One afternoon in 1995, while I was talking to my grandfather about things that had happened before I was born, I saw a startled look pass across his face, as if he had seen something unexpected, and, in that instant, I was sure he’d felt the speed of time. A month later, on an October night, he walked into the bathroom, had a heart attack, and fell to the floor. He was ninety. Four years later, in the late summer of 1999, my grandmother followed him in her sleep. And two weeks after that, my mother, who had moved to North Carolina in the year following her father’s death, collapsed and was taken in an ambulance to an Asheville hospital.
It was not a surprise. At her mother’s funeral, her face looked worn and gray, the color of damp ash, and she was feverish and trembling. She could barely stand. When had my mother become such an old woman? Her cough had grown nightmarish, frightening to listen to. At her mother’s service, listening to her, it was possible to feel the worry and discomfort of the people sitting in the pews behind us, our grandmother’s elderly friends from church and town, and the small handful of relatives who’d driven in a single car across the mountains from eastern Tennessee, my mother’s uncle Orbin and her cousin Annette and aunt Dorothy. After the service, my mother found her way outside the church, where her cough abated long enough for her to light a cigarette and send herself into another fit.
That night, my sister and I stood on the porch at our hotel, and I told her that I thought our mother was a dangerous person. I said that I did not want to be alone with our mother. I said that I did not think our mother would live much longer. “A year? Two years?” I guessed. Then I suggested that Terry and I get ready for bad news ahead, because when the time came it would be up to us alone to handle our dying mom, who, during much of our childhoods, had been a drunk, a woman we had known — and, I think, in our memories, in our consciousnesses of ourselves, and in our bodies, continue to know — as a holy terror.
I remember my phone conversation with my mother, just over a week after my grandmother’s funeral. It was the morning after she’d been rushed to the Asheville hospital. I was back in Brooklyn. I sat perched on a low ottoman — slumped over, as if hiding in my own house. I pressed the telephone receiver against my ear, and my mother whispered that she was ready to die, and that she knew peace awaited her in the Universe. She told me she loved me, and would continue loving me when she was dead.
After hearing that, I had a conversation with her pulmonary specialist, who told me that my mother would not recover, and that invasive or aggressive therapies were out of the question. Radiation might give her ten months to a year. If the malignancy were left to grow unchecked, infections brought about through the blockage of one lung would kill her in half that time.
“Your mother has made it clear that she intends to refuse the radiation,” he told me.
We talked a while longer. He asked me about my own smoking, and I admitted to some; he suggested that it would be better not to do it, and I agreed. I thanked him and hung up the phone, then made my way out of the living room and down the hall, passing the dimly lit bathroom and the little extra room that, before too long, would be packed and spilling over with uncrated marble-top bureaus, rolled and folded-over rugs, and carefully wrapped and boxed smaller items saved from my grandparents’ house out on McCoy Cove Road, and, from my mother’s house, old artworks and an Art Nouveau lamp and a stained-glass vase and an ivory brooch — all the various belongings that I could not part with, yet which I fear I will never learn to live with. I made my way down the hall, as I was saying, to the bedroom, where R., my girlfriend at that time, waited under the sheets. I got in bed beside her, and, after I’d cried a long time, she and I made love, and, at some point in the day, I got out of bed and phoned the airlines and packed a suitcase, and, early the next morning, I was off.
My first stop was the Charlotte airport. I called my father in Miami from a pay phone in the commuter-flight terminal. I told him how things were, and he told me how sorry he was, and then we were silent. I remember waiting for him to say something more. Or was my father waiting for me? He and my mother had, after all, been high school sweethearts. Not long ago, while sorting through a box of family photographs, I found a picture cut from a Sarasota newspaper.
“Panhellenic members lived it up this week, when they had a holiday dance at Tropicana,” the caption begins. My future parents, home on vacation from college, sit across a table from another couple. It’s the mid-fifties, and my mother has on black evening gloves; her hands rest on a table draped with a plain white tablecloth. She wears a sleeveless, backless white dress fastened at the throat with a choker made from darker fabric — it appears in the picture, though it is impossible to tell, for sure, that the choker closes with a brooch. Her hair is pulled out of the way in a hairdo that is difficult to see in detail. She wears costume pearl earrings of a sort that I remember her putting on for parties when I was a boy. Smiling, she gazes down and away from her future husband, who, sitting beside her — from the camera’s point of view, my father is more or less behind her — and wearing a dark jacket, a narrow, tightly knotted tie, and a white pocket square, leans in close with one elbow propped on the table. His open hand rests near her bare arm. But he does not appear to be touching her. Instead, he is staring at her face in profile. Frankly, uninhibitedly, he appraises her. And my mother-to-be, aware of his eyes on her, aware of being seen by him (and by the camera) — is an alluringly beautiful, coy young woman. Unless I am mistaken, she is in love.
That day on the telephone in the Charlotte airport, I listened as my father described Hurricane Floyd, at that moment racing toward Miami. Floyd was expected to make landfall with greater force than 1992’s Andrew, which had ripped apart entire districts of the city. My father was preparing his house for Floyd. He and his wife had, at that time, two old, sick cats. My father doted on the cats. He told me that he and my stepmother planned to wait out the storm with their pets in a barricaded bedroom closet.
“What?”
My father and his wife were professors at a Miami university. Surely the campus would offer better protection than their house. True, my father told me. Unfortunately, the shelters would not admit animals. I thought about what he was telling me, and then shouted, “Dad, if you want to use your body to shield your cats from a force-five hurricane, I can’t help you! My mother is dying! She’s dying!”
I slammed down the phone, showed my boarding pass at the gate, and marched onto the plane to Asheville. I was breathing heavily, and perspiring. My father’s love for his animals had undone me — and what had I done but angrily show my own powerlessness?
One way that I have for years maintained a relative powerlessness is by neglecting to keep a valid driver’s license. I let my Florida license, the one I’d had throughout college, expire after several years in New York, and learned to rely on public and commercial transportation, like a European. My sister would be joining me in two days; she could rent a car. During the flight, I stared from the airplane window at the Smokies below. It was a clear, hot day in September. The plane, bouncing on wind currents, was headed into the sun. After landing, all alone with the driver in an enormous van I’d hired to take me from the airport to the hospital, I watched the day’s light fading behind a western ridge of the same green mountains I’d seen from the air.
At Mission — St. Joseph’s Hospital, it took me a while to find my mother’s room. I lost my sense of direction and rode up and down in elevators. The old people I came across in the halls looked neither beautiful nor youthful. Quite a few were gasping for air in the rooms on the hall that led to my mother’s, which, thanks to her lung infection, was stickered with brightly colored quarantine notices.
I knocked lightly, opened the door, and peeked in. She was propped up in bed. “Mom?”
“Don?”
I put down my suitcase, walked across the room, leaned over, and, cautious of the tubes and hoses connecting her to pieces of equipment, hugged her.
“How’re you feeling?�
�
“Not great.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry, Don. Was your trip all right? I’m glad you’re here. Thank you for coming,” she said. After that we made an effort, for a while, to talk as if nothing out of the ordinary were taking place — the way people in crises will, I suppose — and suddenly she asked, “Don, are you going to dedicate your next book to me?”
My first had been dedicated to her parents, the second to my father and his brother, my uncle Eldridge, who’d died in 1992. The third, about some misbehaving psychoanalysts in a nameless city, was scheduled to appear in early 2000.
I was trapped. Obviously, she was next in line. But I didn’t particularly want to dedicate — certainly not on demand, as it seemed to me in that moment — a book to my mother. I stood in her hospital room and said:
“Well …”
“No?”
“What I mean to say is that the new book isn’t — it isn’t appropriate for dedicating. I’ve decided not to dedicate it.” What?
“Oh. Will you dedicate one to me sometime?”
“Of course,” I promised, and, desperately, went on, “It has to be the right book. Do you know what I mean? Mom?”
“I don’t. I don’t know, Don. I’m going to die.”
“Oh, Mom.”
A nurse entered the room and tried to talk to my mother about home care. My mother thought this pointless, because she had determined on her own that the cancer had spread to her brain. She hoped to move directly from the hospital to one of the Hospice facilities known as Solace houses, meant for people in the last stages of illness. I remember that my mother’s silver-haired GP stopped by on his evening rounds, but stayed only briefly. I’d booked a night at Asheville’s most expensive hotel, far on the other side of town. I had thought that I might, in some unaffordable place far removed from the circumstances defining reality, feel — what? Protected? I told my mother that I’d see her early the next day, called a taxi (which took a long time coming), and, when I arrived at the resort, found the dining rooms closed. I trekked past empty ballrooms and conference halls, and, after several wrong turns, located my room, where I stayed awake until dawn picking at room-service food, watching television, and wishing that I could open the sealed-shut windows.
The windows faced a construction project. The hotel was building a new wing. All of a sudden, the sun was up and the day’s work with heavy equipment had begun. I got out of bed and drank coffee, cup after cup. I’d arranged to meet a lawyer my mother had retained for a lawsuit she’d brought against the previous owner of her house, the real estate agent who’d handled the sale, and a Black Mountain oil-company owner. Shortly after moving in, in 1997, she’d smelled fumes. The heating-oil tank in her basement had been leaking into the topsoil. Without a clean bill of health from the EPA, her house — paid for in cash — would be worthless. A suit for damages had dragged on for more than a year, and my mother had made enemies in Black Mountain. I ran downstairs to meet the lawyer, already behind in his day’s schedule. He offered to take me to the hospital, and talk along the way. Driving through Asheville, he told me not to worry about the oil underneath the house. He told me that he admired my mother, whom he saw as a courageous person. He asked me if I’d ever married.
“I haven’t.”
“No? Why not? You ought to try it,” he said, and went on to describe his happiness in his second marriage, which had gathered the children from his and his wife’s first marriages together in one family.
At the hospital, my mother complained that her GP had not visited that day. One of the nurses thought he might be in the emergency room. I went downstairs and entered the maze of corridors leading to the ER. When I got there, I saw, through the doors to the ward, my mother’s doctor. I pushed open the swinging doors, marched past nurses, and asked him if I might speak with him. He put down his clipboard and we chatted — as if getting to know each other — and he told me, “There’s nothing we can do about your mother’s cancer in the long run, but we can give her time, and she needn’t suffer.”
“I understand.”
“Talk to her about radiation. She’s a good lady.”
“I’ll do what I can,” I promised. On my way to see her, though, I had the thought that I might prefer her gone sooner rather than later. When my grandmother died, my mother had proclaimed that, unburdened of lifelong parental constraints, she would be free at last to move to the San Juan Islands, a place she’d never visited, but which she understood to be a secret garden for women artists. Now I was having my own fantasy about the freedom to pursue happiness. All I had to do, I thought, was respect her rejection of medical interventions, and she would die by Christmas from fevers that would make her delirious.
When I got to her room, though, I told her that her doctors were not conspiring to harm her. “They’re doctors, Mom. They took an oath.” And I begged, “Try radiation?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Will you? Please?”
“I said I’d think about it.”
A Hospice worker appeared, and my mother said, “It’s in my brain! I feel the cancer in my brain!”
The woman said, “You can’t usually feel it like that,” and turned to me and said that someone would need to be at my mother’s house the next morning. A hospital bed, an air compressor and hoses, and portable tanks were scheduled for early delivery.
I could get a lift to Black Mountain, it turned out, from a friend of my mother’s who worked near the hospital.
“I have to go get things ready, Mom. They’re kicking you out of here in a few days.”
She squeezed my hand, laughed, and coughed. “Go ahead, Don.”
On the drive, my mother’s friend told me about her grown son, whom she had not seen for many years because he refused to visit her. I nodded my head sympathetically and stared out the window at the kudzu strangling the life out of trees and plants beside the highway.
“I don’t know whether your mother has told you her theories about your family. I guess she hasn’t,” the friend said.
“What does she believe?”
“Your mother thinks her father wasn’t her father. There was another man in your grandmother’s life.”
“Jesus.”
“Why would your mother say that?”
“I don’t know. What do you guess? As her friend.”
“We’re not close anymore,” the friend said, and commented on my mother’s flair for working people against each other. “It’s hard to be close to someone who gets people mad at each other.”
We were nearing the Monte Vista Hotel, on Main Street. I had to check in, watch the television for reports on Hurricane Floyd, call R. in New York and rant into the telephone, try later to sleep, wake up at a reasonable hour, and meet the oxygen truck at my mother’s house a few blocks away. If time remained before my sister arrived, I might, in the early afternoon, visit the estate lawyer (who was not, I should say, the lawyer working on the oil-spill suit) handling my grandmother’s — and, soon, my mother’s — last will and testament. In the event, I did what I needed to do (including standing on the Monte Vista lawn sometime after midnight, praying to my grandfather’s spirit for any kind of guidance he — it? — could give), and, at the lawyer’s office, in a brick house on a quiet street, I was handed a pair of sweetheart wills signed by my grandfather and grandmother in the early eighties, the second of which — my grandmother’s, already in probate — left all their worldly goods to my mother.
My grandfather did not leave behind great wealth. Like many in his generation, he had been distrustful of the stock market. Yet he’d been frugal, and had saved enough to help his family when needs arose. Before he died, he told us his intention to draw up a will that would disperse whatever remained, after his and my grandmother’s deaths, among my sister, me, and our mother. He told us he wanted to do this out of consideration that his grandchildren were now, like his daughter, adults.
“Tha
t’s not the will. That’s not the will,” I said over and over to the confused lawyer.
And later that day, when my sister arrived in the car she’d rented at the Charlotte, North Carolina, airport, I said, practically as she was opening the car door and stepping out, “Mom fucked us.”
“What?”
“She took in a 1983 will! She grabbed an old will out of the file! Leaving everything to her!”
We set up a labor routine that followed old-fashioned gender lines. My sister occupied our mother’s house, phoning nursing agencies and scheduling interviews. I commandeered the hotel bar as a base from which to contact doctors, lawyers, and the woman in charge of the money-market accounts. I saw my mother as a suicide and a cheat who would steal her children’s birthright, and I hated her, with her brain-cancer dreams and her banishment of her father, without whom she must have felt orphaned and alone, as did I — a fact that I savagely demonstrated the evening my sister and I drove west on Interstate 40 to the hospital, where we packed our mother’s suitcase, put her shoes on her feet, and rolled her in her wheelchair past the nurses’ station, into and out of the elevator, across the hospital’s expansive lobby, and into the Appalachian night.
We helped her into the rental car’s front passenger seat. I recall that I tilted back the seat for her comfort. I loaded the oxygen and her suitcase into the back, then climbed into the car. I was sitting, as I remember, behind my mother, and could see, passing through the space separating the front seats, the clear tubing connecting her nostrils to the squat green tank propped beside me like some strange new addition to the family.
“How are you doing, Mom?” my sister and I asked. “How are you feeling?”
The Afterlife: A Memoir Page 10