Lying with the Dead

by Michael Mewshaw

  “I’ve saved some stuff in the cedar chest,” she says, “in case Quinn wants it.”

  I doubt he wants anything, not from her, not from me. I doubt we cross his mind except as burdens. In my low moments, I suspect Quinn cracks jokes to his English friends about his threadbare Irish family. I know he’s honed a pitch-perfect impression of Maury, something resembling Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. I’ve laughed at it myself so I’m as guilty as he is. I just hope he never imitates my limp.

  Mom scoots around on her scrawny shanks and leans against the cedar chest. There are photos in it, too, and she hands me a stack of them. Then she tilts her head like a sword swallower and drags on the Kent, letting the poison stab deep into her lungs. After a lifetime of cigarette smoke, they must be as black and wrinkled as leather handbags.

  “How long is it,” she asks, “since Quinn brought that woman to visit?”

  “About ten years.” I don’t mention his more recent visits when Mom refused to open the door for him. She warned him by phone she didn’t want to be seen in her sorry shape. Still, he assumed if he stopped by the house she wouldn’t turn him away. He assumed wrong! Insulted, he threatened to stop sending her money. But he cooled off and never missed a monthly check.

  “What a stuck-up twat she was,” Mom says. “She eyeballed my furniture like her skinny ass was too precious to sit on it. Everything she ate, even soup, she worried she had food stuck between her teeth and trotted off to the bathroom—the loo!—to check in the mirror.”

  Mom laughs, then coughs, then fights to catch her breath. “And that nose of hers, I’d love to have it full of nickels.”

  “I thought she was very elegant and aristocratic.”

  “Aristocratic my ass. I bet she knew some tricks in bed. Otherwise Quinn wouldn’t have been with her. You believe what the nuns taught you about love, and how it depends on holding hands and looking into each other’s eyes. But you’ll learn soon enough if you stay with Leonard that it comes down to what you do in bed. Your father claimed that’s how he wanted to die—during sex. But what about the woman? That’d put a gal off love for good.”

  “Mom, please!”

  “He’d stagger home drunk after winning at cards and want to rush me before I was ready. I liked it better when he lost. He was slower and grateful then.”

  “Save this for Quinn.”

  “Don’t think for one minute I didn’t teach him the score. I hope he was listening. Doesn’t look like you or Maury’ll give me grandkids. So it’s up to Quinn to make sure the family doesn’t die off.”

  “Does that really matter?”

  “Damn right. What mother doesn’t like the line to go on?”

  I riffle snapshots of Quinn that show his career with the chronology scrambled. One moment he’s onstage at the Old Vic with Laurence Olivier, the next he’s dressed as one of the magi for a grade school Christmas pageant. In the oldest pictures Mom’s always hovering nearby. Whenever she wasn’t spanking him, she spoiled him rotten. Soon as he started talking—and that was early—she never punished him for pretending to be something he’s not. From the word go, they were in it together. But unlike Maury or me, he gave her as good as he got. He was her favorite opponent, and she loved tangling with him.

  She believed it would always be the two of them costarring in a script she wrote. But early on he brushed her off. I’m not talking about when he flew to Europe and never came back. I mean as a kid, he was already aiming for a wider audience.

  What did she expect? Even before he was born, Mom made him the center of attention. She paraded around pushing her belly forward, like a man proud of his chest, and invited total strangers to touch it. Soon as he was weaned, she brought him to Patuxent Institute with us on visiting days, and let him fill up the silence. He’d jabber away, entertaining everybody—guards, inmates, other families. On the way home, Mom claimed to be too tired to drive, and since I had my learner’s permit, I’d take the wheel while she’d lie in the backseat crooning to Quinn. Damned if he didn’t croon back to her, the two of them in harmony. I sometimes wondered whether this, not seeing Maury, was the point of the trip.

  For a kid who was such a charmer, Quinn never had many friends, and as a teenager he didn’t date girls. As Mom put it, he was too smart to knock up some local tramp and waste his life like so many neighborhood boys did. She thought he was saving himself for the right woman. But I believe he was waiting for better opportunities.

  I once cut loose with both barrels and told him that if it wasn’t bad enough having a brother with Asperger’s syndrome, I had a second one that was an Iceberger. But I really don’t blame Quinn for his calculating nature. If I had his brains and ability, his good looks and good luck, I’d have done the same thing he did—get away at the first chance.

  • • •

  “Kids,” Mom mutters half aloud. “I used to figure nothing pays off like kids. Now I’m not sure. Every time Quinn calls, he sounds so bored.”

  “It’s five hours later in London. Maybe he’s tired and ready for bed.”

  “Nah. He’s just tired of me.”

  I toss aside a publicity still of Quinn in a Shakespearean costume that’s as flouncy as a 1940s cocktail dress, and she picks it up. “Kids’ll drive you crazy. Life’ll make you nuts. After a while it all wears you down. It started for me when your father was in the army. During the war I virtually lived in the bathroom.”

  I assume she means she was sick to her stomach for fear that her husband would die in battle. But she says, “There were blackouts every night. The whole city of Washington was scared the Japs or the Germans would bomb us. When the siren wailed, I’d take shelter in the bathroom until the all-clear signal. I tacked tar paper over the window so I could leave on the bulb over the sink and read a book. I spent so many hours on the john smoking and reading, it’s a wonder I didn’t die of hemorrhoids. Sometimes I feel like I’m still holed up in that one bitty room, shut off from the world.”

  What am I supposed to say? Get out more often? Join a club? Take up a hobby?

  She stares at the picture of Quinn in the cocktail dress. “Who are you?” she asks. “Where did you come from?” Her voice grows shaky and she starts to sob. “God knows, I did my best. I loved Quinn like all my children. Now he hates me.”

  “He doesn’t hate you.” I slip an arm around her shoulders.

  “He’d hate me if he knew the truth. So would you.”

  This is my hint to ask, The truth about what? But I do no such thing. In fact, I move my arm off her.

  “What’s the matter? Can’t you take the truth?” she asks.

  Again I don’t answer.

  “He was never supposed to be born. Quinn was an accident.”

  “A happy accident,” I say. “A gift from God after Dad died.”

  She cries harder, hacking and straining to haul up something from deep inside her, like a buried anchor from mud. “I considered aborting him. Honest to God, I did. I beat my belly so hard it left bruises. I would have done worse. But I had a girlfriend who got pregnant by a sailor while her husband was off in the army. She took a coat hanger to herself and bled to death. I didn’t dare chance that. Not with you and Maury to worry about. Damned if I’d let you be raised by your father’s family.”

  “You must have been under terrible pressure.” I can’t think of anything else to say.

  “That’s what the priest said when I confessed to him. He didn’t blame me for being tempted to get rid of my baby. The point was, I didn’t do it. He told me to pray for my dead girlfriend. I’ve been doing that since 1944.”

  “I think it’s time for you to let go and let Christ take over.” I repeat the homily from this morning’s Mass. “Life is like waterskiing. The Lord’s job is to steer the boat, and ours is to hang onto the rope while He does the driving.” This image of me up on water skis requires a leap of faith, but I manage it and enjoy the idea of zipping across Chesapeake Bay with God at the controls.

  Mom, however, can�
��t make the jump. “I haven’t worn a bathing suit in forty years,” she says.

  “Then forget about waterskiing. Just have faith in God’s forgiveness.”

  She shakes her head. “After all I’ve done, God won’t forgive me. There’s so much you don’t know and I’ve never told you.”

  And there’s so much I’d rather not hear, I want to holler. Instead, rocking her in my arms, I murmur, “Go to your happy place.”

  This is what Mom told Maury and me when we were sad or sick or scared. “Go to your happy place,” she’d say, “and tomorrow’ll be a better day.”

  “The only place I’m headed,” she says, “is hell.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  Rocking her harder, I whisper, “Let go. Just let go and let the Lord do His job.”

  Mom heaves and shudders. The spasm is so powerful, I’m afraid it’s a seizure. I pull back and examine her lopsided face, the blue eye and the brown eye behind mismatched lenses.

  “Quinn’s not your brother,” she blurts. Then she corrects herself. “He’s not your full brother. He’s a half to Maury and you.”

  I don’t bother to ask whether she’s lying. When it’s a question of bad news, Mom never lies.

  “Does Quinn know?” I say.

  “Of course not,” she spits out indignantly, like how dumb can you be? “You’re the first person I’ve ever told, the only one I’d trust.”

  “Lucky me!” In my shock I want to lash out at her. Lash out at something. But I bite my lip. “Don’t you think he deserves to know?”

  “That’s what the priest claims, the Filipino. For my penance, he wants me to admit the truth. But after hiding it all these years, how can I do a thing like that to Quinn?”

  “Same way you did it to me.”

  “I’d rather die,” Mom declares. “I’d rather be put out of my misery.”

  I’m stunned, appalled. “Suicide is a mortal sin. You know that. It means damnation and no burial in consecrated ground.”

  “I’d never kill myself. But I’m afraid what Quinn’ll do if he finds out.”

  “He certainly won’t kill you.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that. Promise you’ll never tell him,” she pleads—which is precisely what she’s angling for me to do, call Quinn and let her off the hook.

  “I couldn’t do it if I wanted to. He’d have hundreds of questions, and I don’t know a thing about it.”

  “I’ll explain everything to you.”

  “I don’t want to hear.” I clap my palms over my ears. “This is between you two.”

  “You’re not curious who his father is?”

  “Not on your life. That’s for Quinn to find out, if it matters to him.” Then it dawns on me that there is one thing I would like to know. “Is this what you and Dad were fighting about the day he died?”

  In a kind of palsy, she claws the glasses from her face, blinding herself and making me invisible. “That’s a shitty thing to ask your dying mother.”

  “Not half as shitty as leaving me to wonder.”

  “Sounds to me like you’ve made up your mind.”

  “You haven’t denied it.”

  “What I haven’t done is dignify the question.”

  “This is a strange time to stand on dignity. Why start so late in the day?”

  “I can’t believe you’re talking to me like this.”

  “Ditto,” I say. Getting up on hands and knees, I climb to my feet.

  “So that’s it. You’re abandoning me.” She jabs her glasses back on. “You won’t help.”

  “I’m late meeting Lawrence.” I reach her a hand.

  “That’s not the help I need.”

  “It’s all I have to give. I’m not telling Quinn he’s a bastard.”

  “I’ve known you to call him worse. Won’t you do me this one favor?” she says. “Phone and tell Quinn I’d like to see him one last time.”

  “Why not call him yourself?”

  “My fingers ache.” She brandishes her swollen arthritic knuckles. They might be a boxer’s fists at the end of a brutal career. “And I can never keep the numbers straight. There’s so many to dial for an international call.”

  “If I call him and have him ring you back, do you swear you’ll tell him the truth?”

  “Not over the phone. I want him here so I can confess face to face.”

  “But you promise you’ll be honest with him then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, it’s a deal. Now let me help you downstairs.”

  “No. I’ll stay and go through this stuff.”

  I leave her there at the cedar chest, and in a state of shock—or maybe my feet have fallen asleep—I almost tumble ass over teakettle down the stairs. I grab my purse and barge through the front door into the fresh air. Gulping it down, I have the sensation of surfacing after a dive into a muddy pond. My gene pool. Oh, how I’d love to swim out of it!

  I cling to the thought of Lawrence. I cling to him as the priest urged us to cling to the waterski rope and trust God to pull us where we need to go. But then pawing for the car keys, I feel the pyx still in my purse. The towline slips out of my hands and God’s boat goes speeding off with the rope jiggling behind it.

  I don’t have the stamina to run back into the house and start over, haggling with Mom to eat the Bread of Life, begging her not to despair, not to die, when in my heart of hearts what I want is for her to be released and me to be free. I open the golden box and take the Host on my tongue for the second time today. A sacrilege, I’m sure. Then I get into the Honda and grip the steering wheel. Once the wafer melts there’s nothing to do but mumble “Amen” and switch on the ignition.

  Quinn

  The question my memoir obliquely addresses—the same one I’ve been avoiding in my sessions with Dr. Rokoko—is how I survived my childhood. How did I escape? Was I the fittest? Or like a feral boy, did I have the good fortune to be raised by a nurturing wolf? As Orestes himself expressed it, half in pride, half in horror, “Does mother’s blood run in my veins?”

  Candy believes it does. She’s long accused me of being as bad as Mom. But that just raises a different question: How bad is Mom? Sure, she can be ruthless and conniving, but no more so than the monsters I’ve had to contend with onstage and off. A case could be made that at her worst she was excellent preparation for my professional career.

  Today’s International Herald Tribune reprints an article from the New York Times science section that examines the maternal instincts of animals. Its conclusion: cannibalism, abuse, abandonment, and neglect are motherly coping mechanisms. Lovable panda cubs, it points out, are born in pairs, and one is always left to die. Mama pigs roll over and crush the runt of the litter. Penguins push excess eggs out of the nest and into the Antarctic deep freeze. Huggable female bunny rabbits drop their babies, then hop away, returning for just two minutes a day at feeding time. “Rabbits are a highly popular prey,” the article says, “and many predators will pursue them into their burrows. To keep the fox from the nursery door, the mother rabbit shuns the room. Her absence may not make her pups’ hearts grow fonder, but it may keep those hearts thumping a little longer.”

  Is this the explanation for Mom’s cruel and contradictory behavior? For the way she alternately blessed and blasted me? Were her vacillations from icy indifference to blistering interference all part of a strategy to protect me?

  As I dither over these questions at breakfast, there’s a muffled concussion at the window. Another bird has hurtled against its reflection in the conservatory glass. Pigeons are forever snapping their ruby-ringed necks and bouncing off in a shower of feathers. Today a fawn-colored dove staggers away dazed, then drunkenly turns and marches back into the transparent door. It hits the glass headfirst.

  I leap to my feet to save the bird from brain damage. But then the phone rings and scares the dove into flight. I answer the call with a rote response to preserve my privacy. “Two aught seven,
four three five, treble six two.”

  “Can I talk to Quinn Mitchell?”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “This is Candy, Quinn. You sound like a servant in a PBS drama.”

  I revert to—I wouldn’t call it my real voice. I have many voices. Mimicry has served me not just as an actor. It has permitted me to fit in, or at least fool people that I belong, anyplace in the world. For Candy’s benefit, I scrub the Britishness and adopt an American accent, Maryland specific.

  “I was finishing breakfast,” I say. “I had egg in my mouth.”

  “What time do you roll out of bed? It’s six here. Doesn’t that make it eleven there?”

  “I got a late start. Nice to hear from you.” I don’t want her to feel she’s called at an inconvenient moment.

  “The reason I’m bothering you, Mom’s not so good.”

  “What is it?”

  “She’s afraid she’s dying and going to hell.”

  “What’s your prediction?”

  “She’s a sad little bag of bones.” On the long-distance line it is difficult to say whether Candy sounds flippant or sympathetic. “But she’s feisty enough to last for God knows how much longer.”

  “I mean what do you make of her chances of staying out of hell?”

  There’s a pause. I can almost hear Candy counting to ten and tapping her foot to stay calm. “Sometimes you seem to get a kick out of acting like a heartless prick,” she says.

  “You’re confused about male anatomy. Pricks don’t have hearts.”

  “You can say that again.”

  I chuckle at her comeback.

  “I’m at the end of my rope, Quinn. I can’t do it alone anymore. I need backup.”

  “Hire somebody. I’ll pay for it.”

  “It’s not that simple. She won’t let anybody in the house to help her.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir. Mom’s the one you have to convince.”

  “Why’s it always up to me to convince her? Why doesn’t somebody else do it for a change? Why not you?”

  “Okay, I will the next time I call. But sometimes it’s hard getting through to her.”