How to Forget

by Kate Mulgrew

  “What are you reading, Mother?” I asked.

  My mother snapped the book shut and, clasping it to her, said, “Very, very good.” By this, I was meant to understand that her fervor for reading remained undimmed, and that I was not to question her further.

  The next day, Sebastian reached new heights in debauchery and left neat piles of feces in nearly every room of the house. Lucy, my housekeeper, delivered this news with barely concealed rage.

  “Señora, that stupid cat need to go! What you think? He loco!”

  Lucy, who had helped me raise my children and whose custodial skills over eighteen years had been incomparable, was defeated by the cat. I decided to get rid of Sebastian as soon as he could be found and successfully wrangled. That night, I approached my mother with the news.

  “Mother, I think it’s time to find a new home for Sebastian, don’t you?”

  My mother nodded in agreement, and then said, “Me, too.”

  Sitting across from her in the living room, observing the same book lying opened to the same page, I felt my heart sink. My mother was not disappointed, she was lonely.

  “Do you want a new home?” I asked, attempting levity.

  “Yes, my home,” she replied, quietly but firmly.

  Three weeks previously, Sam had delivered my mother to me. She was happy to be in my comfortable house on the west side of Los Angeles, happy to swim at her leisure in the heated pool and to eat Lucy’s delicious meals, happy to accompany me to the market, the bookstore, the seaside. When it was time to get in the car and drive to our appointment at UCLA Neurology, my mother appeared composed.

  The neurologists at UCLA had been meticulous, compassionate, and decidedly more upbeat than Dr. Fortson. When the battery of tests had been completed and a kind nurse’s aide had taken my mother for a snack, the lead neurologist took me aside.

  “Unfortunately, the neurologist in Dubuque was pretty much spot-on. I’m not sure I’d diagnose this case as atypical, but I’d say there’s very little question that your mother has Alzheimer’s disease,” the doctor said, looking at me with a studied, almost charming, directness. He was about the same age as Dr. Fortson, but better dressed beneath his white coat, and impeccably groomed. Despite the onerous nature of his task, this doctor conveyed a polished optimism that made me yearn for the likes of Dr. Fortson.

  Homesickness is a sickness of the heart, not of the mind. It is deeply subjective and belongs, inarguably, to the sufferer alone. My mother had traveled a long way to accommodate my needs, she had endured the second round of tests at UCLA, she had accepted my long absences while at work, she had been spurned by a cat she had wanted to adore, and now she was ready to go home. I had never before fully understood the depth of her attachment to Derby Grange, probably because I hadn’t had to. Ours was an allegiance of escape, not of resignation, and yet here she was, longing to return to a place she had spent a great deal of her married life running away from.

  As she sat in a deep-cushioned wicker armchair, the late afternoon California sun dancing on the surface of the pool, a plate of Lucy’s cheese empanadas on the tray beside her, and a glass of cold, frothy Corona in her hand, my mother’s sadness was palpable. It transcended filial bonds, the life she’d made for herself, with the husband she had chosen, and my mother knew only that she had stayed away too long, and that now she wanted to go home.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  We spent the day slogging through the bog field of our mother’s affliction. Though we were good children all, there was nonetheless a wariness in the air, behind which each sibling retreated as the atmosphere thickened with unspoken resentment. Some of this hostility was aimed at me, I understood that, and I accepted it. The circumstances under which I had lobbied so passionately for the position of health-care guardian were hardly fair. It is conceivable that I had compromised our mother, but I didn’t think so. I knew only that the faces in my Brentwood living room, on that winter’s day in 2001, were clouded with confusion and distrust. My siblings resented the inconvenience of having to travel to Los Angeles for a meeting that might have been held in Iowa, had it not been for my refusal to deal with my father’s unmanageable recalcitrance. I felt strongly that his inability to accept the nature of our mother’s affliction put her in harm’s way, and that it was imperative to make my siblings understand the gravity of the situation.

  It was difficult and unsettling to see them like this. Then again, a family conclave of this nature had never before been requested. The reality of what lay ahead of us was not only daunting, but terrifying, and because of this our vision was blinkered. Fear is a starkly felt emotion, it is not nuanced, and as I looked around the room, I saw how it had manifested itself in each of my siblings.

  I thought how unfair it was to strip a family of its one great gift. We knew how to laugh, we had always known how to laugh, and now this, too, was threatened. Who would we be without our laughter? How would we cope? How would Tom manage without his antics, a clownishness so absurd that my mother was helpless to resist? If she didn’t immediately respond to his silliness, he’d pick her up, open the oven door, and shove her in. Jenny, on the other hand, brought original material to the table. In a single, brief sketch, she could capture two women in a trailer park discussing paychecks and cheese cubes with a perfect ear, and with timing so impeccable that my mother, delighted, would clap her hands and say, “I think Jenny’s the funny one, don’t you? Do it again!” How would Jenny navigate the silence? And Joe, wielding a lightning-fast wit, how would he react when his brilliant punch lines failed to dazzle, when my mother would no longer cock her head and say, “He’s not only beautiful, he’s a polymath”? Or Sam who, while appearing to play the foil, offered the laughter of release when he’d cap off an hour’s badinage with a simple, perfect irreverence, which invariably elicited a collective groan of surrender, after which Mother would pat the seat next to her and say, “Come here, my hero.”

  I recalled a time, seven years earlier, when they had all come to L.A. to celebrate my fortieth birthday, a hedonistic and gaudy event that went on for four days. On the evening of the fourth day, when the party officially ended with me announcing that I needed to go to bed and study my lines in preparation for my reemergence into outer space the following day, there were only a few revelers left. In my bedroom upstairs, I unlatched the French doors that opened onto a deck overlooking the pool and listened as the sounds below drifted up to me. At first, I could hear only murmurs and then, quite distinctly, Tom’s voice rang out, “Big Mama, you better watch your mouth or I’m gonna have to do something about it!”

  My mother’s voice responded. “Like what, Big Daddy? I ain’t afraid of you! I got Brother Man here to defend me, don’t I, Brother Man?”

  “Hell, I don’t know about that, Big Mama,” Sam shouted. “All’s I know is I’ve had about enough of your bellyaching!”

  Screaming, footsteps on the brick patio, shrieks of laughter, and then the sound of my mother being thrown into the pool by Big Daddy and Brother Man, both of whom jumped in after her.

  This aquatic revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, replete with expletives and hysteria, seemed to go on for hours, during which I lay on my bed, my script unopened beside me, smiling. I would wake up an hour early, I promised myself, and learn my lines then, because while I was prepared to spend the following day in a stupor, I was unwilling to sacrifice this moment.

  The atmosphere in my living room on the day of the family conference was heavy. It was without levity, levity wasn’t allowed, and in the realization that we had conducted a meeting for over three hours without even the suggestion of laughter, I knew that we had become a different family. The one thing that had set us apart had been taken from us, and though we would joke again, and tease, and strive to recover a flavor of the old exuberance, we would never again laugh as we once had.

  When my mother entered the living room in the late afternoon, having awakened from her nap, and found all of her children waiting for her,
she stopped, but in the sudden swift movement of bodies coming forward, of arms outstretched and faces lit with love, whatever confusion she may have felt was instantly dispelled, because everything that made sense to my mother was present in that room.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Lucy came upon me weeping outside and, because such a sight was unnerving, she quickly retreated. Moments later, she reappeared carrying two glasses of white wine, the more generous of which she handed to me.

  “You want to talk about it, señora?” she asked, sitting lightly in the chair opposite me.

  This was neither customary nor habitual, this coming together for drinks after dinner, but it had gained frequency, now that the boys were older. Lucy never fully reclined in her chair but sat on the edge of the seat, legs crossed, still wrapped in her red apron. Her black hair was pulled back into a ponytail, her dark eyes were fixed on me, and one white-sneakered foot bobbed in the darkness.

  “I’m worried, that’s all,” I said, wiping my nose with a cocktail napkin.

  “About Beanie?” Lucy asked, referring to my mother with the nickname that she felt best suited her. In Lucy’s mind, there could be only one señora, and that was me.

  “About everything, but yes, mostly Mother. I don’t know what to do, I feel hamstrung out here, and God knows what’s going on back there. They’ve got a girl coming in every day, but Sam tells me she lives in the boonies, and sometimes she’s late, other times she’s early, sometimes she doesn’t show up at all. She doesn’t have a car, so she relies on her husband for a ride and, to hear Sam tell it, he’s not the most dependable guy in the world,” I explained, taking a long sip of my wine. “I swear to Christ, Lucy, if I weren’t contractually bound to this series, I’d move out there and take care of her myself.”

  Lucy grew thoughtful, her white-sneakered foot pausing in mid-bounce.

  “I go, señora,” she said.

  I looked at her and laughed.

  “You’re crazy,” I responded. “How would you do that?”

  “I think you the crazy one, señora. The boys is grown, only you now. You need me and Javier to take care of you? You can’t make the bed yourself?”

  Stunned, I leaned forward and searched her face. Could she possibly be serious?

  “Listen, señora,” Lucy demanded. “I an American citizen, my kids everywhere—here, Mexico, Nebraska, one guy even in Iowa. Javier can stay here for now, I go ahead alone. This a really good solution. What you think?”

  “I think you’re extraordinary,” I replied, but Lucy dismissed this with a wave of her hand. The tears, censored by the intensity of the conversation, began to flow again.

  “Oh stop, señora, you make yourself sick. Everything is okay. I go to Iowa to take care of Beanie. How hard can it be? Mexico is hard, Campeche is hard, leaving five kids and crossing the border is hard, but this is not hard,” she stated, conclusively. She stared at me almost defiantly, then took an unladylike swig of her wine. This gesture, so unlike her, was her way of letting me know that whatever resistance I might offer would be considered insignificant.

  “I won’t argue with you because first, you’re right, and second, you’re stronger than I am,” I said.

  “No, señora, we the same,” Lucy declared, her voice lifting with the wine, the hour, the enormity of what had just been settled. “We born in different places, different countries, but we the same kind of person. You save my life, señora, you know that—and now it’s my turn to help you. I want to take care of Beanie. You know I love Beanie, señora, I swear to God. I ready to go.”

  What does mercy feel like? Shakespeare knew: the quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven. Whatever sins I had committed, whatever smallness I had practiced, whatever selfishness I had indulged, all were instantly absolved. The gods, present in the fierceness of Lucy’s features, in the uplifted, proud chin, in the ramrod-straight back, in the warmth of her skin and the depth of her sable eyes, had chosen to show me mercy, and it had, indeed, fallen as the gentle rain from heaven.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Covert communication was complicated, but my mother persevered. She plucked at my sleeve to get my attention and pointed a slender finger first at me, then at herself. She widened her eyes and raised her coffee cup as if we were playing a game of charades.

  “More coffee?” I whispered, intensifying the mystery of the game.

  My mother shook her head and then, using the same finger, pointed upward.

  “To talk,” she said, putting a finger to her lips.

  I understood. My mother wanted me to accompany her upstairs to her bedroom. She wanted to have a heart-to-heart, and she did not want us to be disturbed. Privacy was of the utmost importance. In the ten minutes we had been sitting at the kitchen table, her eyes had not left my face.

  “I think Mother’s tired, aren’t you, Mother?” I asked, rhetorically.

  My mother yawned.

  “I’m going to take her up for a nap,” I said, “and maybe I’ll lie down with her myself for a few minutes.”

  “Good idea, señora,” Lucy said, from her station at the sink. “But first, Pie, you need to take your pills.”

  In Lucy’s vernacular, Pie was all that needed to be salvaged from this overused term of endearment. One was either a sweetie, or a pie, but never both.

  Lucy turned to the cabinet above my father’s makeshift bar and opened the door. In the three months since she’d arrived, the house had been transformed. An order it had never known showed itself on gleaming surfaces and spotless floors, in pots and pans meticulously organized, in scented laundry folded into sensible piles, in the vase of tiger lilies that sat on the kitchen table, and in this cabinet, where the bottom shelf had been stripped of flatware and now housed two rows of pill bottles, neatly arranged. I moved to Lucy’s side and watched as she shook the pills from various bottles onto a small white plate. Vitamin B12, vitamin E, a tiny coral capsule from a bottle labeled Aricept, ginkgo biloba, vitamin B6.

  Lucy leaned into me and whispered, conspiratorially, “Beanie don’t like the pills. I give her applesauce, maybe pudding, I try to fool her, but she smart. And hard to swallow, señora, sometimes she don’t do it, she throw them out.”

  My mother’s aversion to the pills was immediately in evidence, as she pushed the plate away from her and rose to her feet.

  “Mother, just take one—for me. Will you do that, please?”

  Against my better judgment, I selected the Aricept and handed it to my mother with a glass of water. She looked at me beseechingly. Taking the pills was perceived as penance.

  Grudgingly, she took the coral pill from my hand and put it on her tongue. More disturbing than her resistance was watching the futility of the effort. Time and again she regurgitated the pill until, unable to stand it, I said, “All right, that’s enough, darling. My God, this is torture.”

  My mother’s expression was grim. She loathed this exercise.

  As I was leading her up the front stairs, I noticed that my mother grasped the handrail before she pulled herself to the next step. These were stairs she had run up a thousand times, her hand lightly grazing the banister, her step soundless.

  In her bedroom, she indicated that I should close and lock the door. This surprised me, as the likelihood of anyone interrupting us was slim. I did not argue and bolted the door with the brass lock I had insisted my father install thirty-five years earlier, when the bedroom had belonged to me and the threat of being disturbed caused persistent anxiety.

  My mother climbed onto her bed, the same bed I had slept in for most of my childhood, an heirloom bequeathed to me by Aunt Jane. Like a disgraced military general, the bed had slowly been stripped of ornamentation until it now resembled nothing more than a pleasant place to lie down. Gone was the elegant green velvet canopy, tented on four tall tasseled posts, sheltering the berth below. Gone the mahogany side frames, the pink corduroy bolsters, the corded neck pillows, the silk duvet.

>   The house was very still, now, as my mother and I arranged ourselves on the bed. Curiously, my mother did not sit cross-legged, as was her habit, but chose instead to sit on the edge of the bed, legs dangling over the side, her arms braced on either side of her. I had little choice but to sit next to her, near the end of the bed, propped up against one post. My mother’s head was down; she had removed her glasses and was twisting them in her hands. Moments passed. Suddenly, she raised her head and looked directly into my eyes.

  “I can’t do this,” she said, tapping the side of her head with her glasses.

  I waited.

  “Kitten, don’t ask me to do this,” my mother continued, slowly, turning to face me.

  “Do what exactly, Mums?” I asked, and instantly regretted the impulse to interrupt, an impulse I could not easily check when I was afraid.

  Using her glasses, my mother pointed to the wall behind me. Her eyes were fixed on a spot directly behind my head. I knew that if I turned to look, I would see nothing there, nothing but the faded floral paper that had covered these walls for too many years. But this, my mother was telling me, this wallpaper is no longer benign, this room is no longer safe.

  “Kitten, this is all I have,” my mother said, haltingly, and once again she tapped her temple with her glasses, but this time more sharply. I wanted to say, Please don’t do that, darling, but I stopped myself.

  “I have a big problem up here, and I know it won’t get better,” she went on. “My brain is all I have. Don’t ask me not to—to . . .” She hesitated.

  “Don’t ask you not to do what, Mother?”

  She stared at me for a long moment. “Think,” she whispered. Then, reaching over, she pulled a book from the bedside table and rested it on her lap.

  “Read,” my mother said, quietly.

  “Are you able to read now?” I asked.

  My mother looked at me pityingly, lifted her hands, raised her head as if straining to find something just beyond the reach of her memory. She could no longer see it clearly, not as it was, but she knew it had been there: a large burlap bag, full of library books, deposited on top of the old chest in the TV Room. Next to it, her tired leather purse, clasp undone. Busy little hands rifling through it, searching for the odd quarter. The burlap bag was of no interest to small children, just as the purse was of little interest to my mother. In the course of two weeks, the lumpy bag would have grown thin, its contents come to roost in every part of the house; on my mother’s bedside table, next to the sewing machine in The Addition, on the coffee table in the TV Room, beside and on top of the toilet, atop the round kitchen table. My mother’s books were part of the infrastructure of the house, like the long windows in the dining room, or the molding on the living room ceiling, and it was unusual to see her without one tucked under her arm. Often, she would lightly kiss the front cover of her book, before placing it under the telephone on the kitchen counter. “Good book?” I’d ask, from my spot at the kitchen table, to which she would reply, “Sheer heaven.”