by Terry Gamble
They all come eventually. Glistening from sweat, reeking of pot, WD-40, suntan oil, and incense, they make it back to the house. Mother’s corpse is laid out benignly on top of the sheets, dressed in peach chiffon.
“She wore that dress to my wedding,” I say.
“It’s a beautiful dress,” says Miriam.
“Peach?” says Ian, looking at me.
I shrug. “It was the eighties.” I examine the fabric for stains. She walked into the lake in that dress, and now it will be reduced to ash.
“Are you going with her?” Ian asks. Ian is no stranger to protocol, having made countless trips to various mortuaries over the past decade and a half. He knows how the body disappears from view in the crematorium. He’s seen the miracle of makeup in disguising Kaposi’s sarcoma on sunken cheeks.
When I die, just push me into the East River, he once said to me. Anything but send me back to Minnesota.
“Just to the pier,” I say, as if the island is enchanted and to leave its gates would condemn me to the Hades of reality.
The tan undertaker and his beefy assistant cover Mother with a sheet and lift her onto a stretcher. Light as air, they carry her down the stairs, knocking some of the photographs askew. My grandfather’s stern face, now crookedly hung, stares down on us. When they took Sadie, they wouldn’t let me watch. I had bruises on my arms, and Aunt Pat had pulled my face into her chest to muffle the sound. They move through the dining room, the living room, out the front door, and start down the labyrinth of steps that twist to the sidewalk below.
The carriage is waiting. By design, there are no other passengers. The two men work efficiently. They set the stretcher across the seat, one of them sitting with her to brace it. Dana and Adele climb aboard, but the rest of us walk behind. Occasionally, we have to jog a little to keep up. When we were kids, we’d run after the carriage at night, darting in and out like Indians, shushing one another, trying not to giggle at what seemed a radical act of delinquency as we climbed aboard the luggage rack. Woo, woo, woo!
“Whoa,” says Sedgie, dodging a fresh pile of horse manure.
All afternoon, I’ve had the urge to call someone, but it’s Saturday. Dr. Anke won’t be in her office, Ian and Dana are here, and anyone I know in New York would say, I didn’t know you were close to your mother.
As we pass the tennis courts, people wave. Bicyclists pull over. We’re an odd little procession, heading to the channel. Too soon, we reach the pier. The mortuary has its own boat—a sleek Boston Whaler that they probably use for fishing when not needed for official business. Mac has stopped the ferry and is standing by the Whaler. I think he might salute. Sedgie once told me that the Odawa used to bring their dead to Sand Isle to bury them, but no bones have been found, and I’m sure he said it just to scare me. In India, the Hindus take the corpses down to the river and light them on fire. This is not so different, I think as they load Mother’s body onto the boat.
I have come to the beach to be alone. It is nearly evening, and the house feels claustrophobic in its silence. We walk past one another, unsure what to say. We knew she was dying, but we are stunned nonetheless. No one has any appetite.
The sand is cool beneath my legs. I throw a handful of rocks into the lake. Derek showed me how to skip stones when I was almost fifteen. It’s all in the wrist, he said, putting his arm around my waist, pulling me close from behind. His hand left a mark on my belly, and his chin was rough as he showed me the stroke. Afterward, my neck had a red spot matched by two flushed dots on my cheeks.
The rocks make a gratifying plop when they hit the water. They will sink and nestle among other rocks, become covered with algae before they are churned up again when the frozen lake melts and rages upon the shore. Plop. Plop. The waves break and pull back. There are no tides on Lake Michigan, huge as it is. You don’t have to factor in shifts in the current when you set your course. Watch the wind, my father told me. Check your sails.
Goddamn it, Maddie, Jamie said. You’re fucking crazy.
No amount of stones. Not enough years. I throw back my head and let out a wail that pitches to a howl and dies in a croak—a sound that no one in our family has ever dared to make.
TWENTY-THREE
Fan-friggin’-tastic,” says Ian, reviewing footage in the viewfinder of his video camera. I feign disinterest.
Sedgie, however, is enthralled. He is draped across the back of the couch, looming vulturelike over my film partner and friend. The two of them could be brothers, both in need of sun. Sedgie’s hair falls forward, nearly touching Ian’s head. Backlit by the window, there is a haloed beauty to the tableau.
“That’s my bad side,” says Sedgie. “I look better from the right.”
“You look better when you’re sober,” says Ian, unable to resist didacticism.
“Nothing looks better when I’m sober.”
Ian and I exchange a glance like a secret handshake. I’d given up “twelve-stepping” my family years ago. In 1988, I moved back to New York with nothing but my clothes, my drinking problem, and the box of Sadie’s ashes.
You had the most talent in the class, Ian told me after he heard about Sadie’s death and my split from Angus. The train film was exquisite.
The conventional wisdom in recovery is that alcoholism is the disease that tells you that you don’t have one, but I knew what I had. It didn’t look exactly like my mother’s gin-and-tonic-with-a-lemon-twist form of alcoholism, or the depraved Mad Dog-guzzling of the bench dwellers along the Santa Monica beach. Instead, my alcoholism looked like a desperate move to New York to take a film job with an old acquaintance, dragging out of bed each morning in my monk’s cell of a midtown apartment, retching and wretched, sleep-deprived and overwhelmed by a crushing depression that could only be remedied by several glasses of wine at the neighborhood bar, then another bottle to keep me company once I got home.
And I vomited.
Nonalcoholics don’t understand why you would persevere when your stomach rebels, but to an alcoholic, it makes perfect sense. At first, you’re trying to keep the bad feelings at bay—wipe them out altogether by pressing the restart button and moving to New York. Only it doesn’t work. You then resort to your old standby of drinking yourself into a different reality, but all you get is sick to your stomach. Still, you persist. The end justifies the means, and the end (dissociation from reality) is eminently worth it. Imagine the pull generated by a black hole—the gravity of a billion imploded suns. Now try turning around.
This was the kind of alcoholism that caused Ian, after half a year of working together, to say, Maddie, dear, there are a thousand reasons for the way you’ve been acting, and none of them is good. He took me to the outdoor flower market in Battery Park. He held freesia to my nose. Smell them. Picking up tuberoses, he said, And these. And these, he said, holding a fistful of Rubrum lilies. They dusted my face with saffron; my face became rust-streaked with tears. Maddie, Ian said, Maddie. You’ve got to live.
Ian was an expert on recovery, having OD’d on vodka and speedballs when he was twenty-five. His veins were near collapsing; he was seeing locusts (like any good Bible-banger, he told me); and the numbers on his liver had gone through the roof. By the time he arrived at NYU, he’d been in Narcotics Anonymous for over three years and was starting to convert to Judaism. That he tested negative for HIV after all this led to his begrudging belief in Betty.
Another conventional wisdom in AA is that you bottom out only when you’re ready. My last binge consisted of me not leaving the apartment for days, too semiconscious to answer the phone, or—when I did—too incoherent to talk. I went through three bottles of wine, a bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream, and a six-pack of Heineken. Toward the end, if there had been vanilla extract or mouthwash in my cupboards, I would have consumed those, too.
In the fall of 1989, when my father died, I had flown back to California to stay with Dana for his service. I was thin again, and dressed in the perpetual mourning that constitutes the New York wardrob
e. It felt like everyone was watching me—a not-altogether-paranoid thought given that my sister smelled my breath, and my mother said, You’re not going to fall apart, are you?
Ten months later, I had consumed every drop of alcohol in my apartment and was unable to call the market to deliver more. After twenty messages from Ian, several from Dana and my mother, Aunt Pat’s voice appeared on the answering machine.
This is not acceptable.
It was summer 1990. The family was going to toss my father’s ashes off the Green Dragon. I was cowering in a corner when Ian found me and called the ambulance that took me to detox, where they tied me to a bed. It took an eye-shadow-wearing, quasi-Jewish Lutheran junkie to tell me what I already knew. If you asked me how a young woman such as myself—from a good family—got to this place, I would respond: How could my mother throw up in a revolving door at the Ritz?
When I was sober for a year, I finally filed the divorce papers. Half measures avail you nothing, the AA Big Book tells us, but when I repeated this to my mother over the phone, there was a long, significant pause. I heard her puff on a cigarette as she considered what I had said. Then she suggested Valium.
This AA is ruining your life, she said, adding that the divorce would have killed my father. But by then he was already dead.
The wonderful thing about AA is that you can speak in shorthand about nightmarish experiences, and everybody in the room knows exactly what you mean. You can talk about your desperation, your embarrassment, your awful choices resulting in awful consequences, and everyone laughs. I wasn’t brought up to consider dry heaves and car wrecks the stuff of polite conversation. I wasn’t brought up to be an inebriate or marry the first person who proposed. I was brought up to hold my head high and have dignity and carry the noblesse oblige of my family like a torch into the next generation.
When I relayed this in earnest to Ian, he practically convulsed with laughter. Unlike the rest of us slobs. Is that what you mean?
It’s different, I said after Ian recovered (it took several minutes). I’m different.
Oh, Maddie, Ian replied.
Now Ian holds up the camera and focuses on me. I stare him down with steely resolve, but it is only a matter of seconds before I can’t help myself and start to mug. The tongue comes out; the eyes loll. I stand up and do my ghoulish zombie dance around the room.
“Maddie Addison,” narrates Ian, “brain-dead descendant of drugmakers. Little did they know the pharmaceutical influences that would permeate the family ethos for generations to come.”
“Aarrgh-guh-guh,” I say.
Dana comes into the room and eyes us suspiciously. Our laughter seems untoward in the postmortem atmosphere. But we have always dealt with loss through humor. Even our father used to joke how they misplaced Bada’s ashes after she was cremated and shipped back to Cincinnati.
“The mortuary called,” says Dana.
“That mortician looks like George Hamilton,” I say, resuming my place among the living. “What kind of undertaker gets that much sun?”
“We need to pick out a receptacle.”
Receptacle is a cold word. I prefer vessel or container—the simple metal box that holds my daughter. I remember my father handing it to me.
What did your parents do when Sadie died? Dr. Anke asked early on in our sessions.
My mother drank and played solitaire. My father polished brass on the Green Dragon.
And you? Where did you go with your grief?
The answer I gave to Dr. Anke was the same as Edward’s when I last saw him in Washington Square.
Beneath the surface, I said.
For seven years, I saw my family sporadically—mostly when I had to go to L.A. for work. Each time, I was confronted by feelings of such unbearable guilt that I would flee back to New York and my friends, my meetings, my therapist. To Dr. Anke, I described my sister’s sighs and my mother’s smoke-filled silence.
So let me get this straight. You felt guilty about your father’s death and your mother’s agoraphobia? You don’t see these circumstances as being, at the very least, out of your control?
“Grant Us the Serenity” and all that?
Maddie, isn’t it possible you were profoundly angry and disappointed in your family for not understanding you? And that, rather than express these feelings directly, you turned them on yourself in the form of guilt?
I must have read the book spines in Dr. Anke’s office a thousand times. Freud, Jung, Miller, Sacks. I would come to know all about repression, isolation, displacement, and projection. Dissociation, depersonalization disorder—now part of my lexicon.
I knew something was wrong before I went into that room. Perhaps if I’d gotten there sooner…
Dr. Anke gave me such a long, sad look that, for a moment, I felt I should comfort her. You’ve been sober, what, five years now…?
Six.
What are the odds of that? I’d put them at one in fifty.
Anyone can stop drinking.
No, said Dr. Anke with a vehemence that startled me. Not anyone.
The mortuary is veneered in mahogany, brand spanking new five years ago, a Sears Roebuck Oriental carpet, a gaslit fire, a stage set for the dead. Families are sequestered from other families so that grief remains private. It is like being in a fancy men’s club to which most people would never belong. The hallway smells of oil and pine. I keep sniffing for formaldehyde or something worse. Babies who die of SIDS are taken not here, but to the coroner. There has to be a reason for sudden death.
Death due to cessation of breathing, the coroner’s report had said.
Dana and I stand in the lobby, unsure where to go. There are prints on the walls of hunting scenes and sailboats, barns in a field, Mary Cassatt’s oft-reproduced Mother and Child. The prints promise places that are happier than here. Tranquil, mindless fields. Cool rivers. The warm embrace of a mother.
“Mother wanted to be a seagull when she returned,” says Dana.
“A seagull? She hated water.”
“That’s what she told me.”
The gulls were cawing on the beach yesterday when she died. I clear my throat. “Have we run this by Adele?” I make my fist into a microphone. “Earth to Adele. Incoming incarnation…”
Dana jabs me in the ribs. George Hamilton, the undertaker, has entered the room. We assume correctly sober expressions. “Ladies,” he says. “Would you follow me?”
Dana and I glance quickly at each other, and then follow him, obedient as dogs as he leads us into their showroom that is a mishmash of Victorian wallpapers and cut velvet upholstery and damask curtains. Heavy mahogany case-goods—the ultrashiny kind—show off a variety of containers, from the simple to the sublime, the most elaborate being one of inlaid mar-quetry like the kind found in stores selling gilt statues of Mercury and elaborate chandeliers. Dana and I peruse the choices politely. There is a plasticine-marble number with a bas-relief of angels, selling for nine hundred dollars. Another receptacle mimics burled walnut for less, but has the feel of Formica.
“What are we doing here?” whispers Dana.
I shake my head. Sadie was returned to me in an unadorned metal box cloaked in a velvet sack like a bottle of Chivas Regal. For the last ten years, she has sat on my bookshelf, holding up my twenty-volume set of Shakespeare.
“Excuse me,” I say to George Hamilton. “My sister and I need to talk. Outside.”
He nods knowingly, appreciative of the virtue of conferring over difficult and painful decisions. He offers us a private room, but I tell him the parking lot will do. When we get outside, we breathe in the fresh air and sun like divers coming up from the depths.
“Where are we going?” says Dana.
“Trust me,” I say.
By the time we return to the mortuary, it is late afternoon, and the undertaker comes into the hallway with a look of impatience. He is reknotting his tie, and it occurs to me that he was probably hoping to go fishing and get his daily dose of rays. When he sees the decoupaged
letter box we’ve brought from the Aerie, he looks even more distressed. At first, I assume it’s because he’s lost a sale, but his discomfort transcends mere commerce or the desire to get out on the lake.
“It’s too small,” I say, reading his thoughts.
He nods.
“You can’t fit all of her in here?”
Again, he nods. Dana and I exchange glances.
“We-ll,” I say, “can you put as much of her in as possible and dispose of the rest?”
Beneath his tan, George Hamilton blanches.
The memorial service is set for the following day. Tonight we’re having take-out pizza that arrived half-cold, having crossed the channel by ferry. Since none of us has attended church in Harbor Town for years, we have decided to forgo the services of a minister. The format for Mom’s memorial, we have decided, shall be that of a luncheon “To Celebrate the Memory of Evelyn Addison” instead of a cocktail party—those endless soirees that constituted our parents’ life.
We’re going to bury Mother’s ashes in the cemetery on the bluff. The rest of her remains—the ones the undertaker couldn’t fit into the letter box—Dana and I will keep. “Because you missed tossing Dad,” Dana says, picking some cheese from the corner of her mouth.
Since hitting upon his idea of using my family as his subject, Ian has barely put down his camera. “Inheritance,” Ian says to my assembled relatives, holding up the video camera to tape their reactions, “is more than money and genes. It is a vocabulary of shared concepts passed from one generation to the next. Like a liturgy.”
“Bullshit,” says Sedgie. “I had nothing in common with my father.”
My memory of Uncle Jack is of a jokester—the loudest and crassest of the uncles, seldom serious, flaunting the virtues of his wife’s family the way a rebellious teenager mocks his parents. I refrain from pointing out the similarities to Sedgie.
“Weren’t Uncle Jack and Uncle Dickie, like, Republicans?” says Beowulf, picking off the pepperoni. “I mean, they had that company.”