How to Forget

by Kate Mulgrew

  Champagne in hand, I crossed the room and interrupted them.

  “It’s about that time, don’t you think?” I asked, glancing at the depleted bottles of champagne.

  “Past time, I’d say. Let’s get this show on the road. What do you say, sweetheart?” Sam replied, kissing my mother gently on the forehead.

  My mother looked nervously from Sam to me, and back again.

  “You come with me, darling,” I said, gently detaching my mother’s hand from Sam’s arm. At first, she refused to come with me, and stood rooted to her place next to Sam.

  “We need to get ready for the wedding now, sweetheart,” Sam whispered to our mother, “so you need to go with Katy.”

  With this encouragement, my mother released her hold on her son and, looking at him with unabashed tenderness, allowed herself to be led away.

  The ballroom, with its high ceiling and graceful lines, held ten tables, each of which was surrounded by ten chairs. In this way, no one’s sight line would be compromised. The bride and groom would take their place at the front of the ballroom, where a small raised space had been marked by a simple arch draped with white silk and strung with a garland of wildflowers.

  “Here we are, darling, sit down,” I said, ushering my mother to her chair. She looked at me as if I had deliberately tricked her into sitting at this table and refused to take the seat I offered. Glancing frenziedly around the room, she grew increasingly agitated until Sam appeared, carrying two glasses of beer.

  “For you, sweetheart,” he said, giving one glass to our mother, “but let’s not get crazy.”

  Visibly relieved to see her son, my mother clasped the glass of beer in both hands and settled into the chair between mine and Sam’s. Guests strolled in, searching for the appropriate table, filling the room with a sense of anticipation.

  Sam, leaning back, slung his arm around the back of our mother’s chair, which she seemed to interpret as some kind of cue, because she instantly nestled into the crook of his arm and tapped his nose lightly with her finger. Sam, playing the game, tapped my mother’s nose in return.

  “You’re a little mischief maker,” he said to our mother, who suddenly and unmistakably beamed, a gesture so unexpected that both Sam and I spontaneously laughed in appreciation.

  Out of nowhere, a pair of arms snaked around Sam’s neck and, resting her head on his shoulder, Wendy said, “Sammy, I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  Sam’s wife was short, dark, and curvaceous, with luxuriant black hair that she wore in any number of bohemian styles, each designed to suit both her mood and the occasion. For Lucy’s wedding, she wore a tight-fitting calf-length red lace dress with long fingerless black gloves and had coiled her hair into a loose bun on the top of her head, allowing long tendrils to fall on either side of her face. Her eyes had been lined with kohl, and she had painted her full lips with a blood-red matte, so that her appearance was at once exotic and sensual.

  Sam, indicating the chair to his left, said, “It’s going to start any minute.” Wendy pulled the chair out and, adjusting herself on its seat, turned to wave a gloved hand at someone across the room. When Sam lifted his free arm and placed it on the back of Wendy’s chair, my mother stiffened.

  She looked at me and, sensing her agitation, I leaned in and asked if something was bothering her. Only moments earlier, she had been smiling, a wonderful and increasingly rare expression of genuine pleasure. Now, her face had tightened, the smile had vanished, and her eyes indicated that she was not pleased with the sudden addition of this overly familiar woman with long black hair and red lips. My mother’s growing anxiety manifested itself in the uncontrollable drumming of her fingers on the table, and in the increased humming that had begun in the back of her throat and now lodged itself in the front of her mouth, unable to retreat or escape.

  In the time it took for me to process what this meant, the atmosphere had shifted. A silence had fallen over the room that within seconds had expanded into an expectation so persuasive that the assembled guests rose to their feet as if by pulled by invisible strings. Sam, Wendy, and I stood, but when I reached down to help my mother to her feet, I saw that she was crouched in her chair, both hands clasped over her stomach, her head bobbing up and down. Intuitively, I leaned down and put my mouth to her ear.

  “Mother, are you all right? Do you need to go to the bathroom?” I whispered.

  My mother did not have time to respond before the first bars of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March could be heard heralding the entrance of the bride and, standing on tiptoe and peering frantically over the heads of the people in front of me, I could just make out Javier under the festooned arch. He wore no jacket and stood rigidly in his olive-green guayabera and dark pleated trousers. His face, glistening with perspiration, was turned to the door from which his bride would soon emerge, and then, suddenly, there she was, radiant in her secondhand peach rayon dress, the wild roses in her black hair announcing her separateness, her stern face, keeper of a thousand tales of conquest and triumph.

  I had seen what I had come to see and bent down to speak to my mother.

  “Let’s go to the bathroom, Mums. Come on,” I urged, taking her by the arm and helping her to stand. My mother was uncertain on her feet, and her face, as she turned to look at Sam, registered confusion and alarm.

  “What is it, darling? Do you want to talk to Sam?” I asked, already extending my arm to touch Sam’s shoulder.

  “No, no, no,” my mother responded, adamantly, and then, clutching my hand, demanded, “Who is that woman?”

  My mother was darting baleful glances at Wendy who, in her innocence, turned to flash my mother a big smile.

  “You know who that is, Mother, it’s Wendy. Sam’s wife,” I said, quietly and clearly.

  The humming could be heard again, almost as a warning bell, and my mother suddenly stiffened. Just as I started to guide her away from the table, I heard her whimper and, glancing down, saw that the cushion on her chair was damp. I glanced at her backside and with a prickle of dread saw that my mother was wetting her pants, the dark stain spreading down the legs of her silk trousers. Even as I tried to pull her to safety, she resisted leaving the table where her son stood, shoulder to shoulder with his wife. My mother’s face, livid with alarm and despair, began to fracture, and I knew I had only a few minutes to get her to the bathroom before we would be noticed. Wrapping my arm tight around her waist, I led her out of the ballroom, up a short, winding staircase, and into the cramped bathroom, where a single shaded bulb illuminated the surroundings.

  Maneuvering my mother into the stall, I latched the door behind us and, pulling down her pants, guided her onto the toilet. She sat there, gazing at me in bewilderment, deeply shaken. None of what had transpired in the past fifteen minutes made any sense, none of it had order or clarity, and yet I recognized in my mother’s blanched face the sense of a betrayal. As she sat on the toilet, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, her soiled silk trousers bunched around her ankles, her anguish was palpable. She seemed to be vaguely aware of her incontinence, and of the shame she should be feeling because of it, but that was not the dominant humiliation. As she searched my face for answers that did not exist, something in my mother collapsed, and I instinctively reached for her hands.

  “You’ll be all right, my darling, don’t worry,” I said, gently.

  There was a pause while my mother struggled to find words, any words, that might convey her feelings. Words hung in her brain like bats in a cave.

  “The one I love,” my mother whispered, haltingly.

  I stroked her cheek.

  “You mean Sam?”

  She looked at me, deeply perplexed.

  “Oh, I see,” I said and, sitting back on my haunches, studied her. The time had come to cross over, and to do it lightly, never letting go of her hand.

  “You mean Jesus, don’t you? Jesus is the one you love, and he’s waiting for you downstairs.”

  My mother tilted her head to one s
ide and regarded me with an expression of such pity that I almost felt ashamed. I had fallen from grace because I had somehow been complicit in the betrayal that she had been made to suffer. I knew, too, huddled in the confines of that stall, that others were equally culpable.

  Wendy, wrapping her arms around my brother’s neck, had been culpable.

  Sam, placing his arm on the back of Wendy’s chair, had been culpable.

  Jesus, the one she loved, had done the unforgivable.

  He had broken her heart.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Before it skidded into murk, her mind paused at a moment of girlishness. An old friend of my mother’s, whose name was Barney Ziv, came to visit her at Derby Grange, and with him was his wife, Irene. My mother had known the Zivs for many years, and loved them both, but it was Barney whom she had met first. This meeting took place in the early 1950s in Chicago, where Barney was a young broker for Merrill Lynch, and my mother was acting as Jack Kennedy’s personal secretary during his senatorial race against Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. It was a heady time for my mother, a time of high spirits and high stakes, during which she shared an apartment with Jean Kennedy, worked for JFK, and most Sunday mornings sat in Mass just a few pews away from Tom Mulgrew, a young advertising executive. The atmosphere had been one of almost dizzying excitement, working for one of the most promising, talented, and attractive young politicians of his time, someone whom my mother had known since she had taken the Cape Codder to Hyannis when she was twelve years old and was met at the pier by her friend Jean, who was accompanied by her handsome, sun-bronzed brothers Jack and Bobby. The Kennedy alliance notwithstanding, Chicago in the fifties was full of young people seeking their fortune, a landlocked, boozy, ambitious town on the verge of greatness.

  In those days, and to those people, she was known as Jicky. The Kennedys had bestowed this nickname on my mother one evening during a lively debate at the dinner table in Hyannis. They teased my mother into wholeness, which is how she learned to read affection, and how she navigated her way through life. After a thorough indoctrination in the art of irreverence, the Kennedys had sent my mother off with an eye for mischief and a wit honed for deployment.

  There were many weekends when Jack left his headquarters in Chicago and returned to the Cape, always extending an invitation to my mother to join him because that, too, was part of the Kennedy mystique—if you were outside the circle, chances were you’d stay outside, but if you were in, you were in forever. My mother often said yes, because nothing was more fun than Hyannis with the Kennedys, who spent their days in the sea, swimming and sailing, and their nights over spirited dinners invariably followed by a movie shown in the projection room, after which someone might suggest a midnight dip in the moonlit ocean. These were times my mother had cherished, but suddenly the bird was on the wing and she found herself, unaccountably, without a serious beau. My mother regarded this as less a dilemma than a challenge because, after all, she had been schooled by the best in the arts of coquetry and found herself, at the ripe age of twenty-four, eager to swim in the uncharted waters of mature romance.

  Picture her, sitting on a barstool in the Cape Cod Room at the Drake Hotel: five feet, four inches tall, petite, gamine, with a head of thick auburn hair falling in loose waves to her shoulders, slender legs crossed at the knee, wearing a navy pencil skirt and a white blouse tucked and belted around a twenty-two-inch waist. Her small, slightly upturned nose was dusted with freckles, her eyes were sharp and sky blue, her mouth was attractive if not sensual, with a thin upper lip and a fuller lower lip. In slapdash fashion, she would have spat into a thin box of mascara, passed the brush lightly over her lashes, drawn her mouth from a tube of Russian red lipstick, and run a brush through her hair. The physical effect would have been immediate and striking, and over the course of an evening all types of men would have been drawn to that barstool, and many drinks bought and placed in front of my mother who, with her customary frankness and piercing wit, had made her preferences known without much fanfare. Shrugging, she had said, “I just don’t like the cut of your jib, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  One Saturday night, my mother had explained to me, the barstool next to hers was suddenly appropriated by a long-legged man wearing gabardine trousers, a madras jacket, horn-rimmed glasses, and a Stetson fedora. He did not at first ask my mother if he could buy her a drink but instead leaned against the counter and, studying her with amusement, said, “Woe betide the man whose jib doesn’t cut it with you, baby.” This opening remark satisfied my mother, who extended her hand and stated that her name was Joan, but that her friends called her Jicky.

  * * *

  IN THE TV Room at Derby Grange, my father is strangely absent. Barney Ziv is sitting in an armless chair in front of the fireplace and my mother is standing before him, laughing. Because we have not seen her laugh like this in a long time, Lucy and I exchange a look conveying both amusement and concern. It is wonderful to see my mother laugh again, it is delightful, but it is strategically miscalculated. Barney is now an eighty-year-old man and, while he has retained his sense of humor, his hair is gray and thinning, his eyes are tired behind expensive tortoiseshell glasses, and he looks at my mother as if this is a game that he is not fully prepared to play. His wife sits across the room on a floral armchair, nestled into the corner. Unlike her husband, she is smiling a little sadly because she understands the nature of this game, and she is silently willing him to participate.

  Without preamble, my mother leans into Barney and, plucking his glasses from his nose, perches coyly on his knee. She twirls the glasses in her hand, she tilts her head coquettishly to one side, she takes Barney’s pink silk tie between her fingers and flutters it against his cheek. My mother is surprisingly nimble and crosses her legs as she sits on Barney’s knee, so that her feet no longer touch the floor. As she swings one leg in the air, she leans back ever so slightly to gaze at Barney, openly offering her face. Barney laughs uncomfortably and shifts in his chair, but he is not so cruel as to release my mother, who has been his friend for many years and who he knows is suffering from an affliction over which she has no control. He had prepared himself for the worst, but he had not expected this, and is shocked to find that the creature sitting on his knee is in fact the girl he had met more than fifty years before, at the Cape Cod Room in the Drake Hotel. As my mother plays with Barney’s hair, I look anxiously at Irene. She returns my gaze with eyes full of warmth and sadness, and nods slightly to let me know that if this trick of memory is giving Jicky pleasure, it is just fine with her, and that I should not interrupt this happiness.

  When it is time for them to leave, my mother is plunged into despondency and clings to Barney with desperation. Again and again, he is compelled to kiss her on the forehead, on the cheek, lightly on the lips. My mother is in agony but cannot understand why; she knows only that if she lets go of Barney’s hand she will return to a place that fills her with terror. Irene attempts to hold my mother, but her eyes are fixed on Barney, who gently guides my mother down the brick path, where his car is waiting. There is a split second of unbearable anguish, during which it is clear that my mother fully expects to get in the car with Barney and drive away with him. Barney extricates himself from my mother’s grasp and puts her hand in mine, so that she is tethered when the moment comes, but my mother is frantic now and disdains Irene’s embrace; she cannot believe that Barney is leaving without her, and yet the moment comes and suddenly, inexplicably, Barney is settled behind the wheel and he is blowing kisses to my mother but she is frozen with despair, and tears she is not aware of stream down her cheeks as Barney drives off, honking his horn all the way down the gravel road until, in a cloud of dust, the car disappears from view.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  In The Addition, my mother converted the bedroom in which Tessie had died into an art studio. In this room, with its windows looking out onto the orchard, she had bookshelves installed, which she filled with biographies of great painters. On one
of the shelves, she placed her boom box and next to it, a collection of tapes arranged in two shoe boxes: Puccini, Verdi, Bellini, Berlioz, Bizet. Callas, Sutherland, Price, Tebaldi. An easel dominated the center of the room, behind which stood an old wardrobe trunk, and on this trunk rested the articles of my mother’s pleasure: black and white feathers, mason jars filled with brushes, tubes of oil paints in disarray, boxes of pastels lying in their respective cots, the corpses of butterflies and moths, some impaled on white cork, some curled lifelessly, their wings already folded into dust. Large tables stood against the opposite wall, spread with paper and hardback sketch pads, charcoal nibs, acrylics, oils, and inks of every kind. These tables often displayed death masks and shadow boxes, which were sometimes propped against a book my mother was reading. In the corner sat an armchair, low to the ground, once upholstered in green corduroy, a fabric long since transformed by wine stains, streaks of oil paint, and cigarette burns left by visiting artists and grandchildren. Next to the chair, a small table supported a rose-shaded reading lamp.

  Her studio smelled of varnish, acrylics, and coffee. The walls were covered with sketches, paintings already framed and hung, sections of maps that intrigued her. Quotes were written in her looping, elegant script, and might attend a painting or, more often, stand alone. Under a monarch butterfly pinned inside a small white box: Glory be to God for dappled things. Beneath the portrait of a middle-aged woman wearing a head scarf:

  GIVE LITTLE ANGUISH

  LIVES WILL FRET.

  GIVE AVALANCHES—

  AND THEY’LL SLANT,

  My mother loved the faces and forms of women, and those are what she preferred to paint. Two women carrying parasols, two women in intimate conversation, two women strolling on the beach. She called them “Doubles” and, predictably, women responded to them. Many of these women fancied themselves artists, and soon there developed a small colony of female painters who spent many afternoons eating lunch at my mother’s kitchen table or taking a picnic into the countryside and afterward painting en plein air. Most of the time, however, my mother sought solitude within the confines of her studio where, left to her own devices, she might lie still for hours, her face encased in wet clay. When the death mask was drying, she’d show it to me and, after a moment’s consideration, say, “I don’t know. It’s missing something, don’t you think?”