by Julia Pandl
“Here, Mom.” I reached through the crowd and over her shoulder to put her purse on her lap. “I’m gonna help Dad.”
In our haste to get the Buick-cum-Medivan unpacked, Peggy, George, and I left an unmistakable signal on the curb outside the Holiday Inn. It was my brother Jimmy who discovered it. It could have been left anywhere in the world, really—on the banks of the Thames, next to the Blarney Stone, under the Eiffel Tower—and my parents’ presence would have been felt. There, on the edge of a sidewalk in St. Paul, two days before Dan Griffith took his vow, sat a lonely commode with the top flipped open and two bottles of sherry waiting patiently in the bucket, an icon of George and Terry’s fifty-year marriage, of togetherness in sickness and in health.
THE SOFTNESS THAT came with the chaos had a tendency to disappear once only one or two of us were with Terry. Pain became worry, and worry folded itself in my mother’s brow and behind her eyes. As we drove over to Chrissy and Bill’s for the preparty, Terry shifted her tiny bottom around the impossible velour car seat, unable to find a pain-free position.
“Agh! My back hurts, my leg hurts, everything hurts. Everything,” she said, pressing both legs into the floor and clutching the door handle.
My father sat in the backseat, reading something about spirituality for the skeptic.
“Mom, just stop moving around. We’ll be there in five minutes.”
“There it is. Turn left at the lights,” she directed. She laid her hand calmly against the window. “Look, it’s so beautiful.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty, Mom,” I agreed, turning left onto John Ireland Drive and eyeballing the Cathedral of St. Paul under the visor. It was—pretty, I mean. I’d seen it dozens of times before, of course, but still, its boldly out-of-place magnificence gave me goose bumps. The granite facade of the entryway had a soft pinkish hue in the lights, and the steeple atop the copper dome had grown dark under the shadows of the early evening sky.
“George, look, isn’t it beautiful?”
He raised his head, looked over, and said with a long sigh, “I wonder what it would cost to build that thing today—a hundred million, two hundred,” and went back to his reading. The cathedral disappeared as we headed up Summit Avenue.
She squirmed again. “Ugh.”
“Mom, stop, seriously.”
She reached in her purse, pulled out a transparent orange prescription bottle, opened it, and let out an anxious gasp. “Oh my God, no! George, I’ve only got two pain pills left.” She turned to me and shook the bottle to illustrate the hideous sound made by two measly pills bouncing around hollow plastic.
“Did you fill the prescription, George? Did you pack the refill?”
I checked the rearview mirror and saw my father reach his knobby hand up and peel it across his forehead. Shit.
“Son of a biscuit.” Twitch.
“Oh, George, you didn’t.”
“No, I’m sorry. I forgot.”
“Honestly, George.” She heaved a heavy sigh. “It’s not enough. It’ll never be enough to get me through the weekend.” Tightening her brow, she let worry and pain spill down her cheeks. “How could you?”
“I’m sorry.” George’s tone was pleading.
“Mom.”
She whimpered.
“Mom! We’re not gonna do this. We’re not freaking out, okay?”
“Well, what am I going to do? What? The whole weekend is ruined. Ruined!”
I felt panic creeping over the backseat and mingling with hysteria in the front. My father picked an ever-present hangnail on his left thumb while my mother pulled out her rosary and wildly fingered the beads. It didn’t take much to whip my parents into a frenzy. I’d seen frustration borne out over a lot less than a nearly empty bottle of much-needed Vicodin: a scrap of Kleenex left on the floor, a bit of scrambled egg caught in the fold of a cotton shirt, a set of curtains left open overnight.
“Mom, here’s what we’re gonna do. Mom, listen!”
“What!”
“Just settle down, okay? Everything’s going to be fine. Dad”—I checked the mirror—“everything will be okay. Mom, when we get to Chrissy and Bill’s, take a pill and have a couple glasses of wine, okay? Mix the drugs and the alcohol.” I laughed the second it came out of my mouth. I laughed, recognizing the slow skid that had made such sideways logic seem like a damn good idea, a stroke of genius. My mother had gone over the handlebars of chronic illness dozens of times, and every time we witnessed it, in slow motion, from the curb. We reached out, but she always managed to slip right through our fingertips. My own grip felt especially slippery. Sure, we helped her clean up the road rash, pick the pebbles out of her palms, but the pain, that was all hers. So, hell yeah, I thought, enough’s enough; mix it up.
“Can I do that?” she asked.
“Yes, you can,” I said, emphatic. “It’ll be fine. Tomorrow morning take another one, and in the meantime we’ll dig up a doctor. I’m sure Chrissy and Bill have a few doctor friends. They have drugstores here . . . too . . . Terry.” I looked her in the eye. “Just settle. Please.”
We found a doctor that night—one of the cousins, of course—and had the problem solved, the prescription picked up, and thus order restored, before heading off to the ordination the next morning. The wheelchair glided down the center aisle of the cathedral as my father pushed, his rubber SAS soles squeaking, step by step, against Italian marble. He parked her in front of the first pew, nearer to the chapel of the Sacred Heart, built during the Depression as a devotion to a compassionate Jesus who understood the struggles of his people. George and I slid quietly into the first pew so we could keep an eye on her, just in case. I listened to the methodic hiss of her oxygen tank and watched her tremble through a long, slow breath. Then something settled in. The tightness around her jaw disappeared and her cheeks, soft as a baby’s behind, fell into an easy repose.
Her eyes, though, had a pristine sparkle like a snow-covered lake on a sunny winter day. Looking back, I can honestly say the look on my mother’s face was one I never saw before or after—not at my siblings’ weddings, not at the birth of her first grandchild, not when she wrote my last tuition check, not even when the Packers won the Super Bowl. She would have said it was the Holy Spirit. The expression was joyful and excited, sure, but there was something else too, something more serene, like a preparedness that came from a lifetime of practiced trust.
As a sea of some 250 clergy worked its way down the aisle through a cloud of incense, chasubles flowing, birettas perched, my father leaned over with a wry smile and whispered in my ear, “Lots of hocus-pocus today.”
My shoulders shook under a silent, fitful church laugh, until eventually the laughter gave way to longing. I longed for her kind of faith—the unassuming, rock-solid faith that took a lifetime to build yet seemed so effortless—the kind of faith I prayed for.
14
Assisi
My niece Betsy and I ran a marathon in Rome today, Sunday, March 23, 2003. We ran past the Vatican, St. Peter’s, JP II saying Mass, past the Spanish Steps and the Trevi Fountain. Twenty-six-point-two miles, and don’t forget the .2.
That .2, it’s ugly.
It took me exactly two hours, 247 minutes. I think I left my uterus at mile twenty-two, right there on the Piazza Navona. I’m not so sure my mother was watching over me from above that day. Running was never her thing. We missed Mass. George thought I was dead. He cried when I crossed the finish line. I forgot to tell him how slowly I ran. Betsy ran faster. She’s twenty-two, fresh, young, and tiny, like a cocktail bun. She doesn’t drink or smoke. She’s the hare, I’m the tortoise. The Kenyans won; they got all the half bananas.
There was no thrill of victory, no agony of defeat. No emotion that clearly defined. No, the feeling was somewhere in the middle where real life takes place, where thrills and agonies look an awful lot alike.
It’s so out of character, running.
WE HAVE JOINERS on this trip too, although fewer than I expected: Amy’s husband, T
ommy, and their oldest daughter, Abby. Tommy is here on business, buying guns for his invention. His mother died too. Abby is fifteen. Tommy prodded her into running the five-kilometer portion of the marathon. Our eyes locked when, after only a few hundred feet, they pulled her onto the 5K course, away from me. I saw watery fear ready to spill onto streets she didn’t know, in a city she’d never been to.
I knew for a second what it felt like to be a mother, and then she disappeared into the crowd.
How many kilometers in 26.2 miles?
I don’t run. Ask anyone. I watch the Lifetime channel’s made-for-TV movies.
The marathon was for charity, the American Diabetes Association. A tribute, I suppose, to my nonrunning mother.
Lord.
I MIGHT NEED the money we raised someday, if diabetes, God forbid, comes a knockin’.
It really rolled in after Terry died, the money.
No backing out.
I don’t run.
THE ADA SENT a training manual, a schedule, a how-to.
I grabbed a beer and read the whole thing.
Smoke curled into my eye, stinging.
Not one word in the manual about the chafing. It’s ugly.
I don’t run. Ask anyone.
SINCE WE RAN past the pope, I’m making it count for Mass. Hell, I’m making it count for a year’s worth of masses. George will agree. Our rules are relaxed. There are crumbs in the Wedgwood butter. It’s not perfect the way it used to be. It feels like we’re all walking through Jell-O.
I’m chafed in some pretty odd places.
GRANDPA TOLD BETSY, “So we missed Mass, let it go.” But she didn’t, so here we are in Florence, just two days after the 26.2 miles, at Mass in the Medici Chapel, around the corner from our hotel. I wanted to stay in bed.
Lord, help me set a better example.
It’s in Italian, but Mass is Mass.
La pace sia con voi. La pace sia con voi. La pace sia con voi. La pace sia con voi. La pace sia con voi.
MY FATHER SAW them first. That’s important.
He elbowed me in the ribs after Communion and gestured with his eyebrows. Five red roses, an odd number, one for each of us who had lost.
A spouse, a parent, a grandparent.
Those roses stood in a porcelain vase perched at the feet of the Blessed Mother.
I will let fall a shower of roses . . . Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary . . .
He believed. I saw it. You know belief when you see it. It’s gone as soon as it comes.
He gasped the beauty and the sorrow.
He cried and prayed.
Grief connects us.
THEY LEFT US in Venice, Tommy and Abby, and flew home. We rented a car and drove south to Assisi, George, Betsy, and I.
DRIVING IS NOT the same in Italy. For starters, the road signs are in Italian. The Autostrada is no place for indecision. The Italians will drive right up your ass and pop you into an olive tree.
The Italians will spend an hour uncorking a bottle of wine, describing its fruity essence, its otherworldly beauty.
And then they’ll drive right up your ass.
My father picked his hangnails in the backseat until they bled.
My sweet little Betsy is a shitty navigator. I don’t care if the map is in Italian.
WE’RE GOING TO Assisi because my aunt Dorothy, my mom’s sister, asked us to go. We’re going because my father feeds the birds, and my mother called him St. Francis.
Mom, I’m bringing our St. Francis to Assisi.
We’re on a pilgrimage.
Grief connects us.
THE MARATHON HAS left me crippled.
ASSISI IS OTHERWORLDLY, tucked in the hills where the heavens open up, the sun pours forth, the angels sing.
It’s ridiculous. St. Francis bottle openers, foam fingers, and snow globes, and enough rosaries to sink a ship or end communism once and for all.
It’s a Catholic Disneyland.
WE ARRIVED ON a Sunday. I said, “Where’s the bar?” George did too, but Betsy said we had to go to Mass, again. We walked. I smoked Merits outside and waited while Betsy and George asked for directions. A dark-haired American struggled over ancient cobblestones with a jogging stroller. Ridiculous. He pointed to the Basilica of St. Clare and said to his wife, “I think it’s right up here.” A New Yorker. Then he asked me, Dove si trovala basilica?”
“I don’t speak Italian.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just . . . you look like you belong here.”
“Must be my mustache.”
Lord, help me be a better example.
TWENTY-SOME CHURCHES, TWO basilicas, three hundred Franciscans, and eight Poor Clares later we finally found Mass.
See what I mean? Catholic Disneyland.
Betsy wept the beauty and the sorrow.
I had nothing to give—no smile, no hug, no touch, no tears, no offering.
Lord, help me. I am crippled.
THE WINE HERE is like manna, otherworldly. George and I drink and Betsy prays. She says she’s doing “inner work.”
I say, “Inner work, schminner work.”
Lord.
IT’S A SACRED destination, the tomb of St. Francis.
He’s in there. Dead, but not really. He has a prayer.
People make pilgrimages, kneeling, praying, offering. There are scores of offerings in that tomb. Crutches—sadness, injury, doubt, despair—thrown down.
And a prayer picked up.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace . . .
WE’RE ON A pilgrimage.
St. Francis delivered a sermon to the birds. There’s a picture of it in every hotel room. I wonder, did they listen?
He has a prayer.
Where there is despair, hope.
I CRASHED THE rental car into the side wall in the parking lot of the Grand Hotel Assisi.
My mouth opened and offered a litany of unmentionables.
Our rules are relaxed now.
There are crumbs in the Wedgwood butter. It’s not perfect the way it used to be.
It’s a sacred destination.
George picked his hangnails in the backseat until they bled.
Lord, make me . . .
15
Church and Brunch
About six months or so after my mother died, I called my father one day and said, “I think I found a Mass you might like.” A few weeks earlier, he had declared he was no longer going to regularly attend Sunday Mass. Offering no other explanation, he simply sighed and said, “I’ve had enough.” He had made statements like that before, sweeping and unilateral, but they usually had to do with lemon drop martinis and dogmatic dinner guests with lipstick on their teeth. This, however, was another story.
I always knew he saw Catholicism differently than most, certainly differently from my mother, but it never occurred to me that he would shrug off its most basic practice in her absence. The decision made sense, though. I felt his reasons somewhere in my soul and knew he was right. I was actually a little jealous—Mass was a painful experience with my mother gone. Still, her words, “Keep an eye on Daddy,” echoed around the hollow place she had left in my heart. I knew he was wrong too. For once, hindsight stepped up and behaved. It pulled out a crimson Sharpie, no less, and drew me a picture; a line, crisscrossing around the past and into the present, revealing a series of tight little overlapping circles, intersecting over the dots of his skepticism and those of her conviction. It was a tangled mess, for sure, but one without the other, doubt without certainty, pulled the line straight and onto a disturbingly empty page.
“You did, did you?” he replied. I heard his smirk through the phone.
“Yeah, I think you’ll really like the priest. I met him at a dinner party at Gerry Steele’s the other night. He seems like a really good guy.” Frustration with stiff, uninspired priests had been another of George’s issues with the church. I sensed this priest was different, spirited, so I asked my friend Gerry and her husband Chris to throw a small dinn
er party and give me a chance to interview him.
“Really?” George was playing me, using the parental “we’ll see” tone, the one parents use when they have no intention of “seeing” at all.
“Yeah, I thought maybe we could go out to brunch after. You pick the place. I might even let you pay.”
“Is that so?” He chuckled. I knew I had him. My father enjoyed picking up the tab almost as much as he enjoyed eating. Food was the easiest way in. The rest was in God’s hands.
“Maybe. We’ll see.” It meant something different when I said it.
The following Sunday I heard him coming up the stairs as I stood at the bathroom sink brushing my teeth. I lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a redbrick four-family on Henry Clay in Whitefish Bay, just a few blocks from the Inn. He paused at the door. I stopped brushing and listened. Knock, knock . . . knock, knock, knock . . . knock, knock. (Shave and a haircut, two bits.) I smiled at his signature rhythm and headed for the door.
“Good morning,” he said with a grin.
“Hey, hang on a sec. I’m almost ready. The paper’s over there,” I said, motioning to the ottoman.
“Thanks.” He grabbed a handful of peanut M&M’s I kept in a bowl on the bookshelf near the door, shook them in his hand like dice, settled into an oversize chair, and leafed through the paper. He looked good—white oxford shirt, tan cotton sweater, and khaki pants. Not exactly GQ but put together. For fifty years he had let my mother, and us, believe he was a color-blind fashion illiterate. Every morning he’d walk out of their bedroom looking like a prison escapee who had just pilfered the racks at Jos. A. Bank. The charade, at least where it concerned going out in public, ended abruptly at her wake. I guess it just didn’t make sense anymore.