All this writing about Mom, all the looking at photographs and home movies, has had me missing her. At least I think it’s fondness I’m feeling. And curiosity, I suppose, though that sounds cold to me. I want to know how she’s doing, but she has made it hard to care very much. I want affirmation, too. Recognition. And that’s perhaps hostile of me. I’m your goddamned son, Frances. I wonder if I have the right to impose myself on a woman who is so obviously unwell. Anyway, I decided to pay her a visit to see if the two of us might reach some sort of closure or commencement. Maybe if she saw me, I figured, saw herself in me—I have her hazel eyes, long nose, and high cheekbones—she’d exhale all that fear. So last week I flew to Providence, rented a car, and drove to Requiem.
Mom and Keefe live in the Fafords’ old house on Barry Street. I was in that house dozens of times as a kid. I remember Donald and I playing marathon games of Risk at the kitchen table while his mom baked bread and listened to her Édith Piaf records. Their linoleum floor was made to look like bricks. They always seemed to have the same shopping list on the fridge: milk, eggs, yeast, King Arthur flour, Fluff. If I happened to be there after supper on a summer evening, we’d go out to the backyard and watch Mr. Faford’s homing pigeons circle the neighborhood until he shook his coffee can of pigeon pellets and called them back to the loft. I wondered how the pigeons could hear the rattle from that high up and without any discernible ears.
I arrived unannounced, figuring if I told Mom I was coming, she’d have sold the house and left town. I parked out front. As I opened the fence gate, all the lights in the house went out. Someone peeked out from behind a window curtain. The doorbell didn’t work. I opened the screen door. Taped to the little window on the inside door was a sign, NO PEDDLERS AND NO SOLICITORS. I knocked. I waited. I said, “I know you’re in there, Mom.” I knocked again. “I can wait all night.” Next time I knocked a friendly shave-and-a-haircut. “Please, Mom.” Keefe opened the door, handed me a bottle of whiskey and two highball glasses. He stepped out onto the porch and closed the doors behind him. We sat on the glider. He said, “She doesn’t want to see you.” He poured whiskey into the glasses. We toasted to better days.
He told me that 119 billion people have lived on earth. “And how many do we remember?” We toasted the first man to eat an oyster. He said, “One of every seven people on earth is a Chinese peasant.” We toasted peasants.
“Does she talk about me?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“Never ever.”
I told him about being in this house as a kid. He told me he bought the house from Mr. Faford. “He moved into one of those assisted living places.”
“I’m surprised he’d leave his pigeons.”
“The pigeons were long gone. This crazy old coot named Buffone—lives in the house behind us—he killed the pigeons.”
“What?”
“Stood on his porch with a shotgun and blasted them out of the sky. Said he couldn’t stand the cooing anymore.”
“Did Faford call the cops?”
“He was losing it by then. After Donald died, he—”
“Donald died?”
“Some kind of cancer. Knocked the old man off his rocker.”
“Fuck!”
“Amen.”
I held out my glass. Keefe filled it. He said half the languages in the world will disappear in this century. “That’s half the worlds.” Keefe told me he had to stop being a reporter when he got sick. He was in a wheelchair for a year. Mixed some booze and Tylenol and woke up paralyzed. He’s given up Tylenol. “They didn’t think I’d walk again.”
“Are you sure it was the Tylenol and booze?”
“You think it’s a coincidence?”
He spent some time in therapy and gained his strength back. But they had to replace his knees. He’s fine now, but has to walk downstairs backward. “After that everything is easy,” he said. “Piece of cake.” He fixes burnt-out washing machines now and sells them. Buys them at the Salvation Army or picks them up on the street on bulk pickup days. Got a Toyota pickup, a beater, and a ramp he bought from U-Haul. He’s got a little shop in the garage. It’s mostly WD-40 and paint. I told him about the memoir. He said, “Call it Mother’s Little Helper or The End of My Rope.” He wanted to know who was going to play him in the movie. He thought Sean Connery was a good choice. He said, “Call it Try Being Honest.”
“I like that,” I said. “Got any others?”
“Lying in Bed.”
Keefe told me his dad owned I See the Light in You Press and fancied himself a Wiccan-Buddhist-Jew. He’s still going strong. Lives in Vermont. He publishes books on topics like UFOs, crystals, yoga, astral projection, homeopathy, and angels. “He’s always been very keen on the idea of the Divine. Once when I was a kid, he took me to Boston to meet God. I got all dressed up. God turned out to be some schmo who bent spoons.”
Keefe said that as a boy he wrote and illustrated comic books. He had dozens of them. He was obsessed. He’d created a superhero named Sloth who walked upside down, was always on his way to a crime scene, and slept for three years at a time. I told him about The Drone. He told me his dad thought comic books were for cretins. Keefe’s personal favorite creation was Peninsula Man, who was green and surrounded by water on three sides and who drowned many of the fiends he encountered and lamentably a few of his allies.
I heard a door slam somewhere in the house. I looked at Keefe. He said, “I came home from school one afternoon and found my father burning all my comic books in the rubbish barrel. He did it, he said, because I had disparaged God. What I’d done was tell my brother that if God was so intelligent why did he make teeth that decayed. My brother squealed on me.”
“One and done,” I said and held out my glass. Keefe poured. “To fathers,” I said.
“To fathers.”
I said, “Do you know why she won’t speak to me?”
“She says you know why.”
“I don’t.”
“She thinks you did something to Audrey.”
“Something?”
“Unsavory.”
“Why would she think that?”
“Audrey told her so.”
I told Keefe I didn’t understand why Audrey would lie about me, or why Mom would believe her, or even why Mom would speak to Audrey but not to me.
“You’re hurt.”
“I’m perplexed.”
“Frances tells me you’re quite the liar.”
“I had to lie to her when I was a kid.”
“And now you lie for a living.”
“Writing stories, you mean?”
“You make them up.”
“Not to deceive anyone.”
Keefe shrugged.
Sheet lightning brightened the sky over the Pingetons’ house. I remembered Tommy Pingeton lifting his T-shirt to show me the scar he’d gotten when he impaled himself to the liver on a picket fence. Last I heard he’d moved to Alabama.
Keefe said, “You mother was blind, but now she sees.”
“She found Jesus?”
“She lost her sight.”
“When?”
“For a year. She keeps her Cadillacs in a jar on the mantel.”
“Her what?”
“It’s what she calls them. ’Cause they cost so much. Her cataracts.”
“She saved them?”
“She’s a sentimental woman.”
“I want to see her.”
“That’s not up to me.”
“Once more before she dies. Or I do.”
“You’d only upset her.”
“Your mother worked at the Corner Lunch, didn’t she?”
“Every time I remember her she’s wearing a hairnet and a white uniform. She’s riding a bus, smoking a cigarette. Cooked there for fifty-one years. Died in their kitchen.”
“I’m sorry.”
“When she was at work, and I was home alone, I’d sit in her closet and smell her on her clothes.” He fini
shed his drink and set the glass on the deck. He stood, held the two doors open for me, and ushered me into the darkened living room. The screen door slapped shut. He switched on a floor lamp by the fireplace and waved me over. The house smelled faintly of apples and bleach. He handed me the thin glass jar of cataracts, little white crystals floating in what looked like Karo syrup. I saw a corked glass test tube on its side. I picked it up. A couple of safety pins. I said, “What are these?”
“From your first diaper, she tells me.” Keefe excused himself and walked down the hall to convince Mom to come out of hiding, I figured. I shook the tube.
“Sounds like a little rattlesnake, doesn’t it?”
I looked across the room to the corner by the draped window and saw Mom almost disappearing into her plushy chair. I said, “You scared me half to death.”
“So Caesar has crossed the Rubicon.”
“I didn’t come to fight. I came to make nice.”
“You came, you saw, you concord.”
“So what have you been doing with yourself?”
“Well, I certainly haven’t been sitting around drinking Manhattans for ten years, if that’s what you mean.”
I smiled. I thought she was joking, but I couldn’t see her face. I sat on the sofa and leaned forward. “You know I didn’t do anything to hurt Audrey. I wouldn’t.”
“You came to tell me that?”
“I came because I missed you.”
“Do you have any kids, Johnny?”
“A dog.”
“You’re lucky. The experts, they’ve proven that people with children are not as happy as people without.”
“This is Mem’s rug, isn’t it?”
“I had it cleaned.”
Dad’s mother made the rug for us when I was six or seven. She’d gathered up decades of family woolens from her attic and our cellar, blankets, suits, slacks, dresses, and whatnot, all the clothes that kept us warm, cut them into strips, braided them, and wove them into an oval rug. My baseball pajamas are in there and Audrey’s security rag, Mr. Binky, my grandfather’s blue gabardine trousers, my grandmother’s wheat-colored bathrobe, and a great-uncle’s doughboy uniform. Generations of the family all together on my mother’s floor.
Mom said, “All of a sudden one day I was beside myself. Until that moment I’d been fine. This happened not long after I lost Arthur. And I’ve never really been able to recover.”
“You seem better.”
“I maintain, but that takes all my strength. All my energy. I’ve got nothing left for you. I’m sorry. But you don’t want me to be the way I was. And I don’t want that. You understand?”
“Trying to.”
“I know how it’s supposed to be. For every body there’s one person, and the body and the person stay together over time and space. We don’t become someone else when we move or when we age. I know this sounds crazy, but ever since that day I’ve felt another Frances inside trying to shove me out. I’m barely holding on.”
WHICH BRINGS us to Audrey.
When Stevie and Drake moved, I expected that Audrey and I would continue to live in the apartment we’d grown up in. And I hoped Drake would spend his summers with us. Audrey knew I’d pay the rent until she could afford to chip in. I had a decent job at the neighborhood community center, Friendly House, working with kids after school, distributing surplus food, and driving seniors to markets and appointments. Audrey laughed at the idea of living with me. She said with Alice moving in, it was getting mighty crowded. We were in Howard Johnson’s on Route 9 having coffee and pie after a movie. She wore a long white frilly sleeveless dress over her jeans. The jeans were rolled to her calves to show off her two new Japanese ankle tattoos. One was a winged, fire-breathing dragon, the other in Japanese characters, a quote from Sei Shonagon, “All small things are adorable.” Her hair was cut unfashionably short so that the tops of her ears peeked out. She had on red espadrilles. She said, “Johnny Boy, I’m getting married.”
“Very funny.”
“I’m serious.”
I didn’t even know she had a boyfriend or had ever had a boyfriend. I said, “What the hell are you talking about?”
The boyfriend was a guy named Walston Hull who owned Hull Home Improvement and was thirty years older than Audrey. Older than Dad, I pointed out. “Where’d you meet this geezer?”
“We’re getting married Saturday.”
“You weren’t going to tell me?”
“It was a spur-of-the-moment thing.”
“I’m not invited?”
“Some judge is going to marry us in his living room. In and out. No big deal. We’ve got our witnesses.”
“Who?”
“Walston’s ex and her husband.”
So Audrey married Walston Hull and moved to his farm in Cold Spring Brook. He bought her two horses. I said, “Audrey, that’s carrying the cowgirl thing too far.” She named the horses Tess and Jude. I was not encouraged to visit. Audrey said, “Walston doesn’t care for you.”
“What’s wrong with me?”
“He thinks you think you own me.”
“If I did, you wouldn’t be with him.”
“He thinks you’re frivolous and unambitious.”
Audrey stopped by about once a week with her laundry. She told me she and Walston didn’t sleep together. He snored something awful. She slept in the barn with Tess and Jude and a radio. They didn’t eat together because Walston only ate peanut butter and chicken, though not at the same time, and he wouldn’t touch vegetables. He drank only water and Lipton tea. They didn’t have sex. Walston had two kids from the first marriage who spent every other weekend with him, high school kids only two and three years younger than Audrey.
I said, “That’s not a marriage, Audrey.”
“All marriages are alike?”
“I don’t know what it is.”
“It’s my life.”
“Get it annulled.”
“Goodbye.”
“Come home.”
I was beside myself. Caeli told me to butt out. It was Audrey’s life, not mine. “The thing with Walston will run its course, you’ll see. Audrey will be fine.”
But I wasn’t finished with her. The next time she brought the laundry, I took her to the El Morocco for kibbe sandwiches. When we got there, she told me she didn’t eat meat anymore. She ordered a salad and gave me the feta cheese.
I said, “What do you want to do with your life, Audrey?”
“I’d like to live in an immense house deep in the forest and bake breads, gather wildflowers, and read in front of a cozy fire.”
“You want to live in a Grace Livingston Hill novel?”
“That would be splendid.”
“Be serious for a minute.”
She put down her fork and picked up her napkin. She leaned across the table and wiped my chin. “I want to be curious enough and brave enough to live the life that comes my way.”
“That’s asking for trouble.”
“Nothing I can’t handle.”
“You should want to take control.”
“Should!”
“You’re drifting.”
“What do you want to be?”
“A writer, you know that.”
“Bullshit.”
“What?”
“If you wanted to be a writer, you’d be writing, not talking about it. I’m sick of your talking about it.”
Audrey had another admirer, one of my old teachers, in fact, the sixty-something British history professor William W. Williams. Dr. Williams owned a three-legged border collie named Tippy who followed him everywhere. He was a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism and spent his summers in Europe as a Hundred Years’ War reenactor. He liked to lecture in costume—a very popular routine with the local press and the college’s PR department. He might be Sir Walter Raleigh, in a starched ruff, smoking a pipe and regaling us on his journeys of discovery. As Henry VIII, Dr. Williams tore at a turkey leg, his lips glistening with f
owl fat, and told us about meeting his betrothed Anne of Cleves. He pulled back her veil and screamed, “A horse, a horse! They’ve sent me a horse!”
Dr. Williams deferred his retirement so that he could keep Audrey in his life. I didn’t say it, but you may have guessed it: Dr. Williams was married and the father of four grown children, all medical doctors. Audrey was working as an assistant to the secretary in the History Department. She and Dr. Williams had lunch—something brought in from the Falcon Pub—every day in his office with Tippy curled on her doggie bed beneath the desk and Thomas Tallis playing on the tape deck. All very romantic, according to Audrey. After lunch he’d brush her hair. She found his flirtation exciting, but was not above complaining about it to me. Too many gifts, too many phone calls. He’s very needy, she said. She got rattled when he actually touched her hand.
As a junior, Audrey took an abnormal psych course and caught the eye of the professor. This time the professor was a woman, Dr. Claire Young. Audrey wound up telling Dr. Young about Dr. Williams and Mr. Hull. Dr. Young asked Audrey if she was happy. No, she was not. They agreed that possessive men seemed to be a problem in her life. She was in need of emancipation, was she not? It was time, Claire told Audrey (they were, by then, on a first-name basis), it was time to become the subject and not an object. Claire and Audrey went horseback riding on Saturdays.
And this all led to Dr. Williams’s abrupt retirement, to Audrey’s divorce from Walston Hull, and to my last face-to-face conversation with Audrey as we folded laundry in my kitchen. Claire had accepted a tenure-track associate professor position at SUNY Cortland, and Audrey was going along as Claire’s amanuensis.
“Are you two lovers?”
“Claire said you’d say that.”
“I’ll come visit.”
“I can’t heal myself with you in my life. Maybe in a year, two, five. I’ve got a load of damage to undo.”
“Audrey, you’re all I’ve got.”
Requiem, Mass. Page 26