How to Forget

by Kate Mulgrew

  Maybe this is what an uxorious man is like, I said to myself, observing my grandfather as he covered his lap with an oversize linen napkin.

  “How is Natalie?” I inquired, referring to his current wife, a wife who never left New Jersey and seldom, if ever, ventured outside their condo in Upper Montclair.

  “Oh, you know Natly!” my grandfather shouted, expertly reducing his wife’s name to two syllables.

  “Actually, Grandpa, I don’t know her very well, but I’m curious about something. Why doesn’t she ever come into the city with you? Doesn’t she like New York?”

  My grandfather slurped a forkful of beef Stroganoff, smacked his lips, and answered, “Oh, you know Natly! She likes her cards, she likes the club, she’s a homebody!”

  I’d met Natalie only a few times, and it was not hard to accept this explanation. She was a soft-spoken, simple woman who was content to while away her days watching television, playing cards, or having her hair done at the beauty salon conveniently located in the lobby of the high-rise where they lived. It was my impression that she was an indolent woman, and that she was in no way embarrassed to lie on her couch all day nibbling peanuts and leafing through beauty magazines. On the rare occasions in which we’d had what amounted to a conversation, she’d looked at me as if I belonged to another species.

  How curious, I thought, glancing at my grandfather as I consumed a large piece of chicken dripping with warm butter, that he is what my mother calls uxorious, and yet his wife is neither fascinating nor beautiful. Natalie was Grandpa’s third wife, and it was hard for me to square uxoriousness with the lethargic creature I’d met in their uniformly beige, shag-carpeted living room. Didn’t uxoriousness imply desire? I wondered if perhaps uxoriousness really meant a kind of insatiable need, the need a certain type of man has to satisfy in order to call himself a man. It crossed my mind that any woman would do, as long as she was essentially dull and affable. Then another thought followed, one that confounded this possibility. Grandpa’s wife before Natalie, a woman called Alfreda, was neither dull nor affable. Not only that, but she was, by all accounts, a very attractive woman. Lithe and soigné, she wore her frosted silver hair in a chignon, her features were made of ice, and in her heart there was very little room for anything that did not please her. It was possible Grandpa had married her before he had a chance to assess her character, but it was equally possible that he had no intention of examining her character beyond the need that presented itself to him, immediately and insistently. The need to have her as his wife.

  “You never talk about Alfreda, Grandpa,” I remarked, sipping from my champagne flute. “I’d love to know more about her. I mean, she was my mother’s stepmother, wasn’t she? She was important.”

  “Katy Mulgrew! You’re just like Joanie! My God, could that kid ask questions! All the time. What about this, what about that? So many questions! How’s your chicken Kiev?” he asked, wiping his mouth with the linen napkin in a gesture signifying that the end of the meal was near.

  I knew it was pointless to persist, that in his mind Alfreda had vaporized into the mists of lore and was therefore no longer meaningful. I knew, too, that Alfreda was of singular importance to my mother and that my grandfather had conveniently compartmentalized the events of the past in order to make sense of the present. When children are very small, however, they are incapable of compartmentalizing, and so the incidents that shape them and the people who discard them are forever fresh. Alfreda met my grandfather shortly after he had lost his first wife, Florence, who had died giving birth to her third child. Frank Kiernan was too young and too untried to be considered uxorious in those years, years leading up to the Great War, and too flush and ambitious afterward as he careened into the Roaring Twenties. All he recognized was his own helplessness, and a paralyzing fear that he would fail as a father. It was in this interstice of intense anxiety and uncertainty that my grandfather met Alfreda and knew instantly that he would make her his bride, if she would have him. Alfreda had smiled coolly at him and said why yes, she’d be delighted to come for lunch and meet his children. Would this Sunday be too soon? my grandfather had asked.

  Looking at the three small children, who were not much more than toddlers, Alfreda grew thoughtful. Frank, Joanie, and little Tony stood upright in their cribs and stared at her, their tiny faces sprinkled with freckles, their blue eyes alert and watchful. They were good children, attractive children, and Alfreda could see at a glance that intelligence shone in their eyes. Even the copper mops on their heads could be considered becoming, although the little girl’s cap of red curls was a bit too vivid for Alfreda’s taste.

  The future stepmother calculated that she would have to endure no more than a few years of unpleasantness, by which time she would have Frank Kiernan so completely in her thrall that he’d do anything to please her. This is exactly what came to pass, and one day the children were told that they were no longer babies, that they needed a proper education, and that separating them would encourage independence. Therefore, my grandfather had explained, Frank would go to an uncle in Florida, Tony to relatives across town, and Joanie, the only daughter, would have the privilege of attending Sacred Heart Boarding School for Girls in Reading, Pennsylvania.

  My mother went willingly. She had never trusted the stepmother with the frosted hair and ice blue eyes who had cast a spell on her father. Stoically, she walked away from the house of her childhood and into a world that would teach her how to forget.

  During holidays, my mother would return to the large Queen Anne style house in Upper Montclair, over which Alfreda presided with an authority that embarrassed my mother. At the dinner table, she sat and watched as her father openly fawned over the woman he adored. The woman for whom he had discarded his children.

  As soon as politeness allowed, my mother would excuse herself from the table and go to her room, which Alfreda had kept as it had always been, thinking this would soften my mother’s heart. My mother was completely indifferent to Alfreda’s intention, which was to win her over, and would have openly scorned this exercise in coercion were it not for the fact that Alfreda had failed to remove from her bedroom the one item that my mother coveted above all others. It was a photograph of my mother’s real mother, Florence, taken shortly before her marriage to my grandfather. In the photograph she is in her bathing suit and her hair is still wet from the sea. She gazes at the photographer (whom one assumes must have been my grandfather) with the look of one very much in love. She is not conventionally pretty, yet she is wonderful to behold. There is nothing elegant or fragile about Florence, her bathing clothes are mismatched and her wet suit bottom clings to her ample thighs, about which she appears to be completely unconcerned. There is laughter in her eyes, and shyness, but in her high forehead and strong chin there is mettle and determination. She is unassuming and vital. My grandfather had seen in her what anyone who looks at the photograph can see clearly: she was authentic and would have considered any display of uxoriousness not only silly, but wasteful.

  My mother would have sat on her childhood bed, holding the photograph, straining to remember her mother’s voice, her touch, her smell. She had been three years old when Florence died, and her impressionable mind would perhaps have convinced itself of a memory and clung to it fiercely as a way to give meaning to the image she now held in her hands.

  My mother would have lain back on the narrow bed, closed her eyes, and reached deep into the recesses of her memory until she was sure she could recall that night, the night before her mother went to the hospital to have Tony. The door to her room would have been half open, and her mother would have entered, her stomach huge with the baby soon to be born. Something in my mother’s face, some perplexity, would have made Florence laugh, and she would have approached my mother’s crib and lifted my mother into her arms and she would have told her that she loved her.

  Florence did not return home. Very little was said. There was suddenly a vacuum where before there had been a mother. How fri
ghtening that shadow must have felt, falling across my little mother’s life. How long, I wonder, did she wait for her mother to return? And how did she make sense of the sudden, awful disappearance of the only person in her world who really mattered?

  My mother never did make sense of this first, terrible grief. It was never processed, it was never understood, and it was certainly never explained. The years passed, and my grandfather married Alfreda, who unwittingly did my mother a great service by sending her to a boarding school where she made friends, discovered God, and kept her sorrows to herself.

  This beginning did not augur well for my mother. Her capacity to put her grief in cold storage was a device, not a solution. She would spend the rest of her life searching for her mother, and she would never find a suitable replacement because, of course, there can be no replacement for the real mother. This unfulfilled yearning could not be contained, it was bigger than my mother’s stoicism, it undid her stiff upper lip and began to abrade her reason, but so slowly and with such deftness that it revealed itself as nothing more than eccentricity, a quality I could no sooner disassociate from my mother’s personality than I could her love of art, her love of God, or her love of me.

  Chapter Twenty

  We lived on Langworthy Avenue, I was three years old, and I remember:

  The bright, hot sun on my naked, sturdy little body, the concrete sidewalk beneath my little feet, those feet pattering along at what I thought was a furious pace, turning to look behind me every few seconds, trying not to stumble. An injustice involving my mother had whipped me into a rage and I was on the lam. Stripping off my clothing and leaving my belongings behind, I had made my way out the front door and onto the sidewalk before she knew I was missing. I was filled with a sense of invincibility and believed that my legs were carrying me with great power and speed, and that she would see this and admire it. So complete was this sense of newfound independence that I almost felt sorry for her, sorry that it was necessary to part in this way. Still, I carried on, my cropped, feather-like hair lifted by the breeze, my face purple with indignation, my spirit rebellious. This time, I knew, she would be properly punished. My disappearance would put an end to the harsh rules imposed on me daily, and she would have her comeuppance.

  Suddenly, I heard her calling my name, and my heart raced. I determined to run even faster, and felt myself tearing down the block, my feet hardly touching the ground. She called again: “Katy Kitten Kat Mulgrew, come back here!” Something in her voice was choked with emotion and, despite an effort at coolness, I was struck by it. Dare I turn my head for a second to see that she was not crying? Would my feet continue to land on the concrete if I attempted such a trick? Again, a garbled cry, this time even stronger, and I began to worry that maybe she would fall down, in her grief, and hurt herself.

  I decided to risk it and slowed down just enough to turn my head and take a quick look behind me. My mother was not far away, but she had stopped still and was bent over, holding her stomach. I, too, stopped, afraid that she might be dying, and it was then that I saw my mother’s eyes filled with tears and, in that moment, I forgave her everything, even as she offered a half-eaten banana with one hand and, with the other, clutched her side as she sank to her knees on the sidewalk. I waited.

  Sobbing with laughter, my mother lay doubled over on the hot concrete. This sight infuriated me. Suffused with resentment and not entirely certain I had the upper hand, I planted my hands on my hips and decided to “rise above it.” This was an oft-used phrase in the house on Langworthy Avenue and one I had come to believe meant something grown-up, and good. With careful, deliberate steps, I walked back down the street toward the house and, just as I passed my mother, turned my face away from her in a gesture of cool detachment. Having half risen to greet me, she again collapsed, shrieking with laughter.

  When I reached the house, I paused to look at her, crumpled on the sidewalk in the midday sun, then walked through the open front door and closed it behind me.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Whenever my mother had a miscarriage, and according to her she had eighteen, a migraine was sure to follow. On at least two occasions, she called for me to bear witness as she baptized the fetal matter floating in the toilet.

  “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen,” she’d say, then hold the handle down to make sure all the bits of bloody tissue made it down the drain and into the sewer. We had only one upstairs toilet and perpetually faulty plumbing, so the john was constantly backing up and overflowing, which was bad enough when trying to eradicate human waste but decidedly awful when a fragmented fetus kept reemerging.

  This distressing ritual had no apparent emotional or physical repercussions, other than the predictable migraine headache, and even this affliction was borne with singular stoicism. My mother would start walking toward her bedroom and without turning would say to me, softly, “I’m having a sinking spell, Kitten. Get me a cold cloth and a ginger ale, would you, dear? And don’t forget the bucket.”

  My feet could not carry me fast enough, as I somehow intuited that the cold cloth and ginger ale were the only effective palliatives in an otherwise dark vortex of pain. When I entered her bedroom, carrying a tray on which sat a small bowl of ice water, a washcloth, and a ginger ale, a metal pail hanging from my arm, my mother was already under the covers, her face barely visible in the late afternoon light. I knew not to turn on the lamp, or to move too quickly, or to speak too loudly. The cloth was to be thoroughly saturated with cold water, carefully wrung, then gently laid across her forehead. Following this, I needed to help my mother hold her head up while she sipped from the glass of ginger ale. This was tricky because any movement, however careful, could cause a sudden wave of nausea, which demanded a hypervigilance on my part, as it was imperative that I switch out the glass of ginger ale for the bucket before she threw up all over the bed. If I were successful in this endeavor, I would stand vigil over my mother and wait quietly until her groans subsided and she had fallen into what she called a “twilight sleep,” which wasn’t a sleep at all but rather a reckoning with pain so exquisite that she needed to concentrate her whole will on remaining as still as possible. She would suffer in this way for two to three days, emerging at last looking extremely pale and drawn.

  It was then a race to the kitchen to see that the girl who worked for us had begun to prepare the only repast my mother could hold down: a soft-boiled egg accompanied by buttered toast and a cup of coffee with milk. This girl, whom we referred to as a “mother’s helper,” was invariably too slow at her task, and I would become increasingly agitated until, fed up, I would say, “It’s okay, Doris, let me do it. You go and take care of the babies and make sure they don’t come into the kitchen because Mother can’t take any noise, all right?” Doris was a well-meaning girl, and she was actually quite helpful around the house and with the little ones, but any kind of drama threw her for a loop. She was in awe of my mother, and when these episodes occurred, she did not know how to react.

  A place was set at the booth in the kitchen, and my mother would sit on the cushion and, taking the cup of coffee in her thin hands, would look at me over the rim and say, “You know, Kitten, you go blind when you have a migraine. That’s why it needs to be dark. Any light is painful—it sears through the brain.”

  I knew I should not ask questions, that what she needed more than anything was food and quiet, and yet I could not resist.

  “Is it unbearable?” I asked, handing her a piece of toast.

  My mother nibbled at the edge of the toast then, dipping it into the soft yoke of the egg, said, “It is absolute agony.”

  There never seemed to be any acknowledgment of the miscarriages, despite the attendant migraines. In those years, my mother accepted pregnancy as the will of God, a will made manifest by my father’s libido. Acceptance and appreciation are two entirely different states of mind, however, and in the evening, when his car was heard coming down the gravel roa
d, my mother moved like lightning. If she was reading a book, she threw it on the coffee table; if she was working on a painting, she abandoned it; if she was with me, she’d whisper as she ran out through the kitchen on her way upstairs, “Tell your father I’m having a terrible sinking spell and I’ve gone to bed!”

  Confronting my father with this reality was scary, and I needed to brace myself before delivering the bad news. He’d come through the back door, allowing the screen door to bang shut, and look into the kitchen expectantly. When he did not immediately see my mother, he’d hang up his coat, fix himself a drink, and then stand in the middle of the kitchen for a moment before asking, “Where’s your mother?”

  I’d look up as casually as possible from my book and answer, “She had to go to bed—she was having a sinking spell.”

  My father would allow his eyes to stay on me a fraction too long, and then he would go into the TV Room, where he had a view of the upstairs master bedroom through the small window on top of the TV Room door. He might stand there for a good two or three minutes, during which time he may well have seen the sliver of light coming from the master bedroom suddenly snuffed out, thereby precluding any possibility of enjoying his wife’s company that night.

  In the morning, my mother would be up early and busy in the kitchen preparing breakfast. What this meal consisted of I cannot now remember, as I have no recollection of ever having been served a normal breakfast. Breakfast was simply not an important meal and we learned young not to expect it. There might have been the odd piece of cold-buttered toast, and once she unwittingly bought a box of Pop-Tarts, which threw us into a frenzy so extreme that within minutes we were at each other’s throats over possession of the unheard-of treat.