’s big, meaty fingers could execute such detailed drawings. Now, however, he held one of those massive hands palm-out toward me, as if to ward me off, as if I were an evil spell or a Jehovah’s Witness. “Sorry, Jenny, but Francie’s not going to be able to see you after all. She came down with a flu bug or something, right after you called. That’s really why I’m home, to take care of her.”
“Is that right?” I said, with what sounded even to me like a deadly calm. I looked past his shoulder, and thought I saw movement on the cranberry carpet that covered the darkened front hall and the central stairs. If he was home working, why weren’t the lights on? Had they wanted somebody to think they weren’t at home? “Did your housekeeper quit, Duke?”
“No, no, I just thought Fran needed me to come home—”
“Really.” I didn’t bother to hide my skepticism.
He flushed a little. John Wayne never could tell a good lie, either. “She’ll give you a call when she feels better, okay?”
I hated standing on the bottom step, staring up at him. It made me feel even more like a child or a supplicant.
“Came on pretty sudden, didn’t it, Duke?”
“Yes, well—”
The invalid herself suddenly appeared at his left shoulder, looking so pale that I could almost believe his story.
“What’s the matter, Francie?” I asked her.
“Your mother was my dear friend,” she said in a voice so soft and trembly that I had to move a step closer to hear her. “I still miss her, and I love you like a daughter, but you have to stop all of these questions! It upsets me to think about it, and I wish you’d just let me alone about this.” She was starting to cry, and dabbing at her nose and eyes with a worn tissue. Duke stared down at me as his wife cried. She said, “I wish you’d just let your poor mother die!”
“I’m sorry,” I said, coolly.
“She got like this,” Francie whispered as Duke reached back to put an arm protectively around her. “Like you are now. So obsessed and frantic. She got so thin, like you are now, and we couldn’t get her to eat anything, and then… please don’t get like that, Jenny, dear God in heaven, don’t get like your moth—”
I turned and walked away from them.
“Jenny! Please try to understand—”
Duke called out, “Jenny, don’t go away mad at us—”
Just go away, I thought, bitterly.
Behind my back, one of them, I wished I knew who, closed their front door quietly. I stalked to my car and got into it. Then I sat behind my steering wheel, fuming. Old friends. Loyal friends. Some friends. Won’t talk to me about my own mother. Won’t tell me what I have every right to know. Sick. Right. Sure, Francie’s sick, all right. Sick of me bugging her. Sick of my family. Sick of all of us, doesn’t want anything to do with us anymore. Well, all right. If that’s the way she wants it. All right. All right!
I stormed out of my car again, threw open their white iron gate again and ran onto their lawn. In front of one of the tall, wide windows on the first floor, I screamed, “I’m sorry you’re sick, Francie! I hope you get well, Francie! Not like my mother! Remember her? Your dear friend, the one you won’t talk to me about anymore? Do you want me to go away, Francie? All right, you’ll get your wish. I’ll go away. Permanently!”
Tears choked off my screams, so I turned and stumbled back to my car. With fumbling fingers, I turned the key in the ignition and pulled away from the curb. I tried to ignore the Greek chorus in my head—(or was it my mother’s voice?)—that was whispering, “This is how you treat an old friend like Francie? You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“So should she,” I muttered. “So should she!”
I drove home, and crawled under the bedcovers again.
When Geof arrived home from work, he came upstairs and said, “Uh oh, and I thought we were making progress.” I heard him cross over the carpet to our bed. “Scratch that, I ought to know better.” Once again, I felt his weight sink the mattress as he sat down beside me. “I guess recovery from grief is not a short, straight line, is it?”
br /> “No,” I mumbled, and then poked my head out. “I did a terrible thing today, Geof.”
“Good,” he said. “That always makes life more interesting. Where would I be if people didn’t do terrible things? Out of a job, most likely. What did you do? Strangle your sister? That’s not so terrible—at least it’s justifiable. Beat your stepmother to a bloody pulp? I could buy that. Wait, don’t tell me, I know—you drowned your father, and not a minute too soon, if you ask me.”
He almost had me laughing. “Geof—”
“Well, if you think I’m going to arrest you for any of those offenses, you’re wrong. Those are only misdemeanors. I’m not even sure they should be against the law. A small fine, a short probation, and we’ll have you back in the streets in no time. Hell, if it’s your dad you drowned, they’ll probably give you a ticker-tape parade downtown.”
I placed my hand on his mouth to shut him up.
“What happened was, Francie Daniel refused to see me when I went to her house this afternoon—at her invitation—so I did the only intelligent thing. I stood on her lawn and brayed insults at her like the total jackass I am.”
He removed my hand from his mouth. “I will listen to the rest of this story only on the condition that you get out of bed. Get dressed. Come downstairs and sit with me at the kitchen table like a normal person.” He got up and gazed down at me. Lord, he was handsome. I hoped I wasn’t responsible for the two or three new gray hairs above his ears. “By the way, you are a normal person. I keep telling you to remember that, and you keep forgetting.”
Faye Basil’s phrase popped into my head. “It’s the Alzheimer’s of grief.”
“What?”
“Doc Farrell—Dr. Calvin Farrell, you know?—told me something today that I’d never heard before. My mother had a hysterectomy right before she cracked up. That’s all I wanted to ask Francie about. I’m not sure what that has to do with the Alzheimer’s of grief, but I seem to be losing my mind because I can’t think of anything but grieving over my mother. So maybe she cracked up out of grief for her lost fertility… ?”