Bettyville

by George Hodgman

  . . .

  Heading back to the kitchen to make the coffee, I pass my old room, which my father made into an office after he retired. On the shelves above his desk there are hundreds and hundreds of seashells, polished, but a little dusty now. In the corner there is my old stereo, bought with birthday money.

  There is a scene I remember that always sums up my last moments of living with my parents in the house my father built. During my last year in high school, my last months truly at home, there was a song on the radio called “Second Avenue,” a ballad I liked. I wanted the album and asked Betty to find it on a day she was going into St. Louis to take Mammy to the eye doctor’s. It was ten o’clock or so before my mother got home. She looked exhausted, worried about Mammy, sitting at the kitchen table in front of something cold.

  I adjourned to my room to listen to the music with my headphones on. I played the record over and over, even after my parents went to bed. That night, for some reason, I found myself singing along to “Second Avenue.” I did not imagine anyone listening and couldn’t hear myself because of the headphones, but my parents, next door, were apparently still awake.

  An hour or so after they turned in, they opened my door and stood together, looking in, smiling, looking happy, amused. “We heard the sweetest voice,” said my mother, hair in some disarray, despite the use of her satinlike Beauty Sleep pillow. “You’re probably going to be a rock star,” my father added, his bare chest just beginning to show the contours of an older man, “but tonight you have to get to bed. Go to sleep now. Go to sleep.”

  That night I loved them so much.

  22

  It is Labor Day, late morning. The neighbors have left for the Lake of the Ozarks or Table Rock to fish and ski. They have gone to cook out and laugh with family and friends. We have nowhere special to go. My mother is standing at her window, watching the sky. Quietly she announces, after a few minutes, that it is raining. The Midwest’s worst drought since the 1930s has finally broken. The weatherman has gotten it right. He has predicted rain all over the state and now it is here.

  I come to stand with her by the window. She seems relieved, as if the fate of all the world depended on this rain falling from the sky, as if this was just her rain, something sent to bring her peace.

  . . .

  Yesterday, I found myself at our church, the First Christian Church, Disciples of Christ. I believed it would be open; there is a prayer room, a refuge for people. I thought of all those I have known in this church, in this town, who might have come here in times of trouble. All the people who have come to ask for help and gone.

  The church was not open. Everything was locked up, so I sat on the step by the side door and said, out loud, to whoever was listening, “Help Betty, please help Betty. Please give her health, and happiness, and peace. Daddy, John Hickey, get your asses in gear.”

  As I sat on the step, so many things came rushing back to me, so many days, and words, and scenes. Through the years of watching my mother there are a few things I have come to understand.

  All Betty will ever say of my infancy is this: “You cried and cried and cried. Every time I picked you up, you cried more.” When she says this—and she does not admit it often—she looks ashamed, as if she should have known how to quiet me. She tells me how she would give me to my father, who would rest me on his big warm stomach and cradle me in his hands. “Your father could always calm you down. Or I’d give you to Mammy. Mammy could always calm you down. I never could. I could never make you stop crying.” She doesn’t believe she ever got it right.

  Several years ago, my mother, my aunt Alice, and I went to Springfield, Illinois, where my parents lived when they were first married. We went by the apartment house where they started out, and I asked if she had been sorry to leave, to go back to Madison, where my father began working at the lumberyard. “Mammy needed us,” she said. “My father was dead. She needed help. Harry needed help, though he wouldn’t admit it. I liked Springfield. We had made some friends. I was young and kind of pretty. There were places to go there, a group of nice young couples, a pretty lake.”

  After our drive, we went to visit our cousin Dick, who lives in a nearby suburb and whose daughter, Kim, a midwife, was visiting from California. Kim has a child, Macao, maybe a year or so old then, young enough that he was still likely to stumble a bit when he walked. Macao had long, shiny black hair, and sweet fat legs, and chubby hands. He was, as they say, a beautiful child. When Kim, holding him, offered him to Mother—the woman who always avoids babies—she said, “He doesn’t want me. I’m not so good at that.”

  I picked up Macao, held him up in the air, waved his hand at Betty, and danced him around. My mother looked wary. “Don’t break him,” my mother said. “Don’t break the baby.”

  I said, “I don’t think you can really break a baby. Here, you take him. I think he wants to come to you.”

  Betty said, “Watch out. You would never forgive yourself if something happened to that child.”

  “You cried and cried and cried. Every time I picked you up, you cried more.” She was scared, nervous, frightened she would do something wrong, and I have come to believe that I, just a baby, sensed her fear and cried out when I felt it go through me. She never quite believed she could or would get it right with a baby, with her baby. She was not the type who could care for a child correctly. She was not good enough and then he turned out broken and, after all, someone had to be blamed. Someone had to have made her boy turn out wrong. She thinks she was the one. My sense of this is so strong, though I would do anything to make it not so.

  Later, Macao was walking around and kept looking at my mother. Again and again he walked over to her and gazed up at her face. Shyly, she reached out for his hand and took it, very gently, in her own, his little fat hand. In a few minutes she stood up, trying so hard not to scare him as he waited to see what she would do. She walked with the baby so carefully, reaching down to hold his hand and guide him. They went outside where she told him the names of flowers, pointed out this and that.

  After lunch was over, she even picked him up, took him outside again. It was as if she wanted to be alone with him, on her own, away from anyone who might spy her making a mistake. She held him as if he were a piece of delicate china, too fine to ever take down from its cabinet. Her fingers seemed wary, so full of caution. From the window, I could see her lips moving, whispering to him, but I could not make out what she had to say.

  When she came back in with the baby, she grinned a little and announced, “He likes me, I think. I think he might like me.”

  . . .

  Betty thinks she is the one to blame for who I am. She was the one who got it wrong. There has never been anyone to tell her differently, because she never spoke of her fears. My father said nothing to reassure her. They didn’t talk.

  For years and years, Betty tried her best to do everything right, to make me okay, to be good enough. When I was a child, as far back as I can remember, my mother read to me: The Story About Ping, Scuppers the Sailor Dog, The Happy Hollisters, poems from A Child’s Garden of Verses.

  Night after night, year after year, after she finished the dishes or the wash and smoked a secret cigarette in the bathroom, she sat on the edge of my bed, in the light from the lamp, reading until her voice got tired or until I slept. Sometimes she added her own commentary:

  “Let the crocodile have him. I’m sick of him,” or “That was kind of silly.”

  She thought it important for me not to be ignorant, to read. My mother gave me words, though she has rarely been inclined to use them herself.

  She made me fish, play football. She took me to endless lessons, dentists for braces, the dermatologist for antiacne pills, St. Louis for clothes. She made certain I ate the proper foods. For years and years, if I was leaving to go back to the city on an early-morning flight, she always got up at 4 or 5 a.m. to prepare steak and eggs, cinnamon toa
st, to stuff my suitcases with special treats, the things I liked best that only home could offer. She did everything, everything she believed she was supposed to do. Now she can do none of that. This clearly grieves her, I see. When I leave for a plane now, she says, “I feel so terrible. I cannot offer you anything to take. I should have made you something nice.” She worries that after she dies, I—a man alone—will go untended.

  I have tried my best to show her I am okay. I have done everything I know to show her she did all right with me. I have told her. I have reminded her of all the things she did, said time and again that whatever happens, I will never forget the things she has done for me. But it has never quite seemed to sink in.

  For years I have tried to tell her that she has been just the mother I wanted, that I am the one who made my own mistakes, that I am not broken at all, that I am just human. But I don’t think she has ever believed it. This is why, I think, she cannot speak of my life, because she somehow got it all wrong from the beginning. Or so she believes. This is why she has stayed, why she has waited, watching out the window, always looking out for the moment when I will turn into the driveway, always trying to look her best for when I come in the door. She has struggled to keep on, trying not to fall. To try to help me. She has not wanted to leave me alone. She has always wanted to be here for me, to do what she could.

  . . .

  We stand at the window. We see the rain falling on the yards, gardens, and flowers. I imagine it coming down on the beans that may bloom now on their twisted vines, on the burned corn, and highways, and back roads, and little white houses. It is raining on the trees and on the graves where, years after my father died, Betty and John struggled, summer after summer, to make the grass grow.

  . . .

  Last night, after I returned from my time on the church step, the evening began softly, but changed. Although her face was a battle of frustration and confusion, Betty sat, without agitation or sound, poring over her stack of bills again. I asked to help; she shook her head. When she reached the end of the stack, she started again. This happened over and over. I watched her go through this process until I began to get nervous and interrupted. “Let’s see if there’s a movie,” I said. “Surely there is something on all those channels.” My mother does not much like television, except for the news, but she agreed. On one of the HBO channels, a Richard Gere film was just starting.

  “Who is that actor?” she asked.

  “Richard Gere.”

  After an hour or so, time she spent staring, seemingly not quite comprehending, at the screen, she asked again, “Who is that actor?”

  “Richard Gere.”

  In an hour, the same question: “Who is that actor?”

  “Richard Gere.”

  I dozed off in front of the television as she crinkled the newspaper. Richard Gere was running down a city street, pursued by someone. When I looked up, she asked again, “Who is that actor in that movie?”

  . . .

  I see the rain falling on the deserted church in Perry, and on Madison’s once-lively Main Street. It is coming down in Holiday, and Middle Grove, and Duncans Bridge, Clarence, Monroe City, Mexico, Moberly, Macon, Boonville, De Soto, Washington, Bonne Femme, Brunswick, Santa Fe, Granville, Huntsville, Salisbury, LaPlata, Keytesville, and Higbee. I see the old farmers with wrinkled faces, looking up at the sky.

  . . .

  Last night she was fitful, pacing around her bed, shaking her head, and getting after herself for something, or so it seemed. She was mad at herself for something. She was angry and so agitated that I knew she would never get to sleep, but I succeeded, finally, in getting her into bed. I fluffed her pillows, and arranged the blanket, and asked if she was too warm or not warm enough. I took her hand to feel if it was cold, then pulled the sheet up to her waist as she stared at the ceiling, shaking, half crying, half laughing, half herself, half gone, half knowing, half not.

  As I turned to leave the room, she glanced at me and I saw that she was smiling at me, not the smile of recent days, the smile that seems connected to nothing, but the smile of the real Betty, the one who has not quite left forever.

  When I left the room, she would not let me turn out the light. I noticed the card by the bedside table. On it, she had written:

  Eggnog

  Richard Greer

  Anne Wallin

  Lisbon

  Richard Greer

  Eggnog: something she served on holidays when she gathered the family together.

  Richard Greer: a stranger running with purpose through her night’s confusing streets.

  Anne Wallin, called Nona, was the aunt she lived with in St. Louis during her days as a secretary who rode the streetcar home.

  Lisbon, I think, is all the places she wanted to go.

  . . .

  We stand at the window for the longest time and do not move. I see the rain falling on the dry shores of the Mississippi and the Missouri. I see my mother’s face in the glass with the rain coming down. We are both standing there, behind the glass that separates us from the world. The fragments of our faces are there in the glass, partly there, partly not. There have been so many Bettys. But I think I like this one best, this old lady in the flannel gown and slippers. She tries so hard.

  . . .

  You tell yourself that something has to happen. You tell yourself that somehow, someone is planning some sort of rescue. You say this cannot be true, that this is not happening to her. You say she is just an old woman whose time has come, who has lived a good life, who is departing, but cannot go and is so frightened of what will come if she must stay. You tell yourself that so many others have suffered more, lost more, lived less. You say that it is just her time, your time to bear sadness and farewells.

  . . .

  Many times in my life I have felt adrift and worried, screwed up, lost. When these moments start to shake me up, I remember coming home from St. Louis in our old green station wagon, lying in the back watching the lights on the highway signs, surrounded by bags of dresses with my fingers blackened from the hard licorice drops my father procured on every visit to Stix, Baer & Fuller where they once had a candy counter stocked with everything. Sometimes I rode in the front seat, between my parents, and would wake up after what seemed only moments of travel to find us driving into the driveway of the house in Madison.

  . . .

  “Mind your own business.”

  “You are my business.”

  . . .

  It is raining on our old house, on my grandmother’s house, on the corner where the ladies used to gather, on the place where the lumberyard was, on the sidewalks where we walked, on Mammy’s house with the many chimneys, in our backyard, on my father’s thirsty trees. We watch the rain fall: her silences, my secrets; my secrets, her silences.

  I watch the rain overflow the gutters and fall in cascades into the overflowing hanging baskets. Because of the holiday, I have bought her all the things she likes, special treats of the kind to please a little girl.

  “The winter is coming,” she says.

  “I know, but we will stay warm inside our house.”

  As I draw closer beside her, she allows me a rare liberty: I stretch my arm across her shoulder. But she stands with her arms held stiffly at her sides. She does not touch back. We say nothing at all.

  Epilogue

  The night before our first visit to the oncologist, I sat in my father’s office, looking over his seashells and waiting as Betty brushed her teeth and prepared to lie down. Most nights, when she falls back, she doesn’t hit the middle of the mattress, only the edge. I am always terrified she will fall off in the night. Now, before she sleeps, as she protests, I put my arms around her shoulders and under her knees to lift and position her in a safer spot. She hates it, cannot stand relinquishing her body to someone else’s control.

  After turning out the light that night, I put my hand acr
oss her forehead, hoping to quiet her distress. Panic showed in her eyes. “You’re okay,” I said. “Now try to sleep. I will get you through this. You’re my partner.”

  I thought that the doctor would say she was dying. I was prepared to let her go, to spare her pain, if that was what she chose. My father died months shy of my parents’ fiftieth anniversary. “Fifty years,” he said to my mother the Christmas before he died. “Fifty years! That’s too damn long.” And then he laughed and slapped my mother on the rear end.

  “Too damn long”: This is what my mother thinks about her life. She seems to believe she is taking someone else’s time. This is part of what it is to be very old. Part of her is ashamed to stay here longer; she doesn’t feel entitled to more.

  That is what I was thinking about that night, about her deciding to leave, about having to allow her to go. By her bed I noticed her sandals, her poor old sandals, waiting for another morning in the world.

  . . .

  The summer of the drought was followed by an autumn where the leaves left unburned changed color quickly and were gone. All winter, the house was chilly in the mornings. We found out that Betty is not eligible for Tiger Place; they felt she needed too much special attention.

  “I thought that was the point,” I said.

  On the first Wednesday of March, Betty awakened, complaining of pain in her side, worried about her heart. When the ache spread to her side, I took her to Columbia to the emergency room. She sat in the examining room in her pink Mizzou T-shirt, saying nothing; but when the doctor pressed her abdomen, she screamed out and I knew. She was very ill.

  Betty demanded to go home so loudly that I could barely hear the doctor describe, after the CAT scan, the blockage in the tube leading from my mother’s kidney, probably a tumor. There was also a mass in her spleen, but the kidney was the immediate concern. She would probably lose it and was admitted to the hospital and given painkillers and an IV.