by Diana Altman
Before she noticed me standing stunned in the doorway, I saw my mother propped up in the hospital bed, her head bandaged, her arm in traction, a cast up to her neck. When she turned, I saw her face was swollen and purple, both eyes black. “Mother!” I hurried to her side. “What happened?” Drugged, listless, she turned her head to see where the voice was coming from.
“Sonya,” she said, then turned her eyes away as if focusing took too much energy.
“What happened?”
She closed her eyes. A nurse came in, a young brisk person who took a pile of bloody clothes out of the closet and handed them to me, saying she was sure I’d like to take them home to launder. She beckoned me to follow her into the hall. The hospital, the pride of the Catskills, was once a farmhouse. There were modern additions on both sides with photographs on the walls of farmers loading cauliflower onto horse drawn wagons and pictures of old-fashioned ambulances and people in wooden wheelchairs. “Come,” the nurse said. She led me to a waiting room where we sat down. “Your mother’s a lucky woman,” she said. “She wouldn’t have survived if that boy hadn’t come along.” She said that a teenage boy was snowmobiling on the old logging road. There, behind the entrance gate, he saw a woman lying in the snow next to a turned over tractor. The boy sped back to his farm. His mother called the ambulance then drove their truck to the gate to wait for it to arrive. “That’s all I know,” the nurse said. She said my sister had been there the day before. “She looks just like you. I thought you were her.
I went back into my mother’s room. Again she turned to see who came in and again she said, “Sonya,” and turned her eyes away.
“Mother. What happened?”
“I thought those tires had better traction.”
“But why were you on the tractor? Where were you going?”
“To get the mail.”
“You were going to drive the tractor to town?”
“One thing about Carl. He used to do a good job plowing the driveway.”
“Did it skid? Is that what happened?”
“It hit that sugar maple.”
“Did you break anything?”
“Probably the axle. That’s expensive to fix.”
“I meant you.”
“Oh. Me. I think my collarbone, shoulder, I don’t know. I don’t know, Sonya. I tried to get back to the house. I crawled up the driveway. Next thing I knew, here I was.” She held her breath to endure a spasm of pain.
“How did the ambulance people get inside the gate?”
“Smashed it, damn fools. Those iron pickets are antiques. Irreplaceable.”
“Maybe an iron worker can replicate the old ones.”
“Thank you for coming, Sonya. Is it still snowing?”
“Yes.”
“Then that was a hard trip. That must have been difficult driving.” She closed her eyes and I went out to the hall and sat in a chair and cried into my palms.
She was there for three weeks before they sent her to a nursing home. I had meetings with my publisher in New York so I stayed with Joan on West 87th, and we drove together upstate to the nursing home in Margaretville. We arrived when Violet was enduring physical therapy. She was supposed to learn how to transfer herself from the bed to the wheelchair, but she was too weak and the therapist was impatient. She said, “You should be able to do this by now.” One of the doctors told us he wasn’t sure Violet would ever be able to walk again. The gash on her thigh was so deep there was nerve damage. Exhausted from her physical therapy efforts, she lay back on her bed and greeted Joan and me with a weak smile. We gave her the candy we’d brought, dark chocolate covered almonds, and the bouquet of roses, and sat down next to her bed. “Girls,” she said, “if you bury me, I’ll come back to haunt you.”
“What?”
“Cemeteries are a waste of a space. They’re an abomination. All that land used for that ridiculous purpose. Think of all the playgrounds, public swimming pools, parks.”
“So you mean you want to be cremated?”
“You’re not supposed to get cremated if you’re Jewish,” Joan said.
“Poppycock,” Violet said.
“What do you want us to do with the ashes?”
“Plant them under some delphinium.”
“Which ones are those?”
“The blue ones. I’ve got them staked near the Shasta daisies.”
“Are those your favorite flowers?”
“Yes. I love delphinium. And they like ashes.”
She couldn’t stay at the nursing home forever so a few weeks later they sent her home. After the contract with the visiting nurses expired, we hired aides. Violet didn’t like any of them, said each one was a thief and lazy. She endured three days of physical therapy then somehow hauled herself from bed into her wheelchair and rolled to the front door to tell the man standing there with his satchel of exercise balls, stretch bands, and weights that she no longer needed him. She closed the door in his face.
Then Shanice appeared. She was about six feet tall with the broad shoulders of a football player. Instead of scolding and nagging Violet to eat nutritious food, Shanice brought bags of Pepperidge Farm cookies to the bedside table and accepted one when Violet offered. They sat together munching on sweets. The other aides that the agency sent had been Violet’s size so she felt insecure when they helped her to the bathroom or held her up to change her nightie. Shanice picked her up as if she were a child and carried her tenderly. Besides loving sweets, they had something else in common. “Meh fav’rite flim star Clint Eastwood; he a ral badjohn in trut, y’know!”
“I don’t understand a word she says,” Mother complained. She was rude to Shanice, told her to go sit in the living room, told her she wasn’t going to pay someone she didn’t need, told her the food she cooked was inedible. “How does someone get so fat eating food you can’t even swallow?” my mother said.
But by the time the cast came off Mother’s shoulder, she was laughing with Shanice, telling her about her marriage. Shanice had no use for men, was married once but never again. Shanice thought Violet was hilarious and encouraged her to speak more, say more funny things. My mother regained the use of her arms and hands but could not walk. She was completely dependent upon Shanice for the most basic things, going to the bathroom and getting fed. She had nightmares and called out. Shanice, sleeping in the next room, rushed to her and held her against her ample bosom and stroked her hair saying, “Doux-doux,” which I learned meant darling. Mother said to me, “I have friends who are shocked when they see a colored person kissing me. I don’t think it’s so bad, do you?” I said no that it wasn’t bad at all. I was surprised by this mention of friends. She had no friends. Mother said. “I think it’s charming.”
Shanice went to her own home on the weekends, an apartment she shared with her daughter and grandson in Oneonta. At Christmas she went to visit her father, a policeman, in Trinidad. She replaced herself with one of her cousins. Leo called it Shanice Incorporated. The substitutes spoke to Violet with such hearty friendliness they sometimes bowled her over, but she was polite to them and if they laughed she laughed even though she didn’t understand their English. There was Myrtle, Angela, and Calister. At first, they came one at a time but soon two would come at once and as the months went by they came to visit when Shanice was there. The women spoke with a musical lilt. Mother couldn’t tell them apart, called them all Shanice or else “the maid” but each of them was affectionate and attributed every insult to the insanity of the aged. Sometimes I’d enter a house full of chatty black women, my formerly bigoted mother in her wheelchair sitting easily among them in her living room. Sometimes the women were playing cards with Mother, Old Maid and Gin. Shanice said when I arrived. “I ax she but why you like being Old Maid? Hear she, you is meh mudder?” The other women laughed as if the joke was new and Violet joined in, but I was pretty sure she didn’t understand the English any more than I did. Shanice did the shopping and Mother’s tops changed from autumn tones selected fro
m Neiman Marcus catalogs to polyester pink hearts on a yellow background purchased by Shanice at J.C. Penney. And with this change on the outside came a change on the inside, a newly emerging sweetness which must have always been there. When I arrived she said, “Sonya! Tell me, how’s the book? Where are you lecturing next? Shanice, did you know Sonya wrote a book?” My mother now slept downstairs so she couldn’t see how the upstairs rooms were sagging from lack of use. There were cobwebs in the corners of the ceilings. Her cats, the older one half-blind and rickety, stepped into their cat pan but left their hind quarters hanging out. With toilet paper, I picked up hard cat turds and dropped them in the toilet. “Hear me,” Shanice said. “I love she.” Another time Shanice said, “She hallucinate. All old people hallucinate. You didn’t know that?” Most elderly people had violent and frightening hallucinations, Shanice told me. Violet’s hallucinations were gentle, flowers and hummingbirds. She said that one time Violet was talking to her brother Alan, asking him why there were so many babies on the wall.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Would she know her secret baby if he appeared? If I brought him to her house and introduced him as a friend of mine, would she suspect? Shouldn’t I introduce him to his mother before it was too late? Maybe I could release some of the pain he must suffer knowing his mother didn’t want him. I’d be his big sister, his protector. I would turn the pages of the family album, show him pictures of his uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents. Here’s one of Violet in her gypsy costume, age twenty, when she was a Spanish dancer. Look how pretty your mother was! Here’s Joan and me dressed as twins in pinafores, and that’s Ruby who used to take care of us. Oh, and here’s your grandfather, Max Greenstone. You would have loved him. This person? That’s Wiley, our cousin. See that gap between his front teeth? His father, our Uncle Jack, had the same gap. Uncle Jack couldn’t sit straight in his chair. He always tilted back and balanced on the two hind legs.
I was tired of keeping Violet’s secret. I didn’t want it in me anymore. I was like a cat with a hairball in its throat.
Joan would object. She’d say I was betraying our mother. So I phoned city hall in Louisville without telling her and asked how a person starts such a search. I was given the telephone of Children’s Services. “Ma’am, you’ll have to fill out a form saying you do want contact,” a caseworker said. “But there’s a snaggle. You don’t have the exact birthday. And y’all don’t know the adoptee’s name.”
“I was hoping you could help me get around that because the mother is elderly now.”
“Yes, ma’am, that’s what they all say.”
“They do?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
When I told Leo I was searching for my brother, he said, “What do you expect from this guy? He probably has a perfectly fine life. What makes you think he wants to dig up the past?”
“You mean he doesn’t want to meet his sisters?”
“I don’t know. But you don’t know either. What is it exactly that you want from him?”
“He’s my brother. I always wanted a brother.”
“Well, let me warn you, Brownie. He may not be the brother you always wanted.”
Months later, I phoned to see if there was any way around knowing the exact birthday. Would it work if I just knew the month? The caseworker I’d spoken to was now replaced by someone else. Couldn’t she just see if someone was searching for Violet Adler? Couldn’t she just look it up that way? No, she couldn’t. If I had his name, that might help. Did I have his name?
“What you need,” Leo said, “is a change of scene.”
Leo’s new work in North Carolina and royalties from my book paid for our second honeymoon. For two months we explored Europe. We sat outdoors at cafes and strolled by shops with enticing windows and figured out how to convert our dollars and slept on feather beds in Switzerland.
At the same time that we were gone, Joan wasn’t home either. One of her designs caught the eye of a location scout who arranged to fly her to Hollywood as a consultant. The film plot involved smuggling money in cleverly designed textiles. Sometimes the money was attached to the textiles and sometimes the pattern of the textiles was a code the smugglers used.
A neighborhood boy took care of Pillow while Leo and I were gone. When we returned, tanned and relaxed, I went across the street to get my house keys back and to pay him. I didn’t really know this child or his parents, a sign that Leo and I were turning into the old folks in the neighborhood. I used to know almost every child who walked by our house. Now I didn’t know any of them. This child was living in what used to be the Johnsons’ house. From my window one day, I saw an ambulance arrive and carry old Mr. Johnson out on a stretcher. Several months later, an ambulance arrived and carried Mrs. Johnson out and a few weeks later a For Sale sign was on their lawn. Now I walked across the street, rang the bell, and the boy came to the door. He was in fifth grade at the school where my daughters went. The boy handed me the keys, and I gave him twenty-five dollars. “Oh, no!” he said. “That’s way too much.” He stood small in the frame of his front door and I stood on the welcome mat.
“How much do you think you should earn?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Three dollars? A dollar fifty?”
“No, Zach, that’s way too little. Here. Take ten dollars.”
“No!” He accepted the bill I thrust at him and stood there watching me cross the street. When I got to my door, I turned and we waved.
A light was flashing on my answering machine. A police officer from my mother’s town asked me to phone. He said he had some sad news and suggested I sit down. It was necessary for me to claim the body at the hospital morgue. I phoned Joan at her hotel in Hollywood.
As we stood in a windowless foyer under harsh fluorescent light near the closed morgue door in the basement of the Delaware County hospital, a police officer told us that two female Jehovah Witnesses ventured down the logging road hoping to find converts. Joan took my hand. We were two little girls facing trouble. The Jehovah witnesses found the entrance gate open, walked up the driveway and rang the bell. When no one answered, they peered through the windows. There they saw a woman slumped in her wheelchair and it worried them because they couldn’t see anyone else.
“I don’t want to,” Joan said when he opened the morgue door and gestured for us to enter a room glaringly lit, with a wall of stainless steel doors and medical devices and a young woman in a white lab coat who nodded to Joan and me as we stood hesitating at the door. “No,” Joan said in a small voice, “I don’t want to.” Under a circular lamp dangling from the ceiling, was a gurney with a body on it covered by a white sheet. “I don’t want to,” Joan said. She increased her grip on my hand, and I could feel her trembling. I wanted to scream well I don’t want to either! You think I want to do this? You think I want to see our mother on a slab in the smelly morgue under a sheet with her foot exposed and a tag on her toe? You don’t have any right to not want to! You have to! And I am not going to say that I alone will identify her. I will not save you from this so buck up. But I only said, “You don’t have to. I’ll do it.” I tried to disengage my hand from hers, but she held on tight. So, together, we approached the body.
The woman in the lab coat pulled the sheet down and there was Mother, the color of plaster, her cheeks sunken and her forehead lifeless as a skull. Joan stood on one side and I stood on the other, looking down at our dead mother while the lab technician, perhaps out of tact, busied herself on the other side of the floor. Something made me poke the body. It was like jabbing a stone. Joan didn’t see me and I was ashamed of doing it, but the feel of it did help me understand what dead meant. Joan said, “It’s my fault, it’s my fault. She wouldn’t be like this if I’d paid more attention to her.” Instead of wanting to cry, all I wanted was to get out of there. I needed to figure out what to do next. She had wanted to be cremated, but I didn’t know how to arrange for that. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than having my body burned up. Did they have an oven
in this place? Did we have to transport the body to some other place? Mother said she wanted her ashes planted under delphinium. I didn’t have any delphinium. Joan didn’t have delphinium. How was I going to find some? I said to the lab technician, “Yes, it’s her.” I pulled the sheet over my mother’s face, which startled Joan out of her misery and made her look at me with very clear eyes. “How are we going to find delphinium?” she said.
From the grisly view of our dead mother, we came out into the gorgeous scenery of the Catskill Mountains. Why this made me cry, I don’t know. Black and white cows were in a meadow, their heads lowered to the grass, their tails flicking while a red cardinal in the tree next to us called, “Wheet! Wheet! Wheet!” We got in Joan’s car and sat in the front seat crying. Joan sobbed, “She was all alone. I wasn’t here. I was doing those stupid things in stupid Hollywood with that moron who thought bluish green was the same as turquoise. I didn’t even call her. I mean I called her, but when no one answered, I didn’t even think something might be the matter. I figured Shanice took her out in the car. Where’s Shanice? Why isn’t Shanice here?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Then, much to my amazement, my sister said, “Do you think she left us any money?”
“How will we ever know?”
“What’s the name of her lawyer?”
“I have no idea.”
“Did she have a lawyer?”
“No idea.”
“So how are we ever going to find out?”
“Go through her files, I guess.”
“I don’t have time to go through her files, Sonya. They’re putting together that display at Macy’s. I have so much work. I … if I don’t … I have … if I don’t … I’m the … I can take work home but—”
“Joan. I’ll do it. Just stop. I’ll do it.”
“I can’t dump all that on you.”
“Shouldn’t we call everybody?”