“You mean, Mom never told you that Ray left her zilch?” I asked.
“All she said was that he had died.”
“That was during your nineteen ninety-eight phone call, right?”
Charlie stared down at his shoes. “Yes—that’s right,” he said quietly. “But I didn’t know she’d been cut out of his will like that.”
“Yeah—Ray left everything to the nurse who’d been looking after him ever since Edith went to that big Episcopalian church in the sky. Poor old Mom—she always got shortchanged on everything.”
“How did she manage to pay the bills?”
“She had a small pension from the school. There was social security . . . and that was it. I offered to help her out, but, of course, she refused me. Even though I could have afforded it.”
“You still with the same ad agency?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“But you’re some senior executive now, aren’t you?”
“A senior copywriter, that’s all.”
“Sounds pretty okay to me.”
“The money’s not bad. But there’s a saying in my business: a happy copywriter is an oxymoron. Still, it passes the time and pays the bills. I just wish Mom had let me pay some of her bills. But she was adamant she wanted nothing from me. The way I figure it, she was either running an illegal canasta game, or she had a lucrative Girl Scout Cookie racket going on the side.”
“You planning to close up this place now?” Charlie asked.
“I’m certainly not going to maintain it as a museum.”
I looked at him squarely. “You know you’re out of the will.”
“I’m, uh, not surprised.”
“Not that there’s much in her estate. Just before she went, she told me there was a bit of life insurance and some stock. Maybe fifty grand tops. Too bad you didn’t make contact with her six months ago. Believe me, she didn’t want to cut you out—and she kept hoping against hope that you’d make that one call. After they told her the cancer was terminal, she wrote you, didn’t she?”
“She never mentioned in the letter that she was dying,” he said.
“Oh, that would have changed things, would it?”
Another of his evasive over-my-shoulder glances. My voice remained level.
“You didn’t answer her letter, and you didn’t answer the messages I left for you when she was in her final days. Which, I have to say, was strategically dumb. Because had you shown your face in New York, you would now be splitting that fifty grand with me.”
“I would never have accepted my share . . .”
“Yeah, right. Princess would have insisted . . .”
“Don’t call Holly that.”
“Why the hell not? She’s the Lady Macbeth in this story.”
“Kate, I’m really trying to . . .”
“Do what? ‘Heal wounds’? Achieve ‘closure’?”
“Look, my argument was never with you.”
“I’m touched. Too bad Mom’s not here to see this. She always had these far-fetched romantic notions about everyone making up, and maybe seeing her West Coast grandkids again.”
“I meant to call . . .”
“Meant isn’t good enough. Meant means shit.”
My voice had jumped a decibel or two. I was suddenly aware that the living room had emptied. So too was Charlie, as he whispered, “Please, Kate . . . I don’t want to go back to the coast with such bad . . .”
“Charlie, what the hell did you expect today? Instant reconciliation? Field of Dreams? You reap what you sow, pal.”
I felt a steadying hand on my arm. Aunt Meg.
“Great sermon, Kate,” she said. “And I’m sure Charlie now completely understands your point of view.”
I took a deep steadying breath. And said, “Yeah, I guess he does.”
“Charlie,” Meg said, “why don’t you go find yourself something alcoholic in the kitchen.”
Charlie did as commanded. The squabbling children had been separated.
“You okay now?” Meg asked.
“No,” I said. “I am definitely not okay.”
She motioned me toward the sofa. Sitting down next to me, her voice became conspiratorially quiet:
“Back off the guy,” she said. “I had a little talk with him in the kitchen. It seems he’s been juggling some very major problems.”
“What kind of problems?”
“He was downsized four months ago. Fitzgibbon was taken over by some Dutch multinational, and they immediately canned half their Californian sales force.”
Fitzgibbon was the pharmaceuticals giant which had employed Charlie for the last twenty years. Charlie had started out as a San Fernando Valley sales rep, then gradually worked his way up to being Regional Sales Director for Orange County. And now . . .
“Exactly how bad are his problems?” I asked.
“Put it this way—he had to borrow money from a friend to buy the plane ticket back here.”
“Jesus.”
“And with two kids in college, financially speaking, things are hitting critical mass. He’s in really grim shape.”
I suddenly felt a pang of guilt. The poor idiot. Nothing ever seemed to work out Charlie’s way. He always had this unerring talent for making the wrong call.
“From what I gather, the marital front is also pretty choppy. Because Princess isn’t exactly being the most supportive of spouses . . .”
Meg suddenly stopped talking and gave me a fast nudge with her elbow. Charlie had reentered the room, his raincoat over his arm. I stood up.
“What’s with the coat?” I asked.
“I’ve got to get back to the airport,” he said.
“But you just arrived a couple of hours ago,” I said.
“I’ve got a big meeting first thing tomorrow,” he said sheepishly. “A job interview. I’m, uh, kind of between things at the moment.”
I caught Meg’s glance—imploring me not to let on that I knew about Charlie’s unemployed status. Isn’t it amazing how family life is an ever-widening web of petty confidences and “please don’t tell your brother I told you . . .”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Charlie,” I said. “And I’m sorry I boxed your ears before. It’s a bad day and . . .”
Charlie silenced me by leaning forward and giving me a fast buzz on the cheek.
“Let’s keep in touch, eh?” he said.
“That’s really up to you, Charlie.”
My brother didn’t respond to that comment. He simply shrugged sadly and headed to the front door. When he got there, he turned back toward me. A look passed between us. It only lasted a nanosecond, but it said it all: please forgive me.
In that sad nanosecond, I felt a surge of pity for my brother. He appeared so bloated and battered by life; as trapped and cornered as a deer staring straight into the oncoming headlights. Life had not worked out for him—and he now radiated disappointment. I could certainly sympathize with his sense of letdown. Because, with the serendipitous exception of my son, I was not exactly a walking advertisement for personal fulfilment.
“Goodbye, Katie,” Charlie said. He opened the front door. I turned away from my brother and disappeared into the bathroom. When I came out two minutes later, I was relieved to see that he’d left.
Just as I was also relieved that the rest of the assembled mourners began to make their goodbyes. There were a couple of people from the building, and some old friends of Mom—increasingly frail women in their seventies, trying to make pleasant chitchat, and appear reasonably spirited, and not think too much about the fact that, one by one, their contemporaries were vanishing.
By three, everyone had gone—except for Meg and Rozella, the large, cheerful, middle-aged Dominican woman I had hired, two years ago, to clean Mom’s apartment twice a week. She ended up being a full-time nurse after Mom checked herself out of Sloan-Kettering.
“I’m not dying in some beige room with fluorescent lighting,” she told me the morning her oncologist informed
her the cancer was terminal.
I heard myself saying, “You’re not dying, Mom.”
She reached out from the bed and took my hand.
“You can’t fight City Hall, dear.”
“The doctor said it could be months . . .”
Her voice remained calm, strangely serene.
“At the very outset. From where I’m sitting, I would say three weeks maximum. Which, quite frankly, is better than I expected . . .”
“Must you always, always look on the bright side, Mom?” Oh Christ, what am I saying here? I grasped her hand tighter. “I didn’t mean that. It’s just . . .”
She stared at me critically.
“You’ve never really figured me out, have you?” she said.
Before I had a chance to offer up some weak refutation, she reached out and hit the call button by her hospital bed.
“I’m going to ask the nurse to get me dressed and help me pack up my things. So if you wouldn’t mind giving me fifteen minutes . . .”
“I’ll get you dressed, Mom.”
“No need, dear.”
“But I want to.”
“Go get yourself a cup of coffee, dear. The nurse will take care of everything.”
“Why won’t you let me . . . ?” I suddenly sounded like a whiny fourteen-year-old. My mom simply smiled, knowing she’d checkmated me.
“You run along now, dear. But don’t be longer than fifteen minutes—because if I’m not gone by noon, they charge another full day for the room.”
“So what?” I felt like yelling. “Blue Cross is picking up the tab.” But I knew what her response would be.
It’s still not fair to take advantage of a good, dependable company like Blue Cross.
And I would then wonder (for around the zillionth time) why I could never win an argument with her.
You’ve never really figured me out, have you?
Damn her for knowing me too well. As usual, she was right on the money. I never understood her. Never understood how she could be so equanimous in the face of so many disappointments, so many adversities. From the few hints that she had dropped (and from what Charlie told me when we used to talk), I sensed that her marriage hadn’t exactly been happy. Her husband had died young. He’d left her no money. Her only son had estranged himself from the family. And her only daughter was Ms. Discontented who couldn’t understand why her mom refused to scream and shout about life’s many letdowns. Or why, now, at the end of her life, she was so damn accepting, and would think it bad manners to rage against the dying of the light. But that was always her fortitudinous style. She never showed her hand, never articulated the inherent sadness which so clearly lurked behind her stoical veneer.
But she was certainly right about the timetable of her illness. She didn’t last months. She lasted less than two weeks. I hired Rozella on a twenty-four-hour-care basis—and felt guilty about not being with Mom full time. But I was under insane pressure at work with a big new account, and I had Ethan to look after (being pigheaded, I also didn’t want to ask Matt for any favors). So I could only squeeze in three hours a day with her.
The end was fast. Rozella woke me at four AM last Tuesday, and simply said, “You must come now.”
Fortunately I had already worked out an emergency plan for this exact moment with a newfound friend named Christine—who lived two floors above me in my building, and was a fellow member of the Divorced Moms Club. Though Ethan loudly objected, I managed to get him out of bed and delivered him to Christine, who immediately put him back to bed on her sofa, relieved me of his school clothes, and promised to deliver him to Allen-Stevenson that morning.
Then I raced downstairs, got the doorman to find me a cab, and told the driver that I’d tip him five bucks if he could make it across town to 84th and West End in fifteen minutes.
He did it in ten. Which was a good thing—as Mom went just five minutes after I walked through the door.
I found Rozella standing at the foot of her bed, sobbing quietly. She put her arms around me, and whispered, “She’s here, but not here.”
That was a nice way of saying she had slipped into a coma. Which, honestly, was something of a relief to me—because I was secretly terrified of this deathbed scene. Of saying the right, final thing. Because there is no right or final thing to say. Anyway she couldn’t hear me now—so any melodramatic “I love you, Mom!” proclamations would have been for my benefit alone. At a momentous moment like this one, words are less than cheap. And they couldn’t assuage the guilt I was feeling.
So I simply sat on the bed, and took Mom’s still-warm hand, and gripped it tightly, and tried to remember my first recollection of her, and suddenly saw her as an animated, pretty young woman holding my four-year-old hand as we walked to the playground in Riverside Park, and thought how this wasn’t a significant or crucial memory, just something ordinary, and how back then she was fifteen years younger than I am now, and how we forget all those walks to the park, and the emergency trips to the pediatrician with tonsillitis, and getting picked up after school, and being schlepped around town for shoes or clothes or Girl Scout meetings, and all the other scheduling minutiae that comes with being a parent, and how my mom always tried so hard with me, and how I could never really see that, and how I hated my neediness toward her, and wished that I could have somehow made her happier, and how, back when I was four, she would always go on the slide with me, always sit in the adjoining swing, rocking back and forth, and how, suddenly, there we were, mother and daughter swinging higher into the sky, an autumn day in ’59, the sun shining, my world cozy, secure, loving, my mother laughing, and . . .
She took three sharp intakes of breath. Then there was silence. I must have sat there for another fifteen minutes, still holding her hand, feeling a gradual chill drift into her fingers. Eventually, Rozella gently took me by the shoulders and stood me upright. There were tears in her eyes, but none in mine. Perhaps because I was just too paralyzed to cry.
Rozella leaned over and shut Mom’s eyes. Then she crossed herself and said a Hail Mary. I engaged in a different sort of ritual: I went into the living room, poured myself a large Scotch, threw it back, then picked up the phone and dialed 911.
“What kind of emergency do you want to report?” asked the operator.
“It’s not an emergency,” I said. “Just a death.”
“What sort of death?”
“Natural.” But I could have added: “A very quiet death. Dignified. Stoic. Borne without complaint.”
My mother died the way she lived.
I stood by the bed, listening to Rozella wash up the dishes from the wake. Just three days ago Mom lay here. Out of nowhere I suddenly remembered something that a guy named Dave Schroeder recently told me. He was a freelance magazine writer: smart as hell, well traveled, but still trying to make a name for himself at forty. I’d gone out with him twice. He dropped me when I wouldn’t sleep with him after the second date. Had he waited until the third date, he might have gotten lucky. But anyway . . . he did tell me one great story: about being in Berlin on the night the Wall was breached, then coming back a year later to find that that monstrous structure—the defining, bloodstained rampart of the Cold War—had simply vanished from view. Even the famous Customs Shed at Checkpoint Charlie had been dismantled, and the old Bulgarian Trade Mission on the eastern side of the Checkpoint had been replaced by an outlet of Benetton.
“It was like this terrible thing, this crucial cornerstone of twentieth-century history, never existed,” Dave told me. “And it got me thinking: the moment we end an argument is the moment we obliterate any history of that argument. It’s a basic human trait: to sanitize the past, in order to move on.”
I looked down again at my mother’s bed. And remembered the soiled sheets, the sodden pillows, the way she would almost claw the mattress before the morphine kicked in. Now it was neatly remade, with laundered sheets and a bedspread that had just come back from the dry cleaner’s. The idea that she died right here
already seemed surreal, impossible. A week from now—after Rozella and I packed up the apartment, and the Goodwill Industries people hauled off all the furniture I planned to give away—what tangible evidence would be left of my mom’s time on the planet? A few material possessions (her engagement ring, a brooch or two), a few photographs, and . . .
Nothing else—except, of course, the space she would permanently occupy inside my head. A space she now shared with the dad I never knew.
And when Charlie and I both died . . . ping. That would be it for Dorothy and Jack Malone. Their impact on human life rubbed right out. Just as my lasting imprint will be Ethan. For as long as he’s here . . .
I shuddered, and suddenly felt very cold, and in need of another Scotch. I walked into the kitchen. Rozella was at the sink, dealing with the final dishes. Meg was at the little formica kitchen table, a cigarette smoldering in a saucer (my mom had no ashtrays in the house), a bottle of Scotch next to a half-filled glass.
“Don’t look so disapproving,” Meg said. “I did offer to help Rozella.”
“I was thinking more about the cigarette,” I said.
“It doesn’t bother me,” Rozella said.
“My mom hated smoking,” I said. Pulling back a chair, I sat down, then reached for Meg’s packet of Merits, fished one out, and lit up. Meg looked stunned.
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