by Greg Fields
“Evening, baby. If you don’t mind, I thought I’d join you tonight. I’d like to do some reading, too,” she gestured with her book, “and the atmosphere in here is so lovely. I’ve totally taken it for granted.”
Glynnis returned a quiet smile. “What are you reading?”
“Shakespeare. Another attempt to get through those things I should have read decades ago. The Merry Wives of Windsor. Go ahead and keep reading. I’ll be quiet.” She settled into the chair opposite Glynnis.
They read there together in silence for several minutes, but Glynnis’s concentration went wandering, disrupted by her mother’s soft presence. She knew it to be intentional. Her mother had not come in here to read. Glynnis saw herself as the prey of a crafty leopard lying in wait in a tree branch over a pathway she had to take. She knew it was only a matter of timing now. There was little she could do about it.
Her mother also grew restless, and after a while she broke the silence. “I’m sorry, Glyn, but I’d like something to drink. Can I get you anything? I think I’d like a brandy.”
Glynnis dropped her book to her lap. “I think a brandy sounds wonderful. In one of those big snifters.”
“Of course.” Florence Mear left the room and came back a few minutes later with two snifters of Armagnac. She had changed her clothes and now wore a thick floor-length housecoat.
“I feel so luxurious in this,” she said, reentering the study. “This is so warm.”
“The brandy should be warm, too,” said Glynnis. “It gets so cold in here.” She took the brandy and immediately drew a sip. The liquid plunged through her at once, sending a warmth her entire length as the vapors pricked her sinuses. She knew there would be no more reading—the leopard stirred and stretched.
“I felt a bit odd offering you brandy,” said her mother. “I’ve never seen you drink before. I just assume you’ve gotten to know a few spirits at college. That’s fine. You’re not too young.” She paused. “In fact, you look to me to be a full lady, and an elegant one at that.” Florence Mear smiled her shyest smile.
“I don’t drink much at all, Mother. I’ve never been drunk. When a group of us go out for dinner, I might have wine. I don’t like beer or hard liquor, at least not yet. I don’t think I’m quite prepared to have my senses confused. I do like brandy, though, on cold nights.”
“I do too, my love. And I think I developed a taste for it when I was about your age. I was living at home and going to school downtown. My father used to keep it around for nights like this. He gave me some one night when I had been out late. I was frozen and it warmed me right up. Of course, after he warmed my insides with the brandy he warmed my ears with what he had to say. I had been out far too late with a young man, and he had been worried, so perhaps it was a combined effect. But you know, I don’t think Italians are bothered so much by alcohol. I remember drinking wine with dinner as early as ten or eleven. I grew up with it in milder forms. Never whiskey, always wine.”
“I don’t remember much about Grandpa. How old was I when he died?”
“Just a little kid, Glyn. You must have been five or six. He was always so proud that I had married a doctor. Your father was like some kind of trophy to him. But he came to love him for his own sake, too. Everyone loved your father.”
“You never speak much about Grandpa. You never really told us much about him.”
Florence Mear took a sip of her brandy, leaned back in her chair and looked at the ceiling, her eyes alive. “He was such a good man, Glyn. He worked so hard. You know, most of the Italians in the North End worked menial jobs. On the docks, or janitors, or construction. Papa worked in a market, though. He didn’t own it, but he always acted as if he did. God, he took such pride in everything—himself, his home, especially his family. It was just natural for him to take pride in his job as well. That may be one of the most valuable things he ever passed on to me. We never had much, but we were required to take such good care of it. We made do, and we were very happy because he kept us that way. It was all a matter of pride.
“I wish he could see me now,” she continued. “See all of us, I mean. He would be so gratified to know that I’m comfortable and have such a lovely family. That was always the most important thing to him, having a close family. ’That’s the limit of what you’ll need,’ he’d tell me. He knew I’d do well materially when I married your father. But he didn’t live long enough to see all my family. He’d have been very pleased.”
“He died of a heart attack, didn’t he, Mother?”
“Yes. Very quickly. He came home from work one day and went to bed early. He said he didn’t feel too well. He woke up in the night with chest pains, but he didn’t want to wake my mother, which I suppose was typical of him. He took a few deep breaths and tried to go back to sleep. When he got up for work the next morning he told my mother about it. Then he went into the bathroom and collapsed. By the time the ambulance arrived, he was dead. Very quick. I’m sure he didn’t suffer much, and I’m glad my mother was with him. I wish I could have been. Just to thank him and to tell him I loved him, that he had been the best of fathers. To say all those trite things one thinks of at the time. He knew how I felt, of course, so there was no need for words. We say them more for ourselves, anyway.”
Glynnis stared hard at her mother, stared into the leopard’s eyes. “How did you react when he died, Mother? What did you do? You’ve never really told me.”
“What could I do? I had my own family and they needed me. I grieved a bit, as we all did, then I got on with my life. You and Martha were the only children then, but you took my mind off things. I think above all else the two of you were the confirmation of life I needed just then. You were both so animated and innocent. You were a joy, and that was necessary for me more so than anything else.
“We go on with what’s at hand, Glyn,” she went on. “We have to. Or else we lose the good within ourselves, and then we profane the passing. It’s so tempting to take our grief to distant levels, but that helps nothing. It’s indulgence. If just kills off those parts that we still hold on to. You can grieve for a loss without turning your back on what you still have, on what still defines you.”
“Do you think that’s what I’ve done?”
“I do. My darling daughter, I don’t know how you rationalize it to yourself, or how you regard this process of grieving. I’m sure that however you do, it makes perfect sense to your way of thinking. But in the end you’ll regret it. Whatever you think, we remain a family, and we’re good for you. We love you, and I invite you formally to partake of that love fully, even in your grief. Let us heal your wounds, however you perceive them, and come back to us from wherever it is you have gone.”
“You misread me, Mother. My grief for my father, your late husband, is long extinguished. I grieve for something else.”
“Tell me.”
Glynnis summoned her courage, sipped her brandy and chose her words as carefully as her mind could sort them. “We’re a family, yes, but we’re a family without a head. We’re misshapen, grotesque, a parody of what we used to be. We became functions in an equation when all the values were suddenly skewed.
“I miss him, Mother. I miss him every day. But it’s like taking a picture from the desk here, dusting it off and putting it into a closet. He should be a living presence, but he isn’t.
“And I come back here, now that I’ve moved away,” Glynnis continued, “and things are so different. I imagine there’s no avoiding it. You can’t stop people from growing older, from recovering from the pain. Martha and Bobby and Peter are different, and you’re so different, and Daddy’s not here, and everybody is proud of how they haven’t let it affect them. But that’s so false. It does affect us, it will always affect us, and I resent the façades.
“When Daddy died, something irrevocable passed away. Nobody sees that. We’re not what we were, and what we are now is . . . Christ, I don’t know. Some odd unit of individuals, too prideful, too independent of their own pasts. There�
��s such a void here, and no one seems to see it but me.”
Florence Mear sat in her chair, hanging on every word which dug through her flesh and pricked her softest tissues. A piece of her wrenched itself away, like a second labor. What her daughter was saying, she supposed, was a type of grief, but it had mutated.
How else could Glynnis have misread the tremendous hurt that she, his wife of two decades, had suffered, how Robert Mear’s death had killed the Romantic in her, how her own sense of conjugal love had been lowered into the ground with him? The man had crept into her veins and become inseparable from her own fiber. If the family, collectively and singly, viewed their lives now in practical terms, how could they be blamed? It was as her own father had said, you had to go on living, you had to nurture what you could still hold. And in so doing, perhaps the resounding pain could be ameliorated slightly by the struggles of coping without him. Why must a single death multiply and claim other victims?
Florence Mear knew that it was all a form of grieving, which comes in infinite variations, an acknowledgement of incomprehensible loss. It could not be obliterated all at once. It would have to break down gradually under its own weight, which, she reasoned, must be terrible.
“Will you then, carry these thoughts forever?” she asked gently. “We grieve for the same reason, all of us. We feel a loss. A forfeiture. We grieve for the man who had to make this sacrifice. Yes, there is a void here. A great big wide one which will never fill, and no one feels it as much as I do. But if you fall down and cut your knee, how long do you keep picking at the wound? Do you never let a scar form to protect the hurt?”
Glynnis twisted in her chair to avoid her mother’s eyes. She did not respond for several minutes. The clock on her father’s desk ticked loudly in the silence, a haunting phantom of the lost presence. Glynnis took a long, slow sip of brandy, saw that only a few drops remained in the snifter, then finished it off. “Is there any more?”
“Yes. I’ll get it for you,” her mother replied softly. She took the snifter and left the room. Glynnis scanned the portraits on the desk. Warm flesh and blood, each one a mirror. Pieces of a single glass, broken. The sons interchangeable, no doubt like the daughters. Different stages of the same process, and a bitter, bitter disquietude. Martha, Martha, sweet Persephone. I call you back.
Her mother returned and handed her the snifter, filled to its previous level. She had added some to her own as well. When Glynnis at last resumed, her voice had lost its certitude.
“I suppose Daddy’s death was a watershed for me. Before, we were so well taken care of. We took everything for granted, including each other. I mean, none of us ever had any conception that anything could change, did we? We were still children, each one of us, including you, Mother. And we were so secure. You look at all these portraits of the stereotypical American family. That’s what we were, a Norman Rockwell painting, quaint and cute.”
She paused to sip her brandy again, and took a deep breath. Her voice grew tremulous, low and throaty. “Then Daddy died. He tried to warn us, you know. He tried to make us ready for the change, to caution us that our whole world was about to be redefined, and we’d better be prepared. That was so typical of him, and he was probably grateful he knew beforehand that he was dying so he could take care of matters before he went. We should have been ready. But even after that, after all his gentle warnings, he died so quickly. It wasn’t like a death after all, really. It was like he was going away on some kind of last-minute trip. To an AMA convention. And I keep expecting him to come back.
“He died, and nothing seemed secure anymore. If Daddy could die, then nothing else was truly safe. He made us a family. Without him, we’re not children anymore.”
“So you don’t feel as comfortable here,” responded her mother, “under these new and sad conditions. And you think nobody else perceived the same transformation, that nobody else felt older when he died. We grieve both for your father, and for what we have lost. And many days I feel as if I’m ninety years old.
“I’ll never get over it, my baby. Every night when I crawl into a cold bed I feel it all over again, and it never gets any easier. I loved your father in a way that you’ll experience some day only if you’re extraordinarily fortunate. And it will consume you if it happens, and you’ll abandon yourself without wanting to and without being the slightest bit able to stop it. I gave myself to him, Glynnis, and I held nothing back. I haven’t had a happy day since he died. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I never will, not in the sense I’ve known before.
“But I do have the rest of you,” she continued, “And I’m not going to cut my own life off out of heartbreak. I will not deny myself what’s left. You lost your childhood. I lost all the sweet excitement of adulthood. There’s no difference. But there comes a time when you don’t dig at the wound anymore. It never stops hurting, ever, but you just stop looking for it. There’s too much left for you to do with and for everybody who remains. You can never put your loss out of your mind, but you just have to stop reliving it. And you can’t think any less of those who have already done what you must. Please, Glyn.”
Glynnis watched the image of her mother blur and swim. The brandy had made her limbs weary, too heavy to animate, so she sank deeper into the warm leather. Her nose filled and she sniffled to hold it back. Blackness leaked inward through the bay window, covering the bookshelves, draping the desk and creeping behind her swimming mother. She felt a rift insider her, a fissure, splitting her from her neck to her knees.
“Mother, you make so much more sense than I do.” She sniffled again. “And I suppose someday I’ll be able to say how sorry I am and become the prodigal daughter.” Her mother had lost all her edges, a wet, watery mess engulfing her chair. “But I can’t tonight. I just can’t.” She sniffed once more before taking a deep breath to compose herself. “I must look pretty awful.”
“Yes, my love, but you are still my darling daughter, and I still love you with all the heart that’s permitted me. If you need more time, then take it. Take all the time you want, and know that we shall be here when you’re done with this horrible process. We will always be here. Take your comfort where you can, even if it’s away from us.”
Glynnis Mear had not lost all control. She would not allow that to happen. She blinked hard until the blackness around her mother receded and the form again resumed a definable perimeter.
There was no resolution. There could be none within the young girl’s confusion, for the rages of loss, of time, of denial are as ancient as humankind itself. Every life brings with it a thousand thousand forms of death, spread among those who touch its web. Only at the final death does the web collapse, sucking those closest into a swirling, vicious vortex. Each will land somewhere on the far side, but one cannot know precisely.
Glynnis rose from her chair, and, for the first time in immediate memory, embraced her mother of her own will. She kissed her goodnight before climbing the stairs to her room, her heart no less heavy, her mind no less troubled. But for this evening at least, she would sleep a dreamless sleep.
Three days later she took the train back to Philadelphia. Lynda Hoelscher had arrived earlier that afternoon and was waiting for her when Glynnis got to her dormitory room. As she entered, she saw Lynda, put down her bag and walked over to her friend. There, silently, she hugged her fast, holding on to the strong warmth of Lynda’s shoulders with all her might.
***
Tom McIlweath, too, had gone home for the holidays, flying across country back to California although swim practice demanded that he stay in New Jersey two days longer than Conor Finnegan. To his parents he was unchanged, and Tom went through his three weeks at home as if they were any other three weeks of his earlier life. He worked out daily with his old swim club; he slept late when he could; he ate well. His parents, particularly his father, asked him ceaseless questions about college life, all of which he answered precisely, showing glimpses of the burgeoning confidence for which he had left home in the firs
t place. Tom remained quiet and saw only two or three of his old acquaintances—he could not really call them friends—over the course of his rest, and those only by chance on those days when he was shopping or running errands. He did not seek them out, and he felt no great exhilaration at seeing them again. Save his parents, he had missed no one.
In short, Tom McIlweath saw himself as a lithe, graceful snake in the process of shedding a worn skin. When he flew back to New Jersey in January, he counted this vacation as the best of his young life, and these holidays the most rewarding he had ever experienced.
Conor Finnegan by contrast had plunged headlong back into his old lifestyle with a fervor that bordered on the religious. He would be home for three weeks—twenty-two short days to accomplish what he wanted, to see the people he needed to see.
He accepted humbly the adulations of his parents, which began of course as soon as he stepped off the plane and continued until he left. His mother became particularly solicitous and took great pains to prepare his favorite meals, to leave him undisturbed as he slept late each morning, to wash and iron his clothes. After nearly a four-month recess, Katherine Finnegan felt like a mother again. She allowed herself to behave like one to excess.
His father, too, reacted warmly. Conor and his father would sit up late at night after his father came home from working an odd shift. Together they would eat something, Katherine having gone to bed early. Then, with the television providing a mindless background, they would talk, openly and without pretension. Here Conor would try to fulfill the frequent longings he had had at school to share his new circumstances with his father, who, he was certain, would find them as stimulating as had Conor himself.
Ed Finnegan enjoyed his son’s stories and looked forward to them as he locked the store at night. As does every father, Ed Finnegan had always lived a bit vicariously through his son. If his own existence might now be locked into place, he could, for these few weeks, find a profoundly practical release through young Conor. With every phrase, Conor’s voice betrayed a barely suppressed excitement with life itself, enhanced through his inestimable joy of discovery. Conor tried to paint for his father a complete portrait of what those discoveries were—not only a tradition-filled campus with a hodgepodge of personalities and experiences, but also the new angles, depths and dimensions he had found within himself. For Edward Finnegan, it was as if his son was learning to walk again, and each evening he would look forward to watching him take a few more steps. Ed Finnegan did not know if he would ever see the Rutgers campus, but, through his son, he had a broad picture of it and its people. More importantly, he could also see the impact this mysterious place had had upon his only son, who returned home in his father’s eyes stronger, slightly more polished, equally as confident as he had always been, and undoubtedly wiser.