How to Forget

by Kate Mulgrew

  We inhabited our tensions with awkwardness, as if they were suits of armor. The suspense of living near death in a small room containing the people most entitled to bear witness to this rite of passage was sometimes intolerable. Bottled-up resentments could, without warning, reach dangerous levels of toxicity.

  One afternoon, a week after our mother had closed her mouth to food, Joe said something I considered so thoughtless and provocative that I opened the front door and stormed off down the block. What he said remains elusive, as do most of the brittle exchanges that took place during this period, but how he said it, and the force with which it struck, sent me into a blind fury. As I stalked down the suburban street in my ubiquitous red apron, past blond-brick single-level houses boasting miniature manicured lawns, beneath leafy trees I could not recognize, my feet landing hard on hot concrete, I sensed my brother in full pursuit. He called my name, but I ignored him, and continued marching down the block. “Kate!” Joe called out again, and this time caught up with me, stepping in front of me to make me stop.

  In the middle of the afternoon on that quiet, well-mannered street, I abandoned all restraint and erupted. I accused my brother of selfishness, of sabotage, of cruelty, and with each salvo I discharged my voice rose in pitch, so that anyone looking out of their living room window might shrink back in alarm at the sight of a wild-eyed woman in a red apron, hurling invectives at a handsome, distraught middle-aged man crouched before her, gripping his head.

  “Jesus, Kate, for Christ’s sake, lower your voice,” my brother pleaded, as my shrillness reverberated down Devon Drive, disturbing its Sunday afternoon equanimity.

  “Don’t fucking tell me to lower my voice, don’t you fucking tell me to lower my voice, are you out of your goddam mind? I have fucking had it! It is fucking enough!” I shouted, and as I shouted I began to wail, tears streaming down my cheeks, weeks of pent-up sadness and impotence erupting all at once, without warning, in a messy, profane display of anguish.

  My brother, never before having seen me completely lose control, was caught off guard, and stood there in the middle of the block staring at me, his expression at once sheepish and apprehensive. Wiping my eyes with my apron, I shook my head and muttered, “Oh, what does it matter. Nothing matters. Nothing matters anymore.”

  Joe reached out and, putting a hand on my shoulder, said, “That’s not true, Kate, and you know it. Come on, get a grip.”

  As we faced off in the middle of Devon Drive, the absurdity of the confrontation struck me. Neither of us, in that moment, could have articulated the precise source of conflict, and that is because there was none. The source of our conflict, of every conflict that had arisen in the past months, was rooted in exhaustion, the inexpressible exhaustion that comes of having lived with the specter of death for eight consecutive years. Our father had died two years earlier, but six years before that our mother had been handed a death sentence, and from that moment forward we had striven to prepare ourselves for this inevitability, and yet we continued to surprise ourselves with unexpected bursts of rage. This is why my brother and I stood, heads already bowed with regret, in the middle of Devon Drive on a fine Sunday afternoon, not a thousand feet from our dying mother, and why we did not move until we had repaired this rupture, which we did by agreeing that this was hard, and would undoubtedly get much harder, and that it was imperative to hold fast and remember that we loved each other.

  When I looked into my brother’s eyes I saw, as I had seen often since our father’s death, a terrible, ineffable sadness, which he was capable of quickly covering with anger or detachment, leading everyone to assume he was pissed off most of the time. He wasn’t. He was lost, and so was I, and our reconciliation came as swiftly as the storm that had preceded it, as he shook his head at his older sister in her greasy apron and wild hair, with her big mouth and her dirty talk, and she in turn wagged a scolding finger at her younger brother with his still beautiful face and his ridiculous self-consciousness over a private tiff in a public place about nothing of substance, nothing at all but parents gone missing and the utter hopelessness of that feeling, and still here we were, and, suddenly washed over with relief, giving way to a spontaneous spasm of laughter, and the careful slinging of arms around each other’s shoulders, and the slow return to the tidy little house on Devon Drive, on a beautiful summer’s day.

  “Jesus,” my brother said, “you look like shit.”

  “The neighbors are going to think I’m a complete wack job.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  For ten days she had not eaten and had absorbed only the liquid dispensed through ice chips or the flexible straw forced between her teeth. Her breathing was shallow, but regular. She did not stir.

  My siblings and I agreed that it was time to make the necessary phone calls. Our mother appeared to be in a deep sleep, and yet common sense told us that it could only, now, be a matter of days before her autonomic nervous system shut down completely, and our mother would then stop breathing.

  The phone calls also signified a public admission that our mother would soon be dead. Most people, I had learned in my life, feared death, but my mother’s closest friends were not most people.

  Mary Eleanore Shanley Harriss, otherwise known as Effie because of her height and its resemblance to the Eiffel Tower, and Jean Kennedy Smith had met my mother at Eden Hall at the Sacred Heart boarding school when they had been very young girls and, in the way of precocious, mischievous, lonely girls sent away to school for the first time, had instantly become fast and, as the years would prove, enduring friends. They would have been considered, by today’s standards, almost laughingly homogeneous. All three were Irish-American, Roman Catholic, well-bred girls born into good eastern families, and all would acquire a familiarity with tragedy before they had reached the age of thirty.

  Being chosen as a godparent within the Catholic tradition in the very conservative era of the fifties was considered an honor and, although Tom was arguably more privileged to have Jean Kennedy Smith selected as his guardian, I had always regarded myself as lucky to have been given Effie Harriss as a godmother. When I was a child, she had blown into my life with an energy and a glamour that had dazzled me, looming over me while smoking a Virginia Slim through the telescope of a black cigarette holder, in the other hand precariously balancing a martini, her full-throated, viscous laughter punctuating each inanity I mumbled and leaning down to look me square in the face, exclaiming, “I like the cut of your jib, god girl!”

  Effie told me she would be on the next available flight out of McAllen, Texas.

  “Listen, god girl, tell Jicky to hold on until I get there, will you? Just whisper it in her ear,” Effie said, hanging up the phone. The conversation had been concise and decisive, a shorthand used by someone accustomed to hearing bad news. She had lost her husband before she reached the age of thirty and, in the decade following his death, both of her sons had died tragically in unrelated airplane accidents. Effie’s faith had seen her through, she had never buckled, never gone mad, never gone under. “She’s one hell of a tough, beautiful dame,” my father used to say about her, lifting his glass. He had been a little in love with Effie, and my mother, proud of her brave, high-spirited friend, had not been displeased.

  Jean Smith would be the more challenging phone call, and I implored my husband to make it for me. Tim had been Jean’s great friend long before he knew I existed, and over the years had become well versed in the habits and idiosyncrasies of the Kennedys. He had regularly been Jean’s escort after her husband, Steve, died, and both he and my mother had often traveled together to visit their mutual friend. My husband knew Jean Smith far better than I did, and yet he demurred.

  “It’s not my place,” Tim said, digging in his heels.

  “What do you mean? You’re my husband,” I replied, heatedly.

  “Exactly. This is about Joan, not me. It needs to come from you, her daughter,” Tim insisted.

>   Reluctantly, I picked up the phone and dialed. When an assistant answered, and I related the purpose of my call, Jean was informed and immediately came on the line. Typically, she was direct, unsentimental, and curious.

  “How bad is she?” Jean asked.

  I hesitated.

  “Bad enough to warrant this phone call, Jean. She’s had nothing to eat or drink for days, she’s in a coma, her breathing is increasingly shallow, it can’t be long now, and I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Well, yah, of course I want to know, kid, but I mean, how close to the end is she, do you think?” Jean persisted, as if speaking to a hospice nurse or an unusually friendly neurologist.

  Tim sat on the bed, listening in, trying his best to interpret my frantic pantomimes, and failing. Covering the phone with one hand, I whispered, “I think I should tell her not to bother. It will be all about her, if she comes, and I’m not up to it. What do you think?”

  I knew that this was, essentially, my decision, and that Jean would honor my wishes. Theirs had been a long and remarkable friendship. Jean was my mother’s oldest friend, it was only right that she should be notified and encouraged to attend the funeral. Jean’s were the questions of someone who had known a preponderance of tragedy, whose view of death was an admixture of the clinical and the philosophical. She wanted and deserved to be guided, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to tell her to come. I envisioned the effort involved in preparing for her arrival, the attention she would require, the obligation Tim would naturally feel, and I knew that I was not big enough to sacrifice my husband at this time, so near to this death.

  “It could be a few days, Jean, maybe even another week. It’s a long trip from Bridgehampton to Dubuque, easier to get to Paris, actually, and I’m just not sure it’s the wisest thing to do. You’ll be exhausted by the time you get here,” I said, my voice gaining conviction.

  There was a silence on the other end of the phone, during which Jean calculated the pros and cons of making the trip. It wasn’t about love, I knew that, or loyalty, but about the vicissitudes of aging, and the fortitude required to withstand yet another loss, and whether it wouldn’t be better, in fact more loving, to abandon protocol and mourn in private, where she could remember Eden Hall and the first time she had laid eyes on Joan Kiernan, whom she had dubbed Jicky and who had remained Jicky ever after, and life on the Cape, when her brothers were alive and the world was full of promise, and the years of adventure and travel and then marriage and children and still they had clung tight to each other, through all of it, through the deaths and the love affairs and the triumphs and the laughter—yes, Jean must have thought to herself, let me remember how Jicky and I laughed, let me remember that, in peace.

  Tim took the phone from me and, in a voice that would brook no opposition, said, “Listen, Jean, our good friend will probably be dead and buried by the time you get here, and what’s the point of that? Joan would not approve of you making this trip, it’s not worth it. You and I will meet in New York and have dinner, share all the memories. Stay put. I’ll call you when it’s all over.”

  “It’s terrific Effie’s coming all the way from McAllen, don’t you think? My God, she’s like some kind of Viking, isn’t she?”

  Jean was not willing to end the conversation on a perfunctory note, so I drew closer to my husband, eager to eavesdrop on the final exchange between my mother’s best friend and my husband.

  Tim laughed and said, “Yeah, you girls were a cross between Amazons and the Three Musketeers. You and Joan had one of the great friendships, that’s the important thing. The rest is irrelevant.”

  This calmed Jean and, with a bit of her old spirit, she quipped, “Listen, kid, tell Effie that she is there to represent both of us and that I expect her to comport herself with great dignity.”

  I had not expected to be put through to the abbess when I called Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey, and I was not disappointed. Mother Columba held dominion over a community of thirty hardworking nuns: those who worked in the candy shop making the caramels that provided most of the revenue for the priory; those who worked in the fields harvesting corn and grain; those too old for manual labor, and those too young to know with certainty that this was where they belonged, postulants arriving at the front door of the motherhouse, straight off the farm, thrown into the singular rigor that defined the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance.

  When she returned my call, I found myself startled, as I always did, by the soft, sweet cadence of her voice. Beneath those mellifluous tones beat the heart of a lioness, whose formidable intellectual vigor and quest for spiritual enlightenment had shaped her into a person of rare authenticity. Columba was interested in an examined life and did not waste her time on superficial relationships. There was steel in her ambition to know God, and thirty years earlier when, on a winter’s morning after Mass in the abbey chapel, a trim, freckled woman had approached her and asked her if she was allowed to drink beer and eat cheeseburgers and, if so, would she be her guest at a hole-in-the-wall two miles down the road, she had immediately recognized in my mother a fellow pilgrim.

  “I’ll come tomorrow, Kate, and spend some time with Joan. It’s time to say good-bye, isn’t it?” Mother Columba asked, with disarming simplicity. For a moment, I couldn’t speak.

  * * *

  EFFIE AND I sat on the back deck of the house on Devon Drive, waiting for Mother Columba. My siblings were inside, keeping vigil around our mother’s bed. Effie, broadened and blurred by age, had nevertheless retained her vital, indomitable spirit, and this made her appear still beautiful, despite her bewilderment. She sat on an unfamiliar metal chair on an unfamiliar deck, attached to a house that had no meaning, and questioned me.

  “But listen, god girl, why isn’t Jicky at Derby Grange? I don’t get it.”

  I knew I would not be able to articulate a satisfying answer, having been unable to do so for myself, and decided to appeal to her compassion.

  “We were all very confused after Dad died, and there’s been a lot of conflict about the house and the property and who should have it and how we should share it, and then Mother got worse and it frightened everybody to think she might choke to death out there, and so one day Tom and I decided to buy this house so that Mother would be closer to a hospital, closer to everything and everybody, and it just seemed the most practical and convenient solution to a lot of problems, do you understand?” I asked, watching as Lucy placed a fresh cup of coffee in front of Effie.

  Effie had envisioned keeping vigil at Derby Grange, where she and my mother had taken long walks down the gravel road, where they had sat together in the swing that Joe built, their sneakered feet lifted in unison, where dinner parties went on until the wee hours, and where she could then be found sitting next to my father on the front porch, flirting under a blue moon, drinking wine and smoking Virginia Slims.

  Inexplicably, I was overcome with embarrassment and said, “I’m sorry, Effie, that we can’t be at Derby Grange. I hope you don’t mind too much.”

  “Oh listen, kiddo, it doesn’t matter. Jicky is all that matters. I wanted to see my friend one last time on this earth.” Effie paused, sipped her coffee, and then tilted her head dramatically to one side.

  “But I can’t believe you produced those strapping boys—two giants! And you kept your figure, but I suppose you have to, don’t you, in your game?” she asked, turning to peer at my son Ian, who was lurking in the long grasses at the side of the house. Ian looked up and grinned wickedly at my godmother, who waved and said, “Hi there, young giant!”

  Lucy again walked onto the deck, wiping her hands on her tired apron, and whispered, “Mother Columba here, señora. She with Beanie.”

  Immediately, I rose and motioned for Effie to stay seated, indicating that I would like a word with Columba before making introductions. Effie, true to form, put a finger to her lips and made her way to the open screen door, where she could observe the drama about to unfold.

  Inside t
he small living room, Mother Columba sat on my mother’s bed, wearing her tunic, scapular, and cincture. She had replaced the traditional coif with a dark blue head scarf, which she had wrapped hurriedly around her head, exposing a fringe of thick white-gray hair. Sturdy black shoes showed from under her serge skirt, and the silver cross that hung around her neck touched my mother’s breast as Columba leaned forward, taking my mother’s hand in her own.

  Drawn as if to a magical liturgy, I settled quietly in the room with my siblings, and we watched as Mother Columba attempted to shepherd our mother through the valley of death.

  “Now, Joan,” Columba began, in a gentle, seductive voice, “I think you’re very tired, and it’s time to rest. You’ve stopped eating and drinking, so you’re showing us that you’re ready to let go of life, and just think, Joan, you’re going to see what you and I have talked about for thirty years, you’re going to see your God. You’re going to understand what you’ve been longing to understand your entire life. So, now, Joan, don’t worry anymore, you’re not disappointing anyone, all of your children are here, and they want you to rest, they want you to know that it’s time to say good-bye.”

  A muffled sob came from the kitchen and, glancing back, I saw Lucy pull the apron up over her face and I caught a glimpse of Effie, mesmerized, leaning against the screen door. Sam stood at the base of our mother’s bed, his hands folded in front of him, his head bowed. In the middle of the room, the oldest child stood next to the youngest, Jenny a head shorter than Tom, while Laura looked on from her station in front of the fireplace. Joe stood behind his chair, both hands resting on the seat back. Ian, too, I could see out of the corner of my eye, was attracted to the unorthodox nature of these ministrations, and I watched as he inched closer to the scene, his eyes riveted to the figure of Mother Columba.