by Torey Hayden
In the kitchen, I got myself a glass of apple juice and sat down at the table to unroll the paper. There, right across the top, as I unfolded it, were banner headlines: LOCAL WOMAN HELD ON TRIPLE MURDER CHARGE.
There was a large photograph of Mama beside the article. The first thing to occur to me was to wonder who supplied them with that picture. It was from a family snapshot taken the previous summer during a picnic at Scott Reservoir. Mama was wearing her old red-checked shirt, the one with the collar that curled up regardless of how often she smacked it with the iron. Mama was smiling in that casual, off-handed way she had sometimes. Her long hair was pulled back. The sun had been behind her, so it created a halo all around her head in the photograph, causing her hair to appear even blonder than it actually was. The lighting also made her look a little more foreign, a little more exotic with her high cheekbones and her wide-set eyes, squeezed into slits by her smile. Yet it remained a disarmingly friendly picture, the kind that made you believe you really could trust her to recommend the best brand of laundry detergent or panty hose or sausages, not that she had just murdered three people.
Missing Mama had already grown into an identifiable ache. My father was always coming and going anyway, so the fact that he was absent from the house was noticeable but acceptable. However, Mama was never gone. I was brutally conscious of the fact that it was morning and my mother was not at home. She was no longer distanced from me and my thoughts, the way she had been the previous afternoon. Now I was aware of only two things: she was my mama and she was conspicuously absent.
It was that feeling, I suppose that made reading the article in the newspaper so much more difficult than I had anticipated, because in it the woman they talked about was simultaneously my mama and a stranger.
The article was long but rather vague. They had her birthday wrong. They muddled up the fact that she was Hungarian, saying that she was German. There were brief, relatively accurate details about the concentration-camp experiences, but they said nothing about the breeding hostel. And they made no mention of the connection between those years and the Watermans: that because of that experience she believed that the parents were Nazis, keeping her son away from her. The killings appeared senseless.
Only the description of the murders was given in detail. Even then, reading about them in the newspaper, they seemed unreal, as if the Watermans were people in a television show, whose lives and deaths did not matter. Intellectually, I knew I shouldn’t think like that. They were real people and they had been murdered. And my mother had done it. She had taken a rifle and deliberately shot them all dead. All the blood and gore faked on the screen was, for that instant in that small Kansas farmhouse, a reality.
I tried to make myself think of it. I tried to see Mrs Waterman crouched helplessly over her son, the way the article described. I tried to picture their bodies, the blood pooled and red in the same hot sunlight under which Paul and I had been making love. I tried to conjure up the other Waterman children, terrified, huddled together in a back-room closet. But I could not. They stayed dream people, like the memory of something once imagined.
Sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of apple juice and the Sunday paper spread out, I could only call up the image of Toby Waterman the day that I was home from the dentist’s. There across from me was the chair he had been sitting in. He had been such a horrid child, with his mucky hair and his odd eyes, and so cocky and confident about his right to a relationship with my mother. He had scared me. Right from the very first moment out by the tree trunk. He had believed so easily what my mama had told him.
And now he was dead. As simple as that. Never to grow up and be a man. Never to go to school and know the guileless tedium of learning. Never even to know what this brilliant spring morning looked like, when the morning before he had woken up just as I had. How could you really understand a thing like that?
Auntie Caroline’s bus arrived at half-past eleven. Before then, my father had come home for a brief while. He’d shaved again and changed his shirt again, so I knew Megan and I were going to have to put on better clothes too. But we stayed home and let Dad go to the bus depot alone. I had seen the reporters run up to my father’s car as he had turned off Bailey Street when he came home from the hospital. It seemed judicious for Megan and me to avoid them, if possible.
By the time Auntie Caroline and my father reached the front door they were already in an argument. Dad had her suitcase in one hand and a flight bag in the other.
‘Cowan, you ought to have told me Mara was like this. It does no good to pretend about such things. Not with family, at least. You just ought to have said something earlier,’ Auntie Caroline was saying to him as he came in the door. Dad put the suitcase down by the foot of the stairs and balanced the flight bag on top.
‘The thing is, Caroline,’ he said, ‘Mara wasn’t like this. I’ve told you that.’ His voice was tight with restraint. They must have been arguing for some time. He marched past Megan and me and went into the kitchen. Filling up the kettle with water, he slammed it on to the stove.
‘She always has been highly strung, Cowan. Ever since the beginning. Ever since that first time you brought her home. Remember that? Remember how she kept carrying on with Mother?’
‘Caroline, anybody’d carry on with Mother. Besides, for God’s sake, she was still sick. She was still recovering from all that. Honestly, what did you expect of her?’
‘She certainly was full of her opinions, though. And she was so highly strung. Every little word and she was upset.’
‘Well, did Mother have to keep going on at her? Did Mother have to harp constantly about religion all the time?’
‘Yes, Cowan, but did Mara have to keep saying what rubbish it all was? She could tell how Mother felt about it.’
‘And Mother could damned well tell how she felt too. Honestly, Caroline, there she was, a guest in our house, a stranger in a foreign land, still sick, still half-starved, just having gone through experiences you and I would never survive. Did Mother have to say all those things to her?’ He paused, looked down at the floor and then back. ‘I married her, Caroline. She was my wife and I loved her. It was as big a slam to me, Mother saying all those things, as it ever was to Mara.’
Auntie Caroline just shook her head.
‘It was, Caroline. It was just Mother trying to make me look like a failure one more time.’
Caroline turned. ‘You’re too sensitive, Cowan, You always have been.’ It was then she saw Megan and me, standing just outside the kitchen doorway.
She smiled suddenly, disarmingly. Her arms opened and we were both wrapped up in a hug together.
My father returned to the hospital immediately, not even stopping to have lunch with us. That left Megan and me to help Auntie Caroline settle in. She had to sleep in the study on the bed that pulled out from the couch. So Megan and I carried her things up, pulled the bed out and put sheets on it. Auntie Caroline stayed downstairs and prepared a meal for us.
She did a good job with what was around the house. No one had done the weekly shopping, so there wasn’t much choice. Mama’s constant craving for starchy things ensured that, while we might be running out of other food, you could count on there being plenty of bread and pasta and potatoes. So there was Auntie Caroline amid our vast collection of Rice-A-Roni and boxed macaroni and cheese, trying to make a Sunday dinner.
My aunt had a lifestyle considerably different from ours. Her husband, our Uncle Roger, was a dentist in Winnetka, and they had lived for thirty-four years in the same house on the same street. Their children were all raised there and had all grown up and married and had families of their own. Auntie Caroline devoted most of her time to playing bridge. The rest she spent at church or at Weight Watchers. Unlike all the men in Dad’s family, both Aunt Kath and Auntie Caroline had figures that were 40–40–40. Auntie Caroline must have been a founding member of her Weight Watchers group, because she’d been going to the meetings for as long as I could remember. And
she was still overweight. When she came to visit us, she would always give Mama heck for her carbohydrate fetish. The two of them were like Jack Sprat and his wife, one unable to gain, one unable to lose, and both not-so-covertly envious of the other.
Auntie Caroline used to visit us quite frequently, although Uncle Roger seldom accompanied her. Caroline said it was because of his practice, but I suspect it was more because of Mama. Mama loathed dentists. She had had several courses of experimental dental work, without anaesthetic, while she was in Ravensbrück and after that, I don’t think she was ever fully relieved of the belief that all dentists were in cahoots with the SS. She could argue this logic in a sophisticated, virtually flawless fashion, the way she could so many of her convictions, which made countering her points almost impossible. And she never let the argument drop. Repeatedly, she would corner Uncle Roger and tell him that there had to be something sadistic in the psychological make-up of an individual who chose a profession that caused most people to be terrified of him and allowed him to legally hurt them. Understandably, this point of view did not endear Mama to Uncle Roger, who was a rather soft-spoken, unobtrusive man. I remember once, when Mama had pursued Uncle Roger into the kitchen to continue the discussion, his saying to her in his quiet, patient voice that dentists were there to stop people’s pain and that they didn’t really want to make people afraid of them. And Mama laughed. She threw her head back and howled like a hyena. Uncle Roger never came again, after that.
At lunch that Sunday, I could not eat. I came into the kitchen, sat down, took my serving of Auntie Caroline’s casserole and then sat there, knowing that if I ate, I would be sick all over the table. Auntie Caroline sat, eyeing me from my mother’s chair across the table.
‘I haven’t got much of an appetite, I’m afraid,’ I said finally. It was reaching the point that even the smell of food was making me nauseated.
‘I think you ought to try,’ she replied. ‘You look like a walking skeleton, Lesley. Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately? You can’t have been eating right.’
‘I’ve been eating fine. I’m just not hungry now.’
Auntie Caroline sighed.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s not the food or anything. It’s just me.’
‘You look anorexic, if you ask me,’ she said. She lifted an eyebrow. ‘Are you?’
‘What’s anorexic, Auntie?’ Megan asked.
‘Anorexia nervosa,’ replied Auntie Caroline.
‘Oh,’ said Megan, still perplexed. She mulled the information over for a few moments. ‘Does that mean nerves? Bad nerves? Nervosa?’
‘Something like that,’ Aunt Caroline said.
‘Yeah, I think Lesley’s got bad nerves too.’
I pushed the food around.
‘You just better watch out, that’s all I can say,’ Auntie Caroline said to me. ‘Or you’ll end up just like your mother.’
About 5.30 my father returned. The doctors at the hospital had decided they would transfer Mama to Wichita. He was going to drive the car over so that he would be there when the helicopter arrived. If I wanted, he said, I could go down to the hospital to see her for a little while before she was moved.
Megan, sitting beside me, leaped up, saying she wanted to go too. She broke into tears before my father even had a chance to tell her no. You’re not quite old enough, sweetheart, he said to her, pushing her hair back from her face. When she continued to cry, he sat down and lifted her into his lap. We’ll go another day when Mama’s feeling better, he said to her. Auntie Caroline can bring you down to Wichita on the bus.
The hospital was quiet. It was too late for regular visitors, so I was all alone in the corridor. My footsteps echoed far ahead of me as I walked. The hospital was so small that there seemed to be no activity anywhere.
The intensive-care unit consisted of only two tiny rooms separated from one another by a nursing desk and the medical monitors. Only Mama’s room was occupied. The other care unit was empty. At the desk, two nurses were absorbed in writing. One looked up, smiled and said I could only have ten minutes.
Mama was all alone in the room. It was a small place, barely large enough for the bed. It faced west and all was bathed in a deep, murky twilight when I entered. There were no lights on, and what came back to me in that quirky, leapfrogging manner memories have of returning at odd moments, was the previous weekend, when I had opened the door to my parents’ bedroom and seen her asleep in my daddy’s arms. She was asleep now, or comatose, I didn’t know which. My father said she’d been conscious on and off through the day. But now she lay in the bed, silent and still, like Snow White in her glass coffin.
All around one side of the room were traces of my father’s lengthy vigil. Newspapers, a soft-drink can, numerous empty coffee cups, a paperback book with its cover bent, half a dozen cellophane salted-peanut bags wadded into balls, a crumpled, half-eaten packet of jelly beans. His watch was there too, apparently taken off at some random moment, set on the bedside table and forgotten.
When I came close to Mama, I saw the tangle of modern technology spilling out the far side of the bed, like spaghetti. She had a tube in her nose. It was connected to a bottle on the table that frothed and foamed with the private workings of her stomach. A bag of blood hung above the bed on my side. Across from it were two other bags filled with clear solutions. The wires of the heart monitor went down through the sheet and out by the railing on the far side of the bed.
Cautiously, I put my hand into the snarl of tubes and wires to touch her face. She was flushed, and when I touched her skin, I could feel the fever. Looking around the room to see if there was a cloth somewhere that I might be able to dampen with cool water, I saw none. I was afraid to go out and ask the nurse for one, in case she wouldn’t let me come back in. So, instead, I dipped my fingers into the pitcher of icy water on the bedside table and wiped the perspiration away from her hairline with my fingers.
‘Mama? Can you hear me, Mama? It’s Lesley. Can you hear me?’ My fear was that locked within an inert body, she might be aware. She would be terrified by all this, to be here alone and in pain and without us and her familiar things around her. I knew Daddy had that concern as well, because he’d been so adamant about being allowed to stay with her, even in intensive care. I was overwhelmed with an urge to get into the bed with her and put my arms around her. Instead, I leaned over and kissed her. On the forehead. On the cheek. I wanted to kiss her on the lips, but with the gastric tube, I couldn’t. Then I sat down in the chair beside the bed.
She moved. In a slow, ponderous motion, she turned her head and opened her eyes. She tried to speak but no sound came out.
‘Do you want a drink, Mama?’ I asked. I looked for a glass but there was none. Only the pitcher. Then it occurred to me that with the tube she couldn’t drink anyway and the water must have been for my father. Her lips were cracked with fever, and I thought perhaps the coolness might make her feel better. So I fished a piece of ice from the pitcher with my fingers and put it in her mouth. The suction jar made a loud, obscene gurgle next to me. Startled, I jumped. Mama smiled.
There were a hundred million things I wanted to say to her. I stood over her, watching her, putting small bits of ice between her lips, and I was desperate to talk. I wanted her to know that it didn’t matter to me what she had done. I loved her. I didn’t care about the horrible things people were saying. Nothing mattered at all except that she get better and come home to Daddy and Meggie and me. I wanted her to be assured that I hadn’t really minded all those days of staying home from school with her. I hadn’t minded any of the things I had complained about. Not really. They were nothing. She was everything.
The problem was, I couldn’t speak. There was the fear far back in my mind that I would be making peace with her, and if I did that, she could die. But if I didn’t, somehow she would have to survive so I could tell her later. The bigger problem was that I just could not get the words into my mouth or my mouth open. So I stood, mute.
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‘Where’s O’Malley?’ she whispered.
‘He’s at home right now, Mama. With Meggie. They’re going to take you to St Joseph’s. To Wichita. So you’ll get better faster. You’re going in a helicopter, and Daddy wants to take the car over so that he will be there when you arrive.’ I managed to smile. ‘Have you ever ridden in a helicopter before? I haven’t. It sounds exciting, doesn’t it?’
‘I’m tired,’ she said and closed her eyes.
‘You can sleep, if you want, Mama. I’ll stay with you. And you can sleep. I’m here.’
She struggled against the tube for a deeper breath. Reaching through the rail to take her hand, I realized I was shaking. Afraid she would notice too, I pushed my other hand through to keep the first steady. But she noticed nonetheless, turned her head and looked at me.
‘I’ve got to admit, you’ve sort of scared me, Mama, getting hurt like this,’ I said. ‘I don’t want anything to happen to you. I love you.’
‘O Liebes,’ she said. ‘Come down here, baby, and let me touch you.’
I put the railing down and sat in the chair beside the bed, my head on the sheet. She lifted her hand into my hair, and the tubing from the IV dropped across my face. Silence too lay down upon us like a comforter, and we did not speak for a very long time. I simply lay with my head against her, the familiar weight of her hand over my ear and through my hair.
‘Can you see now, baby?’ she whispered to me.
I didn’t know what she was referring to. I was too overpowered by emotion at that moment to be able to ask, and when I finally moved to see her face, I saw she had slipped back into the sleeplike state.
My memory pulled me back just then to that very long ago time in west Texas when I was lost in the sunflower forest, when she had crashed in among the stalks and saved me and lifted me high up on to her shoulders so that I could see beyond the flowers.