She could tell her mother had begun one of those sodden monologues she delivered from time to time, full of edgy eloquence. Eileen just sat and listened.
“I used to daydream about living in the mansions I cleaned. I liked to do windows, everyone else’s least-favorite job. I could look out on rolling lawns. They didn’t have a single rock, those lawns. I liked to look at the tennis courts. Perfectly level, and not a twig out of place. They suggested . . . what?—the taming of chaos. I liked the windswept dunes, the spray of crashing waves, the sailboats tied to docks. And when I went out to run the rag over the other side, I looked in on women reclining on divans like cats that had supped from bowls of milk. I didn’t begrudge them their ease. In their place, I would have planted myself on an elbow from the moment I rose in the morning until the time came for me”—her mother made a languorous gesture with her finger that reminded Eileen of the way bony Death pointed—“to be prodded back to the silken sheets.”
“It sounds nice,” Eileen said.
“It wasn’t nice,” her mother said sharply after the few beats it took her thoughts to cohere. “It was—marvelous, is what it was.”
• • •
A few days before Christmas, her mother told her to take the train in to Loft’s a little before the end of her shift. When Eileen arrived, her mother looked so effortlessly composed that one would never know she’d become a serious drinker. Eileen walked around the store in stupefaction, gaping at the handcrafted, glazed, and filigreed confections.
When her mother was done, she gave Eileen a box of truffles to take home and walked her over to Fifth Avenue and down to Thirty-Ninth Street, to the windows of Lord & Taylor, which Eileen had seen only in pictures in the newspaper. The scenes behind the windows, with their warmly lit fireplaces and silky-looking upholstered miniature furniture, gave her the same feeling she’d had when she’d stood before that great lawn and peered up into the perfect world of the garden apartments. Gorgeous drapery framed a picture she wanted to climb into and live in. Brisk winds blew, but the air was not too cold, and the refreshing smell of winter tickled her nose. In the remnant daylight, the avenue began to take on some of the enchanted quality visible behind the windows. It thrilled her to imagine that passersby saw an ordinary mother-daughter pair enjoying a routine evening of shopping together. She checked people’s faces for evidence of what they were thinking: What a nice little family.
“Christmas gets the full treatment,” her mother said in the train on the way home. “Mind that you remember that. It doesn’t matter what else is going on. You could be at death’s door, I don’t care.”
That night, her mother tucked her in for the first time since she’d gone into the hospital. When Eileen awoke in the middle of the night and saw the other bed empty, she stumbled out to find her mother sitting on the couch. For a terrible instant, Eileen thought her mother was dead. Her head hung back, mouth open. Her hand clutched the empty tumbler. Eileen drew close and watched her chest rise and fall, then took the ashtray from her lap and the tumbler from her hand, careful not to wake her, and brought both to the kitchen sink. She took the blanket from her mother’s bed and spread it over her. She slept with the door open in order to see her from where she lay.
• • •
The package she received in the mail contained a book on how to play the clarinet and, beneath it, Mr. Kehoe’s own clarinet. A note on legal stationery said that he’d died of lung cancer and left it to her in his will. She slept beside it for several days until her mother found it one morning and told her to stop, calling it ghoulish. She tried to play it a few times but grew frustrated at the halting noises it produced. With an undiminished memory for its muffled, sensuous sound through the walls, she thought of Mr. Kehoe. She could hear whole songs when she shut her eyes and concentrated, as if the music were waiting to be extracted from her by a trained hand. She could never even string together a couple of familiar-sounding notes. Eventually she took to laying out its pieces and looking at them awhile before fitting them back into the soft pink felt that lined the case. She didn’t need to play Mr. Kehoe’s clarinet to appreciate it. Its parts were sleek and expertly wrought, their burnished metal protuberances shining with a lustrous gleam. They filled her hand with a pleasant weight. She liked to press the buttons down; they moved with ease and settled back up with a lovely firmness. The mouthpiece where Mr. Kehoe had pressed his lips came to a tapered end. She liked the feel of it against her own lips, the pressure against her teeth when she bit down.
The clarinet was the nicest thing she owned, the nicest thing anyone in her family owned. It didn’t belong in that apartment, she decided. When she was older she would live in a beautiful enough home that you wouldn’t even notice the clarinet. That was what Mr. Kehoe would have wanted. She would have to marry a man who would make it possible.
• • •
When she was thirteen, she started working at the Laundromat. The first time she got paid, after kneading the bills awhile between her thumb and forefinger, she spread them on the table before her and did some math. If she kept working and saved every dollar she could, she wouldn’t need anything at all from her parents once she was done with high school—maybe even before. The prospect excited her, though excitement gave way to sadness. She didn’t want to think of not needing anything from them. She would save her money for them.
Her mother drank harder than her father ever had, as though she were trying to make up for lost time. Eileen started tending to her needs in a prophylactic rather than merely reactive way. She made coffee, kept a constant supply of aspirin waiting for her, and lay a blanket over her when she fell asleep on the couch.
One night, Eileen came into the living room and saw that her mother’s head was bobbing in that way it did when she fought sleep to hold on to a last few moments of conscious drunkenness. Sitting with her was easiest then. She was too far gone to say something tart and withering but could still register Eileen’s presence with a tiny fluttering of the eyelid.
Eileen took a seat next to her and felt wetness under her hand. At first she thought her mother had spilled her drink.
She was terrified to change her mother’s clothes, because there was a chance her mother might realize what was going on, but she couldn’t just let her sit there in that sopping spot all night. She managed to remove her wet clothes and wrap her in a robe. Then she lay her back down on the dry part of the couch. Getting her to bed would be much harder.
Eileen sat on her haunches next to the couch and guided her mother’s head and shoulders from her lap to the floor, then dragged the rest of her down. Once she had her there, she slid her along by hooking her arms up under her mother’s armpits. Her mother was making murmuring noises. When Eileen got her to the bed, though, she couldn’t lift her up into it. Her mother had stirred to more wakefulness and was trying to stay on the floor.
“Let me get you up, Ma,” she said.
“I’ll sleep right here.”
“You can’t sleep on the floor.”
“I will,” she said, the end of the word trilling off. Her brogue came back when she was drunk or angry.
“It’s cold on the floor. Let me lift you up.”
“Leave me be.”
“I won’t do that.”
Eileen tried for a while and then gave up and lay on her mother’s bed to rest. When she awoke it was to the sound of her father coming home from tending bar. She went to the kitchen and saw him sitting at the table with a glass of water.
“Can you pick Ma up? She’s on the floor.”
He stood without a word and followed her. It occurred to her that, except on Mr. Kehoe’s last night, she’d never seen her father enter that bedroom. In the light streaming in from the kitchen, her mother looked like a pile of dirty sheets on the floor.
Eileen watched him pick her mother up with astounding ease, as if he could have done it with one hand instead of two. One of his arms was cradling her head. Her long limbs hung down; she was fast a
sleep. He took his time laying her in the bed. He looked at her lying there. Eileen heard him say “Bridgie” once quietly, more to himself than her mother, before he pulled the blanket over her and smoothed it across her shoulders.
“Go to bed now yourself,” he said, and shut the door behind him.
• • •
“Imagine all of Woodside filled with trees,” Sister Mary Alice was telling her eighth-grade class. “Imagine a gorgeous, sprawling, untouched estate of well over a hundred acres. That is what was here, boys and girls. What is now your neighborhood, all of it, every inch, once belonged to a single family that traces its roots back to the very beginnings of this country.”
A garbage truck in front of the school emitted a few loud coughs, and Sister paused to let it pass. The rolled-up map above the blackboard swayed slightly, and Eileen imagined it unfurling and hitting Sister in the head.
“The grandson of one of the early Puritan founders of Cambridge, Massachusetts, built a farmhouse near this spot, on a massive plot of land he’d bought.” Sister started walking around the room with a book held open to a page that contained pictures of the house. “His heirs converted that farmhouse into a manor house. This manor house”—Sister practically spat the words—“had a wide hall leading to a large front parlor. It had a back parlor with a huge fireplace, a grand kitchen, a brass knocker on the door. It had an orchard to one side.” The insistent way Sister counted off the house’s virtues made it sound as if she was building a case against it in court. “After a few generations, they sold the estate to a Manhattan-based merchant from South Carolina to use as a weekend retreat. Then, in the latter half of the last century, when the train lines expanded, a real estate developer saw an opportunity. He cleared the estate’s trees, drained its swamps, laid out the streets you walk on today, and carved it into nearly a thousand lots that he distributed by random drawing. He opened the door to the middle class, letting them pay in installments of ten dollars a month. Houses were built. The last vestige of the estate, the manor house, was razed in 1895 to make room for the church, and, eventually, the school you’re sitting in right now.”
Eileen was watching the frowning white face of the clock at the front of the room when Sister came up to her with the book. Her gaze drifted lazily to the pictures, but once she saw them she couldn’t take her eyes off them, and when Sister moved down the row, Eileen asked her to come back for a second.
“The Queensboro Bridge was completed in 1909, and then the LIRR East River tunnel the following year, and they began laying out the IRT Flushing line—the seven train to you—station by station, starting in 1915. The Irish—your grandparents, maybe your parents—began coming across the river in droves, seeking relief from the tenement slums of Manhattan. They wound up in Woodside. Imagine ten people to an apartment, twenty. Then, in 1924—providence. The City Housing Corporation began building houses and apartments to alleviate the density problem.” Sister had made it back to the front of the room. The faint outline of a smile of triumph crept onto her lips as she addressed her final arguments to the jury. “This is the way the Lord works. To those who have little, he gives. Isn’t it nice to think of all of you here instead of it just one privileged family in a mansion in the woods? Wouldn’t you agree, Miss Tumulty?”
Eileen had been daydreaming about the demolished mansion she’d just seen the picture of. Sister’s question snapped her to attention. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
But all she could think was what a shame it was they’d knocked that house down. A big, beautiful house in the country with land around it—that wasn’t a bad thing at all.
“And think of this,” Sister Mary Alice said in closing. “Not a single one of you would be here if that estate were still around. None of us would. We simply wouldn’t exist.”
Eileen looked around at her classmates and tried to conceive of a reality in which none of them had come into being. She thought of the little apartment she lived in with her parents. Would it be a loss if it had never been built?
She pictured herself on a couch in that mansion, looking out a window at a stand of trees. She saw herself sitting with her legs crossed as she flipped through the pages of a big book. Someone had to be born in a house like that; why couldn’t it have been her?
Maybe she wouldn’t have been born there, but she’d have been born somewhere, and she’d have found a way to get there, even if the others didn’t.
• • •
Some nights she went up the block to see her aunt Kitty and her cousin Pat, who was four and a half years younger than her. Her uncle Paddy, her father’s older brother, had died when Pat was two, and Pat looked up to her father like he was his own father.
Eileen had grown up reading to Pat. She’d delivered him to school an early reader, and he could write when the other kids were still learning the alphabet. He was whip-smart, but his grades didn’t show it because he never did his homework. He read constantly, as long as it wasn’t for school.
She sat him at the kitchen table and made him open his schoolbooks. She told him he had to get As, that anything less was unacceptable. She said there was no end to what he could do with her help. She told him she wanted him to be successful, and rich enough to buy a mansion. She would live in a wing of it. He just rushed through his work and read adventure stories. All he wanted to do when he grew up was drive a Schaefer truck.
• • •
Her mother’s morning powers of self-mastery, so impressive in the early days, began to dry up, until, when Eileen was a freshman in high school—she’d earned a full scholarship to St. Helena’s in the Bronx—they evaporated overnight. Her mother went in late to Loft’s one day, and then she did so again a couple of days later, and then she simply stopped going in at all. One day she passed out in the lobby and the police carried her upstairs. After the officers left—her father being who he was meant nothing would get written up—Eileen didn’t say a word or try to change her mother into clean clothes, because her mother would be embarrassed, and Eileen still feared her wrath, even when her mother was slack as a sack of wheat, because the memory of her mother taking the hanger to her when she misbehaved as a child was never far from her mind.
The next day, when they were both at the kitchen table, her mother smoking in silent languor, Eileen told her she was going to call Alcoholics Anonymous. She didn’t mention that she’d gotten the number from her aunt Kitty, that she’d been talking to others in the family about her mother’s problem.
“Do what you want,” her mother said, and then watched with surprising interest as Eileen dialed. A woman answered; Eileen told her that her mother needed help. The woman said they wanted to help her, but her mother had to ask for help herself.
Eileen’s heart sank. “She’s not going to ask for help,” she said, and she felt tears welling up. She saw her mother’s darting eyes notice the tears, and she wiped them quickly away.
“We need her to ask for assistance before we can take action,” the woman said. “I’m very sorry. Don’t give up. There are people you can talk to.”
“What are they saying?” her mother asked, pulling the belt on her robe into a tight knot.
Eileen put her hand over the receiver and explained the situation.
“Give me that goddamned phone,” her mother said, stubbing out her cigarette and rising. “I need help,” she said into it. “Did you hear the girl? Goddammit, I need help.”
• • •
A pair of men came to the apartment the following evening to meet her mother. Eileen had never been more grateful not to find her father home. She sat with them as they explained that they were going to arrange for her mother to be admitted to Knickerbocker Hospital. They would return the next evening to take her in.
That night, as soon as the men had left, her mother took the bottle of whiskey down off the shelf and sat on the couch pouring a little of it at a time into a tumbler. She drank it deliberately, as if she were taking medicine. They’d told her mother to pack en
ough clothing for two weeks, so Eileen filled a small duffel bag for her and slipped it under the bed. She would explain things to her father once her mother was in the hospital.
Eileen spent the school day worrying that, with so many hours left before the men returned, something would go awry. Her mother seemed okay, though, when Eileen got home. All in the apartment was still. The kettle sat shining on the small four-burner stove, the floor was swept, the blinds were pulled evenly across the windows. Eileen cooked some sausage and eggs for them to eat together. Her mother ate slowly. When the men arrived, shortly before six o’clock, both wearing suits, her mother acquiesced without denying she’d agreed to go. The strangely tender, sorrowful look she wore as she shuffled around the apartment gathering the last of the things she needed—toothbrush, wallet, a book—made Eileen’s chest ache.
Eileen rode with them to the hospital. At the end, the two men drove her back. When they reached the apartment building, the driver put the car in park and sat motionless while the man in the passenger seat came around to open her door. She stood outside the car, thinking she might like to say something to express her gratitude, but there wasn’t a way to do it. The man took his hat off. A strange, knowing silence filtered into the air around them. She was glad these men weren’t the kind that said much. He handed her a piece of paper with a phone number on it.
“Call if you need anything,” he said. “Any hour.” Then they drove off.
Her mother stayed in for nine days. When she reemerged, she attended meetings and took a job cleaning grammar schools in Bayside. She complained about being beholden to the Long Island Rail Road schedule, but Eileen figured what actually bothered her was all the time she had to herself on the train to consider how she hadn’t gotten very far in the years since she’d made similar trips.
We Are Not Ourselves Page 3