How to Forget

by Kate Mulgrew

  When someone dies, time changes, and so it was that day. It seemed as if the afternoon had been preternaturally extended, the will of God on an otherwise bleak midwinter day. How like the caprice of nature to shift from the celebration of death over a long day into a night so sudden that I was incredulous when the men came through the bedroom door, recognizing them instantly as strangers. The men from the funeral home, come to take my father. Joe backed away from the door, as if he’d been struck. There must have been words of acquiescence, although I’ve long forgotten them, because these men moved swiftly and smoothly to my father’s side and without words or explanation of any kind, transferred his inert form into a long black bag, zipped it up, and began to carry him from the room. There was an audible gasp from the group, because it was terrible in its suddenness, and we knew that my father’s wish was to be cremated and therefore we would never see him again as we had known him. The weeping intensified as the men withdrew from the bedroom, as the women urged the children to stay behind, not to follow. But I followed and so did Joe, down the staircase so familiar to my father’s step, out through the front door into the blackness, down the brick path my father had laid so many years ago, past the swing he had hung from the maple tree, under a brilliant canopy of stars, and into the back of a hearse, where we struggled to touch one last time his feet, his head, and Joe blocked the shutting of the door until one of the men put out a hand and rested it on his shoulder.

  The hearse drove off, and I knew I would never see my father again in this lifetime, so I stood there until the vehicle had passed through the old stone gates and started its journey down the gravel road. I watched until the headlights were no longer visible, and then I turned, expecting to find Joe beside me. I’d felt him near me in the darkness all along, and even now I was sure he must be there, standing somewhere in the shadows, not wanting to be seen.

  Chapter Eighteen

  When my father died, we held the wake at Derby Grange. The event was not traditionally Irish, his body was not displayed in an open casket so “that he might face the rising sun.” His body had been incinerated and the ashes placed in a lovely wooden box. Everyone understood that the ashes given to us were an amalgamation of ashes scooped out of the crematory at the end of the day. Still, we accepted the box as the bones of our father, and spread the ashes over the front yard, in the bonfire, at the bases of trees that had been planted commemorating the birth of each grandchild. Lucy, when the box was passed to her, dipped her fingers in the ashes, made the sign of the cross, and put the ashes into her mouth. It was a striking gesture, one very foreign to the rest of us, and starkly moving on that gray winter’s morning.

  The wake was a proper party, which is what we’d anticipated, the house quickly filling with people we’d known for many years. Jenny and I applied our makeup in the upstairs bathroom, sharing the only well-lit mirror in the house. We laughed because we couldn’t help it, as if this were just another great Derby Grange party, as if our mother weren’t lying twenty feet away, in her old bed, in my childhood room, staring at the ceiling and thinking nothing. Lucy had seen to it that our mother had been safely ensconced in her old bedroom earlier in the day. With agonizing slowness, supported by Lucy on her left and me on her right, we had climbed the stairs, and when we reached the bedroom, my mother had immediately lain down. She would soon be asleep, her eyes would close suddenly, an unsettling transition from blank wakefulness to complete inertia. There would be no struggle to find sleep, no fluttering of the eyelids, no tossing and turning.

  The party had all the elements of old: plenty of booze, good music, laughter rising and falling, a paucity of food. My father would have approved. I moved from one room to the next, greeting people I hadn’t seen in years, listening to insignificant chatter and watching as the gathering gained animation, and voices were raised high above the din, some to the point of shouting. I heard, from across the dining room, “Katy Mulgrew, come over here! Come and see an old friend of yours!” The pitch and familiarity of this greeting struck me as vulgar, and I wanted nothing more than to retreat, but first I threaded my way through the throng of people and submitted to the embrace of a woman who, I knew, would not otherwise leave calmly. The banter was loud, inebriated, and clumsy. When my father was mentioned, it was with astounding gracelessness.

  “Oh, you know we all loved T. J.! Jesus, he was one helluva guy! Are you still living in New York? Christ, how do you stand the noise?”

  If my father had not died the day before, and if I had had one instead of three whiskeys, I’m sure I would have been able to exercise tolerance, but under the circumstances I found the woman’s behavior appalling and couldn’t wait to get out of there. When she turned away to talk to someone else she hadn’t seen in ages, I slipped out of the room and ran up the front stairs and down the hall to where my mother lay sleeping. Quietly, I opened the door to the bedroom.

  Lucy sat in the yellow damask armchair against the far wall, her feet on the ottoman, a table lamp illuminating the room with soft light. I put my finger to my lips and whispered, “Go to bed, Luce—I’ll stay with her.”

  “You sure, señora?” Lucy asked, rising from the chair.

  “Absolutely. I’m exhausted. Just going to crawl in next to her and pass out,” I replied, removing my heels.

  When Lucy had closed the door behind her, I slipped out of my dress and, finding an old nightgown in the closet, put it on and got into bed beside my mother. The lamplight infused the room with warmth. I lay on my side, facing my mother, who slept as if she had been painted there, without movement, without sound. Muted laughter and conversation from downstairs floated up, emerging through the wall vent like sounds from an old radio show.

  As very often happens when we are consumed with the busyness of life, a condition exacerbated by the occasion of death, we are shaken when, at last, we find ourselves useless. Some vestige of the hypervigilance I had practiced for two weeks remained with me as I lay in that bed with my mother, turning over in my mind the events that had led to my father’s wake. Notwithstanding the disease that had hastened his death, what had caused my father to so categorically renounce his life? He deliberately chose not to fight, there was no passionate pronouncement of regret, he exhibited none of the steely reserve that in the past had characterized willfulness. He had accepted his imminent death with grace and quiet stoicism. At no time did my father show fear or resist that which was clearly inevitable. Instead, he allowed his guard to drop, revealing a man whose vulnerability would not now be judged, whose endurance would be honored. For two weeks, he had lain in his bed, listening to the chatter of his children, powerless to resist their ministrations. He responded to nothing, not with so much as the hint of a smile, and yet I felt his presence, and knew that he was there. Even as he slipped into unconsciousness, I had had the uneasy but unshakable impression that he was waiting for something.

  Looking at my mother’s face—vacant, masklike—I suddenly stiffened. My parents had had no closure, and it was for this that my father must have waited, hoping that my mother’s last words to him would in some way validate the fifty years of their union. This, of course, was not to be. She had studied her husband for a moment, but she had not been perplexed when she drummed her fingers on his forehead and said, “Adiós, el señor.” Everyone standing vigil had smiled at the strange idiosyncrasies of my mother’s affliction, but not for a moment had anyone regarded her words as the death knell, and yet, that is what they were. If he was not already gone, those words ushered my father into oblivion.

  How he must have resented those final years! Crossword puzzles, vodka, and a wife, whom he had once adored, slowly and inexorably losing her mind. Propping myself up on an elbow, I searched my mother’s face for signs of stored secrets. Nothing to suggest disquiet in the unfurrowed brow, the set mouth, the closed eyes behind which no dreams stirred. She would not have been aware of it, had my father crept into her bedroom one night when, after a long day, Lucy had gone to bed and my mothe
r was alone. She would not have known that he had stood looking down at her, glass in hand, slowly shaking his head, sure that he had been right about this thing and everyone else had been deluded, impulsive, moving with unforgivable speed and efficiency to consign his wife to madness.

  If they’d just left her the hell alone, it would have worked itself out, he may have thought. Or maybe not. Having harbored similar feelings about Tessie, he understood the way of pernicious illness, and yet, this wasn’t a helpless child with an inoperable brain tumor, this was Jicky, his wife, the girl with copper hair and intellectual chutzpah challenging him from atop a barstool, the slim, surprising, nimble mother of eight children, the passionate artist with open disdain for his love of drink, the partner who amused, the woman full of laughter and play, so essentially and incurably naughty, who lay before him immobile and utterly impassive. How could this be? my father must have thought. Or, worse, silently pleaded with her, C’mon, Jick, wake up!

  The more likely scenario, and the one that expedited his demise, would have featured my father in a profoundly resigned and bitter state of mind, wherein every surge of resentment, every flush of impotence, every grief was vigorously, impatiently suppressed, and the glass brought hastily to his lips to vanquish the last drop of self-pity.

  He never left the couch, never ventured beyond the confines of the TV Room, never once considered taking her with him. He never said good-bye, and maybe that’s why the day he shattered his glasses wasn’t one he considered altogether unlucky, but was instead the beginning of his escape from under this bell jar, this untenable and agonizing place where from one day to the next he was made to bear witness to the many creeping horrors that preyed on his wife’s mind, stealing in a single hour her smile, the turn of her head, her step on the stair.

  His only defense was resistance, a powerful exercise of the will that enabled him to defy Dr. Fortson, to scorn and belittle science, to withdraw entirely behind a façade of impregnable self-righteousness. His retreat from my mother’s affliction was one of tremendous strategy and strength, almost equal in proportion to the depth of his love. But not quite. When the opportunity presented itself, he moved quickly. He measured his chances against hers and took the fast track. This way, at least, he could stop playing the game of pretense that left him utterly depleted by three o’clock in the afternoon, waiting only for the first drink, marking the threshold of a relief that would continue to elude him. This way, he would be vindicated, because she could not blame him. She would not know. She would never know.

  I would like to think it is a mystery why my mother did not immediately confide in my father that certain doubts had begun to plague her, that she was feeling slightly off-balance and that occasionally whole thoughts were wiped from her mind by a swift, invisible authority that unsettled her and forced an unnatural silence, but it is not a mystery. This behavior subscribed to the unspoken tenets of their relationship, which held as its mandate that they should never be emotionally vulnerable to each other, that such exposure could only lead to trouble and, besides, it wasn’t as attractive as the high road. They valued courage and honor above devotion, and withdrawal above displays of emotion or affection. They did not weep, they did not howl, they did not fight, they did not complain.

  Whatever burned within each of them burned deeply and fiercely, but they were not the type to roar. The drama of their joined lives was made manifest in the stoicism of their grief, the contagion of their laughter, his hyperalertness to her presence, her willingness to persevere. They were never confidants, they never paraded as intimates, and yet their sheer tenacity in the face of difficulties, their remarkable ability to rise above the nearly unbearable, their patrician pride, and their respective minds—supple, witty, unorthodox—announced to anyone who had eyes to see that they were bound to each other, and that the arrangement would remain undisturbed.

  In the end, she did not wish to disappoint, and he did not wish to be disappointed. A silence grew between them that may have been construed as a bridge, in the way of plodding sufferers everywhere, immersed in commiseration but lacking all empathy, but this interpretation would have been false.

  My parents said good-bye to each other in much the same way they had said hello, those many years ago outside a Catholic church on a rainy day in Chicago, when they were as yet unknown one to the other.

  Part Two

  My Mother

  I have always known

  That at last I would

  Take this road, but yesterday

  I did not know that it would be today.

  ARIWARA NO NARIHIRA

  Chapter Nineteen

  He was uxorious, my maternal grandfather. “What does that mean?” I’d asked my mother. I was twelve years old, and she’d fixed me with a look that stopped me cold.

  “A man who loves his wife too much,” she’d answered, and refused to say anything more.

  I could not have understood then what I understand now, and it’s a good thing, too. It would have prevented me from having even a semblance of the relationship I shared with my maternal grandfather who, when I was a young aspiring actress in New York City, would come in from New Jersey and take me and my friends out on the town. There was always a flower in his buttonhole and a kerchief in his jacket pocket, and I thought he was dapper, charming, and ebullient. Frank Kiernan spoke loudly and quickly and had a pronounced New Jersey accent. “Katy Mulgrew!” he’d shout, when I appeared at the designated meeting place, which was either Sign of the Dove on the Upper East Side or the Russian Tea Room on West Fifty-Seventh Street. There was a third place, a real joint in midtown, which he loved because it had a piano bar and low-hanging fringed lamps and an atmosphere of perpetual gaiety. We’d sit at the piano bar and order drinks and shrimp cocktails and laugh over the music and the noise and Grandpa Kiernan would ask about my mother.

  “How’s Joanie?” he’d yell, even though I was sitting right next to him, perched high on my barstool. He always referred to my mother as Joanie, something that didn’t sit right, but who was I to argue? My grandfather must have thought that Joan Virginia was a good name for a Catholic girl born to a fairly affluent family in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, in 1927. Secretly, I thought it didn’t suit my mother at all. Too dull, too square. I’d answer politely enough, though, eager to get on with the business of eating and drinking, knowing I wouldn’t get another meal like this for a long time. I tried to be engaging, bellowing anecdotes above the din, and Grandpa Kiernan in turn showed genuine interest in my passion, which was, of course, the theater. Having loved the circus all his life, he felt that the craft of acting was something shared by all people in the entertainment business: elegant ladies atop elephants, dwarves popping out of tiny cars, strong-torsoed men on the flying trapeze—weren’t they performers, too? Wasn’t it all the same magical world of make-believe? Although I took issue with this conflation of two very different worlds, I nodded and let my grandfather believe that he and I were, indeed, cut from the same cloth.

  This period, during which I saw my grandfather every few months for lunch or dinner, was a challenging one for me. I was trying hard to become an actress, and life was not easy. While I did not think of him as particularly intuitive, Grandpa Kiernan called one day when I was really at my wit’s end, and said he was coming into the city and that I should put on a pretty dress, he was taking me to lunch at the Russian Tea Room. I’d been there with him once before and leapt at the invitation. The Russian Tea Room was everything my life was not and allowed me to forget that in just a few hours’ time I’d be back at Friar Tuck’s Inn, zipped into a too-tight nylon uniform and flirting with old men in the desperate hope that they’d be moved by my extreme youth and pale prettiness and would, out of pity, leave me a generous tip. It was dark at Friar Tuck’s, loud and chaotic and full of aspiring young actresses like me, waiting tables to make enough money to pay the monthly rent for a five-floor walk-up just south of the Bronx.

  The Russian Tea Room, however, was a wo
rld unsurpassed in order and beauty, where waiters dressed like Cossacks dazzled the crowd bearing silver trays upon which sat crystal shot glasses of vodka or flutes of champagne or delicate china plates ornamented with caviar blinis. The booths were upholstered in red leather, the tables were draped in starched linen cloths, and the maître d’ preceded me into the room with a stateliness and dignity that belied my rather questionable appearance. Anyone looking closely could see that I was wearing a costume, one that had been worn too many times and for far too many auditions: gray wool pleated skirt, white silk blouse, tailored double-breasted black jacket, and a pair of black classic Ferragamo pumps. I had coveted those shoes, had saved up for weeks in order to afford them, but after six months of hard walking in weather conditions that changed with startling regularity, they lacked any resemblance to what they once were. These were my audition shoes, my good luck slippers, and it was devastating to see them fail me.

  Nothing daunted my grandfather, however, neither shabby shoes nor dampened spirits. Everything about the Russian Tea Room was evanescent, sublime, and we were to honor this exceptional ambience by sitting up straight, laughing delightedly, and cooing extravagantly over the chicken Kiev. My grandfather had long, white teeth, which he showed often and happily. It struck me, sitting there, that while there was a clear physical resemblance, I could find no other similarities between my grandfather and my mother. My mother was not loud, she did not bray, her smile was subtle.