Between Them

  And that, I think, is what she did after his death and my departure, when she was on her own. She maintained, made an objective out of that. She became brisk, businesslike, more self-insistent. Her already deep voice became deeper, assumed a kind of acquired gravity that matched her outlook. She drank in the evenings to get a little drunk, and took up an everyday attitude of one kind of firmness or another—particularly toward men, whom she began to view as liabilities. She made her situation be the custom and cornerstone of her public self. She would not be taken advantage of, even though I suspect no one wanted to take advantage of her. A widow had to look out though, had to pay attention to all details. No one could or would help you. A life lived efficiently wouldn’t save you, but it would prepare you for what you couldn’t be saved from.

  Along the way she helped maintain my wife and me when we were young and newly married—always at a prudent distance and only as we needed it. She eventually sold the house on Congress, moved back to Little Rock and into my grandparents’ hotel, and lived comfortably with them until Bennie suddenly died, after which she lived with her mother in apartments here and there in town, as her mother gradually grew ill, then crippled, then house-bound, but never appreciative. She became a daughter again at fifty-five, one who looked after an irascible mother who’d once wanted her to be her “sister.” She did not relish it.

  They had, the two of them, plenty of money. A good car. There was a set of friends—mostly widowed—people in their stratum. Her mother “accompanied” her everywhere. They went to eat in small groups, played canasta afternoons, spoke to people on the phone, watched soap operas, engaged in arguments, grew bored, restive, furious. Had cocktails. Laughed about men. Stared. Lived a nice and comfortable life of waiting.

  Our life together during this time—mother and son—consisted mainly of my knowledge of what her life was and her knowledge of mine. And visits. After college, we continued to live far away from each other. She in Little Rock. I, and then I and Kristina, in Michigan, California, Mexico, Chicago, Michigan again, New York, New Jersey, Vermont. To visit us she arrived on trains and planes and in cars, ready to take us to dinner but also to loan us money. To have a room painted. Buy tires for our car. Pay a doctor bill. To worry about me. To listen. To be present for a little while as a part of what passed for our family—wherever we were—and then to go home.

  It must be true for most of us to believe that our particular circumstances are not exactly typical of what the mass of others’ lives are like. Not better. Not worse. Only peculiar in some way. My mother’s and my life did seem peculiar. Or possibly it just seemed imperfect. Being so far from each other. Her being alone. Our visits and partings. All without either of us knowing what perfect could’ve been—my father not being dead of course. But more than that, too.

  This imperfect arc of events consumed, as I’ve said, twenty years of both our lives—her last twenty, my second—when whatever my life was to be was beginning and then happening. It never felt exactly right that during all these years I could not see my mother more, that we did not have a day-to-day life. That I lived at a great distance by choice. That the repairs we made to things after my father’s death could not be finished and shared. And that at no time was there a moment when life for us rejoined itself and became as it had been before he died. This imperfection underlay everything. So that when she left me again and again and again, she would cry. And that is what she cried about. That what we had together was most of all there was. And it was not enough. Not a full enough outcome. She told me that once in the elevator where she lived, a new acquaintance had asked her, “Mrs. Ford, do you have any children?” And without thinking she had said, “No.” And then she’d thought to herself, Oh, for God’s sake. Of course I do. There’s Richard.

  Our conversations over these years came to have much to do with television, with movies we’d seen and hadn’t, with books she was reading, with baseball—which she adored. The subject of Johnny Bench and Jackie Robinson—whom she admired—came up often. After my grandmother died, my wife and I took my mother to the World Series at Yankee Stadium, where she rooted for the Dodgers, whom we didn’t like, and complained about the seats we’d moved mountains to get. We took her on the Universal Studios Tour. We took her back to Antoine’s in New Orleans, where we did not discuss the fight she’d had with my father in 1955. We drove her to California and to Montreal and Yellowstone. To Maine. To Vermont. To northern Michigan. To wherever we went and could take her. We, she and I, observed each other. She observed Kristina and our marriage and liked them both. She observed my efforts to be a writer and supported them, but did not understand why I was doing it. “When are you going to get a job and get started?” she asked me once, after I’d published two novels and was teaching at Princeton. She observed the fact that Kristina and I had no children but offered no opinion—though I’m certain she had several. She silently estimated her life, and her life with ours, and possibly did not completely see how one gave rise to the other but accepted that it did.

  I noticed of course that she grew older; knew that her life was not very much to her liking but that she made the most of its surfaces. She would sometimes take me aside early on a morning when we could be alone together, two adults, and say to me: “Richard, are you happy?” And when I told her I was, she would say in a warning voice, “You must be happy. That’s so important.” Not that she was unhappy, but just that she knew whereof she spoke.

  And that is the way life went on. Not pointlessly. But not pointedly, either. Maybe this is also usual in our lives with our older parents—a feeling that some goal is being sought, and then the recognition of what that goal inevitably is, after which we return our attention to what’s present now.

  Something, however, some essence of my and my mother’s life is not, I realize, coming clear through these words—as if there are not words and memory enough to give a life back and have it be right. In one sense, over our years lived apart, my mother and I acted toward one another the way people do who like each other very much and want to see each other more. Special friends. But then I have not said about her that she never interfered, that she agreed that my life with Kristina had retired a large part of her motherhood. I have also not said that she didn’t cultivate random, impromptu judgments about my life. That she always saw her visits as welcome—which they were. She saw, in fact, that what we’d made of things together—herself and me—was the natural result of events that were themselves natural. As before, she was not a psychologist. Not a student of life. Not a quizzer. But by some strange understanding—and maybe these are the words—she knew that we both knew that this was life. This is what we would have. We were not fatalists as mother and son. We made the best of things and knew we were doing that.

  Richard and Kristina, Coahoma, Mississippi, 1984

  IN 1973, MY MOTHER DISCOVERED she had breast cancer. It’s tempting to say that such an ominous occurrence would inevitably follow a certain course for her and for people like her, people of her background and age—sixty-three: first there would be a time of being aware that something irregular was there inside her breast—something she didn’t care to discuss with anyone or seek medical advice about. Then would follow a time of worry and growing realization and expectancy, during which a whole year would manage to pass. Followed by a casual mention to a trusted friend (who in this case unforgivably did nothing). Finally a distraught admission, to Kristina, with instructions not to tell anyone—me. Though of course she does tell me, after which we bring my mother quickly to a doctor who advises tests but because a year has passed does not seem hopeful.

  What I remember of that brief, fraught period, which took place in Little Rock, is that following the first doctor visit, but before all the results were known, the contingencies stated and plans made, she and I and Kristina took the weekend together. (There is always somehow a weekend to wait.) She would “go in” on Monday for a definitive “procedure.” Still, on Saturday it seemed a good idea to dri
ve up to the country, to Atkins, to visit my father’s sister and his cousins, whom she liked. To visit his grave. She told the sister—Viva—that she would be having these tests. And my aunt—who was much older than my mother—put a good face on it. Hugged her. Afterward, in my mother’s Buick, we drove around the flat, Arkansas River bottom-land, which my father’s father had lost before he killed himself, but where none of the three of us had ever felt at home. But it didn’t matter where we were. We knew this was the last of yet another period, a period when we could be the selves we had made up and tried to enact in the face of all that had gone before. Something in the tests would change everything—again—and we wanted to act out our conviction that, yes, this has been a life, this adroit coming and going, this health, this humor, this affection expressed in fits and starts, even this occasional sadness. Nothing would change that. We could look back, and it would seem like we were alive enough through it all.

  DEATH STARTS A LONG TIME ahead of when it arrives. Even in death’s very self there is life that has to be lived out.

  My mother had cancer, but we found that the life we had confirmed that weekend could carry us further on. There were seven years to go, but we didn’t know that. So we went quickly back to how we had done things. Visiting. Talking on the phone. Trips, friends, occasions. There was a more pressing need now to know from her “how things are,” and the staunch willingness to have them be all right. To insisting, in other words, on life’s being life, and recognizing that it could easily be less but shouldn’t be. To us it seemed like the time that had gone before. Just not exactly.

  My mother, I think, made the best of her problems. She had one breast removed. She took radiation but not chemotherapy. She went back to her solitary life in Little Rock. All accomplished with a minimum of exhibited fear and a great deal of stoicism, even humor—lessons first learned from the nuns, long ago. She bought a prosthesis, which she joked about. It seemed as if her years since my father’s death had been training for bad news—for facing down disaster. She was, I think, sharply aware of how she was coping.

  This was the first time I thought seriously that my mother might eventually come to live with us, which had been a well-discussed subject between her and me, there having been precedent for it and plenty of opportunity for us each to have a point of view. My mother’s attitude was clear. She was against it. Such decisions ruined lives, spoiled the future, she thought. She had lived with her own begrudging mother, and that had eventuated in years of arid unhappiness. Bickering. Impasse. Her mother had disliked her for it, she said, had hated being looked after. She’d turned even meaner. It was a no-win, and she wanted no part of it, wanted me to swear off the idea. Which I did. We laughed about how high and dry I would someday leave her. How she would be in the poorhouse, and I’d be living it up someplace far away. France. Farting through silk, was the old Arkie saying.

  She was, herself, practical. She made arrangements in someplace called Presbyterian Village, in Little Rock. There would be her home when she was ready. She wrote out a big check to them against the day, reserved a place for whenever. They promised to do their duty. My wife and I saw this as an acceptable, even a good arrangement. “I don’t want to have to be at anybody’s mercy,” my mother said. And that was that.

  So it was back again to regular life, as regular as could be. Life in remission. Kristina and I had moved to New Jersey. We owned a nice house. And there were plenty more visits, with my mother doing most of the visiting—spending afternoons out in our shady yard, chatting up our Orthodox neighbors as if she knew all about them, weeding our flower beds. Raking leaves. Sitting in the gazebo. She seemed whole. In high spirits. Illness and the possibility of illness had made her seize life harder. She wanted to do more. Visit Hawaii. Go on cruises. She began to go to church more regularly. Became a deacon. She had new friends, younger than she was. We heard about them by name. Blanche. Herschel. Mignon. Louise. People we never met, but who drank and laughed and liked her and were liked by her. I had pictures of them in my mind. Loud, personable southerners.

  The year was now measured from medical exam to medical exam, always in the late winter, soon after my birthday. Every year there was good news delivered, after worrying. And every year there was a time to celebrate and feel a reprieve.

  I do not mean to say that our lives—the three of us—were lived outside the expectation and prism of death. For her, definitely not. The joy of surviving was tainted by the squeamish certainty that you can’t survive. And no one can lose one parent and not live out his life waiting for the other to drop dead or begin to die. I read my mother’s death in almost all her life’s evidence during those days and short years. I looked for illness. Listened to her complaints too carefully. Planned her death obscurely in my abhorrence of it—treated myself to it early so that when the time came I would not go down completely.

  At first there were backaches. It is hard to remember exactly when. The winter of 1981, possibly—six years since her surgery. She came up to New Jersey to visit, and something had gone wrong. She was seventy-one, but pain had now come into her life. She looked worn down, invaded by hurting—though shortly before she’d been fine. She’d seen her doctors in Little Rock, but none of this had to do with her cancer, she said they said. It was back trouble. Her parts were just wearing out. She flew home from Princeton, but in the summer she hurt more. I would call her, and the phone would ring a long time, and then her answering voice would be weak, sometimes barely audible. “I hurt, Richard,” she’d tell me, wherever I was. “The doctor is giving me these pills. But they don’t always work.” “I’ll come down there,” I always said. “No. I’ll be fine,” she’d say. “Do what you have to do.” The summer managed past that way, and the fall began.

  I started a teaching job in Massachusetts. And then one morning there was a call. It was just at light. I didn’t know why anyone would call anyone at that hour—unless a death was involved, but that didn’t seem possible. My mother had come into the hospital the night before, a nurse said from Little Rock—in an ambulance. She had been in serious pain. And when she got there her heart had paused, though it had started again. She was better now, the nurse assured me. I said I’d come that day, from Massachusetts; find people to teach my classes, drive to the airport in Albany. Which was what I did.

  In Little Rock it was summer. Hot September. A friend of my mother’s, a man named Ed Lingo—Louise’s husband, it turned out—met me and drove me in. We went by old buildings, over railroad tracks, and across the Arkansas River past where my grandparents’ hotel had been, but now was gone—imploded. Ed Lingo was in a mood to counsel me. Though this would not turn out well, he said. My mother had been sicker than I knew, had spent days and days in her apartment without coming out. She had been in bed all summer, he said. It was something I needed to prepare myself for. Her death.

  But it was more than her death, he was predicting. Life—hers in particular, ours—was moving into a new class of event now. These things could be understood, is what he meant to say but didn’t exactly. To hold out against them was hopeless and maybe perverse. This all was coming to be a kind of thing that happens. An inevitability. Best to see it that way.

  Which, I suppose, is what I began to do. Our ride in the car, across town to the hospital, was a demarking line. A man I hardly knew was suggesting to me how I should look at many important things; how I should consider my own mother, my own life, my future. Suggesting that I begin to see my self differently. That I stand back. It would be better.

  You can mistake such moments as these, but at your own risk.

  My mother, it turned out, was feeling better. But something unusual had happened. Her heart had, in fact, entirely stopped. There was congestion in her lungs, the doctor told me and told her in my presence. He was a small, curly-headed, bright-eyed young man in a white coat. Dr. Wilson. He was soft-spoken. He liked my mother. Everyone liked my mother. He remembered how she’d looked when she first came to see him. Years ago n
ow. “Healthy.”

  In her hospital room, however, where we all three were, he sat down in a chair with some papers and told us even more bad news. Though it was just the customary bad news. He had performed other tests, and their results weren’t good. He felt confused now, he said, by the course of a disease he supposedly knew all about. But the back pain was cancer. She was going to die, although he didn’t know when she would. Sometime in the next year, he imagined. There didn’t seem to be any thought of recovering. I know he was sorry to know it and have to say it. His job may even have been harder than ours was—though only on that day.

  I do not really remember what we said to him. I’m sure we asked very good questions, since we were both good when the chips were down. I do not remember my mother crying or even seeming shocked. I did not cry. We knew, both of us, what class of event this was—this message. Among other things, this was the class of event that ended one long kind of uncertainty. I cannot believe we both, in our own ways, didn’t feel some relief—as if one tired, old curiosity had been satisfied and other new curiosities were being ushered in. The obvious question—how serious is all this?—can be dispensed with in a hurry: the very worst. But it is an odd and un-obvious sensation to have—this relief. I wonder if doctors know how instinctive it is.