by Pat Conroy
That night when I went up to the Eisenhower hospital to say good night to my mother and stepfather, I handed the postcard to my mother.
“This is it? My house?” my mother asked. “Are you sure?”
“Five librarians helped me and Helen find this house,” I said. “They found some old records, and the residents of this house were Jasper Catlett Peek and his wife, Margaret. They listed the names of the kids. That’s the place. You were born in the upstairs bedroom. We got a tour of the house today.”
“John, it’s even more beautiful than I remember,” my mother said, handing it to her husband. “Promise me we’ll go there when I beat this thing.”
“A Southern mansion,” John said. “Where else would a woman like you be born? We’ll go there. That’s a promise.”
It was a trip they would never make.
CHAPTER 12 •
Gnome
Time caught up with me in the years leading up to my mother’s death, and pulled me to the ground in its merciless grip. The truth is, I couldn’t tell you anything about time and what it did to me that year, except that it manhandled and defeated and horse-collared me. On November 17, 1984, it broke my heart with an ax blow of destiny. Time did not even take notice. Its eyeless immensity passed over me without pause or recognition.
Augusta is now a fearful word to me, and so is Eisenhower. Both city and hospital have retained the power to cause inflammation and distress when I hear those words in a sentence. Although my mother had held her own since her last remission, finally the word came. She had gone out of remission, and was back in the hospital. In the waiting room I embraced John Egan yet again and could tell sadness had overcome him long before I got there. It was the fall of 1982, and I had driven over from my home in Atlanta.
“It’s bad this time, Pat,” he said. “It’s really going to hit Peg hard.”
“Dr. Madden said it would get worse each time the cancer went out of remission,” I reminded him. “So far, he hasn’t been wrong.”
Dr. Madden came into the waiting room shortly after I arrived there. He and I had become friends by that time, and he knew I had implicit trust in his decisions about Mom’s health. But he was not optimistic about my mother’s chances.
“Pat, the leukemia might kill her this time. Or I might kill her with the treatment,” he said. “She went out of remission and the leukemia moved in fast. So I put her on the strongest chemotherapy possible, but it’s a balancing act in this stage of her cancer.”
“How’s she taking it?” I asked.
“She’s a fighter, Pat. But tomorrow she’s going to have to use every ounce of that fighting spirit. It’s about to get ugly.”
And ugly it got. On the second night, with me sleeping on a cot beside my mother’s bed, I woke up as she was projectile-vomiting off a far wall. In a flash I was out of bed and brought her a wastebasket she could vomit in, which she practically filled until she stopped long enough for me to rush it to the bathroom to empty and wash it out. When I returned to her bed, the diarrhea had started, and it was far worse than anything I could imagine. I leaned down to pick her up, and during a brief pause in her falling apart, I grasped her and placed her on my shoulder and made another run to the bathroom and deposited her on the toilet seat. I undressed her completely and left her with the wastebasket and listened as her entire body collapsed in on itself. I washed my hands as carefully as I could but realized I was covered in excrement and vomit, and my mother’s room had the feel and smell of an abattoir. As I looked at her sheets and pillowcases, I realized that time had started to kill my mother with a callousness it had not shown before. Into laundry bags I threw all her sheets and towels and defiled clothing and hurled them out into the hallway, where the night workers would pick them up at five the next morning and have them back in her room by five in the evening. I scrubbed down the bed with ammonia and water and cleaned every wall and floor where my mother had spewed those poisons fleeing from her body. I made her bed with sweet-smelling sheets the way they taught me to do it at The Citadel. Going across the hall to an empty bedroom, I stole all the fresh pillowcases on its bed and placed them on her bed. Then I waited outside the bathroom for her.
Since I used all of our towels cleaning the mess around her bed, I went across the hall on another scavenger hunt, where I lifted bars of soap and shampoo and towels. After another fifteen minutes, I heard a weak tapping on the bathroom door, and I opened it to find a bathroom where it looked and smelled like a murder had taken place.
“You okay, Mom?” I asked stupidly, and she answered me with laughter.
“I think I’ve seen better days, Pat,” she said, and we both started giggling.
“I’ve got to bathe us to get us clean again, Mom.”
“I’ll never be clean again,” she said.
“I’ll be damned if that’s so,” I said.
I turned on the shower, then picked Mom up and we stepped into a stall where the water fell in a hot steaming rush of cleansing. I emptied small bottles of shampoo on our heads. Soapy washcloths cut through the dried vomit and diarrhea as I worked up and down Mom’s feverish body. My mother was squeaky clean, but she noticed the nature of our human predicament long before I did. As I washed the soap off her body, she leaned against the shower stall and said, “You shouldn’t be doing this, Pat. It’s not natural.”
“It’s the most natural thing in the world, Mom. You did it for me.”
Somehow I got her out of that shower, dried her off, got her into a clean nightgown, doused her with White Shoulders, and got her back in bed. For the next half hour, I was cleaning up the bathroom, which smelled like an outhouse. Eventually, I would fill two bags with laundry and throw them out into the hallway. With infinite relief, I put myself on my cot, as exhausted as a Channel swimmer. As I turned toward Mom to wish her good night, she surprised me by being awake, and the moonlight was coming in the window, lighting up her face. Her wig was lying on the bedside table, and I went to retrieve it and helped her place it back in position. She spoke to me first. “Are you writing about me in your new book?”
“No, Mama, I’m not,” I answered.
“You’re lying,” she said. “I can always tell when my children are lying.”
“You might not like what I’m writing about you.”
“I’d like you to promise me one thing,” she said.
I went to her bedside and said, “You’re in a great position to bargain, Mama.”
She turned toward me, turned the pretty blue eyes that not even the cancer could touch and said, “Don’t write about me like this. Make me beautiful.”
“Oh, Mama, oh, mother of mine,” I said that night, “you who opened up the universe for me with all the stuff of language, I’ll make you so beautiful. Because you made me a writer and presented me the tongues and a passion for language, I can lift you off that bed, banish the cancer from your cells forever. When they speak of beauty in the South, my mother, they’ll talk about you, mention you by name, praising you to the sky.”
Although I swore to my mother I would not write about her in this condition, I knew I was lying as I tendered the promise, because she had never appeared so beautiful to me as she fought against the forces determined to kill her.
After I made this pretty speech, my mother reached up and squeezed my hand. “I’d like Meryl Streep to play the role.”
When my mother got released from Eisenhower, everyone who loved her knew that we were losing her. She had suffered through the chemotherapy for more than a week, and I took her by wheelchair out to my car, where I started down the long, lush drive that would take us through the pretty towns of Allendale, Fairfax, Varnville, and Hampton before the countryside began to open, revealing the bright green marshes like mile-long prayer rugs along the creeks. Mom was surprisingly talkative on the trip east through the comely railroad towns. She talked a lot about her reconciliation with my father, and how she had once planned never to speak to him after their trashy divorce. Dad had
come down for the whole time Mom was in the hospital this time, and a real friendship was forming between John Egan and my father. Mom was proud that her two husbands were in attendance in her time of greatest need. Two such different Irishmen never met on such a desperate stage. Dr. Egan with his great gentlemanly reserve and my barnstorming peasant father were complete opposites, but the love of my mother presented them with the most fragile linkage to a friendship that would last both of their lives.
When we neared Beaufort, my mother stunned me by asking, “Where are we going to lunch today?”
I had not considered lunch because of the delicacy of her condition, and I tried my hardest to talk her out of it. But she refused to be deterred by my lack of enthusiasm.
“It’s a tradition between us. My girlfriends at Fripp love to hear me tell about the expensive meals you order me, even when you know I can’t eat a single thing,” she said.
“Did you tell them I start with a little champagne?” I asked.
“The most expensive bottle they’ve got, and you always ask them to ice it down by the table. They’ve invited me golfing next week. And I plan to play in that golf match,” she said.
“My girl’s a tough girl,” I said.
“Damn right,” she said. “I haven’t given up yet, and you can say that to anyone, Pat.”
“Good to know,” I said. “I’ll spread the word.”
A new restaurant with a good reputation had just opened on Lady’s Island, with splendid views of the Beaufort River and the magical town built on its bluff. Though I heard the food was good, restaurants in Beaufort had always proven to be much more mediocre than the approval of the street indicated. I struggled to get Mom out of the car and into the restaurant, which was large and airy. The menu was nice by Atlanta standards and spectacular by Beaufort ones. I ordered the most expensive things they had, then had them boxed up and ready to carry home. At that point disaster struck. A ladies’ club that my mother had once tried to join, over her son’s strong objections, walked into the restaurant, singly and in groups, and filed in silent review past the table where my mother and I sat. It was a commonplace club in the small towns of the South and, perhaps, small towns everywhere. On a regular basis one member of the club would read a scholarly paper that she had written for that particular meeting. They were formidable wives of powerful men in Beaufort, and all of them had been members of the infamous Great Santini premiere committee. They formed the intellectual underpinning of this small town, and their fingerprints were all over every cultural event that took place in the city limits. The club put out a fragrance of respectability my mother couldn’t resist, and she’d turned in an application for membership. One of the club’s ironclad rules was that its women be college graduates. Naturally, my mother claimed she had graduated, cum laude, from Agnes Scott College, and just as naturally, the club turned down her application. When the club proved the falsity of the college degree, it stung my mother’s deepest sense of herself.
But now the society ladies passed my mother and none of them spoke to her. She was sobbing by the time I got her out of the parking lot, and made a right turn on the road to Fripp Island. Language failed me, and I couldn’t think of a single word to assuage my mother’s complete social humiliation. Her sobs cut through me like slivers of glass. For five miles they continued and grew even louder and more despairing, until I finally broke and said, “Hey, Mama, do you want me to turn around, drive back to that restaurant, and throw every one of those women through a plate-glass window?”
My mother tried to gain some control of herself, because she knew that she’d unleashed a fury inside of me. In the weakest, most timid voice, she said, “You’re just like your father. A beast. Nothing but a beast of the field.”
“That may be so, Mama. And by the way, I never got to thank you for mixing my gene pool with that guy. But since you did, this is what you get. Hey, Mom, do you know that those women back there are all in my new book, The Prince of Tides?”
I felt a reawakening in my mother, a return to vibrant, ecstatic life as she asked, “Did you get ’em, son?”
“I got the living shit out of them.” And my mother giggled.
“Will they know who they are?”
“Tour guide operators moving their horses down Bay Street will be able to point them out to tourists as they come out of stores.”
Again my mother giggled, but more of a cackle this time, and said, “Son, you’re just like me.”
• • •
My mother’s two-year battle with cancer provided a new entryway into the lunatic center of the Conroy family. Furthermore, it provided a wick of time where we could measure her diminishment as she went in and out of remission during several harrowing years when the grotesque gnome “leukemia” came to rule all of our hours. I got to the point where I couldn’t mention either the word “cancer” or “leukemia” to anyone—and would say only that my mother was a very sick woman. The language itself seemed to have turned on us.
The rules of engagement became very clear to all of us. Since moving back to Atlanta from Italy, I had been a full participant in Mom’s recovery from the devastating results of her chemotherapy, when her body would react as if the doctors were overdosing her on arsenic. My duties were clear and my siblings gave me my marching orders.
Mike said to me during my first week back, “Pat, you’ve got to come and stay with Mom at the hospital whenever she goes out of remission. That may take a week or even two weeks. The rest of us will come down on the weekends to help you.”
My first call to arms came six months after I returned to Atlanta. Dr. Egan called me from his and Mom’s new house on Fripp Island, and he sounded distraught and confused on the phone. “Doesn’t look good, Pat. Though I’ve been a medical doctor my whole career, I can’t stand to see Peg suffer like this.”
“Just get Mom up to Eisenhower, John. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Yet again I arrived in Augusta to find Mom already hooked up to the poisons that eventually would kill her. Dr. Steve Madden had given her a sedative that would put her to sleep through the following day. I found Dr. Egan in the waiting room that now contained just the two of us. I noticed his hands were trembling.
He said, “Peg was doing so well. She was jogging a mile on the beach every day, walking another four miles, eating the right stuff. Your mother thinks she is going to beat this thing. She really thinks this cancer won’t kill her … that it can’t kill her. She is terrified, though.”
“So am I,” I said. “Look, John, this has been very tough on you. Why don’t you go back to Fripp Island and rest for the next ten days? You know that Mom’s going to be out of it for the next week, and it’ll give you some time off from being her caretaker. I’ll be up here every day. I’ll stay on a cot beside her bed. I’ll make sure she’s comfortable and well taken care of.”
“But she’ll need me,” he said.
“She’s going to need you to be strong and fresh, Doc,” I said. “Not like this. You’re exhausted. Let me walk you to the parking lot. When she wakes up and starts speaking coherently, I’ll call you back up for duty.”
“Will you promise to do that?” he asked. “She was so frightened last night. Just terrified.”
“Mom’s a warrior, John. That’s the first thing you need to know about her. She’ll have some setbacks, but she’ll come out of it, and you’ll know you married Athena before she dies.”
“Peg and I are already sick of this trip from our house on Fripp Island to Augusta.”
“You’ll be a lot sicker of it before all this is over, Doc.”
I sent Dr. Egan down the road toward Fripp Island; then I went down to fetch my overnight bag and the six paperbacks I had brought up to read to Mom on those occasions when she could tolerate the sound of another voice. The chemotherapy devastated her, as though a plague had entered her bloodstream. I learned there was nothing more painful for a worshipful son than watching his mother lie in her bed of anguish
and being unable to do a single thing for her. Before Dr. Madden left for home that night, he made a correction in Mom’s medicine that brought her fever down and let her sleep through the night, at least.
When we looked back at my mother’s futile rearguard battle against her cancer, she and I both agreed that the first rounds of her treatment were halcyon compared to the last fierce and killing encounters. This time, she had two days of grievous symptoms, until her compact, agile body enabled her to gather reinforcements for a counterattack. Her body was hard and game for battle. The leukemia was not a worthy opponent in those early days of siege, but it would grow into unseen power as though it were a tsunami, gaining monstrous strengths undetectable to the human eye.
She would often ask me to read to her, and I would always start out with Dunkirk, by Robert Nathan, a poem I had taught in a sophomore class at Beaufort High School and that I had loved with a passion I brought to all things British. The entire history of England seemed contained in that remarkable poem. Then I would switch over to Dylan Thomas, and James Dickey, and Carol Ann’s book of poetry The Jewish Furrier. When she was ready for bed, I’d read the books I had brought up for her pleasure. I read her The Greengage Summer, by Rumer Godden, and The Lords of Discipline, because she insisted I read it to her aloud. As I was reading through it, Mom would pepper me with questions.
“Did that really happen?” she would ask.
“Not to me, but to a boy I knew,” I’d answer.
“That couldn’t’ve happened, could it?”
“That did happen,” I’d say.
“It sounds preposterous.”
“It is preposterous. Welcome to The Citadel.”
She would go into a sweet, purring repose when she got too tired to stay awake for another moment. I would mark the book and go to sleep on my cot beside her. I felt lucky I could do this for my mother. I could feel the old resentments between us melting like wax, like altar candles reducing themselves in the name of light and heat. My resistance to Mom disappeared as her dependence on me increased disproportionately every day she woke up.