My father’s bedroom is a shrine. Every morning, upon waking, he was able to worship himself, worship his success. The walls are crammed with signed photographs of governors, senators, congressmen. There is a photo of Justice Louis Brandeis, since my father prepared the legal brief on behalf of the United States Government in the Edwards (The Grapes of Wrath)case, argued before the Supreme Court. A letter from President Truman, framed with a photograph and a presidential pen, commends my father’s work on behalf of Guam. There are pictures of bank openings. A photo of my father with his colleagues on the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission. And more. Most of these men are dead, of course. Of those still living, none will be with my father as he dies. None will call. Relationships remain lifeless photographs. But tucked among the mementos, hung on the wall close to his pillow, is that one small photo of our family at the opening of the Saddle Brook Bank. My father stands between my mother and me—my sister slightly detached. My father beams. How proud he is of the lovely picture he created.
In the closet I find my mother’s button jar and pour all the buttons onto the rug. I trail my fingers through them, inspecting each one. Blue buttons, red buttons, white buttons. Leather buttons, metallic buttons, glass buttons. Plain plastic buttons. Buttons with intricate designs. Buttons with thread still dangling from the holes. Buttons covered with material. A pearl button with a fake diamond center. All these buttons managed to survive all the shirts, skirts, slacks, sweaters, shorts, all the clothes worn by my family.
One special button I put in my wallet to carry home with me on the plane. It is a white button with two large holes for eyes. Around the holes, eyebrows and eyelashes are painted. Below, in red paint, is a dot of a mouth. A button face. A yellow playsuit with button-face buttons. Perhaps the playsuit had first been my sister’s, then mine. I see them: all our playsuits, all our pretty cotton dresses, our pinafores, our jumpers, our sailorsuit dresses, all swaying on a clothesline in a summer breeze. I imagine I lie on the grass and gaze up at our playsuits, at our dresses, almost transparent in blinding white sunlight. I see this thinness of material, like a transparency of an undeveloped photograph, with no little-girl bodies inside.
At the bottom of a wooden trunk, under a pile of blankets, I find my senior high school yearbook. I haven’t seen it in years, and had lost track of my high school friends shortly after graduation. I sit on the floor and skim the pages of photographs, a chronicle of proms, class plays, sporting events. I turn to the senior class pictures. Jane—still smiling her New Jersey smile, one I never learned to imitate. Christopher. His young, innocent shyness is frozen in time, his face one I will never forget. I lean close to read the faded inscription, wanting to recall what he thought to write to me years ago.
“Dear Sue—What I say now I mean sincerely. You have been a part of my life that I will never forget. I’ll remember the good times, the bad times, and the confusing times. Love, Christopher.”
I wonder if he does still remember those times. Christopher, do you remember me as often as I remember you?
I turn to my own picture. I stare straight into the camera. My hair, the flip I adored, is still rigid, sleek, perfect.
I close the yearbook and ruffle my long curly hair. No longer do I need to look perfect.
In my father’s desk I discover a leather journal. Embossed in gold on the cover are the words “My Trip Abroad.” It is a honeymoon journal kept by my father when he and my mother sailed to Palestine. Inside is a dried red rose pressed into the cover with a short item from an October 27, 1933, Chicago newspaper:
CHICAGO ATTORNEY AND BRIDE PLAN TO LIVE IN PALESTINE
Irwin Silverman, young Chicago attorney, and Fay Silverman, who are to be married Sunday in the home of the bride’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. M. Silverman, 515 S. Central Ave., plan to make their home in Palestine. Immediately after the wedding they will leave for a honeymoon in Ireland, France, Italy, Switzerland, Greece, Turkey, Smyrna and Egypt. From there they will go to Palestine, where Silverman plans to join a firm of attorneys.
They sailed on the M.V. Georgic of the Cunard White Star Line on Friday, November 3, 1933, at 8:45 P.M., from New York City. The captain was F. F. Summers. I want to hold time in my hands, contain it. I want this trip back. I want the clock to read 8:44, and they have one last minute before sailing. They have just been married. But this time, before the ship sails, in this final minute, but a long-long minute, the ship must be delayed while a squall batters the harbor. All the leaves gust from trees, all the feathers fall from wings of the birds, and in this violence of nature, they, my parents, must balance nature. They must be the calm. So this time when the ship sails, the journey will be different. They will not return on the M.V. Brittanic, September 15,1935, two years later. Maybe if they’d never returned to the States, maybe if they’d stayed overseas, then they would have been different.
I remove the rose from the journal. It smells of ancient, dusty paper and crushed burgundy petals. I am awed it has survived the years. I imagine my father purchasing it for my mother the morning they married. What was he thinking that morning? Who was he that morning? Would he even once remember his mother, his first years in Russia? Surely his parents and brother and sisters would be at the wedding, even though his mother vehemently objected to the match. She insisted that my mother was beneath her son, that her truly beloved son could do better.
My parents had met on a beach, introduced by my father’s cousin, who also knew my mother. By chance they had the same last name because immigration officials redefined their parents’ identities by baptizing each family “Silverman.” I want to ask my parents if part of the attraction between them was a narcissistic whiff of incest: We are the same name; you are me; and I am only capable of loving my own image.
On their first date my father proposed marriage, although my mother initially refused. For weeks he persisted, threatening suicide if she didn’t acquiesce—until she did. What was his persistence, his obsession, his compulsion, his need? Did you know I was coming, Daddy, a baby girl just for you?
I replace the rose inside my father’s honeymoon journal. Most truly, it can only smell bitter.
Now, my mother is alone in her room, my father alone in his. They do not see each other, for my mother refuses to see him. Enraged, my father tries to escape to find her, hissing to me that the Nazis have kidnapped him and won’t allow him to return to his apartment. Later, he will sob that my mother has left him. The nurses secure an anklet on him that sounds an alarm when he crosses the third-floor boundary. Finally a boundary is established for him—his first ever. He is contained, trapped. He can’t reach any of his three little girls. And all it takes, all it takes, I see now, is a thin plastic band around his ankle, a band to sound an alarm. If only I had known this—how simple.
My mother sees him only one more time. After she learns the cancer has spread to her other lung, she goes to his room once to say good-bye. She will cry. He will not fully understand what is happening, only understand it is bad. I want to comfort him. I want… No longer do I even know what I want. Just not this. I don’t want my parents to die, each alone, in separate rooms. I want to bring them home with me. I want to baptize them with balms to cool fevers. I want to give them life. Over and over, like a mantra, I tell my father I love him. He tells me the same thing back. These words he remembers. But still I doubt if he understands what the word “love” means.
As I sort through my parents’ possessions, it’s difficult for me to part with anything because there wasn’t enough love in our family. In the same way I have gorged on sugar, I now try to stuff myself full of my parents’ trinkets as if, by the weight of these objects alone, I will feel weighted with love. The cost of the items isn’t the issue. If my parents were homeless I would fill a plastic garbage bag with every scrap of tattered rag. If my parents had fifty cents I would hoard my quarter, resigned that I had to give my sister the other half. In a pocket of my father’s sports jacket I discover a package of Lifesaver
s. I sit on the floor of the hallway gripping it, knowing I will never part with it. I am almost overcome with the image of my father walking into a drugstore and buying it, making the selection. Why this package of five flavors and not another? Cherry, lemon, lime, strawberry, orange. The package is unopened. Surely this is one of the last things he purchased. He never had the chance to place one on his tongue to let it dissolve, allowing him to concentrate on the flavor for a few moments rather than concentrate on—what? This package of Lifesavers I put in my suitcase with his honeymoon journal; I wouldn’t want the movers to accidentally lose it. When I get home I put it in a drawer with my jewelry.
I decorate my father’s room with photographs of his family—his family of origin and also us, the family he created. I put a pretty plaid blanket on his bed. In his closet I stuff too many of his clothes from the apartment, even a sports jacket and tie, as if his condition is temporary. It isn’t. A series of small strokes causes my father’s dementia. His circulation has slowed, almost stopped, causing his hands and feet to swell until the skin cracks.
But even with his dementia—no, because of it—I can talk to him now, as if for the first time. His mask is gone. His career is gone. The face he wears in the world is lost to his dementia, and now he is alone with himself. He’s not in time or space as we know it, but does that matter? Sometimes he believes I’m his sister, sometimes his daughter, but it doesn’t matter. He is quiet, almost gentle.
He tells me his mother and father should never have married, that his mother used to beat his father with a stick, beat him with a stick. His mother was cruel, he says. She hurt him. Even though he is over eighty now, I see the hurt little boy in his eyes, in his face. And I have to ask him what she did to him, even though I understand it’s not right for me to know. “How did she molest you?” I whisper, bending close to him, our eyes level. His hand makes a small gesture toward his face. “With the mouth,” he whispers back, our secret. “My mother was a whore.” This is all he says about it.
“Your mother and I should never have married either,” he says. And because the room is stuffy, because his skin is cracked and dry, because he is always asking for glasses of water, he says, with an odd accuracy of a mixed metaphor, “She and I were like glass and water.” His smile is small, almost timid. “You and I are exactly alike.”
I wonder what part of him says this. Is it the father of my childhood or the father who’s now dying? I wonder if he remembers us, the way we used to be. I wonder if this is why he loved me the way he did. You and I are exactly alike. Incest. In his narcissism he could only love his own image. He’d even given me the same middle name as his own, which was also his father’s name: William. He didn’t love me, could never have loved me. He could only love himself.
Later that same evening, after this conversation about his mother, his mind worsens as if quickly needing a strong fix of the soothing drug dementia. Every fragment of his mind seems to disperse, profoundly forgetting secrets lived, secrets revealed. He is restless. Trying to leave his wheelchair, he falls. The nurses put him in bed but he tries to get out. Again he falls. When they place restraints on him he thrashes his arms and screams, terrified. He has never worn a seat belt, always got angry when asked to wear one, has always been claustrophobic. Now, I know why: He is a young boy. He is pinned to a bed of straw. His limbs feel paralyzed. And so they are.
Tonight neither the nurses nor I can calm him. I try giving him juice. I show him pictures of the family. I talk to him, but he waves me aside. I ask him if he knows who I am.
“Of course I know who you are.” His voice is angry.
“Who?”
“Josephine Missouri.”
No one. Anyone. A meaningless name. A random selection of words pieced together in the jumble of a mind disassembling. Josephine Missouri. Maybe to him I always was—and am. Later, when I tell Randy what he called me, I am almost able to smile.
My mother wants no photos of the family in her room. No mementos of her life. No flowers. No decorations. She slips off her wedding ring and gives it to me. She hands me the money in her wallet. All she’s brought with her from her apartment is her radio, her closest companion. She will be listening to news or a talk show on politics, I know, when she dies. World leaders, political leaders, the state of Israel—distant voices on a radio, faraway events and places—are her closest friends. Even disasters, like wars in the Middle East, comfort her, actually suit her better, since disasters create more of a distraction, consume more energy, more time. Oh, Mother, I want to say to her, why don’t you feel sad because you struggled to love your family, because you struggled to love your life?
I know I never fully understood her life. On the counter in her bathroom in their apartment is a small cut-crystal vase filled with miniature dried flowers. Surrounding it is a girlish arrangement of perfume. Most of the perfume is from St. Thomas, yet the seals have never been broken. She has saved this perfume all these years as if for an emergency. I realize I never knew the girl (I must call her a girl, here), who arranged this girlish display. I never knew the girl who waited for a stranger good enough for her to sample her perfume. Who—what did my mother want? Did she desire me or my father? Did she want us to stop or desire for us to continue while she waited for someone worthy of her perfume? Did she want to preserve our family, our home? Did she want us all to fall apart?
I sit with my mother in her room as she drifts into sleep. I switch off her radio and lean back in the chair, watching her. It is dusk. Just before dinner. A wedge of light from the hall seeps into the room. Her breath is faint, her sleeping body still. In this absence of sound, in this quiet, quiet light, I wonder if she senses me here, close to her. Mom, do you know your daughter is with you, waiting for you to waken? Do you know this is what daughters are meant to do, be with their mothers while their mothers are dying, be with them because they want to?
Now, as she is dying, I wonder if she remembers those moments, those times, when I must believe she did want to preserve our family, when she wanted us to be a family, when she understood what she must do as a mother, when she understood the definition of the word “daughter.” I want to ask her if she remembers—I want to ask her if she knows who was the mother I called that one particular night, years ago, the mother who knew how to listen, the mother who knew how to whisper the word “sorry,” the mother who wasn’t scared?
It was the time, it was one night, when I was in my early twenties, Mother. It was night, late at night. All evening I’d sat on the black corduroy couch in my apartment, the telephone on my lap. All night the night felt as if it would last as long as my life, as if it would never ease forward. I hadn’t moved all night, had continued to hold the phone after he’d called to say he didn’t want to see me again. All I could imagine for the rest of the night, for the rest of my life, were men falling both toward me and away from me like dominoes. So I gripped the phone as if it were all that remained of the relationship. It was all that remained of any relationship. I didn’t know how to release the phone. I was afraid to. I was afraid to go to bed. I believed I had to hear something, know something, feel something, before I’d be able to release the phone and go to bed. I believed, at that moment, I needed to hear my mother.
“What is it, dear?” she’d said when she answered the phone. “What time is it? Is something wrong?”
“I think I’m kind of having an emergency.”
Of course I had awakened her. I imagined her fingers clutching the buttons of her bathrobe. I believed I said the word “emergency” to be sure she’d hear me, a news flash on her radio, and that even now she was imagining a fire, a car wreck, cancer, three weeks to live, or random violence, paralyzed from the neck down. But I also said the word “emergency” because right before I called I’d heard a siren splitting the night, sure it raced toward me to rescue me, here, where I sat on the black corduroy couch in my living room all night, having an emergency.
“Tell me,” she urged. “What’s wrong.”<
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“It’s just—” Now I wasn’t sure how to describe the melodrama of an emergency.
“Did something happen? You need money?”
“No, no. I don’t need money. I need—”
You.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, maybe if you’re not too tired we could just—” I’m all alone, Mom, help me. Please just don’t hang up the phone. “Maybe talk a little while.”
“Of course we can talk, dear. But tell me what happened. A man?”
“Well, kind of.” I wanted to speak; I was scared to speak. I leaned back against the couch and pressed the palm of my hand against my mouth. I felt pressure, where it always began, in my throat, rising hard toward my mouth. This pressure scared me. I was scared it might leak out. Once it started leaking… I curled my fingers into a fist and pressed my knuckles against my neck. “It’s just, things don’t seem to be working out the way I want them,” I said.
“Yes, yes, I understand, dear. They never do.”
“But I mean really.”
“I had no idea,” she said. “Don’t worry. One day you’ll meet the right man. I promise.”
The pressure deepened. I pressed my knuckles harder. “But maybe I’m not the ’right’ girl.”
“Why you’re a lovely girl. You’re friendly. Intelligent. Any man—”
“Mother. Wait. I think I’m really, really—not doing too well,” I said.
For a moment there was silence. The siren had faded. Our voices had faded. Then, very softly, she said, “Oh, dear. I’m so sorry.”
Slowly I released my fist from my throat. Sorry, I’d whispered to myself. Sorry. A word I’d waited to hear, a word to ease me through the night, a word to protect me until morning.
Now, as my mother is dying, I wonder if maybe I am the one who needs to remember those moments, those times, remember there are other words to hear, other voices that must be remembered.
Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You Page 22