“When do you go in for the mastectomy?” Mumma asked.
“We don’t have to talk about that now, Rida. We don’t want to dwell on that.”
“Yes you do,” Mumma said.
“Oh, honestly! Really, Rida, sometimes you—The doctor said not until Monday.”
“And Francis will be with you?”
“I don’t know. He’s—You know how busy he is, his work is important.”
“Who would you like me to telephone?” Mumma asked. “To tell.”
“Oh, no one,” Jonquil said. “Really, there’s no need.”
“Someone, maybe from the garden club?” Mumma insisted.
“Oh, Rida. You know how it is with women. Those women aren’t friends. They don’t like me any more than they like you,” Jonquil told Mumma.
“They elect you.”
“That doesn’t make them friends. That makes them people who think that if I’m running things, things will be done right and nobody will be insulted. They can be sure that I’ll look like they want their president to look. It’s not about me. It’s about them staying comfortable.”
Mumma thought about that. “You think I make people uncomfortable.”
“You make me uncomfortable. But I never hold it against you because I know you mean well.”
Mumma was amazed to find herself talking with Jonquil Cartenbury like this, amazed to learn that the other woman had understood her. “I do mean well.”
“Well of course you do, my goodness. You can’t help what you’re like.”
“Will Francis drive you in on Monday?”
“It’s Sunday, actually, that I have to go in. Sunday evening. But I imagine he will. He’ll be back from his golf game by five, he always is. That’s plenty of time to drive to Hyannis.”
“I’ll be there Monday, then,” Mumma announced. She could see that Jonquil was about to tell her not to bother, so she preempted whatever the other woman was going to say. She thought that Jonquil had no more idea than she herself did about just how Jonquil might be feeling on Monday, so she added, “Monday, if you want me to, I’ll leave you alone. You won’t have to ask me twice, I promise. You don’t have to spare my feelings.”
“You’re not giving me any choice,” Jonquil complained, temporarily diverted from her distress by irritation at Mumma, who was acting entirely in character. Jonquil was clearly of the opinion that by their age Mumma should have outgrown this kind of behavior.
“What would be the point of giving you a choice?” Mumma asked. “Although, really I have. A choice between me or someone else. Or actually, a choice between me or someone else or Francis, because if Francis is there of course I’d leave. Anybody would know that.”
Mumma didn’t believe for one minute that Francis Cartenbury was the kind of man who would spend hours at the bedside of a postoperative wife, and as to what would happen after that, she had her doubts. About how Francis Cartenbury would feel about being a man whose wife no longer had breasts, she had strong doubts.
• • •
That spring, Mumma made Jonquil Cartenbury her first priority. As she had predicted, Francis consistently came up short. It was Mumma who went to the hospital, carrying flowers, bringing books and puzzles, needlepoint projects, messages from Jonquil’s friends—friends who, somehow, for a wide variety of urgent reasons, could almost never make the trip in. In the hospital, Mumma was unflaggingly cheerful, as she reported it to us, but sympathetic, too, although she never allowed fear or despair to get in and run the show. Mumma was running the show.
When Jonquil was sent home to complete her postoperative recovery, it was Mumma who went over every day to do the physical therapy exercises with her, and whom Jonquil taught to play bridge. “It was that or mah-jongg, and I at least already know what a deck of cards looks like,” Mumma told us when we wondered at what she was getting up to. “But maybe I should give her a Scrabble board. For all that she has a college degree, she doesn’t have much of a vocabulary. I don’t know what they teach you all in college. Maybe it was different then, and in the South, too. Growing up in the South, even in a college town—I think it was different in ways I could never have imagined. Jonquil did a brave thing, marrying a Northerner. I never thought of that before, but she has qualities I never realized.”
Mumma was the only person Jonquil could count on, for attention, for casseroles and card games, for company. “Those women, they think cancer’s contagious and it’s not. It’s life. They think death is contagious, but if it is they’ve already got it. I don’t know what’s wrong with people,” Mumma said.
“At least it’s not wrong with you,” I remember answering, by that time tired, I admit, of hearing about Jonquil Cartenbury.
“Well, I know better. There’s lots I don’t know, but I know better than to waste time being blind about things. Life is too short.”
That Mumma persisted in being helpful to Jonquil Cartenbury didn’t surprise us. For one thing, she no longer had children at home, so her bossiness needed an object. For the most important, it was in Mumma’s nature to do thoroughly whatever she set herself to do.
What did surprise us was the pleasure she took in Jonquil Cartenbury’s company, her obvious interest in the close companionship of another woman, in a friendship. Mumma did the physical therapy exercises alongside Jonquil, and they talked. Mumma drove the woman to her radiation treatments, and they talked. They talked on the phone, often at length. Our mother was behaving like a teenager, not able to do anything without talking it over with her best friend. Mumma seemed half enamored of Jonquil Cartenbury, who was, Mumma said, a complicated lady, full of dignities and prides and insecurities, and she had not had an easy time of it, Mumma assured us. “Just that husband, to start with,” Mumma said.
When, after six months of intensive treatments, Jonquil was given a necessarily temporary clean bill of health, Mumma took her into Boston to shop for prosthetics. Rowdy as teenagers, they came to see me afterward at my new Avon Hill house, for a cup of tea or coffee before they headed back out to the Cape. Their eyes were sparkling and their cheeks pink, and they would sometimes just look at one another and start to laugh. “Your mother,” Jonquil Cartenbury said to me; then she started up laughing again and couldn’t speak. I thought, watching her, that I might after all get to like her, that perhaps this illness (Knock on wood, she really had it beaten; the doctors wouldn’t be really hopeful until a year, or confident until five) might have changed her fundamental nature. It had certainly transformed her into someone who would be friends with my mother.
They had good times together, those months. Jonquil Cartenbury tried to tone down Mumma’s habits of dress, and Mumma insisted that Jonquil wear higher heels. “You have nice slim legs,” Mumma told her. “You should show them off, and you could wear shorter skirts, too.” They talked over their pasts, and their husbands, and their different experiences of being outsiders married into Boston society, and their similar experiences ditto. They talked about their children, fears and worries, and occasionally they allowed each other to boast about conquests and victories. They had friendly exchanges about politics, and Mumma listened to Jonquil’s advice never to run for office again. Mumma advised Jonquil about managing her money, since, as Mumma pointed out, it was likely that she would survive her husband, and inherit his wealth, and she would need to know how to do more than pay monthly bills and balance a checkbook. Although, “I just admire your mother so much,” Jonquil told me, when Mumma was in the bathroom. “I would surely enjoy being a successful businesswoman, but I know it about myself, I don’t have the heart. Your mother is a lion. I’m more of a peony.”
On another day, while Jonquil was powdering her nose, or spending her penny, or any of the other euphemisms she had for peeing, one of which was even “visiting the little girls’ room”—on the subject of which expressions Mumma maintained an uncharacteristic silence—Mumma admitted, “I never thought a woman could be so interesting. If she wasn’t my daughter, I mean. Es
pecially Jonquil Cartenbury. I never thought a woman would like me, either. Well, you must have noticed, women are competitive and for some reason they don’t feel as if they ever win against me. But then, you’re not supposed to want to win, if you’re a woman. That’s the trouble.” Briefly, Mumma considered this statement. “I always want to win, so I guess it’s simpler for me. Jonquil says she’s fragile, but really she isn’t. She’s been tested,” Mumma admonished me. “I don’t mean just cancer, either, I mean life.”
Even after cancer, life wasn’t through with Jonquil Cartenbury. Or perhaps it wasn’t life. Perhaps it was just Francis. It all blew up at a belated Thanksgiving dinner.
Because both Jonquil and Mumma had family commitments, they had to wait until the Sunday after the holiday, to have their own Thanksgiving celebration. This included husbands, of course, even if despite the women’s friendship, the two couples had not become a foursome. Jonquil felt that Pops found her uninteresting and Mumma couldn’t deny it. Francis Cartenbury found Pops recondite, while Mumma could barely bring herself to be polite to Jonquil’s husband. Notwithstanding any of that, the women decided to make a dinner reservation for the four of them on the Sunday, at The Paddock, where the evening did not go as planned.
Or, rather, it went as Francis Cartenbury had planned it. On the drive to join Mumma and Pops at the restaurant, he told his wife of more than thirty years that he had wanted them to have this last good holiday together with their boys, wanted to give the boys one last good memory. He told her that it was their last holiday together because he was leaving her. He had met a woman at his work, another lawyer, in fact, someone who understood what he did and understood him, too, and would be an asset to him in his political life, because these days being divorced wasn’t that much of a handicap, on the state level at least. The woman wanted Francis to marry her before she was too old to have children of her own. Francis knew Jonquil would understand. He had stuck by her in this illness, but now that she was better—although she was not the woman she had been and she did understand how that had to affect a man, didn’t she? He was sorry. He didn’t want to hurt her. But he had promised this woman, he’d made promises. Jonquil had never liked the house on the Cape all that much anyway, had she? She’d always wanted to move back to Cambridge, he knew that, she thought he hadn’t been listening to all those complaints over the years, but he had. Because he wasn’t a bad guy, and he hoped they’d always be friends, and there were the boys and the grandchildren now, so a peaceable divorce would be to everybody’s advantage. She’d inherited money of her own, so she wouldn’t need anything from him, or want it, he was sure of that. Unless, he suggested, ignoring the sounds coming from the far side of the front seat, she would want to move back to Virginia? To Charlottesville where she had family and friends and a familiar way of life. He wouldn’t object if that was what she decided to do. It was going to be hard enough on him being divorced and remarried—think of Nelson Rockefeller and Happy—with his political career, and she could actually help him, now he thought of it, by moving south. Not always around to remind people, he admitted.
“He’d rather you’d died,” Mumma interpreted. She and Pops had waited at the table for the Cartenburys to arrive, and when they were half an hour late Mumma had gone to ask if there had perhaps been a phone message. That was when she saw Jonquil, standing alone outside the glass door. Mumma immediately sent the headwaiter back to tell Pops to pay the bar bill, and leave a twenty on the table, please, to make up for the lost tip on the dinner they wouldn’t order. “You’ll have to watch and make sure he does it. The man has no idea about tipping,” she told the headwaiter. “Tell him I need him to take me home. Emergency,” she explained.
“I can’t just abandon her,” she told us later, explaining why she hadn’t had time to stop by on her regular business days in Boston, or to invite grandchildren out to the Cape and give their parents a needed respite, or done anything more than write a generous check for Christmas. “Not when her life is falling down around her like a bombed city. Or like hail, maybe, because it’s only natural for men to be unfaithful. Not your father, but some men. It’s the urge to propagate, it’s Darwin. But it’s more like an earthquake in her life, really, and she can’t think clearly yet. She was going to let him have her house!” Once Jonquil had stopped weeping and emerged from the subsequent rabid fury at Francis, Mumma could mention other men to her.
“I’m too old to get another man,” Jonquil said.
“Don’t be stupid,” Mumma advised. “You’re a pretty woman.”
“I have no breasts,” Jonquil reminded her. “I’m too old and I have no breasts.”
“You know how to get along with people.”
“And those supposed friends who didn’t disappear with the cancer don’t want a divorcée at their parties, making uneven numbers. They don’t even invite widows, Rida. You don’t know them like I do.”
“And you’ll have a nice sum of money when your lawyer finishes with that nogoodnik.”
“He is the father of my children,” Jonquil reminded her, which Mumma interpreted as Jonquil making sure she had the moral high ground, so that she would be well thought of in the community. “It’s important for a woman to have the moral high ground in a divorce,” Mumma told Jo.
Mumma stood beside Jonquil through all the long months of the required period of separation for an uncontested no-fault divorce and never once complained about the repetitive conversations, as Jonquil turned over and over the cancer, the abandonment, and the stinginesses with which Francis responded to her refusal to “do the right thing by him.”
To celebrate the actual divorce, Mumma and Pops suggested that Jonquil join them for two weeks in Paris over his spring break, but Jonquil had already been invited by some South Carolina cousins to join them at the Mill Race Club in the Bahamas for Easter. “I didn’t know how to tell you,” she told Mumma. “They’re family,” she said apologetically. Mumma suggested that she might go, too, because the cousins asked if Jonquil had a friend she wanted to bring. But Jonquil told Mumma that two single women would be a social disaster for her cousins, and she wanted to be a good guest since they’d been nice enough to think of asking her. Mumma reminded her friend that she wasn’t a single woman. Jonquil told Mumma that wasn’t what she meant and Mumma knew it, Mumma was just being her usual perverse self. They talked frankly, about everything, or at least that’s what Mumma thought, but it turned out that there was a man at the Mill Race Club, a man her cousins wanted her to meet. They were fixing her up, but she didn’t tell Mumma that. “Probably,” Mumma decided, “she was worried that he’d fall in love with me.”
After phone calls that were cut short and lunch dates it was impossible for Jonquil to make, Mumma found herself dropped by the only real friend she had ever had. There was one dinner when Jonquil brought her new husband to meet Mumma and Pops, again at The Paddock. Then, all the long summer holiday season, while Jonquil and Jake were living in her Wampanoag house to escape the South Carolina summer, they couldn’t accept any of Mumma’s invitations. Until, finally, Jonquil snapped. “I wish you’d stop telephoning, Rida. I don’t know what’s wrong with you. You never did have any subtlety. Or any tact.”
“So you’re avoiding me on purpose,” Mumma said to Jonquil, and later, having repeated what Jonquil said to each of us, separately, she concluded, “She was avoiding me on purpose, so that’s that.”
Mumma refused to discuss it. “You never liked her,” she reminded us, one after the other, and that was true enough. For Mumma, the door had shut on Jonquil Cartenbury Heolms. We were never given an opportunity to say we were sorry about the way things turned out, or to tell our mother we thought she’d been treated badly.
So I find myself agreeing, whenever Jo reminds us about that odd interlude in Mumma’s life, that Jonquil Cartenbury Heolms might be the example where the essential Mumma could be seen. “Including being dumped, because whoever her parents were dumped her at the emergency room door
at the very beginning of her story,” she says.
“We were the only friends Mumma had,” I realized.
“As if it wasn’t bad enough being her daughters,” said Amy.
“I don’t know that I was much of a friend,” Meg admitted.
“Neither was she. A friend to us, I mean.”
“She was our mother.”
Jo had the last word, and it was a question: “Do you think that any mother and daughter can be friends?”
8.
Mumma at the End of the Road
We did become uneasy, when Mumma virtually retired from the business two months after Pops died. Mumma’s financial successes gave her satisfactions that marriage and family life could not, that being a useful and publicly acclaimed citizen of Wampanoag didn’t offer. She always remembered that it was Pops who started her out, but she knew it was her intelligence and her proven judgment that made its great success, that made her what she was. It was Mumma against the world and she knew she’d won when she had made her own fortune. Amy understood it best. “For Mumma, making profits was like getting a good grade in school. Making money, making A’s, they’re the same thing. They stand for approval. They stand for visible success.”
We worried about Mumma’s life without work. We couldn’t imagine it, any more than we could imagine her without her various civic activities, the library and the hospital, the garden club, all of which she also retired from before the end of her first year of widowhood. We couldn’t imagine her without anything to be fixing. She had said it so often, “I’m going to save the world and then I’m going to get it running right.” She said it most often to the television set, or the newspaper: “You can’t get away with that, not with me.”
But it wasn’t until Mumma bought herself a pair of sneakers, and wore them, that we became anxious.