by Kate Mulgrew
As Lucy and I walked through the dining room, the large ornate mirror over the fireplace reflected the muted light of dusk, and I wondered at the stillness of the table, and at the obedient chairs grouped around it, expecting no one. We passed through the foyer, where I glanced up the stairway that had once seemed so daunting in scale and now appeared unassuming, almost modest, curving just before it reached the top landing and abruptly opening into the single bathroom on the second floor, where, for many years, eight people had been accommodated.
The Good Living Room, just off the foyer, had been converted into a bedroom for my mother, who could no longer climb the stairs. Lucy opened the door quietly, and we entered. The room was in shadow, and I could barely discern the silhouettes of chairs, of the great long mahogany coffee table that sat in the center, of the many lamps and framed photographs that adorned side tables and bookshelves, vivifying the marble counter of the wooden chest that doubled as a bar on festive occasions. Photographs, books, and paintings filled the room. Paintings on every wall, paintings on easels, paintings laid one on top of the other on every available table space. My mother’s paintings. My mother’s books. Photographs of my mother’s children. My mother herself tucked neatly away in a corner, under a soft quilt, in a well-ordered narrow bed pushed against the wall. As I approached, I saw that her eyes were open, and when I leaned down to kiss her, she looked at me and did not know me.
Even so, I said, “Hello, Mums, it’s me, Katy. I’m home.”
Still, and even so, she did not respond. Her fingers played with the bedcovers.
“I’m here, darling, and I’ll be here when you wake up tomorrow. I love you, Mutti.”
Mutti. A sobriquet bestowed on her by a German boyfriend of mine. Mother loved the sound of the word, at once whimsical and unexpected, and so I played along. The nickname that stuck, however, despite my mother’s best efforts to abolish it, was Beanie, which attached itself to her one spring day as we passed a small coffee shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan called the Sensuous Bean. “That’s you all over, Mums,” I declared. “You’re a deadly sensuous bean.”
“Oh, that’s so uninteresting,” my mother said, striding off down West Sixty-Ninth Street.
“Nevertheless,” I called after her, “you will henceforth be known as Beanie!”
Sitting on the edge of the bed, I was suddenly overcome with fatigue and wanted nothing more than to lie down beside my mother and sleep, sleep for hours, sleep without interruption, under the clean white sheets that held my mother secure. I kissed her forehead and looked again into her frightened, vacant eyes, which foraged, still, for some hint of recognition. Our baser impulses are not easily vanquished, nor can they be bent to a stronger will. They rise anew each time we see the face of the one we love, and each time we are pierced by a sliver of hope, that this will be the moment of reclamation, that ours will be the face remembered.
I kissed the soft skin of my mother’s sweetly scented face, I stroked her thinning silver hair.
“I like the pink lipstick, Luce.” I chuckled.
“She want to be ready for you, señora,” Lucy responded, standing at the end of the bed, her arms crossed in what could have been interpreted as a posture of defiance but was, in fact, the way in which Lucy guarded her sense of pride. She had bathed my mother, and washed her hair, she had clipped her nails and moisturized her skin and, at the end of these ablutions, she had applied a hint of rouge to my mother’s cheeks and lips. She had done this for my mother, but she had also done this for me.
“I’ll get up early tomorrow. You let Mother sleep, and you and I will have breakfast. Alone. Good?” I asked, crossing to where Lucy stood.
“Okay, señora, whatever you say. I go to bed now. You stay up with Señor?”
“Oh, yes. We’re going to burn the midnight oil,” I replied, kissing the top of her head. “Thank you, Luce. Good night.”
“Good night, señora,” Lucy responded, closing the door gently behind her as we left my mother’s room.
* * *
JOE WAS PREPARING to leave and rose as I entered what was pragmatically referred to as the TV Room, thus named because it harbored the only television in the house, and a modest television at that. My father, from his established place at the end of the couch, sat directly across from this television, and we had observed, over the years, that at no point had he shown an inclination to cross the ten-foot distance between the couch and the chest on which rested the TV set, electing, instead, to sit in silence and work on his crossword puzzles. The television set had been purchased and installed for one purpose and one purpose only: to watch Notre Dame football. To that end, we missed television as our cohorts and friends knew it, missed the anticipation of weekly programs, missed the idea of television as a cultural bellwether. We knew it only as a box that facilitated the projection of Notre Dame football games, and for that reason, we feared it. Notre Dame football inspired anxiety, tension, and dread. When the Fighting Irish lost, the entire house was plunged into despair. When they won, the rooms reverberated with euphoria. Tonight, the television looked awkward and out of place, and sat in its customary spot atop the walnut chest like an overweight, unwanted child.
“When was the last time this thing was turned on?” I asked my brother, indicating the television set.
“Who knows,” Joe replied curtly, looking at Dad, who was in the process of lighting a cigarette. A relatively thoughtless exercise among the smoking hoi polloi, the lighting of a cigarette could evolve into an elaborate ritual if my father did not wish to participate in the conversation, or if he wished to avoid the conversation altogether, or if he simply wished for silence. With excruciating attention to detail, the cigarette was first selected from the pack of Pall Malls as if chosen for an honorable execution. Turning the pack upside down, he would tap it smartly three times, presumably to bring the soldiers within to attention and to prepare them for evacuation. Then, he would carefully extract the cigarette of his choice with an impressive combination of delicacy and savoir faire, until he held it pinioned between thumb and index finger, where it remained until he brought the flame, ignited only once and with expert precision, to meet the little brown mouth of the cigarette. Satisfied with the effort, my father would settle back on the couch, cross one leg over the other, put his right hand, which held the cigarette, behind his head, and exhale. If he had any surplus energy, or if the hour of the first drink was about to strike, he might shape his lips into a kiss and expel three or four perfect O’s of gray smoke from his mouth.
Joe and I did not feel a need to recognize this ritual, which ordinarily we might have done by gently shouldering each other and shaking our heads, because we understood that all that mattered now was the pleasure our father could extract from it. No one in the family had ever discussed the dangers of nicotine addiction, not because we feared the repercussions such an opinion might incur, but because we had been taught that debates concerning physical health and well-being were, in the main, insufferable. Even now, Joe and I did not acknowledge the grave price our father’s love of nicotine had exacted, because it did not occur to us. We wanted what we had always wanted, our father’s pleasure, our father’s comfort and, most of all, our father’s approval. Joe, cut-glass blue eyes set in a chiseled face, stared at our father. His anxiety was palpable, and nothing could dispel this anxiety except our father’s love, the smallest crumb of which would have been sufficient, tossed by a glance, a gesture, a word. Dad looked up and, acknowledging that his son had put on his coat, said, “See you, Joe. Thanks.”
I did not walk my brother to his car, knowing that if I did so a hurried, whispered conversation would ensue, one in which nothing of any further consequence could be shared. I had in mind an altogether different conversation, one that I could not risk missing.
Chapter Six
The TV Room was hushed. My father, though smoking, was very still. I sat on the faded red and black ottoman opposite him, looking at the fireplace. Someone had sw
ept the floor of the hearth and arranged the logs neatly in a conical fashion, then balled up pages of newspaper and tucked them carefully and strategically under the wood so as to facilitate a good fire.
My father had complicated feelings about fires. He like the idea of a fire but resented the extravagance of all that beautifully cut wood reduced to ash. Tonight, however, I wanted one so badly I decided to circumvent those feelings and approach him from another angle altogether.
“How about a drink, Dad?” I asked, standing.
My father had no such complicated feelings about alcohol but nevertheless glanced at his watch, deliberated for less than a second, and said, “Why not?”
“Good. You’ve earned it,” I said, walking into the adjoining kitchen.
Even now, after a day in which he had been told he had a limited time to live, my father felt compelled to call out the words which had always preceded the offer of a drink. “And easy on the ice.”
This ritual was easier in the old days, I mused, when it was scotch on the rocks and no fuss. With his abrupt, unexplained conversion to vodka, the effort was necessarily more involved. I sighed as I pulled the ice tray out of the freezer, dropped the contents into a ceramic bowl, pulled the bottle of Popov from its frozen cot, retrieved my father’s favorite, slightly grimy glass from the surface of what was once the dishwasher but had long since been converted into a bar, released three cubes of ice into the glass, poured four fingers of vodka over them, swirled the elixir with my finger, did the same for myself, and returned to the TV Room, where my father welcomed the drink and, lifting it to mine, said, “Thanks, kid.”
“Or, as they say in West Palm Beach,” I added, “to rose-lipped maidens and fair-haired lads.”
My father, squinting, shook his head.
“What the hell are you doing in West Palm Beach?” he asked, although, of course, he knew.
“A by now rather tedious one-woman show based on the life of Katharine Hepburn,” I answered, not wanting to pursue this subject but curious to see if my father would. He did not.
“I can’t keep track of your goofy life,” my father stated, flatly.
“It’s goofy all right,” I agreed, “I won’t argue with that. But I will argue with the temperature in here, Dad. It’s freezing. If you won’t turn up the heat, could we at least have a fire?”
My father, now drinking as well as smoking, felt he could display a measure of munificence and asked, rhetorically, “Why not?”
These words, the words I had been hoping to hear, were deeply satisfying. It was now clear that my father intended to settle into the evening.
“Tired?”
“Not yet.”
“Hungry?”
“Not significantly.”
“Not ever, you mean,” I parried.
“Not interested,” he said.
My father had always disdained food and, observing his face softened by the warmth of the fire, I wondered if he had not developed this curious discipline as a result of having watched his parents indulge their respective neuroses: my grandmother, her extreme vanity and my grandfather, his unapologetic hedonism. Why else would anyone consign himself to a diet that precluded all the reasons to go on living? Those substances he allowed to pass his lips never varied: black coffee, soft-boiled eggs, dry toast, a single hamburger relieved of its bun, a small, well-done filet mignon, and, very occasionally, a dish of tapioca. Only during Lent, when my father took the pledge and practiced abstinence from liquor, did we recognize certain aberrations in his diet. Deprived of alcohol, he experienced a powerful craving for sugar, a craving that, as children, we considered patently cruel. For forty days and forty nights, the freezer was stocked with chocolate bars. Snickers and Milky Ways and Mars bars lined the floor of the otherwise destitute freezer, and to each coveted article my father had taped a warning: PROPERTY OF TJM. DO NOT TOUCH.
Once or twice in the history of this abusive practice, one of us kids, in a paroxysm of lust, would filch a candy bar and, stealing off into a neighboring cornfield, would spend a half hour of inexpressible bliss sucking madly at the slowly melting contents of the bar while mentally repeating the mantra: it’s worth it, it’s worth it, it’s worth it. It never was worth it, because the theft was followed by whole days and nights of suspended terror (we were all guilty by association), and it was only a matter of time before we heard the pop and swish of the freezer door being opened, followed by a profound silence, during which we all sought our respective hiding places, and ending with the freezer door being banged shut, and our father’s voice, deep and resonant, shouting in outrage, “Goddammit! Someone in this house is in big bleeping trouble!”
“Another?” I asked my father, indicating his drink. “The night is young.”
“Why not,” he replied, offering the glass to me.
I quickly replenished his drink and replaced it on the rattan coaster, where it had sat for years in its designated spot on the end table. As I approached the fire to give it a nudge with the poker, my father said, “Not necessary.”
A small, comfortable silence settled between us, and I was grateful for it. My father’s thoughts were well hidden behind eyes that had long ago learned to conceal emotion. He had his mother’s wonderful eyes, only his were air force blue, fringed with black lashes, set deep in a face that had once been strikingly handsome. Two flaws served to offset the perfectly symmetrical features, but these imperfections grounded the face, endowing it with character. His mother’s genes were immediately in evidence: the mouth full but contained, an elegant nose, broken in a fistfight, rendering it a Celtic masterpiece, and lodged above those slightly slanted eyes were a pair of eyebrows, thick and unruly, which defined his entire face. These were the final, bold strokes of the genetic artist, save for my father’s ears, which might be considered the artist’s final irony, protruding aggressively, as they did, from the sides of his strong, well-formed head. The ears were spared any undue notoriety mainly because my father’s hair was both abundant and wavy, showing the Irish propensity for premature graying, so that from the time he was quite young his black hair was shot through with silver and only now, in his eighty-third year, had his head completed the metamorphosis, and become fully white.
I moved from the ottoman to a matching armchair, put my legs up on the ottoman, and looked at my father. It was only eight o’clock, but on this preternaturally cold, dark January night, it seemed much later. A clock ticked in the distance, and I wondered, dreamily, if the sound could possibly be emanating from my father’s wristwatch.
“Well, this has been a hell of a day, hasn’t it?” I asked, gently.
My father shifted his body, pursed his lips, and shook his head ever so slightly. I knew that he was irritated. Profoundly irritated. His life had been interrupted, and he resented it. After years of toil and struggle and loss, culminating in the ultimate betrayal when it was made clear that my mother would never again say his name, my father had harbored the small hope that he might live out his days in a quiet, orderly, simple fashion, with coffee in the morning, a drink at night, and crossword puzzles to fill the soft, easy hours in between. That this was not to be hurt him deeply, and he considered it a grave injustice. What harm could a few years of peace do? After the unending years of children being born, the constant noise and turmoil, and then the years of children suffering and dying, when he would not have minded oblivion, after all of that had passed and at last given way to these days of stillness in the house, why should he suddenly be dealt this blow? Just another in a long line of paradoxes that had depleted my father, leeched him of his faith, and now caused him to sit back on the couch and say, “A hell of a day is right. Just wanted to finish the goddam puzzle. Evidently, I should do so without delay.”
So, he would choose stoicism and would not be going gentle, after all. This kindled in me a sentimental pride, one I had long nursed regarding my father, and with a stab of terrible sadness I realized that he hadn’t been kidding, that this was the real thing. Dr
unk or sober, he was what he was. Unchanging, and unchangeable, this character trait was potent, captivating, and dangerous. Even now, his power was in evidence. In stillness, he processed the information that had assaulted him earlier. He did not speak, he did not seek comfort, he was in no way agitated. Instead, his usual gravitas assumed an even greater dimension. My father was reckoning with the gods, and I could not leave him alone.
“Dr. Koenig seemed a decent enough guy, don’t you think?” I asked.
He turned to look at me, as if pulled rudely from a profound rumination, and answered curtly.
“He was all right, as doctors go. Honest. Direct. Not like some of the clowns I’ve had to deal with, imposing their half-baked opinions where they’re not wanted, or needed.”
He was referring to my mother, of course, and the awful nature of her disease. My father didn’t believe it, he wouldn’t accept it, and so he denied it, and went on denying it until spiders were seen crawling out of the wallpaper, turpentine was set to boil on the stove, the piano rendered mute. The fury fueling his denial was seismic, and it was felt acutely by the kind, brave doctor who made his way out to the house to pay a personal visit to my father. I had organized this visit, of course, but my father had no intention of spending all his well-fermented wrath on me, not when he had what he needed most sitting directly in front of him, the living embodiment of everything my father despised.
My mother’s doctor, Mark Fortson, was a thoughtful, levelheaded, compassionate man, who had intentionally forgone greater opportunity to serve a community largely composed of working-class people with little or no regard for the disorders of the nervous system. If you couldn’t see it, feel it, treat it with pills, or fix it with an operation, then it was suspect. My father may have received a formal education, but this did not alter the fact that he was a true product of the Midwest, a breed of man unlike any other, men whose curiosity was largely limited to sports and the weather, men who sat in dingy taverns for hours as they downed their beer, men who told jokes about their wives and seldom spoke of their children, who sought their own counsel, men who disdained erudition in its obvious forms but who accepted a man like my father, who wore his work boots and soiled khakis with pride, bought a round only when it was appropriate, and never talked down to anyone. These men feared and distrusted doctors, and while it would be hyperbole to suggest they considered them nothing short of sorcerers, it would be fair to say they avoided them until they were left with no other choice, which typically meant a wife in hard labor, an arm mangled in a thresher, or a dislocated jaw. Despondent spouses, kids with ADHD, a blow to the head from the kick of a cow were dismissed as nuisances and treated with aspirin and indifference.