“Well, thanks for a nice evening, Caroline.”
“Oh, Matthew, it’s wonderful to see you again and I can’t begin to thank . . .” I tried the front door. It had locked itself.
“Not another word about your brother, okay?”
“Let’s walk around to the back door,” I said.
I went up the back steps and he waited at the bottom. He just stared at me. No moves, no kiss, no feels, no nothing. I was beginning to wonder if I should change my toothpaste.
“Okay, mister,” I said, and walked back closer to him.
He cocked his head to one side and said, “You want me to kiss you, don’t you?”
“Not unless you want to, Matthew.” Jeesch, I thought, is he studying to be a minister in his spare time? “Are we saving it for something? It’s perishable, you know.”
He obviously didn’t know what I meant, because he said, “Wha . . . ,” and then, “Why don’t you just come here?”
Then, in a glorious moment of moonlight and pheromones, Matthew Strickland pulled me to him, laid his lips on mine, and went to work. Good Lord! I thought I had left the earth! He couldn’t have kissed like that in high school or I would have remembered! My knees were weak and my stomach fluttered. Sweet Jesus! What a man! I would have melted his clothes on Mother’s back porch, except that the kitchen light went on. We stopped and looked toward the door. It opened slowly and out came Mother’s broomstick with an alarm clock swinging from its end. Eleven o’clock. I started to giggle.
“Decent people need to be asleep!” came the voice from an unseen source.
I turned to Matthew, who was now practically eating his lips, suppressing laughter.
“Good night, Matthew, thank you for a wonderful time.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said, and walked away toward his car.
Thirty-nine
Mr. M.D.
CONVINCING Mother to get in the car wasn’t easy. It required the full cooperation of Millie and Trip and a big, fat slice of guilt. Eric’s tutors, “the family lovers,” were coming within an hour. Millie agreed to orchestrate their day. It was just one too many complications for me and I gladly took her help.
We were all gathered in the kitchen slapping together a little breakfast. Over coffee, toast, and scrambled eggs, Mother bickered with us.
“I don’t understand why in the world you think my body is your business! I’m perfectly content to live as I do and perfectly content to let y’all live as you do. And if anybody around here has the right to point fingers, it’s me, not you or you!”
“Mother,” Trip said, “look, I know you hate doctors. I hate doctors. But if you’ve got something growing on your rib and a big nasty mole on your back, don’t you think someone should look at you?”
“Not necessarily,” she said. “The whole problem with doctors is that, at my age, they will most assuredly find something wrong! I’d bet my last dollar on that!”
“Oh, come on now, Miss L, you lost your mind or what?” Millie said.
“If this was me, wouldn’t you make me go to a doctor?” I said.
“That’s different. You’re my daughter, Caroline. I couldn’t stand by and see anything happen to you.”
“Well, Grandmother,” Eric said, piping up from his plate, “I’m just really getting to know you, and even though I’m just a kid and you’ll probably tell me I’m out of line, I don’t want to stand by and see anything happen to you either. I love you.”
That clinched it. The room fell silent. All eyes were on Eric and he shifted in his seat, nervous that the big ax of the matriarch executioner was about to reshape his Abercrombie & Fitch haircut.
“Eat your eggs, son,” I said, hoping the moment would pass. “It’s brain food.”
It didn’t, but the ax didn’t swing either. Mother rose from her place and went to Eric’s side in the gliding, graceful move of an Olympic ice-skater coming to the close of a gold medal dance routine.
“For you, darling, I will see this charlatan of a doctor. For you.” She kissed him on his head. “You dear, sweet, darling little boy,” she said to him in an audible whisper, and then to the rest of us, “Did you hear that? My grandson loves me! I’m going to dress. We leave in fifteen minutes.”
She left the room with all the flourish that Loretta Young used to descend a staircase in the fifties. The swinging door, as alive as any costar, swooshed behind her on cue. Each of us stared at each other and shook our heads. The door swung back open and she poked her head inside, looking at me with an arched eyebrow.
“How old is he?”
“Who?” I said.
“This doctor, of course. Is he handsome? Should I wear something exciting? A hat perhaps?”
“Mother? Please! Just wear something normal. A St. John knit. It won’t wrinkle in the car. Yes, he’s very handsome.”
It was impossible not to smile. Mother had only wanted someone to tell her why she should submit to the intrusive eyes and probing hands of a stranger. She hated doctors. But she sure loved men.
By eight-forty-five, we were in Dr. Jack Taylor’s office. He took her right in as though she were the queen. At nine-fifteen, he called us into his office while Mother dressed in his examining room. I was filled with dread. In the tradition of our family’s emotions, I wanted to dislike him and decided in advance that anything he said would be reexamined by a second opinion.
“Please sit down,” he said, motioning to the two leather occasional chairs in front of his desk.
While he shuffled through his papers, I looked around his office. It looked exactly as you would expect a male doctor’s office to look. His mahogany desk was nicked and dulled from years of abuse, but the top was neatly organized with a pen set, blotter, and pencil cup. His cards rested in an old clamshell, which had probably been painted and decorated by one of his children years ago. His walls were covered with diplomas and citations and photographs of what appeared to be open-air-market people in Istanbul and Greece. He apparently liked to travel. And to read. In addition to bookshelves of reference materials on various skin diseases, he had a small collection of leather-bound old books—classics—probably first editions. He treasured books. He couldn’t be all bad.
He made a few notes on his prescription pad and cleared his throat.
“I want you to take your mother to this clinic at the Medical University for blood work, when you leave this office. I’ll have my nurse make the appointment.” He cleared his throat and looked from Trip’s face to mine. “There’s nothing good to report.”
“What does that mean?” Trip said.
“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but I’ve been practicing medicine for twenty years and I can predict and recognize with certainty your mother’s condition and the prognosis.”
It still wasn’t sinking in with me—that Mother was seriously ill. “I’m sorry,” I said, “it’s early and I’m just not sure what you mean. Is Mother in danger?”
“Ms. Levine . . .”
“Caroline,” I said.
“Caroline,” he said, “look, the mole on your mother’s back is melanoma. No question about it. The lump in her side is almost definitely related to it. I’d say her cancer began to metastasize more than a year ago. She has all the classic symptoms—loss of appetite, loss of balance, numbness, and leg pain—the blood work will be the definitive clue. So I’d say, go get the blood work, I’ll rush the lab for results, and as soon as I know for sure, I’ll call you. In the meanwhile, I’m going to call my friend Jim Thompson—he’s the best oncologist I know—and tell him to open his calendar for us tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” I said, and a numbness crept through me. I didn’t even know what questions to ask. I looked at Trip and his face was a mask of shock.
“Can you have her at Dr. Thompson’s around four tomorrow?”
I lost it and tears spilled over my lids. I got up and leaned over his desk. “Are you saying this might be fatal?”
He reached his
hand out and covered mine. Then, he squeezed my hand with a kindness and sympathy for which I was completely unprepared. Trip got up and put his arm around my shoulder.
“What can we do?” Trip said.
“First, we get the facts, then we decide,” Dr. Taylor said. “It may be that there is a course of action which would at least put her into remission. How old is your mother?”
“She’d shoot me if I told,” I said, wiping my eyes with a tissue and cracking a halfhearted grin. I blew my nose with a frightening sound. “Sorry.”
Jack Taylor and Trip smiled, all of us at once having a moment to honor Mother’s feminine mystique and my emotions.
“She’s young enough to fight,” Trip said.
“I thought so. She’s quite a lady,” Dr. Taylor said.
“What did she do to you?” I said and knew it was none of my business to accuse her of anything, but I knew her.
“Oh, the usual personal questions. Was I married? I said, no, I was a widower. Did I have children? I said, yes, one boy at the Citadel. Did I want to remarry, and I said, I was too busy to think about it. And, finally, did I know she was single.”
“Oh, my God! When will she stop?” I said, but had to giggle. Mother was an impossible flirt.
“Yeah, boy, she’s something, yanh?” Trip said. “There’s only one of her.”
“What should we tell her?” I said.
“That you’re taking her for some blood work. No reason to alarm her. Even if the news is as grave as I suspect, even then, you should wait for her to ask you. She will.”
The office was suddenly filled with a weight that made my ears pound. It was my blood pressure. I was going to lose Mother. Not today, but soon. I knew that was what he was saying. I couldn’t fathom it in a million years. I didn’t want to acknowledge the depth of his diagnosis, what it meant in the end. That there would be an end. Soon. It was too horrible to accept. It was the same for Trip. When I looked at him, I could see he was having an even more difficult time digesting the news. We did the cowardly thing. We thanked him, met Mother in the waiting room, and left.
Mother knew. Don’t ask me how, but she knew. She didn’t bring it up; neither did we.
“After the vampire takes a snack from my arm, why don’t we drive over to Shem Creek and have lunch on the water?” Mother said.
It was a suggestion she would have made on any ordinary day. Not on the morning of the first peal of her death knell. We were entitled to our denial. We would face the inevitable if and when we had to face it. Not a moment before.
Later, at our waterside table at the Shem Creek Bar and Grill, our favorite spot for seafood, we watched the seagulls swooping down and around as the shrimp boats came in from a night’s work and docked. The air was filled with the healing smells of salt suffused with an undertone of slightly decomposing marine life. Sunlight playing on the silver ripples of Shem Creek had a hypnotic effect on us. We watched the waters, picking at our platters of deviled crabs, fried shrimp, and flounder, silently dreaming. Mother hardly ate at all.
I didn’t know what rattled around in their heads, but I was remembering summers with Daddy, waterskiing on the Edisto, picnics on Otter Island, laughing in the blistering glare of summer’s midday light, sunburned and sticky and adoring my daddy. He was my world when I was a little girl. Good things, fun, loving moments of praise and encouragement flowed from him as easily as instructions and corrections rolled from Mother’s tongue. Never again had I loved anyone like I had loved him. Except Eric. I had locked it all away and saved it for my son.
For her own reasons, probably to ensure our permanent proximity, Mother had made us afraid of living, of taking chances. She had railed against New York. I realized now that Richard had been like Mother—that somehow I always came up short in their eyes. Over time, that had become familiar for me—to be short something that would have made me whole, by their standards. What were my standards?
Trip drove us back to Tall Pines. I pretended to nap in the backseat, but all the while, I worked to make sense of our personalities, the qualities and deficits that drove us.
It had appeared to me that Mother had no fear of risk for herself, only for us, second-guessing every choice we had made. After Daddy’s death, we accepted her authority without question. We knew too that she wanted us gone then. Without Daddy, she didn’t want to be a parent. It was too much. So she became Attila the Hun, and we yessed her to death, all of us keeping an emotional distance from each other that ultimately served no one well.
True, Mother had her moments of being a wild woman, classic parental defiance after Daddy was gone, but only within the confines of Tall Pines. On closer examination, I could see she had been practically agoraphobic, refusing to fly after Daddy’s death.
She had become her mother, who had beaten a disdain for the outside world into her, creating an environment of postures, propriety, and gentility which was a self-selecting process of elimination for most things life offered, such as risk and adventure.
Daddy had taken her everywhere, but once he was gone she lived in a warp of sorrow, reverting almost to the life her parents had lived. Had it been necessary for her to have shunned the world to preserve the past? To keep Daddy alive? Did Trip and I owe her that kind of blind obedience? Was I to take up where she left off ?
Indeed, over the years, her world had dwindled to only a few locales—her friends’ homes, King Street to shop, downtown Charleston and Shem Creek for restaurants. Her garden shows, her work in conservation of the ACE. She was comfortable in that narrow alley of places and trusted faces. They threatened nothing.
There had been a time when she lectured on American paintings at the Gibbes Art Museum in Charleston and at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. I couldn’t remember the last instance of her calling me to tell me of her successes and acclaim. It had been years.
And, most onerous of all to consider, if she had been closed-lipped about sharing her sorrow and phobias because of some locked-away fears, would she be afraid to die, if that was what we were facing? I felt blindsided by her illness, alleged or true. I wasn’t ready to let her go. I wasn’t ready to face my own needs. Something told me I had no choice.
It was nearly six o’clock when we turned into the driveway at Tall Pines. As we passed under the umbrella of live oak shade, I reminded myself to put my anxiety aside for Eric’s sake. I would tell Millie; although, Millie had probably already seen it in her mind. I was right. As our car pulled around the circular drive, the front door opened. Out stepped Millie.
Forty
Stardust
MILLIE had iced tea, a platter of carrot cake squares, a wedge of Jarlsberg, and water crackers waiting for us in the dining room. She called Eric in and we stood, eating and drinking, making light talk about Mother’s doctor visits and inquiries about Eric’s first day of homeschooling.
“I’ll tell you, Millie, that Dr. Taylor was a very manly man!”
“Lord, please, no,” Millie said.
“What?” Mother said. “If I were twenty years younger? Ooh-hoo! Yes, sir! What musk!” Her voice twinkled but her eyes were clouded. She wasn’t fooling Millie or me.
I stuffed a square of cake in my mouth. “Mmmm. Millie! This is tho gud!” I garbled, then swallowed and said to Eric, “So, sweetheart? Which one of your tutors did you like the best?”
“Rusty,” he said, licking the cream cheese icing from his fingers, “she’s so cool. Everybody else gave me homework except her!”
“Please use a napkin, son, okay?” I really didn’t blame him. It was so delicious I wished I’d been home to lick the bowl myself. “Well, you have a snack now and I’ll help you with it in a little bit, okay?”
“Sure,” Eric said and turned to Mother. “Grandmother? Are you sure you’re all right?”
“As sure as I am of my own name! Wait here! I brought you a little sursy!”
“What’s a sursy?” Eric said, his voice cracking slightly—puberty already?—and loo
ked at me for translation.
Mother slipped out to the hall for her purse.
“A little surprise,” I said, wondering what she had for him.
“I reckon I’d better get a move on,” Trip said to no one in particular and didn’t make a move to move on anything.
Mother returned with her hands behind her back.
“Guess which hand?” she said.
“That one!” Eric said.
To Eric’s delight, Mother produced a huge Hershey bar.
“Don’t eat it all at once; you’ll spoil your supper!” she said. “I picked it up at the cashier counter at the restaurant!”
It was an old custom of ours, but it was Daddy’s, not Mother’s. Like the hand reaching from the grave, Mother gave Eric what Daddy had always given Trip and me when he was in a good mood. A plain Hershey bar. It was a small symbol of his large indulgence of us.
Trip’s eyes met mine and I imagined we both had the same thought—that Daddy was calling through Mother, and telling us it would all be all right, not to worry. Sure.
“Supper’s gonna be around eight o’clock,” Millie said. “I made collard greens and fried chicken.”
“Collard greens?” Eric looked at me with a gag, rolling his eyes. Under his breath, he began to mumble. “Well, I’m not that hungry anyway.”
“You’re gonna eat ’em and like’em,” I said. “It’s food of the Gods.”
“Jeesch,” Eric said, “this morning I ate brain food. Tonight I gotta eat God’s food. Can’t I just get some regular food? Like Chinese?”
“Come on, boy, help me carry all this mess to the kitchen,” Millie said, ruffling his hair. “Iffin you don’t like my collards, I’ll make you some kale!”
“Kale? Augh!” Eric said, grabbing his throat. “Mom?”
“Help Millie,” I said. “Nobody ever died from Millie’s greens. Folic acid. Good for you!”
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