The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  Daddy sent my sister to Europe for a summer. “Anne,” he told her, “I want you to forget that boy with his silly grin and mumbling speech. He snuffles and mumbles and giggles and will never amount to a thing. No one likes mumblers. If you spend three months in Europe and travel with an open mind you’ll see that you deserve more than this chump and that the world has much more to offer.” Anne burned with resentment—a third-degree burn that took the full European tour to heal. While traveling she wrote daily letters to Dick and collected postcards to show him later. Since the trip was an organized one she met only other American students and though she became extremely close with several other girls not one guy looked at her as anything more than “a great gal, real popular with the other girls,” the ultimate formula of failure back then, the female counterpart to the male version, “basically a good guy.”

  As soon as she returned to Ohio she married Dick. Daddy didn’t attend, and certainly didn’t pay for, the wedding. I gave my sister away.

  Once they were married Anne became a model wife, a pillar or at least pilaster of the community and soon enough the perfect mother. She had two boys and a girl. Our father came to see his first grandchild and was so appalled when he observed Anne breast-feeding the baby that he predicted she’d give up this nonsense within a week—and seven days later her breasts ran dry.

  Her husband was appointed an assistant principal in a local junior high, which was considered progressive. Anne hid her natural sporty beauty under long skirts, full blouses, a man’s trench coat. She plunged herself into PTA activities and soon became the local president. With a group she was authoritative and humorless, but the minute she was alone with another woman she became giggly and conspiratorial. Between such encounters, public or private, she walked about with extreme concentration like a somnambulist who half-knows she’s teetering on a ledge. When she was at home she sat vacantly at a glass-topped desk and looked down into reflections of moving clouds. The minute the phone rang she was stung into amiability, but otherwise she felt so tired that her children often found her asleep when they came home from school. The tireder she became the more she ate meat for energy—not the roast beef of her childhood, which she could no longer afford, but ground beef patted into “hambies,” as she and the children called them.

  She’d always treated me sarcastically when we were kids and now she found herself lashing out at Dick, whom she was surprised to discover was less intelligent than she’d believed but far more passionate than she’d suspected. He loved her, loved her long, hard body and loved her restless mind. When she unleashed her harsh tongue and covered him with insults, he pretended it was a parody of an attack and he covered his head with his hands and grinned, as though he were being pummeled by his kids.

  She hated sex with him but he could never leave her alone. He wasn’t a rapist, certainly not a seducer, but he could never get enough of her.

  Two years before our mother’s cancer surgery, Anne had fallen in love with the neighbor, a woman her age, married to a much older husband who neglected her. Peg liked the attention but was afraid to sleep with Anne. They drank Bloody Marys together. In that neighborhood of turn-of-the-century wood houses with peeling paint and rusting porch swings and of quiet streets as grey as watery reflections of the sky, the sidewalks buckling over rampant tree roots and the whispering silence of rustling leaves punctuated by the distant bark of a tethered dog—in that damp, colorless suburb that at certain hours appeared abandoned, as though a siren had driven everyone into bomb shelters and a lethal ray had fried them underground, leaving above nothing but dogs and a few crying, hungry babies and a single goldfish staring out through the magnifying glass of a bowl—in this vacant world my sister would pay lightning visits to Peg, streaking across unraked, moldering lawns still in her bathrobe and nightie at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday.

  Peg and Anne had come to visit me in New York before I’d gone to Rome, back when I’d still had a nice apartment and a good salary, before I’d sunk in the world. The two women had drunk Bloody Marys all morning in their robes and seldom emerged from the apartment before dusk. They had secret jokes, code words, a strained complicity that unexpectedly would break down and send my sister wailing into the bathroom.

  When I was in Europe my mother phoned me to tell me my sister had attempted suicide: “I just don’t know what that girl wants. She’s had all the advantages. She says I neglected her, that I gave you too much attention, but if there’s one thing I know it’s that I always loved you both equally. Of course you were different. With you it was more a spiritual companionship, why, even when you were a little boy we were so close that I’d forget you were with me, I’d lose you at the department store—”

  “Mother,” I said, exasperated, “what happened?”

  “Well, your sister, poor little thing—” and here her unstoppable narrative voice dried up and she sobbed tiny little sobs on a baby-doll frequency, so unpracticed, so unlike her usual saturated style, that I knew she’d never cried like this before and couldn’t even recognize herself—“she’s in a coma in the hospital, St. Luke’s, and we don’t even know if she’ll come out of it.” More crying. “She drove her car into the woods up near Zion, I don’t know what she was doing way up there, and she drank a bottle of vodka, Smirnoff’s I think, and took a whole bottle of sleeping pills and then she slumped into the front seat and it was cold—” Here she broke off again, perhaps crying over the image of my sister in the cold woods, la Belle au Bois Dormant, a Sleeping Beauty without courtiers, awaiting the kiss of a princess who, alas, liked only princes.

  “Someone found her and called an ambulance, I think it was a man out walking his dog, and she was saved, they pumped her stomach but she’s still lying in a coma, the kids haven’t been told, Dick just said their mother is away for a long rest. I just don’t know—don’t—” And here she dissolved into her funny little sobs, as though a cruel child were slapping a doll on the back again and again just to hear its faint, broken mew.

  After my sister recovered she was signed over by her husband to a lock-up ward in a hospital on the Near North. For weeks she lay bedridden, in a stupor, and moved only enough to avoid bedsores. Her husband, stricken, frightened, visited her every day. His nerdy grin had been dehydrated into a mere pellet of a smile. Under the watchful eye of a psychiatric nurse he knew he couldn’t touch her, much less rub up against her.

  After a month her old camp spirit re-emerged. She organized round-the-clock group therapy sessions in the hospital. Fueled by cigarettes and black coffee, she and other unhappy men and women talked and talked. My sister had discovered an almost uncanny ability to read other people’s thoughts, explain them clearly to her “patients” and to will these broken people into healing. Everyone liked her and wanted to be near her. When she walked down the corridors it was as though she were once again a summertime sovereign going from cabin to cabin. Here where men were not allowed to touch her she became amiable, even with them.

  Sometimes, however, the least frustration would make her fall apart—literally, it seemed, for the parts of her personality would separate and collapse, like the walls of a rocket silo, except the missile wouldn’t rise and roar but burn itself out in place. She’d rage and sob and hug her knees to her chest and her “patients” would look in at her as fearful as children.

  Her own children weren’t permitted by their father to visit her and she was relieved, since she could see them only as reproaches. She’d set out to be the perfect mother and she’d ended up by lingering at Peg’s for the fifth Bloody Mary of the afternoon when the kids came home from school.

  If her children made her feel guilty, the thought of Peg scared her. She’d suffered so much over Peg that now she shied away even from the recollection of her face or name. Anne couldn’t afford the luxury of thinking about Peg, not if she ever wanted to get better. Nor did Peg write or try to see her.

  Anne, who’d always had such power to dominate other women, had been surprise
d that she’d been unable to talk Peg into bed. It had been a failure of will, and now Anne doubted her will altogether. Her will was broken.

  Her failure was almost exactly like mine with Sean. In our different ways for a long time Anne and I had both exerted an appeal over a few people, and various men and women, whom we’d scarcely noticed, had loved us or wanted to be constantly with us. Yet despite all our stratagems we’d failed to secure Sean or Peg, our two big beauties, and the defeat had shaken our entire self-esteem. I’d always wanted a man like Sean and for a moment I’d believed I was close to marrying him. I thought that if he became my husband I’d finally have the life of sex and status, an ideal and superior life, that I’d always dreamed about. His beauty was to me what wealth and beauty were to Jay Gatsby—a dream more than a reality, an identity more than a dream. Gatz had become Gatsby the day he’d seen his first yacht; when I first slept with Sean I felt tempted to become fully human.

  In the restaurant my sister and I both ordered thick, rare steaks and ate pounds of red meat with a gnawing, gulping desperation. “Why are we like this? Oh, Brulley,” she said, using her childhood name for me, a version of brother, “these women who work here are horrified, look, you can tell, they’re all vegetarians, granola dykes longing for a rural commune, and look at us, we’re horrible carnivores.” She inched closer, a smile exposing her crooked teeth. “Do you sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and cook yourself a steak? For that matter, if you have an extra steak in the fridge doesn’t it call out to you like a siren until you’ve eaten it? You do! It does! You see, we’re exactly alike. Where did we get that? Do you think it’s because Mully—” (her old pronunciation of mother)—“never gave us enough to eat, just that awful pork tenderloin because it was the cheapest cut and she—”

  She began to cry, to leak, and her pale nose turned red and all at once I understood how much Christa resembled my sister—to be sure a taller, nobler, blonder version, neither so mercurial nor so intelligent, but Christa was the sad, resigned resolution to what had always been so anguished about Anne, so raw.

  “I’m crying, Brulley, because I’m scared. What if she dies? I haven’t seen her in a year, since I started therapy; my shrink says I must recognize how evil she has always been. I have to shout and pummel a dummy labeled ‘Mom’—”

  “I did that, too,” I said, “when I was with Dr. O’Reilly….”

  “Poor Mully,” Anne said, sighing deeply. She suddenly looked much older, as though she’d taken off dark glasses to reveal ancient eyes. I didn’t know whether she thought we’d desecrated Mother’s memory and that’s why she was “poor” or whether she suddenly remembered her cancer. “I talked to her doctor and it looks bad. It’s going to be a radical mastectomy, they’re going to cut out all the lymph nodes in her upper arm as well, she’ll have to wear a surgical gauntlet to keep her forearm from swelling with uncirculated lymphatic fluid.” As she raced on and on, the precise, technical vocabulary dried her tears. Her feeling of scientific control replaced her fear. She smiled. I smiled.

  And yet, whipped kid that I was, I kept worrying that our armistice was fragile or might even be a trap and would give way in an instant to Anne’s old scorn.

  “You know,” I said, “when you came that time to visit me in New York with Peg, I kept thinking you weren’t really gay.” I used the word gay, which united us, rather than the divisive word lesbian (lipstick-less mouth, cigarette behind the ear)—used it even while I was doubting that we were alike. “I thought you were just imitating me because you were unhappy.”

  “I don’t know what I am, but don’t you remember that crush I had on Jeananne back at Camp Sibelius, and I pined all winter over her?” She laughed. “That should have been our first clue. But, Brulley, it’s neat but right now I’m involved with this really cool guy, early forties, big manly hands, clean as a surgeon’s, but with flossy black hair on the first knuckle of each finger, and he’s rich and well read, his name is Arthur.”

  “Where’d you meet him?”

  “The madhouse.” She smiled wanly.

  Did she think I preferred her to be heterosexual? Did she imagine I found a straight woman to be more attractive, less weird than a lesbian (perhaps because straight women shared my taste for men)? “And what about Dick?” I asked.

  She just made a face. “He’s so icky.” With me she reverted to our childhood vocabulary. “No, poor thing, he dotes on me, it’s scary, sometimes he’s the one who acts crazy, I never knew someone could love anyone so much, but he leaves me cold. Anyway, I’ve moved.”

  “Yeah, Mully said you had your own place near here.”

  “The only problem is I can’t earn my living. Dick pays the rent and gives me and the kids an allowance, but we’re so poor, you’ve never known this kind of poverty, I can’t even afford a movie on Saturday nights and those steaks I was talking about are ghostly memories from the past, now it’s just macaroni and cheese, even the kids are complaining.”

  “What would you do—what kind of work I mean—if you could choose anything, if you were a millionaire?” I asked.

  She said she’d like most to be a psychologist and that she’d learned she could practice if she had a master’s degree in social work, just two years of course work. I told her that I’d find the money for her tuition if she really wanted to go.

  She had tears in her eyes.

  For the ten years that had gone by since university days all my affinities had been elective and it was strange to be back home, responding to my sister, worrying about my mother, these women I’d inherited. With lovers I imagined an ideal life to come; with family members I remembered the tormented life of the past. With friends everything was new and renewable; with my sister everything, as Tom had written in a poem, was “old, inadequate and flourishing.” A friend could please me in one or two ways; my sister and I could anger and hurt each other in myriad ways despite a firm resolve to be friendly.

  “What does Mully think about your being a lesbian?” I asked.

  “Well, maybe I’m not a lesbian, but when I was so nuts over Peg, Mully was horrible, she kept saying that she was feminine and loved men, too bad none of them was good enough for her, and the only time she’d ever been attracted to another woman—”

  “Was that time,” I interrupted, laughing, “when that woman friend of hers bent over and Mully could see her breasts and wanted to touch them?” I laughed, and Anne laughed, too, because suddenly we’d recognized that another thing our mother said was a “rap,” one of her set pieces.

  “Of course there’s something weird about that story, anyway,” Anne said, adding, “I think she was sending me a double message.” We subsided into a psychoanalytic dissection of our mother, a familiar vocabulary that expressed little beyond our general irritation with her and our certainty that she was the source of all our problems.

  Anne ordered a second bottle of wine. We were both smoking so heavily that the disapproving waitress, dressed like a chef in a white hat and a huge apron wrapped around her ample figure, kept exchanging empty ashtrays for full; the ashtray itself was so small and provisional that it was doubtless designed for a single after-dinner lapse, not a continued bad habit.

  Fueled by red meat and nicotine, all our pain dulled by wine, we forgot our weariness and the inexorable lockstep of time. We flew high, then hovered above our mere bodies, these machines pulsing air and blood and mulching food. Our words weren’t plucked from vocal cords but rather were the spontaneous condensation of thoughts precipitated out of the cloud of smoke hanging in a dense haze above our table.

  “Do you remember, Brulley, how when we were kids we saw the movie of The Glass Menagerie and we howled with laughter because Mully was just like the mother? ‘We’re going to go to Bowman’s Department Store and charge and charge and charge.’ ” She imitated a fancy Southern accent, a Tidewater exaggeration of our mother’s faint Texas twang.

  I didn’t want to fall into all our old shared jokes, these vaudevill
e turns of our adolescence. We’d been the ones to torment our mother, and if our shrinks had taught us to blame her, they (and we) conveniently ignored the hours and hours every week my sister and I, as children and adolescents, had devoted to mocking the poor woman. If she said, “I need nice things in my life, I must make a nice appearance, I’m going to charge some lovely winter outfits at Neiman-Marcus,” then Anne and I would howl in chorus, “I’m going to charge, charge, charge at Bowman’s Department Store.” If she’d talk about how cute and popular she’d been as a girl, Anne would paraphrase Tennessee Williams, “Why, when I was a girl I had so many gentleman callers one Sunday back at Belle Rive that we had to send for extra chairs.”

  Our satirical idea, I guess, was that Mully was self-deceiving and pathetically out of date; we ignored her gallantry. After our father had left her for another woman she’d had to go to work for the first time at age forty-five. She’d made a success of her life, although at a terrible price, one that everyone around her had to pay. She never stopped singing her own praises in her frail soprano, a voice weak exactly to the degree her will and self-absorption were relentlessly strong. One of her colleagues had drunk too much once at an office party and had told me he thought she was crazy. “With the parents and children she plays Lady Bountiful, with the doctors she plays the best and brightest student, though she’s not bright, in fact she’s an idiot, begging your pardon, but with the people who work under her she’s suspicious, hysterical, hectoring, ungrateful, a real bitch, begging your forgiveness, a real dragon lady. Just last week she sobbed and screamed at us that we were obstructionists, little people who didn’t appreciate how a big mind like hers thinks. She shook all over like a crazy woman. I mean, I think she is crazy.”