How to Forget

by Kate Mulgrew

  At fourteen, I was a short-order cook at Pete’s coffee shop on the weekends and worked Friday and Saturday nights serving cocktails at the Holiday Inn, where no one ever thought to ask how old I was.

  “Come on, Mother, Dad will give me something, won’t he?”

  “Don’t count on it. Your father has never subscribed to the theory that work is happiness. And by the way, Daphne darling, watch your figure,” my mother said, using the name of a character she’d found in a Mitford novel, one that allowed her to send important messages in the guise of playfulness.

  “Nobody,” she added, “likes a fat leading lady.”

  Occasionally, we would be interrupted by the phone ringing. Mother would jump as if spooked and, looking at me, would frantically mime that I should answer it. Unaccountably, since the phone was still ringing, and we were alone in the kitchen, I would mime back why? in response to which she would lift her hand and draw it slowly across her throat. I was baffled. Why did my mother regard the phone ringing as a prelude to her execution? Nonetheless, I did her bidding, only to hear Father O’Byrne’s voice on the other line.

  “Oh, hi, Father O’Byrne, how are you?” I’d ask, which was all that was needed to send my mother flying. She was up and out of her chair in seconds, pausing only to mouth “Not home” before running from the kitchen into the dining room, where she evidently felt she could eavesdrop with impunity.

  When the phone call had ended, my mother reappeared and sat on the edge of her chair, looking at me intently.

  “What did that jerk have to say?” she asked, to my astonishment.

  “Jeez, Mother, take it easy. He’s a priest, you know, and they don’t like being called jerks. But since we’re on the subject, why do you think he’s a jerk?” I asked, rising to refill our coffee cups.

  “He’s so full of himself it’s unbearable. God’s gift to Catholic mothers everywhere,” she scoffed, looking out the window.

  I poured a dollop of milk in my mother’s cup and waited for her to speak. When she turned back to me, her expression had changed completely. Not ten seconds earlier, she’d clearly been furious, but now, lifting the coffee to her lips, she suddenly appeared very young and very vulnerable. She looked into my eyes as if searching for something, then dropped her gaze and whispered, “I must be out of my mind.”

  Instinctively, I pulled back. I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to know why she must be out of her mind. The entire episode, brief as it had been, had a chilling effect on me, and I knew that our conversation about my future as an actress was over.

  When it happened again, two weeks later, the same pantomime was repeated, only this time I was annoyed and let her know it.

  “You’re acting sort of childishly, Mother, you know,” I said, when she again emerged from the dining room and again sat gingerly on the edge of her chair. “What’s going on?” I demanded.

  My mother lowered her head and shook it rapidly from side to side, as if trying to dislodge a sharp hairpin.

  “I don’t know, Kitten, but it’s awful.”

  “How awful?” I persisted, despite her evident distress.

  It was then that she looked at me directly and a shift took place, one in which she decided to take a risk.

  “I don’t know how it happened,” my mother whispered.

  “How what happened, Mom?” I asked, my own voice dropping.

  “Oh, Kitten, you know what I’m talking about. It’s agony. Like a sickness.”

  It suddenly struck me that Father O’Byrne had visited the house a lot more in the past year than he ever had before. Everyone understood that he was a very important priest and in demand at Catholic seminars and conferences all over the country. Tall and imposing, Kevin O’Byrne was a well-traveled and sophisticated priest, one who drank easily with my father, and laughed heartily. It was obvious that my father admired him, and that is why the priest was given entrée to the house at any time, and why he was so graciously received. My father’s veneration for Father O’Byrne allowed the priest every privilege, and though these privileges appeared innocent on the face of it, they were, as it turned out, very dangerous. O’Byrne and my mother under the maple tree, my father inside making drinks, leaving them undisturbed. O’Byrne and my mother walking slowly down the gravel road, alone. O’Byrne and my father, heads thrown back in mirth, and my mother’s face, white as chalk. O’Byrne approaching the front door, and my mother, seeing him, taking to the stairs but caught by my father’s voice calling, “Jick, O’Byrne is here—come on, let’s have a drink!” O’Byrne and my mother embracing in the orchard during a summer party, the kitchen full of noise, the house crammed with people, and Joe crashing through the back door, shocked and livid with rage.

  “I’d give my right hand never to have met him,” my mother said, and I believed her. From that moment forward, I was complicit in a love affair I didn’t fully understand, nor did I want to. I was intuitive enough to sense that this entanglement was harrowing for my mother, and that the shame it fomented ate at the very core of her being, but I was too young to understand it on a deeper level. My mother longed to believe, if only for a few years, that she was understood and adored, and that having a love affair with a priest was somehow the price one paid for such an unfathomable need.

  Over the following months, we devised a shorthand when referring to Father O’Byrne, one that allowed us to talk about the situation without taking it too seriously. It was my mother’s way of managing something over which she had no control, a tool she had needed to learn as a young girl and one that protected her from the intolerable nature of the truth.

  “He thinks he’s a big star, you know—big star of the diocese, with his golf tournaments and dinner invitations and every woman in town fawning all over him. When he’s on the altar, it’s nothing but a big show,” she said, working herself into a lather.

  “You don’t know that, Mother,” I countered, attempting to salvage some semblance of propriety.

  “I know what goes on in the sacristy, and I can promise you, he’s full of it.” She spat out the words. Her feelings were strung on a live wire, and I was frightened.

  “Maybe that’s what we should call him,” I suggested, pretending indifference.

  “What?” my mother demanded. “What should we call him?”

  “Star!” I declared, triumphantly.

  My mother laughed and then clapped her hand over her mouth like a girl, as if she’d been caught in the middle of a prank.

  “That is perfection,” she said, a glint in her eye, a half sob mangled in her throat. “From now on, he will be known as Star.”

  My mother gave me the impression that she wanted desperately to be rid of O’Byrne, but this was hard to square with her ongoing, passionate response to him, one that was both physical and emotional. She expressed to me her great wish that she’d never met him and, for the most part, I believed her, but there was a part of me that found her desire for him not only bewildering, but repugnant. While I could understand my father’s deficiencies and how they might dampen my mother’s enthusiasm for the marriage, I could not justify her ardor for a Roman Catholic priest. It occurred to me, only much later, that she had been seduced by the very thing that was most forbidden in her world, and perhaps this was the ultimate allure. An unheard-of secret that she alone possessed but could not quite bear to shoulder all by herself led her to seek vindication in her fifteen-year-old daughter’s eyes. As was true of most of her deeper yearnings, she was incapable of dabbling, so she continued with the priest until the day she found Tessie curled into a ball at the base of the stairs, grasping her head with both hands, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  When my mother learned that Tessie had a tumor the size of a grapefruit in her brain, and that it could not be removed without permanent damage, that this malignancy was, in fact, called a “butterfly” tumor because of the insidious way in which it had spread its wings throughout the matter within the very organ that had, only weeks before, inspire
d my sister to leap onto my father’s shoulders—when all of this had been explained and a death sentence guaranteed, my mother cast O’Byrne out and began to prepare for the crucible from which she would emerge indelibly changed.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  It lasted a long time. My mother had to endure the unraveling of her beautiful twelve-year-old daughter. Each week, something new and impossible to let go of was sacrificed, and it was my mother who served as Tessie’s guide across this minefield. She watched as the headaches increased in intensity, causing my sister to weep, and then as her vision became affected, one green eye moving fractionally, relentlessly to the right. She watched as her daughter’s mobility became impaired to such an extent that Tessie needed to be taken out of school because the other children were beginning to make fun of her unpredictable pratfalls, and this deprivation was the hardest of all because then she was consigned to home, to the isolation that sickness imposes, to the abominable acceptance that there was no way out.

  On the face of it, life went on. There were still three other young children at home, and they needed to be cared for. The three oldest—Tom, Joe, and me—made plans hard and fast, and moved on them as quickly as we could. I left home early, having graduated from high school at the end of my junior year, and moved to New York, where I attended New York University and studied acting at the Stella Adler Studio. My brothers went off to college, Tom to McGill in Montreal, and Joe to Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts. Laura, Sam, and Jenny were still in grade school, a time when children are most impressionable and in need of a mother’s care. Of this crucial element there was a distinct paucity, but because my siblings loved their sister, they did not complain. Whatever frustration, resentment, or anger they harbored (and I now believe they must have battled these feelings daily), they treated Tessie with unflagging tenderness.

  Still. Within the walls of a house that had at one time resounded with laughter, where life had for so long been lived audaciously, there suddenly existed a new and unsettling delicacy. A strange, inarticulable decorum was imposed on the young ones as a result of Tessie’s sickness, and this must have frightened them more than anything else. Though they longed for their mother, at the same time they must have resigned themselves to her absence, a conflict that undoubtedly compromised all three of them.

  There was, of course, a succession of mother’s helpers to assist with the chores, and friends were attentive and generous with their time. The disease followed a wayward course, during which there were periods of stability. Conversely, there were weeks when Tessie had been completely immobilized and would suddenly appear in the dining room as we ate, a specter floating from chair to chair as we watched in astonishment. The tumor wending its way upward in her brain controlled my mother’s actions, as well as Tessie’s. Initially, my mother tried her best to live with the death sentence that had been imposed on her daughter, but ultimately the terror of what was to come, combined with the memory of what once was, worked to abrade my mother’s nerves, and over time she developed a detachment that filled us with a new kind of fear. The two of them were linked, my mother and my sister, and they would go together.

  On my visits home, which, admittedly, were insufficient to in any way help my mother or ease her pain, I would nevertheless try to steal her away from Tessie’s bedside for an hour or two for a heart-to-heart. At twenty, I had become a professional actress, and Tessie’s battle with cancer had lasted for more than two years. I tried to entertain my mother with anecdotes about my life in New York, but very soon the subject would lose its flavor, and her eyes would assume the old vacancy that frightened me so much.

  “What are you thinking about, Mums?” I asked, putting my hand over hers. We were sitting at the kitchen table having coffee, as had been our habit for years.

  Almost wistfully, my mother looked at me and said, “I’m thinking that if your father goes into Tessie’s bedroom, I’ll kill him.”

  By this time, my mother and Tessie had moved into what we called The Addition, a partition that had been built onto the back of the original house when my father reached the limits of his patience, and wanted the chaos of laundry, garbage, winter coats, and cartons of empty beer bottles to be confined to one area, so that guests entering through the front door would not be assaulted by the sight of such mayhem. The Addition was a narrow, dreary room lined with a grimy linoleum floor, on which rested a washing machine and dryer, my mother’s old-fashioned sewing table, an ironing board, a refrigerator, a table that ran almost the entire length of the space, and a bulletin board attached to a wall that separated the bathroom, which my father had grudgingly installed, from the bedroom. On that bulletin board, my mother often tacked quotes, the favorite of which had been written in her distinctive, looping hand: Never resist a good impulse. This is where my mother settled herself and her daughter in the final months of Tessie’s life.

  The vitriol with which my mother spoke these words alarmed me deeply, and I realized that she had chosen my father as the receptacle for all of her impotent rage. He was the only person she felt she could blame with impunity—after all, he was the one who had wooed her with such tenacity, with such assuredness, whose countless letters showed a single-mindedness: I can’t offer you the easiest life in the world—you know that. But it’ll be fun and, because our love will be based on love of God, I feel confident that He’ll see us through the rough spots. If He won’t, I will. Either way you’re covered. You might as well hang up your spikes, sugar—this is the McCoy.

  He had not made good on his promise, life was not fun, and God was not seeing them through the rough spots. My father had been tried and found guilty. To compound this growing alienation, my father sold his asphalt business and, having nothing to do and nowhere to go, consigned himself to mowing the lawn for hours every day. Despite his loneliness, my mother would not speak to him, nor would she permit him access to the back room unless it had been planned in advance, and even then, these visits with his dying daughter were tightly controlled.

  In the evenings, my father poured himself a drink and settled into his place on the couch in the TV Room. Several more drinks would follow, until he felt the first wave of deliverance from the guilt that had gnawed at him all day. As midnight struck, he would stumble upstairs and fall onto the bed he had once shared with his wife, slipping into a torpor so profound that he did not wake until ten o’clock the following morning, when he knew, even before he opened his eyes, that the nightmare was destined to begin all over again.

  On a hot July morning, my mother opened the window in the back bedroom so that she and Tessie could listen to the birds singing in the orchard. It is doubtful that, in the last moments of my sister’s life, she was capable of hearing anything, but it is certain that my mother heard them, as she sat on the narrow twin bed and stared at her fourteen-year-old daughter. My mother watched as the tumor pushed its way through Tessie’s eyes, a struggle that lasted nearly two hours, and during this struggle my mother understood that the birds outside had stopped singing, and that something terrifying and unbidden was about to overwhelm her.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Immediately following Tessie’s funeral service in the front yard, my mother went upstairs to her room and locked the door. When she did not soon reappear, my father climbed the staircase and called to her. She did not respond.

  “Jick,” my father said, quietly approaching the closed bedroom door, “we’ve got to go to the cemetery now. It’s time.”

  From within, there was silence. My father began to plead.

  “Come on, Jick, we have to do this together. I can’t do it without you.”

  Minutes passed. My father rested his forehead against the hard wood of my mother’s bedroom door. His hand, placed flat against the door, was trembling.

  “Please, Jick,” he pleaded.

  As the minutes passed, my father’s anxiety turned to resignation and, turning from my mother’s door, he made his way down the front stairs and walked s
lowly to the driveway, where Tessie’s coffin was waiting for him.

  My mother waited until the last car had driven away. Then she pushed herself up from the floor, where she had been laying, and moved toward the closet. Without thinking, she pulled a few items from hangers, and stuffed them into a faded red duffel bag. Opening the bedroom door, she paused. Hearing no movement downstairs, she descended the stairs and made her way through the dining room, the kitchen, until she arrived in The Addition, where her daughter had died only the day before.

  Standing at the door of the bedroom where Tessie and my mother had spent so many weeks was a tall, dark-haired woman whose face had once been pretty. This woman, whose name I will not mention, had loved my father for many years, but whether theirs was a realized love is immaterial. What is important is that this woman, with her elegant, worn features, had immediately forsaken my father when she learned that Tessie was going to die, and had turned her allegiance to my mother. For many months, she had assisted my mother, and the two women had worked together to make my sister’s final months as tender and painless as possible. It is perhaps fortunate that neither woman could have imagined the grotesquerie of Tessie’s last hours.

  Unsurprised, my mother looked at the woman, and put her hand on the doorknob. When she opened the door, she felt the woman’s hand on her arm, and allowed herself to be led down the short brick path to her car. Opening the car door, the woman who had once loved my father kissed my mother’s cheek and said, “Good-bye, Joan. Be careful.”

  On that sunny July day, while Tessie was being interred at Asbury cemetery, my mother drove away from Derby Grange and kept driving until she arrived at Our Lady of the Mississippi Valley Abbey, where Mother Columba stood waiting for her at the top of Abbey Hill Lane.

  * * *

  WEEKS LATER, WHEN my mother returned home, I found myself pacing back and forth in the kitchen. When I heard her car pull up, the pacing stopped, and I waited. Moments later, my mother walked into the kitchen, carrying her red duffel bag. She was gaunt, and very pale. Around her head she had wrapped a large red kerchief, of the kind my father habitually tucked in his trouser pocket. The kerchief rode low on her brow and, when she had finally been coaxed to sit down and a cup of coffee placed in her hands, I knelt beside her and gently pushed the kerchief back from her forehead. Reflexively, I gasped. Her forehead was kneaded with bruises, the abrasions purple and raised.