How to Forget

by Kate Mulgrew

  “You see?” she said, regarding us with disgust. “Not worth it.”

  When my father walked into the kitchen, adjusting his tie and looking very handsome, we all paused to assess his mood. My mother did not look up from her position at the stove but asked him if he wanted a cup of coffee.

  “I’ll get it,” my father replied, gruffly.

  The atmosphere in the room was suddenly unpredictable, as if a line of tension had been drawn between my father pouring coffee and my mother at the stove. They didn’t look at each other, nothing was said, but we sensed our father’s obvious displeasure as acutely as we did our mother’s apparent indifference. Moments of sustained silence would pass during which we would try to pretend nothing was wrong, and yet found ourselves mysteriously reduced to whispers and sign language.

  After my father had left, placing his coffee cup too loudly in the basin of the sink, my mother would visibly relax, and into the pan on the stove she’d add a tablespoon of butter, a handful of sliced onion, and a piece of liver, which she would sear and subsequently devour. I’d wrinkle my nose and groan at the sight of the slippery brown organ meat covered with onions. My mother would smile and say, “You don’t know what’s good.”

  “Yes, I do, and it’s definitely not that putrid stuff! Why do you like it so much?” I’d ask, genuinely perplexed.

  “I crave it because I have an iron deficiency and because I know it is the one thing you kids won’t touch. Heaven,” she’d say, smacking her lips lightly.

  After she’d driven me to school, she’d put the car into park and looking out the window, as if lost in thought, would suddenly whisper conspiratorially, “Why don’t you go to the nurse’s office after lunch, tell her you’re sick, and I’ll pick you up and we’ll go to the movies?”

  This suggestion was always met with an exclamation of delight, regardless of what my scholastic obligations may have been, and my mother would be waiting for me in her station wagon at the appointed hour.

  The afternoon would be spent sitting in a near-empty darkened movie theater in downtown Dubuque, riveted for hours to whatever film my mother wanted to see.

  If it was Doctor Zhivago, she’d say afterward, “Adultery in Siberia—ghastly.”

  If it was The Sound of Music, she’d say, “I hope Christopher Plummer was nicer to Julie Andrews than he was to Tammy Grimes.”

  If it was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, she’d say, “You know, you look like Katharine Ross, only prettier.”

  And if it was Gone with the Wind, she’d look at me penetratingly and challenge me to tell her who the real heroine of the movie was. Then, without waiting for my response, she’d declare, “Melanie, of course! Completely selfless.”

  Treats were never allowed because, as she often stated with conviction, “Eating in the movies is strictly for losers.”

  Instead, we would drive to Long John Silver’s, my mother’s preferred fast-food establishment, and tuck into baskets of fried cod and shrimp, accompanied by generous portions of French fries. She’d lean across the table and whisper, “You know and I know it’s really catfish, but who cares? Anything deep fried is divine.”

  Her spirits restored, we would drive home discussing the merits and flaws of the movie we’d seen, with the implicit understanding that no one would ever know about our stolen afternoon. My mother at no time warned me to keep it a secret, as such a direct order would have been demeaning to both of us. She’d had a miscarriage, she’d had a migraine, this was her reward for having overcome them both, and who better to share it with than her oldest daughter, the one whom she had asked to bear witness.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It began when I was still very young, far too young to attach any great importance to it, and yet even then the faraway look in my mother’s eyes unsettled me. I see her standing over the kitchen sink, in the gray afternoon light, wearing her soiled apron and pretending to do the dishes. She despised doing the dishes, and therefore she washed them with a carelessness that stopped just short of sloppiness. The glass would be dipped in the murky water, then lifted and placed negligently on the sideboard, no cleaner than it had been before. She would handle the dirty dishes robotically, never looking at them, never with a view to improving them, her slender hands moving in and out of the water, her simple gold wedding band glinting on her ring finger.

  If I were coming into the kitchen with the intention of talking to my mother, the sight of her standing over the sink would stop me short. She was there, and yet she was not there. I sensed this as a deviation from the normal and would hide myself where I could watch her unobserved, stepping onto the base of the back staircase, leaning quietly against the wall. My mother’s gaze would be fixed on the view outside the kitchen window, on the cornfields and the apple orchard and the line of evergreen trees that led to a small grove, in the middle of which stood a statue of St. Francis. She gazed, but she did not focus. Hers was an inward turning, producing almost a trancelike state. It was not the stillness of her form or the stepping away from reality that so unnerved me, but the vacancy in her eyes. It was clear that she saw nothing, that her mind was at a standstill, and that whatever was causing this torpor was as powerful as a drug. My mother was inert, unresponsive to her surroundings, and lost entirely in another world.

  From the vantage point of my hiding place, I studied her face with intense curiosity, and the longer I looked the more anxious I became. Her blue-gray eyes appeared spiritless to me, no sign of life flickered in them. A fear crept over me, one that I experienced as a coldness in my hands and feet, and one that also defined the physical distance between my mother and myself as unbridgeable, existing, as we did in that moment, in two completely disparate realities. Strangest of all was the profound sadness I felt at witnessing my mother in this state, and I somehow grasped that she, too, was filled with an ineffable sense of loss. Most disturbing of all was her extreme detachment. It was as if she were someone I had never known. I desperately wanted to wrench her from this state, to restore her to the mother I knew, and yet, I couldn’t move. I was transfixed.

  When waiting for my mother to return to herself became unbearable, the time of her absence too attenuated, I would step lightly into the kitchen and, standing behind her, whisper, “Mom, what are you doing?”

  She never jumped, my interruptions never startled her, she would immediately return to the present, but she would retain a thoughtfulness that continued to bother me. I yearned to know where she had gone, what had pulled her so far away, and yet, standing in the kitchen alone with my mother, I did not ask, and she offered no explanation. Instead, she would drop the glass she was pretending to wash into the water, as if she couldn’t bear to hold it for another second. The dishes were often left like this, piled in a basin half filled with cloudy water, a dirty gray washcloth floating amid the debris.

  Turning, my mother would acknowledge me, but give no indication that I may have caught her in the act of doing something strange. From her perspective, she had been daydreaming over dirty dishes, enjoying a brief respite from the endless responsibilities of motherhood. Still, I knew that what she had been engaged in was not mere daydreaming, nor had she been lost in thought. My mother had truly gone away, disappearing behind eyes that no longer saw the fields outside the window, into a shadow-world where perhaps nothing existed at all.

  As disconcerting as these episodes were, they were dispelled by the usual bedlam at dinner, over which my mother presided with an air of tired resignation. Tucking into my portion of jambalaya, I would steal glances at her, worried that she might be considering another disappearance. I wondered if my mother’s trances were brought on by a disappointment she may have felt, a longing for something she once had that now completely eluded her grasp. Most of all, I worried that wherever she had gone, she had gone without me. I resolved to bring my mother into the present, so that I would not be left alone again, exiled to a place where I could see her, but where she could not and would not see me.


  A very effective way of pulling my mother into the present was to suggest that she have a dinner party. Although my mother was a terrible housekeeper, neither this nor her pauper’s budget deterred her from throwing dinner parties.

  Food was the least of her concerns, as she laid the large oval table in the dining room with mismatched china plates and twisted half-burned candles into the pockets of a silver candelabra. She was a skilled seamstress, and the dinner table was always adorned with a colorful tablecloth and napkins. If she were in a particularly festive mood, she would place the napkins into the wineglasses and tug them into bloom. It was an artist’s table, and by the time the guests sat down to eat, the drama was well under way, and my mother had already begun to show signs of weariness. She resisted this impulse with bravado and would initiate an argument with the guest on her right, who was invariably a priest, a painter, or a con man. If he was a con man, the argument ended in laughter. If he was a painter, it ended in mutual admiration. And if he was a tall, strapping Irishman wearing a Roman collar, it ended in romance.

  Love affairs percolated in the house all the time; it was a heady, boozy place full of low light and music, with children underfoot, a fire crackling beneath the marble mantel over which hung an enormous gilt-framed mirror, reflecting all the people at the table who, illuminated by candlelight, appeared lovelier and more sensuous than they ever could in the cold light of day. These evenings unfolded in stages, each one of which provided a stepping-stone to the next until, at last, my mother would slip from her chair and steal away, never saying good night, never saying good-bye. Again, she had disappeared so artfully that it was some time before her absence was noticed, and by then the remaining guests would have been lost in worlds of their own, with the possible exception of the Irish priest who, while noting my mother’s disappearance, nonetheless rose and moved to the other end of the table, where he pulled up a chair next to my father and helped himself to another glass of wine.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Children born into large families have a curious habit. When asked if we have siblings, we are inclined to answer in an almost military fashion and, not without a sense of pride, we call out those who have shared our upbringing. We are wont to count those who have died, as well as those who have survived. Tom, Kate, Joe, Maggie, Laura, Tess, Sam, Jenny. There’s rhythm in that lineup, if you like jazz. We never had the full lineup at once, which is a palpable regret. Tess, Sam, and Jenny never knew Maggie, and little Maggie, given only a few months to live, knew no one at all. In the Catholic community where I grew up, bewildering sorrows like Maggie proliferated, but were not considered unusual. Babies died for all kinds of mysterious reasons, were buried in tiny caskets in the family plot, and life went on.

  My father bought a small nineteenth-century estate on the outskirts of town, which we called Derby Grange. In that verdant place, on those forty acres of land, we thrived. We were allowed to run free, almost virtually without supervision. My brother Tom, older than me by a year, naturally assumed leadership and often led expeditions which, in hindsight, came perilously close to real danger. It delighted him if we were lost, he was amused by our helplessness, and for some unaccountable reason he always emerged from these harrowing adventures unscathed and undaunted. When we returned home to find our mother hunched over the kitchen table, thoroughly engaged in sculpting a miniature clay figurine, she’d say, “Don’t bother me. I’m working on Jesus.”

  “But we’re hungry,” Joe would retort, tired and irritable after having endured yet another journey into the snake-infested timberland, where Tom had convinced us that spearing frogs was imperative in case we were permanently lost and faced starvation.

  “Go outside and pull some rhubarb out of the patch,” our mother advised, intent on the microscopic head of Christ.

  In the singular dynamic shared by siblings very close in age, we were bound to one another whether we wanted to be or not. Tom’s easy personality was the perfect antidote to Joe’s pugnacity, and both of them exulted in making fun of me and did so continually until I turned on them with dire warnings of what would happen to them if they did not stop. Teasing was by far the most effective means of communication, and we developed it into a fine art. We tested one another, we shaped one another, and we depended on one another. We were the three oldest, and therefore we were entitled to form a collective that stood apart from the rest and removed us from exercising too much responsibility over our younger brothers and sisters, whom we referred to as the Smalls.

  It’s not that we didn’t like the Smalls. They were necessary to our ongoing sense of superiority and were often amusing in their own right. Laura, who was two years younger than Joe, was neither a Big nor a Small, falling, as she did, in the middle. She stood alone, and very early on developed an independence that separated her from the rest of us. As a result, her accomplishments were more unexpected; we marveled at her double-jointedness, her acrobatics, and her dazzling dance steps. She was a natural athlete, and we regarded this as both a gift and a curiosity.

  Therese Louise followed Laura, and she, too, quickly revealed a personality that was not typical. Neither Laura nor Tessie looked like the rest of us, but in entirely different ways. Whereas Laura was slim and pale, her head a mass of ash blond curls, her large blue-gray eyes fringed with light lashes, Tessie was strong-limbed and green-eyed, her olive complexion an exception in this otherwise fair-skinned, freckled family. She had a muscular little body, and supple limbs, and it was not uncommon to find her climbing tall trees. It was even less surprising to find that she could scale walls if she climbed quickly enough, plopping to the ground on her bottom, her sturdy legs splayed in a wide V. Climbing was her sport, and her object of affection was my father, who pretended impatience with her hijinks but laughed when she sprang onto his shoulders, clinging to tufts of his thick black hair. He nicknamed her Creature, but we knew we were not to use that name ourselves. This was a special nickname which my father alone was entitled to use and, although it singled Tessie out and may even have been interpreted as a sign of favor, none of us seemed to mind.

  While Laura danced, and Tessie crawled, the two youngest were relegated to another world entirely. Sam and Jenny were the babies of the family; small, curious, and unkempt, they toddled around the house in a perpetual hunt for forbidden treasure, which could mean anything from my mother’s attention to a dead mouse fossilized under the couch. Very early on, it became apparent that although they may have resembled each other physically, there was no such similarity in their personalities. Whether extroverted by nature or by necessity, Jenny soon became outspoken and strong-willed, demanding my mother’s attention and defiant if she did not get it. Very often she did not get it, and this advanced a gene that might otherwise have lain dormant. Jenny was smart and observant and quickly ascertained that a sure way to our mother’s heart was to entertain her. My sister became an expert mimic and learned to impersonate all of us, which delighted my mother and earned Jenny a place at the dining room table.

  Sam was the outlier. Although a year older than Jenny, he showed none of her aggressiveness. Instead, he was remarkably self-contained and spent hours in his own company. Sam’s happiest day came when Mother took him to see Jeremiah Johnson, a movie he loved featuring a character with whom he so identified that for months afterward he took to stalking the grounds wearing an oversize cowboy hat, a long blade of grass sticking out of his mouth. We called him Buck because he had a rather unfortunate overbite, a flaw made less and less apparent by his transformation into a quiet, questing cowboy, alone on the Grange.

  There was a time of grace, when my mother started painting in earnest, and the house simmered with life. Though she was far from a skilled pianist, when she sat and played in the early evening I stopped whatever I was doing to listen. Her fingers, long and slender, falling lightly on the keys, promised safety. Her dinner parties, more extravagant than ever and more bountiful, stretched into the early morning hours. My father grudgingly attend
ed these parties and was always reluctant to see them end. He and my mother went away for a long weekend to Aspen, where my father could spend his days on the ski slopes and my mother could amuse herself going to art galleries. When they returned, my mother seemed distracted and nervous, but I put this down to her disappointment at having to return to the domestic grind.

  Over a period of weeks, perhaps months, something had begun to happen to Tessie. We weren’t paying attention, we were busy living our own lives, so we didn’t find out until much later. We were a robust family, and ours were parents who tended to ignore complaints of constant, throbbing headaches, who did not find crossed eyes amusing, and who considered tears cloying. In our world, it was impossible to imagine that, behind Tessie’s dancing green eyes, something pernicious and indestructible had taken root.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  In the months before Tessie was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, my mother and I were busy attending to my future. We agreed that high school was a waste of time, so if I was late for a class or skipped one altogether in order to sit at the kitchen table absorbing my mother’s counsel, it was accepted as necessary. If I had been a more attentive student, and my mother had been a stronger disciplinarian, it is likely I would have had a very different future. In my early quest to become an actress, these late morning or early afternoon conclaves became imperative, and we would gather at the kitchen table, heads together, animatedly discussing our shared goal.

  “You’ll need to be classically trained, if you want to be a serious actress, and if you want to be a great actress you better get started on the Shakespearean canon. Apply to the Cherub program at Northwestern University, or the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis—they must have a summer program for kids! Get going! Whatever you do don’t give up your job at the coffee shop and take double shifts at the Holiday Inn because you know, and I know, that Daddy is not going to spring for this.”