How to Forget

by Kate Mulgrew

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Following Tessie’s death, I feared the family would be constitutionally unable to withstand another breach. The premature and wholly unnatural way in which my sister died had created a fissure, felt by those of us who survived her. It only ever revealed itself in the way our laughter ebbed when she was mentioned, or in the sudden cessation of our teasing. Her absence was felt as keenly as a nightmare which, upon waking, proves to be the reality. Over time, the understanding that we would never see her again was pocketed, and taken out only when we were very careful, or very drunk. The wound, stitched tightly and well scarred, could nevertheless open at the least provocation, so close did it sit to the surface of feeling.

  My father had tried to honor his own grief, but because it was unfathomable he was never sufficiently prepared for the fall. When Tessie died, he had buckled under the weight of her casket and fallen to the ground, sobbing, “I never thought I’d see you go out like this, kid.” At Uncle Bob’s funeral, my father had entered the church and, recognizing the figure in the casket to be his beloved younger brother, stood frozen in disbelief. Certainly, he had known he was attending his brother’s funeral, and yet, when confronted with the reality of his death, was so profoundly shaken that he could not move.

  My parents, who had lived their lives with incontrovertible courage, had never accepted the stages of grief, and therefore were unable to ritualize their sorrow. Intolerable sadness was tolerated by closing the book on a life, one never to be reopened. If I attempted to talk about Tessie with my mother, I would be met by a blank look, the ghost of a smile, and the end of the conversation. My father was more forthcoming, but he knew his limits. He might indulge a few fond memories, leading to what one hoped might be an exploration of feelings, but when the opportunity for real communication appeared, he withdrew behind a sentimentalized but nonetheless impermeable façade. I understood that they were guarding their privacy, which they prized above all else, but theirs was such a fierce and solitary defense that those of us left in its wake floundered.

  With our father dead and our mother lost, we surviving siblings became unmoored. Unusual behaviors revealed themselves at inauspicious times. Simmering beneath the surface of our loneliness was a kind of inarticulable fury, reducing each of us to a meanness we despised. We longed to reach out to one another, but at every turn this instinct was thwarted, tangled in a web of suspicion and resentment. As much as we had loved one another in the fullness of life, we hated what we had become when that wholeness was eclipsed by loss. Mendacity, jealousy, and rage percolated on the back burner while egoism masqueraded as generosity. In our confusion, we second-guessed one another, and because we had never learned to confront each other with frank vulnerability, we fell back into the roles assigned to us at birth.

  Observing my siblings at this time, I was struck by the willfulness of grief, and by its extraordinary subjectivity. Laura loved my mother in a way entirely unfamiliar to me, while my father’s death seemed only to have deepened Joe’s devotion, his bereavement in stark contrast to my own. Tom, the oldest, assumed a patriarchal authority, the newness of which was burdensome. His was the way of lightheartedness, of the confidence of love, and to be suddenly thrust into a position contrary to his nature weighed heavily on him. In New York, Jenny struggled with two toddlers and an ineffable longing for her mother who, when awake, blinked at the ceiling above her and thought of nothing. Occasionally, in the late afternoon, Sam would steal into our mother’s room and sit beside her, holding her hand. He avoided Joe, aware of the vast chasm between their singular griefs, and Joe, had he been able, would have avoided everyone. I came and went, leaning on the doorjamb and watching as Lucy gently washed my mother’s rigid face, her blue-veined, slender hands. Lucy’s expression was set, aggrieved, her indomitable spirit in shadow.

  It was a house divided, but exactly how it came to be so remained a conundrum. We had always been competitive, pugnacious, mischievous, and thought it our right to be so, given the limitations of parental attention. Whatever ill will we bore one another, it was always within the accepted confines of sibling rivalry, but in the absence of parents to inspire that rivalry we lost confidence in ourselves, and in our love for one another. We fought for life to continue as it had always been, we fought for our right to be in the house that we loved, we fought for stature, for respect, for equality. We fought to be known in a new way, as siblings without parents. It was a swift and terrible tide to swim against.

  After a visit home, I would return to New York and spend days ruminating on what I had just experienced, wondering how and why tensions had risen to such a fever pitch. It was as if we had all been in a catastrophic accident, leaving some severely damaged, others stunned, everyone debilitated. The house had come to represent the love of our parents, and in that spectral world we struggled to reclaim them, each of us longing to proclaim our specialness to two people who were no longer there.

  A balance might have been achieved, had we viewed our mother as sentient. Instead, the emptiness that filled the house after our father died was edged with the anguish of having a mother who, though she existed, could do nothing to assuage our fears. The increasing vacancy of her mind juxtaposed with her strikingly familiar physicality lent a kind of surreal terror to the atmosphere where, in hushed, brittle tones, we hissed at one another about who deserved what. Occasionally, when the tension became intolerable, there would be shouting, the pounding of a fist on a table, the slamming of a door. There could be no justification for these violent displays of volatility, save one. We were inconsolable.

  And how deeply we loved, I thought, watching Joe as he stood before the bonfire, hands stuffed in pockets, staring into the flames, or noticing with what quiet unobtrusiveness Sam stole into our mother’s room, gently closing the door behind him. Tom, his sandy hair streaked with gray, no longer entertained us as he once did, but sat at the kitchen table, lost in thought. He maintained an equilibrium that eluded the rest of us, but even this virtue could abrade, when the mood was foreboding and the slightest touch incendiary. Jenny, coiled with resentment at not having had either parent as long as the rest, sought relief in vehemence, but could sometimes be seen kneeling next to our mother’s bed, tears streaming down her cheeks, tears she would immediately wipe away if Laura walked into the room, having stopped by for a short visit.

  I pretended to go about my business and, having the luxury of a New York apartment to return to, considered myself well out of the mess. In the past year, I had transferred my mother’s health-care guardianship to Sam, who, on-site, could act more quickly and with far greater efficiency than I could from the Upper West Side, but even this capitulation hurt. Nothing could alleviate the constant anxiety that plagued me, the certainty that I had somehow neglected something in my mother’s care, that if anything happened in my absence I would be responsible. I, more deluded than any of my siblings, imagined myself still important to my mother’s happiness.

  The most chilling aspect of my mother’s affliction was the way in which it had settled over us, with infinite precision, coercing us into accepting this new mother, while inexorably leading us away from the one we had adored. This normalization of an affliction that had stripped our mother of personhood stole over the house like an undetectable poison, so that in time her presence came to serve as a reflection of our own deficiencies, creating strife and conflict among us.

  In this twilight, we hovered over our mother, and waited.

  Chapter Fifty

  She no swallow so good now, señora,” Lucy said, sipping her coffee. A bright morning in May, the birds in full-throated song outside the open window, the sun glinting through the leaves of trees. Spring at Derby Grange, shimmering with anticipation.

  “What do you mean, exactly?” I asked, leaning forward on the kitchen table, chin in hands.

  “She try, señora, but it too hard to get down, so now sometime I use a dropper, fill it with some Ensure, some custard, soup, and wait till I see
Beanie swallow. It take a long time, señora, and sometime I scary she might choke. What I do then? We so far from town.”

  I sat back heavily and sighed. Lucy, whose spine was never less than ramrod straight, conveyed a weariness that lived, now, in her bones, evident in the way she rose from a chair, in the deliberateness of her step, in the foreboding that crouched inside her.

  “How much longer can you manage like this, Luce? Tell me honestly.”

  My mother’s inert form was extremely difficult to move, complicating even the simplest of chores. Her petite frame concealed the rigidity of her muscles, which had slowly calcified. There was no direction coming from her mind to advise her body of its abilities, no memory to recall its suppleness. She lay in her bed, inflexible and unyielding, forcing Lucy and Javier to apply both strength and strategy to the changing of a diaper, the turning over for a sponge bath, the lifting of her body to allow for a lightning-fast replacement of linens.

  “I all right now, señora, but next week? Who knows? Why you think she don’t eat, señora? Beanie always love food.”

  “She doesn’t eat because her brain isn’t sending her the message to eat,” I answered, fiddling with a spoon, rubbing its shallow bowl with my thumb, something I had often seen my mother do.

  Lucy understood this and nodded gravely. The insidiousness of my mother’s affliction continued to astonish and appall her.

  “What going on up there, you think, señora? Anything?”

  “I think a lot of soldiers have jumped to their death up there,” I replied, laying the spoon gently on a blue-and-white cotton napkin.

  In the Good Living Room, I sat on the edge of my mother’s bed. More and more, she slept. Her white hair had been brushed back from her face, revealing small, symmetrical features, enviable skin, perfect ears. Her mouth, thin-lipped and tightly shut, precluded beauty, but what that mouth had articulated would put beauty to shame, I thought. I smoothed her hair very gently so as not to wake her, but suddenly her eyes opened and fixed themselves on mine. There was no longer the soft adjustment from sleep to wakefulness, what remained was the effect of a light, abruptly switched on. My mother knew to look into my eyes, she still understood that eyes, like open windows, were to be sought, and now she gazed at me, unblinking.

  Still, and despite my better judgment, the warning bell in my heart sounded, and I would look deeply into her eyes and imagine that I saw there what no one else could see. In the far recesses of what was left of her cognition, I thought I could glimpse—behind the vacancy, almost lost in the deliquescence—a terror. My mother’s pale blue eyes, anchored by pinpoint pupils, fastened onto my own with what I was sure was the last, supreme effort at communication. She did not know me, she did not know herself, but in some primitive corner of her ravaged brain she knew that she had fallen into an abyss, and if she could only find her way back to the moment before she had lost her footing and slipped off the cliff into darkness, if she could only find that moment, she would remember to grasp my hand.

  “Where are you, my darling?” I whispered, leaning down to kiss my mother’s forehead.

  Her eyes fixed on mine, I knew very well how she had come to be where she was. This is what happens, I thought, when you are sent unmothered and unmoored into life. This is what becomes of a good mind throttled by blow after blow of unexpected and unexamined griefs, of a heart so hungry for solace that it mistakes persuasion for love, of a yearning so unfathomable that not children or friendships or artistic catharsis can fill it. I thought of her early migraines, and her dismissal of them, of the cool cloth laid on the livid brow, the blood pooling at the base of her brain. I thought of Maggie’s death and my mother’s trauma, the shock of leaning over the small crib in the early light of dawn, the tiny figure, blue and lifeless, and how and where that shock had settled. I thought of Tessie’s death and the daily horror of being forced to bear witness to the suffering of her own child, beloved and utterly lost. I thought of the betrayal she had endured when Father O’Byrne had not attended Tessie’s funeral, his presence having been requested at a golf tournament somewhere in Colorado. I thought of the unbearable smallness of this excuse, his cowardice in the light of what had passed between him and my mother, and the devastation of that indiscretion.

  It is only an organ, the brain, just as the heart is only an organ, and hearts will stop when they have been broken. We give full marks to the broken heart but are less tolerant of the broken mind. Concerned and purposeful, we put our faith in science, convinced that a solution lies in the magic bullet of medicine, that the chemistry of the brain is somehow more fixable than the chemistry of love.

  Injustice is random, of this I was well aware. Was I not the child of a mother who, when I wept about the unfairness of a marriage gone wrong and the havoc it was wreaking on the children, had looked at me sadly and said, “Life isn’t fair, Kitty Kat girl, so get on with it.”

  I gave Lucy the night off and prepared a nice dinner for my brothers, who stopped by later in the afternoon. We sat and talked about the state of our mother’s affliction, the emptiness of the house, the future without a name. Joe left first, saying that he would look in on our mother in the morning, when she would be more alert.

  Our mother, hearing none of this, lay in her narrow bed, turning to stone.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Tom listened impatiently and then said, “All right, let’s take a look at some nursing homes, some assisted living facilities, just to get an idea.”

  “And then?” I asked.

  “We’ll figure it out,” he answered, shortly. Tom was not a man given to terseness, it didn’t suit him. Suffering unnerved him, and he found the apparent suffering of his mother demoralizing. He had watched as Lucy applied the small spoon to our mother’s lips, he had seen the complete lack of responsiveness and, finally, when the dropper was inserted into her mouth and our mother had struggled unsuccessfully to swallow, her eyes widening in alarm, he had turned and walked out of the room.

  “Where to?” I asked, settling into the passenger seat. “I don’t know this town anymore.”

  “You never knew it,” Tom replied. “Let’s face it, you were just passing through.”

  “And stranded, half the time. Always begging for a ride because you commandeered the car. So unfair. That car was meant to be split three ways, if you’ll recall,” I said, adjusting my seat belt.

  “Not easy to split things two ways, let alone three,” Tom said.

  “Not to mention six,” I stated, glancing at my brother sideways.

  Tom sighed and shook his head.

  “Derby Grange is turning into a shit show, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “That’s an understatement, but we both know it’s about something else, something much bigger than a house and forty acres of land,” I suggested.

  We drove in silence for a while, and then my brother said, “Dad’s death was bad but this thing with Mom is worse. Everyone’s losing it.”

  “So, tell me again why we are visiting these nursing homes,” I demanded, turning to face him in the car.

  “Jesus, Bate, because we don’t want her to choke to death in the middle of the night with Lucy and Javier panicked out of their minds and an ambulance an hour away, that’s why,” Tom responded, defensively.

  “What about a twenty-four-hour nurse on-site, at the house?” I knew this would be dismissed but was curious to hear what my brother would have to say.

  “There is no nurse in Dubuque County better able to handle our mother than Lucy. And besides, it would drive Lucy nuts,” Tom said, emphatically.

  “Not to mention Bo. That would be the last straw,” I added.

  We looked at each other and said nothing. The tension at Derby Grange was palpable. The house now stood only to serve our mother’s needs, and to shelter Lucy and Javier. Everyone longed to restore meaning to the place, but not everyone could live in the house. In his will, our father had divided Derby Grange equally six ways and, while in principle this was equ
itable, in practice it was extremely complicated. The house and property could accommodate only one of us, and this reality forced us into making a choice as to who should live in the place we all loved so well. This decision, sufficiently excruciating to cause conflict among us, was exacerbated by our mother’s emotional absence.

  “Ah, here we are at the highly reputable Brightview Home. You ready to check this out?” I asked, as my brother pulled into the parking lot and turned off the ignition.

  Inside, we were greeted by a stout, pleasant woman in her middle age, whose vigorous gray hair and authoritative demeanor suggested that she had at one time been a nun. Tom and I were immediately subdued and accepted the pamphlets she offered as if they were exam forms being handed to us by an eighth-grade teacher.

  Up one corridor and down another, we followed this figure of near-imperious stature, weaving through breakfast rooms and sunporches, through game rooms and libraries, passing through desolate spaces where we encountered white-haired nonagenarians lost in thought, or conversation, or sleep, walking slowly through the dining hall, where a number of people sat finishing their nondescript lunches served on plastic trays, appetite no longer a drive but a test of endurance, the cloying smell of ammonia and mushroom soup permeating the atmosphere, until we arrived at the door of an en suite room the woman thought might best suit our mother’s needs.