Floyd said, “Karen Blixen lived on oysters in her old age at Rungsted, but unlike Ma, she was inconvenienced by the tertiary syphilis she contracted from her fiendish husband.”
Mother said she was saddened by Marvin’s death; she sorrowed for Franny, who was grief-stricken. Mother confided to each of us individually that she had consulted Angela, who was as always a consolation. Yet in this grieving period Mother gained a lightness of spirit, she was physically nimbler, and it seemed that Marvin’s death gave her a sparkle that was now a familiar mood. I realized that over the past decade or so, whenever one of her friends or neighbors died, she did not darken or brood, but instead was vitalized, more talkative, more animated and assertive, while at the same time more relaxed. I had expected something else, a foreboding, a reminder of the Big Sleep, but no—what was it?
She was a survivor. She was the fortunate traveler at the gate who missed the plane that had crashed on takeoff. At Marvin’s funeral, her face upturned as if listening hard, she seemed to radiate the pronouncement, I’m here—you’re not. That was her victory: she was still standing, the winner.
“It is not enough that I win,” Floyd used to say. “Others must lose.”
So in this short period of time, passing from ninety-eight to ninety-nine, Mother was on top again, saying that she despaired of her children, who were growing old, whose health was failing.
“We don’t think Mumma’s going to make it,” Franny had said. But it seemed now that Mother might be the only one who would make it.
Having abandoned my trip to Mexico in response to the summons on my cell phone (farewell to my assignment, adiós to my expense report), I visited Mother most days. Watching her knit—a skill I did not have—and walking with her, she seemed determined to exhaust me, or at least outwalk me. I would try to engage her in conversation, but that was futile too. She was not a conversationalist; she was either a talker, monologuing in the role of Wise Old Thing—Mary Worth, Mother of the Year, the bun-haired crone (played by Peggy Wood) from I Remember Mama—or, bored with this, a competing interrogator.
“Can you name your first-grade teacher, Jay?”
“Miss Purcell.”
“Mine was Mr. Watson,” Mother said, and then rapidly: “Second grade, Miss Eliot. Third grade, Miss Cramer. Fourth grade —”
That became her party trick, a feat of memory that stretched back ninety years. Mother could recall every teacher she’d ever had and many of their approving remarks.
Then it was her neighbors. I was poor on neighbors—I could only remember my friends’ families.
“We lived at 134 Jerome Street. The Bergins were at 136. Across the street at 137, the Duggers—Major Dugger was in World War One. He was black. They named the park after him. The Kountzes, at 139, were also black. Lovely people. On the corner, an Italian family . . .”
And so on, down one side of the street and up the other. It was impressive, but like many other virtuoso feats—high-wire acts, juggling, tap-dancing—it soon became monotony. You wanted it to stop. Enough, I’d think, and mourn again my abrupt departure from the Trinidad family in Chiapas, who had no phone and didn’t write.
Mother was proud of having saved a lot of money, but proudest of all of her frugalities and folk remedies—putting mercurochrome on a bad laceration instead of going to the doctor, jamming a clove onto a bad tooth, drinking Karo syrup for a sore throat, repairing eyeglasses with Scotch tape, darning socks, patching pants, and there were those rubber soles that we glued onto shoes to make them last. Mother prided herself on her sacrifices, saving and economizing, because she’d grown up having to learn the survival skills of the Great Depression. But the habit refined itself into a game and finally a competition: the winner was the person who spent the least money, and the greatest spender was regarded as the biggest fool.
Mother’s good memory, her mending and making-do—these were admirable qualities. But her gloating over them, turning everything into a contest, was annoying, for the fact was that Mother would never admit defeat in any of it. She was merciless in her need to win.
We all said now, “She’ll outlast us,” and it seemed so. Marvin was gone, leaving Franny oddly buoyant and renewed, as Mother had been when Dad died. Fred had what seemed a permanent limp and couldn’t walk without a cane. Floyd had recovered from his surgery but had put on weight and was always short of breath after one of his rants—and more of his rants were directed at me. He became more choleric and overbearing, with a wife and a new life, while I was alone in a rented house, writing about a solitary gringo in a Mexican village, being fleeced by the people he’d befriended on a remote river, the family having become parasitical. Saddened by what I’d lost, realizing it was unattainable, I was attacking it.
Mother seemed indestructible, shrunken to her essence, more powerful than we would ever be. As I lamented the loss of my Mexican idyll, I marveled at her, sitting upright in her chair, while I crouched on a stool before her, as she knitted a scarf or squares for an afghan. She was half the size she had been at Father’s funeral, and that lightness made her stronger. She moved more quickly and was alert in a bird-like way, with bird bones and a bird beak and a bird’s beady eyes, even a bird-like way of jerking her head and twitching at a unexpected noise.
Someone so old seems to exist in a region beyond physicality: Mother had no fleshly essence. She was a wisp, a wraith, a vapor, almost ghostly, insubstantial and gray, as though spun from cobwebs. And I felt old and frail and cheated, taking medicine for my gout.
“Dad had gout,” Mother said. “I think the medicine he took for it contributed to his poor health. It might have killed him.”
I was forced to listen in silence. My days of arguing with her were over. She was above reproach and she knew it. As a survivor of so many deaths and crises, she had attained the status of an immortal—not a figurative deity but an actual goddess. She could not be criticized or contradicted, not opposed or doubted.
Yet she still lived alone and did most of her own cooking—a soft-boiled egg for breakfast, half a can of soup for lunch, wilted salad for dinner: short rations on which she thrived. She read the local newspaper every day, always had a book on the go—never one of mine—did the daily crossword. Once a week she was picked up and taken to bird-carving class by a fellow carver, whom she flirted with in a grotesque geriatric way that might have inspired a work by Samuel Beckett.
As mercurial as ever, and often irritating, maddening at times, she had outlived the criticize-by date, and so was blameless in everything she did and said. Yet she did not seem any older, cruising through her ninety-eighth year.
She was bored with me, bored with all of us. She needed more stimulation, different admirers, less skeptical listeners. But then, she was always more responsive to attention from outside the family than from any of her children, even the ones who adored her, or claimed to. She’d heard it all before; she needed something new.
The Ohlendorfs were a family from Connecticut whom Fred had known for a while, lawyer father, dentist mother, two kids, who visited the Cape and discovered Mother as they might have discovered a rare old treasure in a museum that they returned to every summer to gaze upon with rapture. They had no equivalent matriarch in their own family, and their pent-up piety they discharged on Mother, who basked in their fascination. They brought her bouquets of flowers, posed for pictures with her, as they might have with a queen or a goddess or a municipal statue, and Mother had a claim to each role. Their visits were too reverential to be termed drop-ins. For me—for the rest of us—the annual visit of the Ohlendorfs meant we could take a few days off; Mother was otherwise engaged. I had no idea of the entertainments the Ohlendorfs had planned for Mother, apart from the chocolates, the flowers, the extravagant praise, the group photographs.
“Jollification with the Ohlendorfs,” Floyd said.
Mother, who was our burden, became their trophy and their boast. Fred reported that they took her out, made a day of it. They had lunch at a Br
azilian restaurant in Hyannis. None of us had ever risked such a thing, but they had a Brazilian friend who’d suggested it. In and out of a car, a long drive, a huge meal—and Mother was game.
Another couple joined them, marveling at Mother’s health and humor. They owned a boat, and after the Brazilian restaurant they all drove to Hyannis Harbor and took her aboard and sailed her around Lewis Bay while she sat on the poop deck like a queen on the royal barge.
“My children have never done this for me,” she was reported to have told Madge Ohlendorf, who casually told it to Fred.
Mother was lame the next day. She had overdone it, but she was so eager to praise the Ohlendorfs, her hosts and benefactors—who’d done more than we ever had—that she could not complain of her aches. Yet she had seriously bruised her knee and could not walk.
“Maybe take some aspirin?” I suggested.
“I’ll be fine.”
But she was hobbling. Nevertheless, the blow-by-blow: “Brazilian food is delicious. There’s music. Gauchos come to your table and give you pieces of meat.”
Mother had other admirers from outside the family. A woman down the street, Wanda, who worked at the library, dropped in weekly, always bringing a book or two. There were weekenders from across the street, the cookie-baking wife, the husband a retired state trooper who did odd jobs. The woodcarvers from the class were always on call and, being old themselves, knew what she might need—a can of soup, a dozen eggs, and food items that had never occurred to me—it seemed that Mother loved hot chocolate and lobster bisque and the occasional jelly donut. I had no idea.
With Mother receiving so much attention from others, we slackened in our efforts, weary, demoralized, unappreciated. Her talk of the gauchos and the Brazilian meat and her tacking around the bay made her seem independent, happier elsewhere. That was no surprise to me: I had been happier in Mexico, with strangers who were grateful for my company. Gilbert still took Mother for oysters whenever he was on the Cape, but his work—whatever it was—kept him away most of the time, these days in Baghdad or Kabul. “He can’t talk about it,” Mother said with pride. “It’s all secret.”
In that period when Mother was occupied with visitors and admirers and gift-givers, we kept away, each of us for our own reasons. I was writing my novel about the outsider held captive in the village, Fred was still doing legal work, Floyd was teaching, Hubby worked at the hospital, all versions of semiretirement, everyone occupied. Each of us believed we were absorbed in our work, that someone was looking after Mother. Weeks went by without my seeing her, though I called every few days to ask how she was doing.
“No complaints.”
This from a woman headed downhill toward ninety-nine.
“I’m expecting the girls this weekend,” she’d add.
At that point I’d cut her off. It demoralized me to hear anything about the others, what they’d brought her to eat, what presents, the news of their spouses and children. And I was certain that when my name came up they’d change the subject too. Even the malicious pleasure of backbiting had lost its appeal. I could not tell whether she was boasting or heaping hot coals on my head when she spoke of the others. Mother had become enigmatic, less readable than ever, and though she was still a gossip, I knew that the salient element in gossip (apart from calling attention to oneself) was mendacity.
The family was now populous with grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I hardly knew their names, but Mother remembered them all and often had a discreditable word for one or another—troubled teen, loser, failure, dropout. I did not want to hear any more, so I stayed away. How was I to know that the others were themselves absent, doing the same?
Fred got a call from a neighbor of Mother’s, who wished (so she said) to remain anonymous but sounded like Wanda, the librarian friend.
“I’m terribly worried about your mother. She’s not eating. She’s wasting away. No one ever visits her. If she was my mother . . .”
That got our attention. Mother was such an unreliable witness we suspected what the neighbor was saying might not be true. Even Fred’s report seemed an exaggeration. He said he found Mother alone, thin, dehydrated, not having eaten, dirty dishes in the sink, the toilet unflushed, her clothes unwashed. Each of us then visited, verifying her condition, which was that of a hostage.
“I thought you were looking after her.”
“What about you?”
“You let her starve.”
“She’s a skeleton. You were supposed to visit.”
Round and round, accusations, recriminations, blame that we leveled at each other. But the sorry fact was that Mother was in poor health, living in a dirty house, slowly dying.
“Que madre!” I heard my Mexicans say, meaning, “What a mess!”
50
The Kindly Ones
In Mother Land no one listened and nothing was news. We never expressed honest surprise at anything we’d heard. Never “I didn’t know that,” but always “I know, I know,” which meant “Shut up!” In a family of talkers, it seemed there were no listeners.
But this was a pretense. We were hungry for information, we had Mother’s voracious appetite for bad news, and all of us were the canniest listeners.
One of the most disconcerting, exasperating habits of the family was our ability to listen keenly while talking nonstop, never betraying any interest in what was being said—and, while yakking or interrupting, remembering every word that was said to us, every interjection, especially if it could be reused as gossip or scandal.
It was never clear whether the talker actually heard what you said as he or she rambled boringly on. The talker was not impressed enough to comment. So you assumed they were deaf to what you’d told them, or uninterested, or that what you’d said had been unimportant after all.
But this very lack of comment signified interest and even fascination. The monologue was another form of indirection. You were not accorded any acknowledgment: that would have imposed a sense of obligation, or required offering you some credit. Yet afterward the story you’d told to the talker and interrupter, or the mention you’d made, or the opinion you’d expressed—seemingly to deaf ears—was the story that made the rounds, usually in an improved form, wickeder, crueler, unanswerable.
This was another trait of Mother Land, one that we’d brought to a pitch of perfection. We feigned indifference, affecting to be careless; we pretended to ignore the idle or revealing remark. But this indifference made us more insistent and sometimes more candid, often more emphatic. While turned away, seeming not to care, making important-sounding noises of our own, we were more highly tuned, the most sensitive and alert and attentive creatures, as predators always are—the motionless boomslang seeming to snooze, coiled on an overhead branch, the lion flattened on its belly in the tall grass, the hyena lurking at the periphery of a browsing herd.
It seemed a small thing, just another family quirk, kind of peculiar. But it was a subtle form of entrapment, and in the way it extracted the essence, and preserved it while seeming to reject or ignore it, was a magnification of blame, enormous in extending our quarrels.
The stark truth in all this deflecting talk was that Mother was shrunken and living in squalor.
So we talked, interrupted, held the floor, and filibustered. No one wanted to assume the responsibility for Mother sitting askew on her throne, her head cocked to the side, her mouth half-open, her tongue drooping. “Making the Q-sign,” Hubby said, an indication of futility, like the patients nearest death, in the last bed on the ward, the one next to the exit door.
Our talking did not take place in a room as a sort of forum on the topic “What shall we do about Mother?” We were too unforgiving to be able to occupy a single room. These were asides, drop-ins, accusations, snarls, the Chinese whispers of sequential phone calls. Sometimes they were cries of rage, all of it was jabber, no one listening—at least no one seemed to.
We brought food, flowers, chocolates, intending to revive Mother with gifts and go
od cheer.
“You’re going to be all right, Ma,” I said.
“Everyone says that, but why? There’s nothing wrong with me.”
That was the most worrying assertion of all, that in her dire state—growing thinner in her dirty house, a figure of neglect—she protested that all was well with her.
When we were teenagers, Mother had devised a system for us to clean the house. Each of us was assigned a room—kitchen, living room, dining room, or one of the many bedrooms—and we were responsible for cleaning it. We could not leave the house for any reason until Mother inspected the room and said it had been done to her satisfaction. The bathroom was another story; it was punishment for the person who had performed poorly the previous week. One bathroom for all those people in the house. It was a vile job. “I want it shipshape,” Mother said, echoing Dad. It meant scrubbing, not mopping, polishing, dusting. “It builds character,” Dad said. He was probably right. From childhood I could never understand anyone who endured a dirty house, and if there were children in the household, why were they not mopping and vacuuming?
In the period of Mother’s decline and shrinkage, we applied this system to her house, each of us responsible for a room. Hubby had the bathroom because as a hospital employee he had access to discount quantities of industrial cleaners and disinfectant, Franny and Rose tidied the kitchen, the others took the dining room and the bedrooms. I opted for Mother’s study, formerly a bedroom, now a small office with bookshelves and a substantial oak desk, all the drawers kept locked since the days of the mysterious break-in and suspected thefts.
“Know what I hate?” Hubby said. “It’s not Ma’s house anymore. It’s Franny’s. We’re cleaning Franny’s house. She should be paying us to do this.”