by Steve Tesich
The story never bogged down. It had a beginning, a middle, and a tragic but satisfying end. At the conclusion of the story was the sense that the story was over.
It was so well written and so well constructed, it made much more sense to Saul than the story he had lived through.
The public story put his private experience of it to shame. It made him wonder if he shouldn’t adopt it as the authoritative version of the events and the people in question.
He had fled from New York precisely because the temptation to do this was so great, but he now wondered (in the darkness of the den) if his flight from the temptation was just a brief postponement of the inevitable.
The thought of acknowledging and being acknowledged as the person in the magazine story seemed like the answer to the problem of living his life. Even his own mother, he was sure, were she to read that magazine story in his suitcase, would have a much better idea of who he was than she did now.
With just a minimum of practice he could become in private, in his own eyes, the person he was now reputed to be in public. The contradictions of his existence would vanish along with the pain of privacy.
(Laugh, laugh, laugh.)
In the living room above his head, the sitcom his mother was watching segued smoothly into another.
If only some Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist could be found to do a profile of his mother, he might be able to discover who this woman was who had given birth to him so many years ago. With his whole heart he wished to read that profile.
Oh, Mother, he thought.
Oh, mother of mine.
(Laugh, laugh, laugh.)
He could not even tell, as he started drifting off to sleep, what he meant by that flowery invocation of his mother.
Did the invocation mean to convey pity for her, or was it a plea of some kind, for help of some kind, from a son who was afraid of dying a death of some kind?
(Laugh, laugh, laugh.)
10
He woke up early the next morning, it wasn’t yet seven o’clock, and he meant to get out of bed when he heard the rolling thunder of his mother’s footsteps above his head.
Whatever little delight he may have experienced in being, for once, an early riser, was stomped to death by the sound of his mother’s feet. Judging by the rhythm of those stomping feet, she had been up for quite some time.
So he stayed in bed, bemoaning the demise of the good deeds he’d had in mind upon waking. He had intended to sneak upstairs to the kitchen and make coffee. To have a cup or two alone, and then, when his mother stumbled out of her bedroom, he was going to tell her: “Good morning, Mother. Coffee’s ready.”
The thought of going up there now and having her say, “Good morning, Saul. Coffee’s ready,” was too much for him.
He stayed in bed. He tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t. His mother started getting telephone calls. (At this hour, he thought.)
There was an extension in the den, not far from his bed, not far from his head, so that each time she got a call the whole den reverberated with ringing. In addition, there was the gallop of her feet as she ran (or so he imagined) to answer the phone.
He almost screamed the next time the phone rang. He jumped out of bed.
His mother was on the telephone when he snuck out the back door. She must have been talking to some hard-of-hearing old crony of hers, because she was shouting at the top of her lungs.
“I’m a tough old broad,” she was shouting and laughing as he shut the door behind him.
11
It was still morning, not exactly the crack of dawn to be sure but well before noon, and Saul Karoo was out in front of his mother’s house shoveling snow with an old snow shovel he had found in the garage.
It was getting warmer. A bright sun was shining on last night’s snowfall, and in the reflected heat and glare Saul, squinting and sweating, was shoveling away for all he was worth.
It was, as late March snows tend to be, wet and heavy, one of those snowfalls much beloved by agronomists who love to translate them into acre-feet of water.
It was hard work shoveling this stuff, but hard work was what Saul sought. He was desperate to disengage his mind, and the only way he could think of doing that was to put as much stress on his body as he could.
He attacked the snow in his mother’s front lawn with an almost vengeful fury, but without any discernible pattern. He shoveled away in one spot. And then he spun around and shoveled away in another spot. At times, he seemed to be trying to kill something with his shovel. At other times, it looked as if he were digging for a lost set of car keys buried in the snow.
Hopping from spot to spot, resembling occasionally a man involved in hand-to-hand combat with himself, he didn’t so much clear away the snow as leave behind numerous craters in it.
His hands on the long wooden handle were so close together that the grip he was using was far more appropriate for a large stick used to whack a snake to death than for shoveling of any kind. But he didn’t seem to notice or care. He simply didn’t want to think about anything. Not his life. Not his mother’s life. Not the story in the den. Nothing.
This stunning display of a man devoid of any physical grace or dexterity but wielding a snow shovel with fury offered an illuminating glimpse into the paradox of modern life. Here he was, this modern man, this Saul Karoo, trying to get away from his highly developed mind and lose himself in a body that had been a lost cause for decades.
His old mother, watching through the large picture window in the living room, was perplexed, to say the least, by the image of her son in the throes of frantic shoveling.
Being an old woman, she had become over the years an expert of sorts on the ways to avoid lower back problems. Observing the manner in which her son shoveled, all back and no legs, she feared a major lower back spasm in the making. She saw crushed disks. Cracked vertebrae. She saw her son in traction. A cripple.
So she rapped on the large picture window to get his attention. When he at last looked up at her, she mimed shoveling snow with her arms and bending at the knees while doing so.
She continued to do this for about twenty seconds while he stared at her dumbfounded.
He had no idea what the hell she was doing, what all her arm-flapping and knee-bending meant. It looked like a strange little dance she was performing for his benefit.
Not knowing how else to respond, Saul smiled at her and nodded approvingly, as if complimenting the dance recital of a five-year-old.
He changed course, however. To get out of her line of sight, he started moving backwards, shoveling alongside the house, heading toward the backyard.
The combination of physical exertion and the rising temperature began to exact its toll on his body. His armpits and crotch were damp. Sweat poured down his face, and his head steamed like a large cabbage in a pressure cooker.
He shoveled on, his arms getting weaker and heavier. With each successive scoop there was less snow in the shovel.
He didn’t want to think, but as the mechanics of his body began to break down, his mind picked up the slack and began shoveling thoughts at him.
Who was she? he wondered.
Who in the world was this woman he called his mother?
This was not a rhetorical question but a genuine inquiry into the matter.
He took a couple more swipes at the snow and then, sweating, squinting, panting, came to a complete stop at a point in the backyard roughly equidistant from the house and the garage.
Who were all those people who called her on the telephone this morning?
What did she mean by saying, and to whom did she say, “I’m a tough old broad”?
And that strange, high-spirited laughter that had accompanied her statement, where did that come from and what did it mean?
Now that he thought of it, although he didn’t want to think at all, but now that he thought of it, he had never heard his mother laugh like that before.
Was this laughter of hers a lifelong trait
he had somehow managed to miss till now, or something she had developed in recent years?
Leaning on the handle of the snow shovel for support, he stood, totally spent.
His postmeridian shadow lengthened slowly across the unshoveled snow while he stood thinking about his mother.
The more he thought about her, although he didn’t want to think about her at all, but the more he thought about her, the larger his ignorance of her seemed to grow. If someone were to put a gun to his head, he could not possibly write her story. He had known this woman longer than he had known anyone else on earth, but he had not a clue about what her story was.
The only thing he could say about her, with any degree of accuracy, was that she was old and still alive.
Could she, he wondered, say more about him than that? That he too was old and still alive?
Lost in contemplation of lifetimes and story lines and the extent to which one had nothing to do with the other, he remained standing in the fallen snow until his mother appeared in the back door and called him inside for lunch.
12
Saul is sitting at the dining room table, in the same chair where he sat the night before. And he’s about to have the same dinner again, only now it’s lunch, because the same aluminum pot of lamb stew is on the stove, being reheated yet again.
“You might as well finish it off,” his mother says, her back turned to him as she stirs the stew slowly with a long wooden spoon.
“One thing about lamb stews,” she says, “and stews in general, is that the more times you reheat them, the better they taste. But you want to make sure to reheat them on a low flame. The lower the better. That way it heats up just right, without burning the pot or wrecking the taste.
“I add a little water sometimes,” she says, “depending on the thickness of the broth.” She bends over the pot and sniffs. “Mmm, smells good.”
Saul is not hungry, but even if he were ravenous, he would rather eat rocks than go through the ordeal of dumping that lamb stew into his stomach.
His mother moves around the house. She comes and she goes. She stirs the stew with a spoon and leaves. To go to the living room. To peek out of the window and see if the mailman is coming. Then all the way back, her feet hammering on the floor, back past him to the kitchen to check on the stew again. And then all the way back to her bedroom at the opposite end of the house. For what purpose he doesn’t know. Maybe to peek out the window and see if the garbage trucks are moving up the alley to pick up the garbage.
It’s a long house from one end to the other, with various rooms and closets running off a single corridor. When he sees his mother returning, at a distance and backlit by the daylight from her bedroom window, she looks completely wrinkle-free. Like some anorexic teenage girl with weird hair. And then, as she keeps walking toward him, time, in its time-lapse way, turns her into a wrinkled old crone.
Now there’s a story, Saul thinks and looks away from her.
“Almost ready,” his mother announces.
“Stews,” she says, “should always be served piping hot.”
The furnace comes on. The air blows out of the louvered registers. Little dustballs roll across the linoleum floor, unseen by her but seen by him.
Like tumbleweeds through a ghost town, he thinks.
The House of Karoo, he thinks.
Who will live here when she dies? he wonders.
Oh, Mother. The unspoken words speak of their own accord in his mind.
He has no nostalgia for this house, where dustballs now roll across the floor. Nor can he summon any genuine filial affection for this woman in a faded bathrobe, his mother. And yet the refrain “Oh, Mother” goes on and on in his mind.
He is old, she is old, but there is something about that “Oh, Mother” in his mind that seems eternal and ever young.
He has followed her with his eyes as she moved around the house and he is watching her now as she stirs the stew again.
She lifts up the wooden spoon to her lips and slurps some stew broth through her dentures.
“I think it’s ready,” she announces.
She opens a drawer and clatters out a ladle. She looks at the bowl of the ladle, blows something out of it, and then starts ladling out the stew into his dish.
Then, bearing the steaming plate of stew in both hands, she walks toward him. A little gnome of a woman, with sledgehammers for feet.
When she crosses some imaginary line and her eyes get too close to him for comfort, he looks away.
The loose sleeve of her Santa Fe bathrobe brushes his shoulder as she places the lamb stew on the table in front of him.
The scent of her old unwashed flesh mingles with the scent of the stew steaming upwards toward his nostrils.
His stomach heaves, contracts.
“Would you like some salt and pepper?” she asks him.
What he would like is a bilge pump to roll in and suck the lamb stew out of his dish, but he accepts her offer.
She totters off and then totters back, holding two identical stainless steel shakers, one in each hand. They look like chess pieces. Rooks.
“There,” she says, and places them on the table.
And then she totters off again. Not far. But far enough away not to be on top of him.
She seems to know that it bothers him, the nearness of her body.
She seems to know on which side of the imaginary line she should be.
Sweating like a stevedore, he reaches for the salt and pepper shakers and sprinkles some of each on top of his stew. As it turns out, both the salt and pepper shakers have salt inside them. But he says nothing. What’s there to say? Not even a sprinkling of crushed cigar butts could make the lamb stew any more inedible than it already is.
She just stands there, intent on watching him eat.
He can see her out of the corner of his left eye. He sees the fingers of one of her hands worrying the fingers of the other. He sees, or thinks he sees, the skin around the corners of her mouth move in tiny spasms. Like someone swallowing little fragments of sentences.
She is on the other side of the imaginary line, but she might as well be sitting on his lap.
He eats some lamb stew, unable to distinguish the taste and texture of overcooked vegetables and potatoes from the taste and texture of overcooked meat.
He wishes she wouldn’t watch him eat.
He wishes she had to go to the bathroom.
He wishes she would get one of her phone calls.
He wonders why it is that she got all those phone calls early this morning and now nothing.
Maybe, he thinks, that is the way with old people. They check up on one another, in rotation, first thing in the morning, to make sure they are all still alive.
Something about that phrase “still alive” causes his mind to wander.
He doesn’t want to think, but he’s thinking and he can’t tell if his thinking is leading him away from the matter at hand or toward it.
Nor can he tell what the matter at hand is.
Something is still alive.
Oh, Mother, he thinks, but his mind is a muddle of mothers. It’s like water on the brain, only he’s got mothers on the brain.
Not just his mother but mothers in general.
He’s awash in mothers.
Mothers of all kinds. Birth mothers. Adoptive mothers. Fourteen-year-old mothers. Old mothers. Mothers, like his mother, who will never be mothers again. Mothers, like Dianah, who was a mother no more. Mothers who miscarry the life within their wombs and mothers with barren wombs. Mothers of the stillborn and mothers of the unborn.
And suddenly he, Saul Karoo, sweating over his steaming plate of lamb stew, feels overcome with kinship and something like love for them all. For all those mothers.
For he too …
He starts crying, averting his face from his mother’s eyes so she won’t see.
For he too …
He starts sobbing, blubbering, shoveling spoonfuls of lamb stew into his mouth in or
der to distract his mother from his unforeseen breakdown.
He too, wombless though he is, he too has known the motherlike yearning to give birth to something living and new.
Has known, within the limitations of his gender, that feeling of fullness and expectation.
But never the joy of deliverance.
His life has been all gestation and no birth.
Oh, mothers, he now blubbers to himself, have mercy on me. Mothers, you life-givers of the world, have mercy on me please. I want to be a life-giver too. Sullied of soul and old and wombless though I may be, there is still something within me as yet unborn clamoring for birth.
Still alive!
This seemingly obvious fact, that he is still alive, and that his own mother is still alive, strikes him now as miraculous.
And before he can stop to think, before he can even plan his next move, he is moving.
He starts to slide off his chair, his arms flapping every which way as he lands upon his knees on the linoleum floor. There, gathering his body together into a figure of a sloppy-looking supplicant, he turns toward his mother.
Kneeling before her, his hands pressed together as if he were pleading, he starts to speak.
“Mother,” he says, looking up into her eyes, “forgive me, please.”
Unprepared for her son’s extravagant display of emotion, she had instinctively stepped toward him when she saw him sliding off the chair, thinking God knows what was happening, thinking that he was perhaps having a heart attack like his father and wondering if her lamb stew was responsible.
Now that she sees that he’s all right, that he’s alive and well, but kneeling there in front of her, looking right into her eyes and pleading for forgiveness, she is positively horrified.
She would have known how to respond to his sudden death, but she does not know how to respond to this.
A dead son is still a son and she would have known what to do, but this man down on his knees in front of her does not seem like any son of hers.