Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent

by Anthony Rapp

  “Well, here we are,” Chris said.

  We got out, trudged up the porch steps, opened the door—the handle of which was a branch—and stepped inside.

  “Anthoneeeeeee!”

  Rachel’s patented squeal and mad dash toward me was right on cue. She launched herself into my arms. “You’re here! I’m so happy you’re here!”

  I giggled as I always did. “Yeah, I’m here, honey.”

  “Did you just fly from New York today?”

  “Yep.”

  “Coooool.” She squeezed me tightly, wrapping her whole body around mine. “Come on,” she said and jumped down, tugging my hand, leading me into the spacious living room where Roberta, Bob, Bonnie, and Mom all sat, situated around a gorgeous stone fireplace.

  “Hey, Pete,” Roberta said, rising up to give me a hug. Pete was a nickname she’d given me in my early childhood when she lived with us for a time. Not long before my second birthday, Dad left Mom, and soon after that Roberta, who needed a place to stay, moved in. She helped take care of Anne, Adam, and me, and, according to Mom, Roberta and I bonded like crazy, clowning around with puppets and stuffed animals, and inventing all sorts of games. The most famous of these was “Movie Star and Peter Glamour,” in which she was the Movie Star, and I was Peter Glamour. I don’t remember how we played this game, but from an old color photo of Mom’s that I loved, in which Roberta and I sat side by side on a sofa, sporting ridiculous, oversized sunglasses, I know we did our best to look as fabulous and, well, glamorous as possible. I had been Pete, or Petey, to Roberta ever since.

  Roberta’s hug was as strong as ever, and when we parted I waved hello to everyone else, Bonnie and Bob waving back from their seats, and Mom getting up for an embrace.

  “Hi, Tonio.”

  And that’s when I noticed how stiffly she was moving and that she was wearing a foam-rubber neck brace, and that her hug was even more delicate than usual and her small frame bonier than before. And my heart sank. She’d been doing so well; there hadn’t been anything wrong with her in so long. I’d thought she was out of danger.

  Two years earlier, right before Christmas, on December 22, 1992, Mom awoke in the middle of the night in agony, doubled over by terrible, blazing pains shooting through her abdomen. She’d suffered from unexplained episodes of internal abdominal bleeding before, so her nurse’s training automatically kicked in, diagnosing that as what was wrong with her now. But as she continued to lie in bed in agony, she began to realize that the pain she was feeling this night was far worse than anything else she’d ever experienced. And she’d never felt so extraordinarily weak or lightheaded, either. She knew she must have been losing a lot of blood.

  Only Rachel, five at the time, was in the house, asleep in the next room, and Mom didn’t want to terrify her by waking her up, so Mom got out of bed, barely managing to roll herself over the edge of her mattress, and crawled along the floor, to a phone a few feet down the hall. Lying on the floor on her back, she called my sister, Anne, who lived nearby, and told her that she was feeling horrible, worse than she’d ever felt, and that Anne should call 911 and come over as quickly as possible. By the time Anne and the paramedics arrived, Mom was unconscious on the floor. All the commotion—the sirens, the paramedics’ voices and bodies moving through the house—woke Rachel up, and Anne did her best to explain what was happening, as they both watched the paramedics hoist Mom up onto a stretcher and take her away.

  The paramedics zoomed Mom over to St. Joseph’s Medical Center, a large hospital a mile away where Mom had once worked as a nurse in the pediatrics ward, and they immediately brought her into the emergency room. Her vital signs were extremely low—she was in massive shock—and she’d been floating in and out of consciousness all the way to the hospital, muttering nonsensically about Rachel and Anne and Adam and me the whole time.

  Dr. Allan Anderson performed the surgery, opening her up to discover massive internal bleeding (“It looked like a shotgun wound,” he said later), which he found was the result of an adrenal gland that had inexplicably burst. She had lost so much blood by the time he got her on the table that he had to give her transfusions equaling twelve units of blood during the surgery—enough to refill her entire body one and a half times.

  This all happened while I was asleep in New York City, and the next morning as I was eating breakfast, the phone rang. It was Anne, who normally never called me, not even on holidays or birthdays. We just weren’t that close.

  “Anthony?” she said, her voice tight and clipped. “Mom’s in the hospital. You’ve gotta come home today.”

  A part of myself clamped firmly shut as she said these words, and I simply registered the information, not really reacting to it, just focusing on listening to my sister’s voice, as if she’d just told me Mom had recently repainted the house or seen a good movie. “Okay,” I said, as calmly and clearly as I could. “What happened?”

  “I don’t really know yet. She called me last night in the middle of the night, and I called an ambulance, and she’s had surgery, and now she’s in intensive care.”

  I breathed in and out and concentrated on her voice and on her words and tried to ignore all of the thousands of implications embedded in what she was saying. “Okay,” I managed.

  “Just come home.”

  “Okay.”

  And the rest of the day was simply one mercifully straightforward action after another: making a phone call to Adam at work to tell him what was happening and making a phone call to the airline to change our tickets home and packing our bags and hailing a taxi to the airport and sitting on the two-hour flight with Adam and getting picked up at the airport by Anne and riding with the two of them, mostly in silence, to the hospital.

  And then walking down the corridor to Mom’s room, not really noticing her mother and father and sisters and brothers who had gathered there, none of us doing much to greet each other. Pausing in the hallway before heading into her room, steeling myself. And then standing at the foot of her bed, watching her sleep, her face and body all milky white and swollen and puffed out. Standing there and absurdly thinking that in her current state she looked like a relative of the Michelin Man.

  Standing there with Adam in silence as we waited for her to stir, listening to the steady droning rhythms of the machines that monitored her pulse and administered her pain medication and emptied her bowels and massaged her limbs. Staring at all the tubes in her nose and belly and arms.

  Standing there and trying to absorb what I was seeing, as if I were at a museum gazing at an abstract painting. Trying to look at her misshapen, wracked, bloated body and face and still see Mom.

  We had a meager Christmas celebration in the ICU a couple of days later, bringing our presents to the ward and opening Mom’s for her. Her swelling, which we found out later was a result of all of the fluids they had pumped into her, had gone down. Though she still looked horrible, she had begun to resemble her old self. But I saw in her eyes a new tinge of terror, which flashed around their edges as she adjusted her body ever so slightly to get more comfortable, or turned her head to stare at the wall.

  Given the trauma her body had undergone, her recovery was incredible, and incredibly swift: within a few days she was out of intensive care, and within a few weeks she was back at work. She said later that Anne and Adam and Rachel and I had seen her through that horrible night; we had kept her there. “I wasn’t ready to leave you guys,” she said.

  We soon learned that the whole incident was caused by a cancerous tumor that had been growing undetected on one of her adrenal glands; it was actually the tumor that had burst, not the gland itself as originally thought, although the gland was destroyed in the process.

  Dr. Anderson felt confident that the entire cancerous mass had been removed from Mom’s abdomen in the surgery, but wanted her to continue getting tested every three months, just in case.

  Mom had always named inanimate objects in her life—her homes, her cars—so it was only fitting that her t
umor would have a name too: Wild Bill. She imagined Wild Bill as an out-of-control gunman who’d galloped in from nowhere and ripped a piece of her away. She visualized herself facing this gunman in the middle of the street and blowing him off the face of the earth.

  For the next two years, we all thought she was out of danger. Every three months she went to the hospital for the afternoon and drank barium, a foul-tasting, radioactive dye, so her oncologist could scan her body for any growths that shouldn’t be there. And every three months her oncologist found nothing. As time went on, and each scan resulted in good news, I buried the possibility that anything more would come of Wild Bill.

  Adam and I lived together back in New York, and after a while we stopped speaking about what happened that night and about Wild Bill. We went about our lives in the city, Adam working on getting his novels published and his plays produced, and me auditioning and occasionally getting cast in something. I hardly thought about Mom’s health scare until the Christmas following it when I went home for a visit, and saw taped to the side of the refrigerator a laminated copy of a notice she’d had printed in the Joliet Herald-News:

  ON THIS WINTER SOLSTICE

  It is a year since my near fatal encounter with “WILD BILL.” There are so many people who helped in so many ways. I’ll always be grateful & openly want to thank the following:

  The Paramedics

  Dr. Allan Anderson & Dr. Phil Meyer [Mom’s anesthesiologist], who clearly saved my life.

  My dear sisters, especially Roberta & Gracia, who were there for me when I needed them most.

  All of my wonderful friends, especially Kathy, Marna, Gloria & Sarah.

  My Coworkers at Joliet Correctional Center, who continue to give me emotional support laced with humor, & all the people who donated blood which is truly the gift of life.

  And most of all I want to thank MY girls, Anne, who held my hand when I was terrified, and Little Rachel, who still thinks she dialed 911.

  I made it for them.

  MARY RAPP

  I stood and read this ad over and over every time I opened the refrigerator during that visit, lingering at the kitchen counter with my orange juice or yogurt or peanut butter sandwich, trying to imagine once again what that horrible night must have felt like to her, and wondering what I would have done in her place, and feeling grateful that she had survived the ordeal. But as much as the ad touched me (especially the sweet line about Little Rachel thinking she dialed 911), it also left me ashamed. Ashamed that I wasn’t mentioned. Ashamed that I hadn’t been there for Mom in a way that merited her thanks. But the truth was I hadn’t really been there for her, not in any way that mattered. Not only was I a thousand miles away, living an extremely hectic New York City life, but I didn’t call her as much as she wanted me to—certainly not in the wake of Wild Bill—or go home for visits as often as she’d like. When I did call, I rarely asked her about Wild Bill, or talked to her about that night or her recovery or her prospects. I told her about my latest auditions and callbacks and all of the roles I wasn’t getting, and spoke of little else. So she was right not to thank me.

  As much as I believed that, though, I still wanted some credit. I could feel the insidious pull of that need lingering in my gut. I was her son, after all, and she had told me that she’d made it through that night for all of us kids, not just her girls. So why didn’t she say that in print? Why did she strand Adam and me like that? It wasn’t fair. But as I stood at the kitchen counter and read and reread the notice and thought all of this through and swallowed down my shame and pride and fear, I glanced over at Mom placidly sitting on the couch reading a magazine, her foot bobbing incessantly up and down as it always did, her head slightly cocked, enveloped in her usual aura of calm, and I decided that I could never bring it up.

  A year later, in the log cabin in the woods of Wisconsin, I also didn’t mention that I’d noticed her bones poking out of her already thin frame when I hugged her. I didn’t tell her how that frightened me. Instead I chatted with her about my work and my life in New York.

  “I brought home some reviews,” I told her.

  “Oh, good, let me see.”

  Reading my press clippings was one of her favorite activities. She was much better than I at cutting them out and saving them in scrap-books, and I wasn’t good at sending them in the mail to her, so I was glad to share them with her in person. And since she couldn’t afford to fly out to New York to see everything I was in (and I couldn’t afford to buy her plane tickets), showing her my reviews was the next best thing.

  “It sounds very interesting,” she said after reading one of the reviews of my current show, a dark, three-character, gay-themed play called Trafficking in Broken Hearts.

  “I wear panties in it,” I said, provocatively. Her eyes grew wide.

  “Really? Panties?” Her brow furrowed. “Why?”

  “I’m playing a sort of confused character.”

  “Well, I guess so.”

  “His brothers raped him as a kid, and this is one of the ways he’s adapted.”

  “His brothers raped him? That’s terrible.”

  “Yeah, it is. But it’s a great part.”

  She started to read another review, peering down at it through her thickly-framed bifocals.

  “Why can’t you play a nice normal person sometimes?” she said after a moment without looking up from the paper.

  This was a conversation we’d had before. And whenever we did, I always felt that she was still holding on to the memories of my childhood performances as Snoopy, Oliver, Tiny Tim, the Cowardly Lion, and the Little Prince—roles that were sweet and innocent and appealing, in shows that were wholesome and clean. “Everyone always loved you in those shows,” she’d say, and that’s what she wanted to see me do again.

  “Well, I can play normal characters too,” I said as she continued to read, “but this is what I was offered right now, and I’m having a great experience in it.”

  She put the paper down. “I just think it’s funny that you play all of these strange characters, because to me you’re such a regular guy.”

  “Well, I don’t know. I think this is one of the best things I’ve ever done. I get to be so different from myself, and that’s very exciting for me.”

  “I guess so.” She nodded, almost imperceptibly frowning. “I’m sure you’re wonderful in it, I think you always do a good job, but sometimes I just want you to, you know, play a nice, regular person.”

  “Well, maybe in the next thing I do I’ll get to do that.”

  “I hope so.”

  What we weren’t directly discussing was the homosexual content of the play. Mom and I had had a long history of talking—and not talking—about my sexuality, never to my full satisfaction, and I didn’t know where she stood with regard to it now. But given her discomfort with the subject, I was fairly certain that my being in a gay play was an issue for her. I toyed with pressing the conversation further but decided against it. I didn’t want to create friction during my short stay.

  Later, as I was helping Mom do the dishes, I asked her about her neck brace.

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” she said, the steam from the sink fogging her glasses. “My neck’s been bothering me a little, is all.”

  I dried silverware in silence for a moment.

  “Well, I hope it feels better.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it will.”

  I never knew how much to believe Mom when she talked about how she was feeling; she had a high tolerance for pain. When I was a tiny baby, she slipped and fell down a flight of stairs while clutching me to her chest, cushioning and protecting me from the pounding her body took. I wound up unhurt, but even though she was quite injured, she walked away from the fall without going to the hospital, and from that day forward she suffered from chronic flare-ups of back pain.

  Over twenty years later, after one of the many sessions of scans for any traces of Wild Bill, her oncologist asked her if she’d ever broken her back.

&nbs
p; “Not that I know of,” she said.

  “Well, if it had happened, I think it’s something you’d probably know about.”

  “I had a bad fall once, a long time ago, but I walked away from it.” “Really? Well,” he said, showing her the X-ray, “there is evidence here of a badly healed fracture.”

  “Huh,” Mom said.

  “So it would appear you did in fact break your back after all.”

  “Well, I guess I did.”

  Roberta and Chris and Bonnie and I took a walk that night, but Mom opted to stay in. “I’m a little tired,” she said. “You guys go on without me.”

  “You sure?” Roberta said. “It’s beautiful outside.”

  “No, I’m okay.”

  “All right then.”

  Mom was an avid walker. She took her dog Zelda out for frequent walks of over a mile almost every day, in any kind of weather. When she was in Toronto with me while I was filming Adventures in Babysitting, she’d often walked the several miles to the set. One day the cast and crew van was stuck in traffic during a heavy snowfall, and Mom beat us to the soundstage, impressing everybody in the van by chugging past us at a steady and implacable pace, her pale cheeks shining a rosy glow, her breath pluming out before her. So it was unusual for her not to join us.

  “Have fun, guys,” she said as we bundled up and shuffled out into the crisp, frigid, clear Wisconsin night. And as we made our way down the pitch-black road, our flashlights bobbing their irregular circles and ovals on the pavement, no one remarked on her absence, even though it was like a noisy flare trailing after us. We all knew what her staying behind probably meant. But we didn’t discuss it. To discuss it would be to say that it was real, and no one wanted to say that it was real, no one wanted that at all.