How to Forget

by Kate Mulgrew

  The death masks and the shadow boxes were diversions, fanciful departures from her driving passion, which was women. There was the odd rendering of a bishop staring out from beneath his imposing miter, or a Sicilian peasant in rough pastel, or a trapeze artist in midair. But in every corner of the studio, covering every inch of wall space, hung paintings of women. The Doubles proliferated like daffodils, and I would spend long minutes examining them. They spoke to and about my mother’s romantic nature, and of her deepest longings. These small paintings revealed the intensity of female friendship, the beauty and grace of the female body, unburdened, lissome, ignorant of grief. My mother sent most of these Doubles to her best friend, Jean Kennedy Smith who, many years after my mother’s death returned all of them to me with this note: Your mother gave these to me over the years but now I think it’s time that you should have them.

  In her art, she was searching, always searching. Among the hundreds of faces of women that she painted, she was looking for the one face she could never find, and this is why her talent deepened so quickly. There was an urgency behind each portrait, and a deftness, demanding a response.

  At her last solo art show in Dubuque, my mother dressed in her uniform of black silk trousers and cream blouse, every painting was sold. The gallery on Main Street was crowded with all of the people who had known my mother well, many from the time she had first arrived in that foreign place, many more drawn to my mother over the years because hers was a different conversation, one they were hungry for. My mother stood in the middle of the gallery, her face suffused with pleasure, her glass half filled with beer, fingering her Mikimoto pearls and sighing as one red dot after another appeared until, finally, she looked at me, and winked.

  * * *

  ALTHOUGH SHE COULD not have known it at the time, my mother gave her last painting to me. Uncertainly, she handed the shadow box to me, and watched me closely as I studied it. I observed the figure of a woman, concealed behind glass, sitting on a staircase and peering through the spindles of a balustrade. The woman is older, her hair is short, dark, and unkempt, she wears a soiled apron, her features are indistinct, almost blurred. Upon closer inspection, it is clear that the woman is clinging to the spindles, with both hands, her face almost pressed against them. Then my eye is drawn to the lower right corner of the shadow box, where it appears the artist may have made a mistake. With a sharp intake of breath, it dawns on me that this is not a mistake at all, but very much the artist’s intention.

  A large black moth, captured in the woods and placed in a jar to die, had been removed from its death chamber and impaled on the painting of the woman behind the spindles, pierced through with a hatpin that had once borne a crown of pearl.

  In the last painting my mother would give to me she had left a message, within which she had hidden her epitaph.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  In the fifth year of her affliction, in the middle of winter, Sam and I took our mother for a walk. Down the familiar gravel road, through the stone gates, stopping at the entrance to the meadow where the bees, for so many years, had been kept. She walked very differently, now. The quick, light step and the girlish gait had eroded, the once agile limbs had grown rigid. Her stride was halting, uncertain, not unlike the disequilibrium toddlers exhibit when they first find their feet. Our arms linked through hers, we talked of many things we thought our mother would enjoy, of crows on the wing against a gray November sky, of rodents burrowing beneath the snow, and of the snow itself, settling in congealed clumps on the still-green ground. Our mother would glance at me, or Sam, if our voices were particularly animated, but mostly she kept her eyes straight ahead. The humming which for so long had served as a guide to her mood, had been silenced. She looked about her as if she were vaguely alarmed to find herself where she was.

  When we stopped to gaze into the meadow where the bee houses still stood, barren in a barren field, our mother straightened. Sam was talking about the bees and the old beekeeper in his wide, funny hat and the big, wonderful jars of honey he would bring to the house. The piece of land on which the bees were cultivated belonged to our father and those jars of golden honey were given to us by the beekeeper in lieu of rent. We always felt we got the better part of the deal because the pure, rich honey was delivered in generous glass jars, more than enough of them to last us until well into the following year.

  “The bees aren’t there anymore, darling,” Sam explained. “It’s wintertime.”

  My mother tilted her head skyward. Wintertime had meaning, bees had meaning, but the two together overwhelmed her.

  Pointing to the large brick house a hundred yards down the road, I said, “And that’s where we went and forced the nice lady to give us a tour of her house, the one with the white carpet that nobody was allowed to walk on and cookies on the kitchen counter that she baked every day, do you remember, Mums?”

  Her eyes skidded across the road, then back to me. My mother’s face no longer questioned, no longer pretended, but assumed instead a studied detachment, as if this was just another in a long line of unanswerable questions best handled with a short, indifferent shrug.

  We turned back toward our house, walking slowly under the arbor of trees that shaded the driveway. Occasionally, our mother would stop and stare at something on the ground and, bending down, we would retrieve a leaf or a feather and place it in her hand. Not so very long ago, she would have responded reflexively, tucking the feather expertly in her sleeve, poking the leaf gently into her pocket. Now, she looked at the leaf for a moment before letting it fall from her fingers. The feather intrigued her, she turned it this way and that to try to discern its meaning. Finding none, she let it go, and did not watch as it drifted to the ground.

  As we approached the front porch, our mother extricated herself from our grasp, and walked ahead of us, alone. Sam and I exchanged a glance that said, She never could bear walking three abreast. We smiled and started laughing, but then we heard what sounded like a whimper and, turning, we saw our mother hesitate, but before we could reach her side she had lurched forward, stumbled, and fallen. She lay facedown in the snow, her arms outstretched in front of her, her body rigid. When we leaned down to help her up, we were startled to hear her cry, “No! No!” We knew intuitively that this was an order, that we were not to touch her. Our mother continued to lie there, her face hidden in the dirt-edged, crusty snow, slapping the cold ground with her bare hands, and my brother and I were powerless to do anything because the loss of her legs beneath her had so profoundly mortified her that she refused to be comforted.

  Watching our mother as she lay prostrate on the frozen ground, my brother and I did not speak. Nothing moved in the yard, the birds were still, and we could do nothing but wait as another ending announced itself.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  My mother’s essential self had always been elusive, so that the docile, simple creature she eroded into provided a kind of reassurance. All of the things we were wary of in her previous self had melted away, allowing us to speak to her in ways that would have been unthinkable six years before. The fawning, the baby talk, the bright, false smiles, all of the behaviors that once would have repulsed her, she now accepted from each and every one of us with hollow sweetness. She was like a beloved child who had been struck by lightning.

  Lucy nursed my mother with a devotion I lacked, one that was crucial to my mother’s comfort and well-being. She bathed her and fed her and washed her hair. In the morning, she sat my mother on the edge of her bed and worked sweatpants up her stiff legs, pulled a turtleneck over her head and slid unresponsive arms through sleeves, glided socks onto her cold feet, and tied her shoes with double knots. In the evening, she laid her back on the bed and changed her diaper, an impossible challenge given my mother’s inflexibility, and yet Lucy accomplished this task with efficiency and grace, never once pausing in her ministrations, her voice measured, tender, confident.

  It’s not that I was incapable of performing these tasks; I had no aver
sion to changing my mother’s diaper or sitting with her while she struggled to defecate. These things did not offend me. What got in the way of true devotion was my inability to let go of the past. Often, she would look at me with an expression of terrible sadness, one that I interpreted as regret. Regret that she had been reduced to this, regret that I had to witness it, and while on one level I realized that my mother was far beyond the discernment of such an emotion, on another I could pretend that in the far recesses of what was left of her mind, I still had meaning.

  It was then that my memory would provide redemption, calling up moments I thought I had lost. My mother’s eyes, incapable of registering the simplest thought, helped me to reach into the past.

  I recalled a warm autumn day when Tom, standing in the kitchen, warned my mother that he would give her just one more chance to answer the million-dollar question.

  “Now, Mother, for the last time, what is the square root of sixty-four?” my brother asked, sternly.

  Our mother, looking up sheepishly, asked, “One?”

  “That’s it, you lose!” Tom exclaimed and, crossing the room in three strides, picked our mother up, threw her over his shoulder, opened the door of the oven with his foot, and shoved her in, her little legs sticking out, yellow sneakers bobbing up and down.

  Convulsive laughter emanated from inside the oven, bringing those of us on the outside to our knees, tears streaming down our cheeks.

  “I’m going to wet my pants!” my mother cried, still stuck inside.

  With one hand, Tom pulled her from the oven, whereupon she fell to her knees, helpless with laughter, and scrabbled across the kitchen floor, wetting her pants and sobbing with hilarity.

  On another evening, my mother sat at the kitchen table working on a miniature clay sculpture of Jesus, when my father opened the back door and asked her what the hell she was doing.

  “A miniature of Jesus,” my mother responded, drily.

  “Hmm,” my father said, fixing himself a drink. He sauntered over to the table and, sitting beside my mother and indicating the small sculpture, asked, “May I?”

  Reluctantly, my mother passed the figurine to my father who, after taking a good quaff of his scotch, examined the clay form and set to work. Two minutes later, he presented his masterpiece to my mother. Onto the miniature of Jesus he had deftly attached an erect, if very tiny, penis.

  “Now, that’s a miniature you can be proud of!” my father proclaimed, whereupon my mother collapsed and, sliding to the floor, clung to my father’s pant leg, shrieking with laughter.

  “Jick, you are beginning to piss little Jesus off,” my father admonished, sitting back and appraising his handiwork, while my mother lay at his feet, completely undone.

  * * *

  QUITE UNEXPECTEDLY, I was awarded an honorary doctorate by Seton Hill University, a small liberal arts school in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. I was in my early thirties with two small children, a difficult marriage, and a wildly fluctuating career, so this honor, aside from being deeply gratifying, provided me with the perfect opportunity to escape for a few days into a world of lofty ideals and high-mindedness. It was, after all, a Catholic university for women, where my name had been pulled from a hatful of candidates because a majority of the student body had admired my performance as St. Elizabeth Ann Seton in the ABC Circle film A Time for Miracles. That, combined with my Catholic upbringing and a propensity for playing morally incorruptible characters, won me the vaunted degree of doctor of letters.

  When I called my mother to tell her the news, she was momentarily speechless.

  “But you didn’t graduate from college, Kitty Kat, did you?”

  “No, Mother darling, I did not.”

  “Did you even go to college? Didn’t you instantly become an actress?”

  “No, Mother, I went to conservatory first, which is where I learned how to act. Admittedly, I dropped out when I was offered my first part.”

  “Your life is very odd, Kitten. Everything is backward, isn’t it? You just sort of stride around, doing things, and getting things that seem sort of magical. You could have been a doctor, or a violinist, or an abbess. What am I saying? You are a doctor! An honorary doctor of letters! How terrific! But very odd.”

  “Will you come?” I asked, flipping through my address book for my travel agent’s number.

  “Are you stark raving mad? This will be absolute heaven!”

  “I’ll send you the ticket.”

  “I mean it, Kitten,” my mother said.

  “Which part?”

  “You would have been a terrific abbess.”

  * * *

  WHEN WE ARRIVED in Greensburg, we were greeted by the president of Seton Hill, a kind woman with abundant blond hair and an attitude of tired benevolence which I took to be the result less of running a women’s university than of having mothered seven children. She drove us to our lodgings, which turned out to be a quaint, tastefully appointed inn on the outskirts of town. My mother and I were very happy. We ordered tea in our room and were pleased when a tray arrived bearing tiny crustless sandwiches, assorted pastries, a pot of tea, and a small carafe of sherry. The sherry was immediately poured, the sandwiches devoured, and the pastries abandoned. We then lay down on our respective beds and started to laugh. As frustrating as it is that I cannot now recall the substance of the lunacy that led to this laughter, I vividly remember the laughter itself, a slow-starting, restrained chortle that expanded into full-blown hysterics, so that in no time both my mother and I were writhing atop our small beds, weeping, begging each other to stop until, unable to contain herself, my mother simply fell out of her bed and hit the floor, a casualty attended by a series of soft percussive farts.

  * * *

  AS I HELPED my mother off the toilet, holding her with one hand while reaching for her diaper with the other, I wondered how it was that we did not notice when the laughter left her, so subtle was its dissolution, and so absolute.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  My mother loved her bath. It was the simple happiness of hours snatched from the pandemonium of a house filled with children. The bathroom door would be closed, the lock turned, and my mother would say, “Kitten, run the water for me, will you?” As she relaxed in the scalding water, a look of pure bliss would suffuse her features. Sitting up in the tub, her preferred posture and one that signified the height of relaxation, she would place one washcloth over her lap, another over her breasts, look at me as I leaned against the side of the tub, and say, “Did anything interesting happen to you today? Start at the beginning, and remember, Kitty Kat, it’s all in the details.”

  Now, years later, a bathtub was installed in the room that was once my mother’s studio. It had been cleared and reappointed and, just as was the case after my sister’s death, denuded of any sense of meaning, so that it would be impossible to guess that this room had at one time held all of the secrets of my mother’s most realized happiness. Mysteries and old comforts were stored in her bedroom upstairs, a place no longer accessible to my mother. Her limbs had stiffened, she could no longer direct them to move up the stairs, or down. A small bed had been placed against the wall in the Good Living Room, a table and reading lamp next to it. This is where my mother now slept, under a soft comforter, next to the tall windows looking out over the broad, sylvan lawn.

  After an early dinner, Lucy would prepare my mother for her bath and, if I was home, I would assist her. The temperature of the water had to meet certain specifications, neither too hot nor too cold, a condition that my mother, had she been aware, would have disdained. The bath bubbles were poured liberally from a bottle of Johnson’s baby shampoo, the lavender salts scooped out of a glass jar and scattered over the surface, hands run smoothly back and forth through the water to balance the temperature. When my mother’s clothing had been removed, an exercise achieved by seating her on a chair and gently draping a towel over her naked body, Lucy would reach for my mother’s hands and say, “Okay, Beanie, time for what you love
. You ready for your bath? Come on, pie, let’s go.”

  I moved forward to take my mother’s arm. I wanted to help her into the tub, but she refused to move. She stood there, a bath towel held by Lucy covering her body, frozen in place. Suddenly, she looked at me with undisguised panic. She had no understanding of the large, water-filled basin, steam rising from its surface like smoke, nor could she grasp her nakedness other than to sense its wrongness. I held my mother’s hand and said, “It’s all right, darling, the water is good. You’ll like it, I promise. Let’s try.”

  At the side of the tub, where for most of her life my mother had instinctively raised her leg to step into the bath, she stopped. I looked at Lucy, Lucy looked at me, and in this brief exchange we shared the fear that is palpable when there is very little room left.

  Kneeling, I put my hand around my mother’s ankle and tried to coax her to lift her leg. The strength of her resistance was unexpected; it was as if she were rooted to the ground. Lucy steadied my mother while I took her leg firmly in my hands and forced it to bend, causing my mother to cry out in alarm. When her foot touched the water, her expression changed from panic to aversion, and I knew then that we had to hurry. Working together, Lucy and I lowered my mother into the water. I quickly lathered a washcloth with soap and started to run the cloth over her body, all the while murmuring softly, “It’s good, darling. It’s your bath, you love your bath.”

  Her expression, as I moved the cloth in gentle, concentric circles over her back, revealed a frightened, wary resignation. Why was she not able to sense the memory of the bath, and the pleasure it had always given her? Taking my mother’s slender fingers one by one into my hand, I carefully soaped them, rinsed them, studied them. I knew these hands as well as I knew my own; knew the earthy, scullery smell of them, the surprisingly delicate touch of her fingers, the unvarnished nails that she pared herself with kitchen scissors, the elegance they assumed in repose. These were hands I had sought since earliest consciousness and, as I watched the washcloth slide from her breasts into the tepid water without the remotest twinge of embarrassment crossing my mother’s features, I realized with a dull, heavy certainty that she would never again in her life know pleasure.