The Afterlife: A Memoir

by Donald Antrim

  I was a teenager when my grandfather retired from his job as a junior high school principal in Sarasota. He and my grandmother sold their large, Spanish-style house on Wisteria Street and moved into a cramped and unattractive condominium, which they hated. After that, circumstances allowed them to become regular visitors to the western Smoky Mountains around Asheville, just east of that part of the world from which they had originally come, and, in 1977, the summer I graduated from boarding school in Virginia, they retired from their retirement and bought a derelict bungalow on Third Street in Black Mountain, intending to restore it and, eventually, move in. Would I like to join them, to spend my summer before college working on an old house? Yes, I would be happy to come to North Carolina and work on the house.

  And yet, once in Black Mountain, I had a tendency to abandon my grandparents to their painstaking and methodical, stooped-over, Presbyterian labors; each day, I fled the house in order to drive aimlessly over mountain roads that passed by indigent farms and even more indigent churches. I had no concept of work. What was wrong with me? When would my life begin? Looking back on that time, I have an impression of myself performing a kind of fitful, mild-mannered revolt against — what? Anhedonia? Boredom? My family? Or it was a protest against southern Protestantism in general, which I associated with prohibitions and taboos in a variety of forms, expressed negatively in the self-destructive or work-obsessed temperaments of, it seemed to me then, everyone I knew. But protests against the denial of pleasure bring no pleasure. In the spirit of someone with nowhere else to go, I turned the car around and returned to the house on Third Street, picked up steel wool or a rag, and found something to scrub.

  The day came when we got around to the windows. These were painted shut and badly warped. There was no question of replacing them; they would be removed, their panes razored clean, the frames stripped with fine sandpaper, or, if too profoundly rotten, disassembled and rebuilt. This was heartbreakingly deliberate work. I remember windows pulled out, holes in the house. Inside the casements lay dust and dirt, dead animals’ tiny skeletons, the windows’ rusted pulley wheels and ancient counterweights, canvas sacks stuffed with lead shot and tied off, their ropes broken. I remember my grandfather’s old man’s hands worrying the wood, delicately touching, like a blind man reading, the surfaces of things; it was slow work that he seemed determined to make slower, as if work of any sort were equivalent to an act of obstinacy. My grandmother’s style was all harshness and haste — she attacked her chores. And I remained lazy and sarcastic; the screen door was always slamming behind me. Nonetheless I was attracted by my grandfather’s patience, by the care he took with this broken house. It wasn’t that I suddenly understood the value in a job well done. Far from it. It was that for a moment — a romantic moment destined to resonate and grow in magnitude over the years — I hoped (and this may have been a fantasy that I wanted to have about the man) that my grandfather had something to pass on to me, to teach me. And I imagined (because it did not occur to me to ask him) that what he had to teach me concerned the beauty in labor that is invisible to others, work that seems superfluous but isn’t, and that no one except the worker will see or even necessarily appreciate. The windows, when they went back in, slid up and down at a touch.

  Fifteen years later, when my grandfather was nearing ninety, in the days right before he began having his heart attacks, and long after he and I had been brought together by my mother’s hospitalizations, we took drives together along the roads that led over the mountains, rambling, all-day excursions that infuriated my grandmother, who feared for his health. We’d stop on the shoulder in a hollow or a narrow valley, and my grandfather would get out of the car, unzip his trousers, and urinate; a frequent need for this was caused by his heart medication. Always, he drove. Bourbon, I suspected, was stashed in the tire well in the trunk — his guilty, exciting secret. At some point along the way, generally when we were far from home, out past Hendersonville, he might say, “Have I shown you the new stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway that goes around Grandfather Mountain without touching the mountainside?” or, “You’ve never seen the Carl Sandburg house, have you, Don?”

  “No, I haven’t,” I’d say, and he’d turn the car around, and off we’d go to our new destination.

  Today, I cannot recall those outings without thinking back to the early 1980s, when he and I took turns caring for my mother. I do not know, can’t say, how many hospitalizations she endured — four? five? — on her way to sobriety, or how frequently she quit drinking for a week or a month, attended a series of AA meetings held in smoke-filled rooms, and then went out and picked up a glass. During these years, my grandfather and I became adept at hearing, in her voice on the telephone, the specific sounds — a softly rising inflection, like a plea uttered by a child, ending a whispered sentence; or a barely audible sigh — that told us she might be feeling defeated and hopeless.

  “Your grandmother and I think we ought to drive down to Miami and spend some time with your mother,” he might say to me during one of our conversations.

  Or, if my grandparents had recently done service, I might say to him, “Mom’s coming out of the hospital at the end of the month. Why don’t I fly down and pick her up and take her home?”

  Or my grandfather might say, “Don, your mother is going to come to North Carolina for a week. She needs a rest.”

  If my mother were on her way to Black Mountain, I might head south myself, and the four of us, three generations, would come together for a brief spell as a family.

  Would it be wrong to remember those as happy times? Is it perverse to imagine, to believe, that she, in her struggle to live, in her nearly dying, took care of us?

  Of all the stories from that era in my mother’s life — the era in which I found myself perpetually on call, waiting for bad or good news from Florida or from North Carolina — one stands out. This is the story of the time she came closest to drinking herself to death.

  In the spring of 1983, she finished a monthlong detoxification at South Miami Hospital, in Coral Gables. The patients on the ward were diverse. One was an emaciated man with a long beard. He’d spent his life in the Everglades drinking whiskey. Another, a Cuban man with an enormous belly who’d worked as a baggage handler at the airport, had, each day on the job, while loading and unloading suitcases from conveyer belts and motorized carts, drunk two to three cases of beer. I remember my mother telling me that he had a wife and baby. There was a young blond guy who’d made and lost a fortune as a cocaine dealer; until entering the hospital, he’d carried thousands of dollars in his pockets. And I remember an aeronautical engineer who’d retired to the Florida Keys. According to my mother, he later piloted a plane of his own design into the Gulf of Mexico.

  But that’s not the story I mean to tell. The story I’m thinking of begins on a Saturday night in New York. I was with friends at the Madison Pub, a bar on the Upper East Side. It was early, still light out. We’d ordered a round of drinks — I was nursing a Manhattan, of all things — and it crossed my mind to call my mother and see how she was getting on. There was a pay phone at the rear of the bar. I excused myself, went back, and dialed her number. It was a collect call. Her phone rang a dozen times before the operator broke in and suggested that I try later. I rejoined my friends but could not enjoy myself. Eventually I went home to my apartment, where I called her again. The phone rang and rang. I’m not sure why I did not assume — it would have been logical — that she was out for the evening. Why did I let the phone ring? I was right, though. She picked up.

  I waited for her voice.

  “Mom? Are you there? Mom?”

  After a long moment, she made a crying noise. The receiver clattered — did she drop it? — and the line disconnected. It was a few minutes past eight o’clock. I called my grandfather in Black Mountain and explained to him that I had to go to Miami.

  “Tonight,” I said.

  At that time in my life I could not have considered any possibility but goi
ng to her, yet could not have afforded plane fare without his help. He promised that he would have a ticket waiting at La Guardia airport. I phoned my mother again, and her answering machine picked up. After the beep, I cried, “I’m coming, Mom!” I threw some shirts in a suitcase, locked the apartment behind me, and ran down the stairs, out of the building, and into the street, where I collided with a taxi. I bounced off its side as it rolled to a stop, and a rear tire almost ran over my foot. I jumped into the back and asked to be taken to the airport as fast as possible. The driver turned and asked, “Hey, are you all right?” and I panted, “I’m fine, I’m fine.” I rolled down the window and took deep breaths of air. At the airport, I ran to the counter of the airline my grandfather always used. The ticket was waiting. At the gate, the flight was boarding. We took off shortly after ten, and, sometime around one o’clock, the plane landed in Miami. I waited for my suitcase to appear on the baggage carousel, then went to the taxi stand, got a taxi, and gave the driver my mother’s address. As I remember things now, she was living in an apartment that I had never before visited. But is this right? Surely, on earlier trips, I had stayed with her in the very place that I was now speeding toward. Have my memories converged to make some new, universal memory? The taxi headed south, then west. After thirty minutes, we stopped at a newly built duplex townhouse, one in a series of identical two-story buildings on a numbered street in a nondescript neighborhood. I paid the driver, grabbed my luggage, and started up the walkway. The lights were on in my mother’s house, and the front door was hanging open. Strange. Had she heard my voice when, earlier in the night, I called to her through her phone answering machine? Had she left the door open for me? Near the entryway stood a couple of empty wine bottles. They looked as if they’d been set out for the milkman. Bottles lay on their sides on the living-room floor. More stood on the kitchen counters. I stood in the brightly lit living room, calling, “Mom? Mom?” It was two in the morning and the house smelled awful. The kitty litter had not been changed, and my mother’s white cat, Flora, had shat on the carpet. “Mom?” I called, and heard movement overhead, a footstep.

  She was at the top of the stairs.

  I saw her feet. Then I saw the hem of her nightgown. She came down one step at a time. Little by little, she appeared. She held the bannister. She lowered herself halfway down the stairs and, with both feet on one step, and with her hands gripping the railing, turned to peer out over the living room.

  She looked to the left and the right, and up and down, slowly. “Mom, it’s me,” I said, but she did not seem to hear.

  “Mom?”

  “Who?” she whispered.

  As my mother aged, and particularly during the period when she was sick with cancer, I would grow accustomed to seeing her frightened, or helpless, or frail; she could look, at times, like a stranger to me. That night, I had the feeling that she was, even as she stood on the stairs, dying. What did she see, looking at me? She did not see me. I don’t remember how many times I said, “It’s me, Mom,” before she turned and, tugging with her arms against the bannister, went back up the stairs. It was as if my arrival had been part of her dreams, or as if she’d heard a noise, come down to investigate, and found nothing. After a moment, I heard her walking overhead. I followed her up the steps.

  She was lying in bed, shivering. I pulled the sheet and bedspread over her. Beginning with her hands, one, then the other, I re-created, from memory, the massage she’d given me when I was a boy in Tallahassee and I’d had my asthma attacks. She had come into my room and whispered, “Easy, honey. You’re going to be all right. I’m here.” She would massage my back, my arms, and my hands, pressing her thumbs into my palms, then kneading her way up my arms to my shoulders. She pounded my shoulder blades and my back, in order to loosen the congestion blocking my lungs. Before she finished, she would retrace her movements and hold my hands in hers once more. I remember feeling that she was squeezing the fear right out of me, pushing my distress down my arms and out my fingertips; and I remember that my panic would subside when she held me, and, as the asthma pills took effect, and even as my breathing remained difficult, I could close my eyes and sleep.

  That night in Miami, her hands were clenched — I had to pry them open — and she was sweating. Her skin, her unwashed nightgown, the damp sheets on the bed, the room itself, smelled of alcohol and nicotine. I rubbed her neck and shoulders, and lightly pressed the heels of my hands against her back. Later in the night she became aware of who I was, and, in a few quiet words, let me know that she’d been hallucinating. Dragons and other monsters flew at her from the corners of her bedroom. I remember looking around, trying to picture her visions. What would it be like to watch black serpents crawl from behind a chair or a dresser? I sat beside her on the bed and whispered to her that I wouldn’t let the monsters hurt her.

  Sometime after four, she slept. I got up, turned off the light, and closed the bedroom door. No, I must have left the door open a tiny bit, just in case. I went downstairs and cleaned the dishes she’d left in the sink and on the counters. I changed the cat litter and put new food and fresh water in the bowls on the kitchen floor. I gathered bottles and threw them in the trash. There were over twenty. She’d had them delivered.

  I stayed a week. She remained in bed for much of it. I went to a store and bought food. She sat against the pillows, and I fed her soup, soft-boiled eggs, and canned peas and corn. She refused a trip to the hospital or the doctor. Instead, when she was able, near the end of my trip, after she’d recovered enough strength, she got in her car and took herself back to Alcoholics Anonymous.

  During the two decades since then, I have often thought of my mother in terms of diseases and symptoms. Ever since she’d been a girl in Tennessee, her life had been marked by illness. Illness defined her relationship with her own mother, whom she outlived by only a year, and, sadly, illness defined her relationship with me. That she was, throughout my childhood, sick, the nightly victim of a terrifying Jekyll-and-Hyde transmutation, I learned to take for granted, even as her grandest symptoms, having become in the eyes of her family more or less expectable, even normative, seemed almost to vanish inside the stormy routines of her, and our, everyday life.

  In recent years I have noted how surviving children can find themselves reappraising their mothers and fathers, who might appear braver, stronger, and more beneficent in death than in life; and maybe it is true that, as time goes on, and we, their children, survive and lament their passing, we nonetheless continue in the hope that we will one day truly know our parents, as they will know us.

  Near her life’s close, I lost the fortitude, the ability, the heart to be with my mother. For a time, I referred to her, in thought and in conversation with others, not as my mother but as Louanne. Her parents had sometimes called her by this name, but my father and my parents’ circle of friends always knew her simply as Lou. In thinking of her as Louanne, I pretended to an objectivity of perspective that I did not, nor will ever, possess, and, in doing so, I pretended to myself that the coming loss of her would not hurt, and that in the absence of suffering I would go forward, a free man.

  A week after I flew by night to watch her descend, in delirium tremens, the staircase in her Miami duplex, I went into her study, where she kept sewing supplies, files holding papers that she’d accumulated during her years of teaching, and her typewriter. In an hour, she would drive me to the airport, and I would return to New York. I sat at the typewriter and wrote her a note. It was brief. I told her that I loved her, and that others loved her, and that we who loved her wanted her to live. I hoped she’d make it. I left the note scrolled in the typewriter. Many years later, she told me that she’d put it in a safe place and kept it. She never drank again.

  Five years have passed since her death. I’m not sure whether I can say, now, what her Christian name means to me. She was my mother. Her ashes have yet to be scattered. They remain, to this day, in a box in a closet at my sister’s house. Maybe before long Terry will fly w
ith them to Charlotte, North Carolina, where, at the airport, I’ll meet her. We’ll join up at the car-rental desk, get a car, put our mother’s ashes in the backseat and our suitcases in the trunk, and head to Bridges, in Shelby, for barbecue, then continue west toward the Smoky Mountains. We’ll drive past Chimney Rock, around Lake Lure, up past Old Fort, and down into Black Mountain, where we’ll stay a night or two at the Monte Vista, the hotel that was our base when our mother was dying. I’d like to sit on the Monte Vista’s porch one more time and gaze out at the mountains known locally as the Seven Sisters, before getting up and continuing on highways bordered with kudzu and corn, gas stations and pecan emporia, horse farms and flood canals, office parks and ocean resorts, straight through South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, all the way to the Keys, to Islamorada, where, on the Atlantic side of the island, there is a beachfront lodge that my mother loved. I hope to go there, take the ashes out of the car, and, with my sister beside me, walk to the water with them.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For their support and encouragement during the writing of this book, the author thanks Jonathan Franzen, Nicholas Dawidoff, Allan Gurganus, Jeffrey Eugenides, David Means, Melora Wolff, Matthew Klam, Christine Hiebert, M. E. Bowles, Janice Deaner, Pamela Leo, Amy Azzarito, Melanie Jackson, and Jane Shapiro. Thanks to Andrew Wylie, Tracy Bohan, Elena Schneider, Katherine Marino, and Amelia Lester of the Wylie Agency; and to Jonathan Galassi, Lorin Stein, Kevin Doughten, Lisa Silverman, and Annie Wedekind of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. My thanks to Deborah Treisman, David Remnick, Bill Buford, Dorothy Wickenden, Field Maloney, and Rhonda Sherman. I thank the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Last, I am grateful to my family for their tolerance and understanding, and I am thankful for the generous and loving support of Fran Dilustro.