by Tad Friend
NEITHER AMANDA nor I is a churchgoer, so, at Day’s suggestion, we had asked Barrie Shepherd to perform the service; he had been the minister at the Presbyterian church in Swarthmore. When Amanda and I met with Barrie to discuss the ceremony, he was as thoughtful and bracing as I remembered, and he said that as he’d wed Catholics and Buddhists, agnostics wouldn’t be a problem. Then he asked us to pray with him. As we sent drafts of the service to and fro, and Barrie disclosed that he always presented the newlyweds with Bibles, we began to realize that he wished God to not only preside over but ordain our marriage. And while we didn’t mind having God as a witness, we didn’t want it to be His day. So we regretfully told Barrie we needed to look elsewhere.
Most of my early ancestors would have taken Barrie’s part. Jacob Hemingway, Yale’s first student, became a Congregationalist pastor who characterized households with unbaptized children as “the nurseries of Hell”; when his daughter married an Episcopalian, he turned her portrait to the wall. In the past century, though, many of my forebears began to lose faith in Christianity, without necessarily gaining a corresponding sense of freedom. Grandma Tim, for instance, left the Congregationalists for the Unitarian Universalist church, which has no official creed. My parents accompanied her and Tom to a Unitarian Christmas service in the early eighties, and Mom observed that there weren’t any familiar carols. “Why are Unitarians embarrassed by the baby Jesus?” she asked.
“We aren’t embarrassed,” Timmy said. “We just don’t believe in Christ as a deity, that’s all.”
“Well, that’s pretty much the end for Christianity, isn’t it?”
Day remains a devout Presbyterian with an amplifying belief in Buddhism and Sufism; Mom seemed to me less a Christian than a Christmasian who believed in talismans and fate. She would walk the aisles of airplanes after boarding, looking for babies, guarantors of safety. And she often told the story of how a man she knew had once boarded an elevator and seen that everyone on it had just lost his aura. “Excuse me,” he said, “I have to get out,” and he thrust his way into the corridor, then watched the elevator plunge through the basement. Once, irked by her definition of an aura as something distinguishable only by its absence, I asked why her friend didn’t tell the others in the car about their auras, why he didn’t save them, too. “If they all left the elevator without their auras, the entire building would have collapsed,” she replied. “He had to allow some to die so that others might live.”
To trust entirely in feeling, one must believe that this life is all there is: that no moral duties are owed. But the modern Wasp like me is uncertain, and tries to straddle both paths as they diverge: attending church occasionally for the hymns, trying to earn enough for a summerhouse without becoming a philistine. So Amanda and I weren’t confident that we could cherry-pick our traditions, that the Wasp menu is à la carte as well as prix fixe. But we decided to risk it, and wrote our own service to include bits from William Carlos Williams and Rainer Maria Rilke and Raymond Carver’s “Late Fragment,” which we asked Pier to read:
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
It’s the “even so” that always lays me out.
Before the ceremony, Amanda and I stood in the master bedroom holding hands. I was wearing a new gray suit, and she was in a knee-length pink Prada dress with cap sleeves. Her hair was blown out, and she stood two inches taller than usual on gold sandals, but she had none of the bride’s freeze-dried look; she was blushing, quivering, alive. From the window, we spied on our friends and families on the lawn. There was Amanda’s brother Dean and his wife talking with Day, and George and Pablo with our two mothers, and Norah prowling the perimeter, and Alessandra Visconti, and Sylvia Welsh, and Paddy and Karen and my cousin Eliza, who’d done the centerpieces — blue and white hydrangeas in bowls filled with sea stones and sand. My life, our life, telescoped.
In the previous months, Mom had kept e-mailing us reports from the Farmer’s Almanac and “hurricane forecast experts” that predicted a devastating blow for September 14. She bought a hundred and fifty ponchos for the guests and put them aside — in a huge, attention-getting box near the front door — just in case. That the wedding day had dawned sunny and mild was due, she felt, to this precaution. The late-afternoon sun lit up the lawn amid the lengthening shadows. Wilson had reclaimed that lawn from the poison ivy and crabgrass and the tunneling moles, widening it by degrees across his lifetime, and now it glowed as a living promise. I wished, then, that I had said something to him before he died, something appreciative. But that’s not how we roll.
Our guests were migrating toward the pond, so Amanda and I slipped downstairs to the path that would bring us through the shoulder-high goldenrod and out by the altar, usually known as the birdbath. As we waited in the rushes, I had a sudden vision of a cocktail hour on the porch twenty-five years earlier. Uncle Wilson was in a poplin suit and Aunt Letty in a blue dress with her hair pulled back and Mom in an even bluer dress and Day in his red-checked blazer, each sipping from the contents of Wilson’s frosted cocktail shaker. It was just a flash — all of them young and smiling and lacquered by light.
The cello and flute struck up our processional music, “Simple Gifts,” a Shaker dance tune I’d always loved, and we started down the path. I was clamping down on my fluttering spirits, trying not to start tearing up then, knowing I was going to later — as I did when I said, “I am marrying you, Amanda, among many other reasons, because my heart jumps up with gladness whenever I see you.”
“Hey, slow up!” Amanda said now. “I want to take it all in.”
“I’m excited,” I said, taking her hand again. “Here we go!”
AT DINNER, Day stood beneath one of the Japanese lanterns bobbing from the tent poles and welcomed everyone. “Elizabeth says that I’m really much better at responding to queries than giving speeches,” he began. “So — are there any questions?” Then, taking up Jenn Steinhauer’s rhetorical question from the night before, he explained that the first step for Wasps seeking to mate was to “cloak in obscurity a mutual self-deference,” which everyone thought was very funny, perhaps because it proved her point.
“I think your father’s a little squiffy,” an older Wasp remarked, smiling. Day wasn’t the only one — I was having a wonderful time. After scuttling Presbyterianism, we’d decided it was all up for grabs, and so we had the band play “Hava Nagila,” and did a twenty-minute hora. Our groomsmen twirled Amanda and me around on our chairs, and once Mom was aloft, she waved her green scarf like Isadora Duncan. Just before eleven p.m., she took me aside to say that Don Petrie had told her the day before that Georgica had a no-amplified-music-after-eleven rule. “First of all, the band quits in fifteen minutes,” I said. “Second, we haven’t had a wedding here in forty years, so let’s enjoy this one. And third, if Don Petrie comes over, I will be happy to personally tell him to fuck off.”
Mom smiled, unexpectedly: “Okay, darling.” She danced on the lawn until the last song, a twangy, foot-stomping version of the gospel standard “Jesus on the Main Line,” adoring it all. The next morning, recalling the highlights over bagels on the porch, she exclaimed, “And then there was that part of the evening where we all became Jews!”
On their way home, my parents picked Sam up from a kennel. They took him back to the house, fed and walked him, and stroked his thinning corona of fur. At dawn, they found his body stretched out in the Link, still warm.
THE FOLLOWING summer, in June of 2003, I took Mom to the hospital at the University of Pennsylvania for an outpatient procedure on her bladder. In the car afterward, still dreamy from the anesthesia, she told me about her first period. It had arrived when she was fifteen and riding the Long Island Rail Road. In every way unprepared for this calamity, she had locked herself in the bathroom and sobbed. It was an odd convers
ation for us to be having, and yet I remember thinking, This is how we should be talking, calmly and intimately, just two adults discussing their periods. Laughing and chatting, we bowled off to Rite Aid. When I came out with her prescriptions, I tapped the window and she awoke from a catnap, smiling.
She began to recover from the operation — and then to fail, rapidly. One morning she just fell down. My father called and said that she wanted to speak with me but had wanted him to prepare me for how she sounded. She got on and said, “He … llo, Tad-di-o …” Her clarion voice was slurred and quavery. I tried to make a casual reply, but we each heard the other’s alarm — the fear of impairment, of dwindling.
She checked back into the hospital, where tests determined that the mitral valve of her heart had become clogged with a strange puttylike material, flecks of which had passed into her brain. The root problem remained mysterious. As the doctors ran more tests, we tried to brighten Mom’s surroundings, to distract her from the applesauce, the beige walls whose color she termed “baby couldn’t help it.” Timmie rubbed her feet with citrus lotions, and I brought in Malta. Antibiotics began to alleviate her symptoms, and in a few days she was sitting up and making plans to attend Timmie’s wedding in Georgica, two months off, declaring, “I’ll be borne in on a palanquin!” She began hostessing the nurses — “Have you met my daughter-in-law, who writes for the New York Times?” — and apologizing to everyone for her unwashed hair. As Amanda and I left for the train, she was trying to find Sex and the City on television, and I told her that the hospital didn’t have HBO. “Well, how do they expect anyone to get better in here if they can’t watch Sex and the City?” she said.
The doctors decided that her mitral valve ought to be replaced. When I called the night before the operation, Timmie picked up and said that a rehabilitation therapist had taken Mom for a short walk down the hall. When she got back, I told her, “I hear you were running up and down the stairs like a mountain goat.”
“Oh, yes,” she said instantly. “Leaping from crag to crag.”
The next morning, as they were rolling her in, Malta somehow vanished from her pajama pocket. And that afternoon, after they stitched her up, her heart just stopped.
As we signed paperwork at the hospital, I kept seeing Mom as she was afterward, bundled in a sheet, her hands folded on her chest and her mouth parted slightly, a small scab on her lower lip. Her skin had felt cool, like home. Day had broken down over her, his tears falling onto her closed eyes. When the doctors asked permission to do an autopsy, Timmie suggested that we allow them to examine everything but those eyes, her last blue-and-white element: “She’s an artist; she may need them.” The autopsy later revealed that the cancer had returned, everywhere and all at once.
We drove back to Villanova in silence. Paddy and Karen were there with us, comfortingly; and Pier’s wife, Sara, came down from Montclair; and Pier flew in from a trip out West, and soon the house was full. Amanda and I ended up sleeping in my parents’ room, because Day said that he couldn’t stand to be there just yet. He took the futon in his study, and I thought of him lying alone beneath his porthole, looking west. Her porthole. The house was a minefield of memory — every painting, well-scrubbed pot on her peg-board, phone message in her hand. Upstairs was a trove of presents she had wrapped but not yet addressed, awaiting Christmas, five months away.
Amanda and I stayed awake for hours. I wished I smoked, because it would have killed some time — time, then, the coward enemy. After she dozed off, I found myself thinking about The Tailor of Gloucester. I was almost able to soothe myself by thinking of Grandpa John as the tailor, absent from his shop only because he was sick and frail, and Mom as a faithful brown mouse, sewing busily in the dark.
At dawn, I was awoken by a soft rap on the door between the bedroom and the Link. Thinking it must be Day, I mumbled, “Yes, come in.” When there was no reply, I decided I must have dreamed it. Then came another rap. Thoroughly awake now, I got out of bed and walked to the door and said, “Hello?” A series of raps, two feet away and distinct, answered back. It wasn’t tip tap, tip tap, tip tap tip, quite, but nearly.
I opened the door and peered into the Link. The passage was empty. It was empty, that is, if you didn’t count the pewter mirror where Mom liked to primp in passing, or the door to the garden with its nested dog door (six inches wide, with an inch of leeway), or the tidy bureau and rack for Day’s suits and overcoats, or the cunning shelf for his hats she’d asked the carpenters to notch out above the lintel — he disliked hats, but you never know — or the closet that she had said would be perfect for him and later appropriated for herself. She kept her suitcases on top of it, ready to go.
FIFTEEN
Home
THE DAY OF hard feelings occurred on the winter solstice, a black day just before Christmas of 2006 that began with us firing our babysitter, who was brusque with Walker, and continued with Addie bellowing at our creeping progress down the New Jersey Turnpike and Walker foghorning periodic agreement. When we got to Villanova, it took a while to unload the car and feed the twins and address their complaints about sleeping in Pack ’n Plays — “Look, here’s your dog, Foo! Oh, now, Foo doesn’t like being thrown into the fireplace!” — before we could finally make it downstairs for dinner.
The New Yorker had published my piece on Mom ten days earlier, and Day had asked me to bring home the alternative layouts: a variety of early photos of Mom and me together. As I was scooping out a carton of ice cream for dessert — Pier and Sara and Timmie and Scott had all just arrived, too — Day leafed through the layouts, frowning. He hadn’t shaved in five weeks because of a skin rash, and his Una-bomberish scruff made him look older; at dinner he mentioned that, according to the IRS’s actuarial tables, he had nine years left. He suddenly held up the sheaf of paper and asked, “How can you look at these photos and not know that your mother loved you?”
I was taken aback by his tone, particularly as I’d shown him the article months earlier, and he’d responded warmly. “I do know that she loved me, just as I loved her, and I think the article reflects that,” I said.
“Judging by many of the eighteen responses I have received, that was not apparent to many people,” he said. Glances flashed around the table, and I saw Pier’s face assume a careful neutrality. Knowing I’d regret whatever came out of my mouth, I willed myself to count down from ten, and fortunately Timmie jumped in to defend the piece, and to say, “It was Tad’s story of Mom, and it would have been different if you wrote it, or I did.” The fragile peace held.
After dinner I started to change for bed, still stewing even after bending over Addie and Walker, who were curled up like pole beans, and listening to them breathe. I told Amanda I had to go talk it through. Yes, she said, I think so. So I put my pants back on and went downstairs, past Mom’s dressing room with its faint smell of old wood and Chanel No. 5, to rap on Day’s bedroom door. He was in his armchair, taking off his cordovan boots. I sat on an ottoman facing him and said, “So what was all that about at dinner?”
He cleared his throat and said, “I’m just trying to give you the range of responses your piece has provoked.”
“I’d rather hear what you think, directly, rather than try to guess where you are behind the screen of eighteen strangers.”
“Since you ask, and in the spirit of candor,” he began slowly, “I feel that the piece didn’t capture Mom’s love for you, or suggest that you loved her. It failed in those respects, and it also failed to capture my relationship with Elizabeth, as well as our family dynamic. To speak in metaphor, it was well written, a shrewdly chosen series of snapshots, but it was an X-ray rather than an MRI. It failed to illuminate the soft tissue. And that failing suggests an emotional aridity that I fear pervades your work.”
“I can’t believe you would say that,” I said. “No one would read Family Laundry and think you didn’t love Grandma Jess or Grandpa Ted. But they were complicated people, and so was Mom.”
“She was com
plicated, but — ”
“Yes, she was wonderful, but she did dominate things,” I said. “Maybe you want to forget that now, forget that there was a reason you spent all your time in your study, because it seems disloyal or petty to bring it up when she’s gone. And maybe that’s understandable — probably, it is. But pretending there weren’t problems means denying what it was like to grow up in this family.”
“It’s your article and your career, and you will do with them what you like. You will do well — you have done well — and you will continue to do well. But this is my view,” he said, frowning. “The emotional sterility is what troubles me.”
“I feel extremely misunderstood,” I said, starting to choke up, and hating that. “And it makes me want to leave this house.” He looked at me levelly, listening. “How can you say that about aridity, when your son is sitting across from you, obviously upset, and you’re sitting there dry-eyed? You’re the arid one, you’ve always been that way, and I wish you weren’t. I so wish you weren’t.” He still didn’t say anything. “I know you have feelings. But why, why do you have to present everything as a syllogism?”
He sighed and shot his cuff, deciding which of several avenues to take. “I have told others, and I don’t know if I have told you, that you’re my favorite living writer.”
“You had mentioned that to me, and I appreciate it,” I said, feeling oddly formal, as if I were accepting a prize that had been announced years before.
“I look forward to everything you write, and read it with great pleasure, as Mom did. But I would remark that I worry about you being a prisoner of Freudianism, which is a thread that wends through the article. Life is about saying yes to the mystery of the future, not about endless refinements of the past.”