Five Questions

by Kitty B. Florey

  It was horrible to watch her suffer. She could hardly breathe, even with oxygen, and the sound of her rasping, shallow struggles for air filled the house. Whenever Patrick and I visited, we lay awake listening to her wheezing in her room down the hall. She was unable to eat, her eyes were huge, her hair fell out from the useless chemotherapy. When I was with her, I couldn’t bear to look at her, and I couldn’t look at anything else.

  She spent her final, terrible week in the hospital, deeply medicated for the pain, hooked up to tubes and a respirator, unable to control the tears that ran down her gaunt cheeks. She moaned, sometimes, in a long, quiet, relentless monotone that I don’t think she was even aware of. This undignified anguish seemed the wrong end for anyone, but especially, somehow, for my mother, who was always so in control, so composed and elegant, who always coped and made everything all right.

  Nothing was going to make this all right. I knew that. All I could do was be with her. My father and I took turns at her bedside. Sitting next to her, holding her hand, rubbing lotion gently into the dry skin of her arms and face, I remembered the only other time I’d been in a hospital, when I had lain in bed at the hospital in Boston and my mother had sat beside me, and how she broke down when she told me the baby was a girl who looked like me. I remembered her stern profile, her distress when I said I wanted to keep her. I had never stopped regretting the loss of my child, but as I sat there listening to my mother fight for breath I reminded myself that she had done what she thought best. I longed for her to get better, to be herself again, so we could talk about it, forgive each other, get it clear between us. But she was beyond that; she was lost in her own pain.

  Her last day was torture for us all. Her doctor had put her on a morphine drip, and she drifted in and out of consciousness. When she was awake, she was restless, tossing and turning, trying to get out of bed. Once I was certain she wanted to tell me something. Her face contorted with the effort, and she clutched my hand. All her strength, it seemed, was in that wasted claw. One of her nurses was there. She kept saying, “It’s okay, Mrs. Tynan. Don’t fight it. Just let go.”

  “No!” I cried. I gripped my mother’s hand in both of mine. “Don’t, Mom. Please don’t.”

  The nurse—Lorraine was her name—put her hand on my arm. “You’ve got to let her go in peace, Wynn. I know it’s hard for you, but don’t make her keep fighting. Let her go.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Wynn,” Lorraine said gently. “You’ve got to.”

  I had another flash of memory, the social worker in the hospital saying, when they took the baby from me: You’ve got to let her go. How alike they were, birth and death: fear, pain, and helplessness. And everything changed forever.

  Lorraine’s shift was over and she left. My father went out to get coffee. I stayed by my mother, listening to the desperate rasp that was her breathing. Each long, slow breath seemed as if it would be her last, but then, from some great depth, she would summon up another one, and my tensed body would relax. How could I let her go? I didn’t care what Lorraine said. I touched the beautiful bones of my mother’s face, her winged eyebrows, still dark. They had given up on the chemo, and her hair had begun to grow back, stark white and perfectly straight. I remembered how she used to struggle with my hair, how combing out the tangles she cried as much as I did. Once she had thrown down the brush and said, “Oh God, it kills me to hurt you, Wynn.” We took a break, and she laughed and showed me myself in the mirror—one side of my head tamed by her brush, the other half still wild. “My two daughters,” she said, kissing me. “Both of them beautiful.”

  How can anyone do this? I thought. How can anyone bear it? Her breathing stopped, then started again. “Mommy,” I said. “Please don’t die.” She opened her eyes and looked at me, and tears gathered and spilled down her cheeks. I wiped her face with the sheet, I smoothed her hair, I rubbed her hand. I wanted her to know I was there. Then, suddenly, as I sat and watched her face, the room became strangely quiet. At first, I didn’t know what had happened, and then I knew her breathing had stopped. Her face didn’t change; she continued to look at me, but her blue eyes were blank. “Mom,” I whispered, and then I put my arms around her and held her to me, I buried my face in her hair. She weighed nothing.

  Her death was a release for my father, but it put him into a state of despair and something close to panic. In less than two years, he had lost his mother and his wife. It was a terrible thing to see my parents’ marriage end so painfully. They had been married for thirty-seven years; their affection went deep, and so did their dependence on each other. Dad was lost after her death; he became a different person—bitter, depressed, and, eventually, unwell himself. When I visited him or talked to him on the phone, he was peevish, complaining about his neighbors, his brother, Henry, who never called him, the weather, the odd aches and pains he had developed. I hoped he would get over it, and some version of his old, placid, practical personality would reassert itself, but that didn’t happen. Within a few months he became—suddenly, appallingly—old, and difficult, and sick.

  For me, it was a double loss. My mother’s death devastated me. Who arranged the world so that she could suffer like this and have her life cut so short? I missed her every minute, and I missed her angrily, outraged at the cruelty of her death, and at the lack of a resolution between us, all the things unsaid. For months, when I thought about her, I wept.

  Trying to deal with my own grief, I became impatient with my father’s. It made me feel terrible to talk to him—his long dejected sighs, his running complaints about how tired he was, how much there was to do without my mother there to help him, how I didn’t visit often enough.

  I tried to be understanding, but I was so agitated all the time that I couldn’t work, couldn’t study, and I had to take the first Incomplete of my life. Patrick and I were always spending our scarce funds to fly to Florida and sit at my father’s kitchen table with him in numbing boredom, while he complained about everything from his lawn to his investments. We were forced to neglect Uncle Austin; we had no time to visit him, spending every possible holiday and bit of time off with my father in Key West. I called Dad twice a week. I wrote him letters, sent him slides of my work and Patrick’s, told him funny stories about student life. Nothing broke through the gloom; he was interested only in his own suffering. Patrick was wonderful with him, trying to engage him in conversations about chisels or chip knives, listening patiently to his long phone diatribes while I paced the floor and gnashed my teeth and made strangling motions with my hands. For a while, my father’s suffering eclipsed my mother’s death and left me little time to think about it, I was so busy trying to come up with ways to comfort him.

  Gradually, of course, I got used to my mother being gone, and to my father being someone else. I had Patrick; my father had no one. I knew that, and in time I did learn how to deal with him, how to distract him from the emptiness at the center of his life—at least not to let his moods affect my own so drastically. I began to work again, and when Patrick and I went to visit him, it was good for a few days: The three of us could play poker, or go fishing, in some kind of harmony, before Dad began to feel sorry for himself.

  But he and I were never as close as we had been, and though he took joy in my existence, my painting, my life with Patrick, a part of my father was always unreachable—always, it seemed, listening for a voice that wasn’t there, seeking a comfort that was no longer available to him.

  His sorrow was especially poignant because I was sure that was what would happen to me if I ever lost Patrick. During that time, Patrick and I became very close; we made love more often than ever, simply because we were alive, we were young and healthy and strong, we were together.

  I had lost everything: my child, my mother and father, my grandmother—even my painting had become chancy. What I had now was Patrick: Patrick, who was enough, who was everything.

  I thought often, perhaps too often, of what Patrick had said when he was in one of his blac
k moods: I’ve gotten used to happiness. What would I do if it was taken away?

  Question Three

  Why Did You Run Away?

  After graduation, Patrick and I moved to New York, to a loft on SoHo’s extreme eastern fringe—a vast, bare, primitive place on Lafayette Street, with no proper kitchen, rough wooden floors, a toilet and a shower. The heat was unreliable in the winter, intense in the summer. Our huge filthy windows looked out across the broad street to a bank and a grungy bar. Derelicts sometimes slept in our doorway. The neighborhood was ugly and desolate, dangerous after dark, not entirely safe in the daytime. We loved it.

  Our rent was $150 a month, and we could just scrape it together. Patrick worked part-time as a welder at a machine shop in Queens. Every Monday and Tuesday morning at 6:30 he would rouse himself out of bed, grumbling, so he could be in Long Island City by eight, and he would arrive home after seven in the evening, grumpy on Monday, buoyant on Tuesday, always starving and filthy. Four days a week, I waitressed the lunch shift at Fanelli’s, which in those days was a workingman’s bar.

  We were hard up but not destitute. For emergencies, I had a little money left me by my mother, and from the beginning in New York Patrick had some small, erratic success with his sculpture. Soon after we moved to the city, he sold a piece for a thousand dollars to our landlord, an uptown lawyer who wanted it for the reception area of his office. Then he had two things in a group show at a gallery on West Broadway; his name was mentioned in a review, and one piece sold. After that, he showed his sculptures regularly, always in modest group shows, and he received a couple of small grants. By then, he was working entirely in metal, and his pieces had become large and unwieldy, and not cheap to produce. They also weren’t easy to store. Our loft was full of his work, but he had to keep some of it at Uncle Austin’s, loading it in pieces into a rented truck and storing it in the decrepit barn behind the house. He ran an electric line out there and made himself a country studio and sometimes, when we felt the need to get out of the city, we drove upstate and stayed for three or four days. Patrick would go out to the barn and work far into the night on one of his pieces, hammering and welding, while Uncle Austin and I drank whiskey in front of the TV and prayed that he wouldn’t set the place on fire.

  I’ve never known anyone who worked as diligently as Patrick did, with such single-minded intensity. He worked on his pieces, but he also spent time making phone calls, taking the subway uptown to the galleries on Fifty-seventh Street, making the rounds of places in the neighborhood, talking to people, trying to get his work shown, trying to find buyers, commissions, grants. He complained about all of it, how it took time away from his work and often ended in futility, but he kept at it, and it began to pay off.

  Occasionally he had enough money ahead to create an assemblage of found objects and have it cast in bronze, an absurdly expensive undertaking. “Making art is a luxury,” he often said. The money he spent producing it, and the dollar value he was able to put on his work astonished me—especially those bronzes—not because they weren’t worth it, but because he was so confident. Ultimately, that belief in himself contributed to his success. He never held himself cheap, and so neither did anyone else. Of course, it helped that his work was wonderful: huge and rough, but lyrical and haunting, and expressive, always, of that unmistakable joy in living that filled everything he did.

  And I woke up every morning with the miracle of Patrick beside me, feeling awe and gratitude for the life we led, and with the old, rarely spoken fear that we both felt—he the orphan, me the bereft mother—that it would somehow be taken from us.

  • • •

  I was painting, too, of course: Patrick’s industry shamed me into working hard. But during those New York years I was beginning to realize that my heart wasn’t in it. I began to look forward to going to Fanelli’s, whole afternoons when I spent hours on my feet carrying trays and dealing with customers: It was a pleasure compared to struggling with a painting that I knew was doomed. I think now, looking back, that, aside from the problems I had creating honest art or finding a voice in the midst of my inner confusions, I let myself be influenced too much by Patrick’s work. I was trying for the same abstract boldness, the same largeness and energy that he achieved in his sculpture. And yet I continued to paint small canvases because that was what always felt right to me. The combination was hopeless.

  What I liked best was working outdoors: Painting the city, I grew to love it. Like a lot of newcomers to Manhattan, I used to take endless walks, exploring the streets north of SoHo in the Village with my portable French easel on my back. My street paintings were the best things I did, maybe because I didn’t have time to think, I was constantly having to deal with the changing light and the crowds and the weather, the occasional hostility of a shop owner or doorman, the curiosity of tourists. I was oddly at ease there, and even Patrick had to admit that my work had some of the old warmth and freedom. What he didn’t say—though we both knew it perfectly well—was that the paintings were also not terribly interesting—just conventional representations of quaint Village scenes. Still, they were the best I could do. When the weather kept me inside I forced myself to work on something or other, but nearly everything I produced was worthless.

  On my travels, I often walked by my grandmother’s apartment building. The dry cleaner had been replaced by a candle shop, and Anna Rosa’s third-floor windows were no longer curtained in the elaborate swagged draperies she had made. Once I stood by her doorbell—O’TOOLE/MEROLA it said now—wishing I could ring it and bring her back, remembering how, when I heard her voice on the intercom, I would yell, “It’s us, Anna Rosa!” and she would say, “Who is us? Burglars? Men from Mars?” Then she would buzz us in, and we would climb the stairs to her exuberant hugs and tins of Italian cookies and the unique smell of her apartment: sugar and herbs and tomato sauce overlaid with dry-cleaning fluid. I made sketches of the old building and always meant to paint it, but I never did: That place was so clear in my head, so beautiful the way I recalled it, that to put it on canvas would have been to destroy it. Someday, I told myself, when I’m working well again, I’ll come back and make a wonderful painting of it. But not now.

  The city’s beauty and richness and variety—even its sordid dangers—seemed the ideal background for Patrick and me and our love for each other, the delight we took in each other’s company, the refuge we found together in our sunny loft, our mattress on the floor. We worked in the daytime and often went out with friends at night. We got to know Santo Peri, who would eventually become an important gallery owner, and his lover, the painter Ralph Pritchett, and Frank and Gwen Maxwell, who lived over on the Bowery and were just beginning to experiment with their photographic collages. We hung out at the Broome Street Bar with them and some of the other pioneering artists in the neighborhood. Those were good times: We were a close little community, we helped each other, we were excited by each other’s successes.

  And then, one day, as I had feared, everything ended.

  My father had bought us a television, and Patrick and I were idly watching the news on the April evening when the story about Molly McCormick’s murder was first broadcast.

  I can remember it with the clarity with which people say they remember a mugging, or a car crash. Even now, in my mind, I see it as a slow-motion film, with odd irrelevant details: the mug of coffee I was holding, the way dusk was just beginning to fall outside the windows, Patrick slouched in an old wing chair we had salvaged from a Dumpster, the announcer’s staccato delivery of the facts of the case—the monstrous, shocking facts. A nine-year-old child tortured, violated, then strangled to death by a father who had been systematically abusing her since she was a baby. Death, it seemed, was merciful. A picture of the father, a drab man in handcuffs. A picture of the mother, an overweight woman with a black eye. A picture of the child, Molly McCormick of Kansas City—a cute, skinny little thing with masses of dark hair and a crooked smile.

  My first thought was: That
could be my daughter. It didn’t come out right away that she was adopted, but even then, in that initial story, I think I knew. I stared at the screen, turned to stone, trying not to know, trying to deny it. The photograph wasn’t a very sharp one. There was more of an impression than an actual child. But the resemblance between us was unmistakable—that and the name. I waited for Patrick to say, “That child looks so much like you!” But he only gave an exclamation of disgust. “Jesus, what is wrong with people?” he said, and was depressed about the story all evening. I don’t think he noticed my reaction, my silent horror, or if he did he assumed it was merely my response to a particularly dreadful news story. I remember lying awake that night beside him, wondering if it could be true, if this had been the fate of the red baby I had held so briefly in the hospital nine years before, then deciding that it was impossible, my imagination was out of control, life couldn’t be so cruel.

  The next day, when I read about it in the Daily News, it all came clear. An adopted child named Molly, exactly the age my daughter would be, a Midwestern couple, and a clearer photograph, a recent school portrait. It was uncannily like my third-grade photograph. The dark unruly hair, the triangular face, the light eyes. She was thinner than I had ever been, and her eyes were older than any nine-year-old’s should be. Her face showed the marks of strain and suffering, and her smile was forced, false, eager to please.

  It was a Monday. Patrick had gone to work. I sat at the table in our loft reading the article over and over, studying the pictures: the unhappy child, the drab father, the battered mother. I knew it was my daughter, and I remember thinking: I did this. The second thing I thought was: I need to tell Patrick. And the third was: I can’t.