Dry Your Smile

by Morgan, Robin;

  This evening, at dinner, we arranged to go together tomorrow and attempt the first siege on Hope’s apartment. It can’t be put off any longer. In fact, somewhere in the midst of my own vagrancy, I’ve got to make the time and find the stamina to face disposition of that co-op, as well as proceed with the nursing-home odyssey.

  Good god. Doctors, lawyers, Laurence, bills, no roost of my own, more speaking dates coming up but little money now and it’s always a four-to-six-week lag between the date and the college actually sending the check. My papers and files for the current book sitting in my study at the loft. Hope in the hospital, staring straight ahead of her whenever I go to visit, which has been every day except for when I was in Chicago. Not knowing whether she’s deliberately un-seeing me or if that’s part of her condition; suspecting the former.

  I sit at the side of her hospital bed and study her. All that power, that archetypal numinousity—now so enfeebled. Lavender veins prominent in her chalky, flaccid skin; the bones of her skeleton already beginning to flirt through her surfaces—in the grimace of teeth, the claw of a hand. Her skull hints its contours more boldly through the lifeless strands of gray white hair. Sometimes she sneaks a glance at me, but mostly she won’t even look in my direction.

  I still fear her. Damn. This moronic fear in me—of what? She’s far too weak to hurt me physically. She’s even incontinent. Parkinson’s, strokes, the cast on her hip, dehydration, the ever-present danger of pneumonia in a patient so bedridden—what more do I want? She’s powerless. How can she possibly hurt me now?

  She does have power. She has the power to not love me.

  Is that where it all begins? The power to withhold love, the primal cause of all violence? She never did actually withhold it (I think). But she must have used the threat of doing that in a manner so subtle and effective as to have created in me this gaggingly desperate approval-search, this supposed devotion to “selflessness” that literally, as Iliana points out, means a lack of self. Making waves everywhere but in my own private life. “Supporting” as the only way I know how to express love. Even turning at-first independent people like Laurence into dependent ones, so I can play the indispensable martyr-mother. Not for nothing was my nickname for her “Little Momma” when I was only four years old.

  So now what? I guess just go on. Here we go again, but more so: one step at a time, put your little foot … I keep bursting into tears at the oddest times—in the shower, on the bus, in the plane’s lavatory, standing at a curb. Waiting for the light to change. And always in bed at night, crying as I try to fall asleep.

  Then there’s a blissful split-second in the morning, on awakening, when I haven’t yet remembered what’s happened, where I am and where I’m not, what I must face in general and on that particular day. Then the wake-up tears start.

  Still. I’m fortunate, I tell myself, given the circumstances. Thank the universe for Ginny, for Charlotte, for the women who want me to come and lecture at their schools. Thank the universe for Iliana de Costa.

  March 28, 1983

  I’ve been to Hope’s apartment. I literally don’t know what I would have done had Iliana not been with me. No words for it.

  Flimsy approximations: squalor, chaos, filth, jetsam of a life, madness. The condition it was in when I was last permitted inside has worsened to a state I couldn’t have imagined. If I were ever to put such a scene into a story, I’d have to reduce it, bring the details down into some border-reality, or everyone would think I had a wildly exaggerative runaway mind. She had become a total recluse. Her mail—including a few puny stock-dividend checks, millions of stockholder-meeting proxy notices, appeals for donations to various synagogues and Jewish hospitals and children’s homes—is heaped in piles all over the place, unopened for months. Layers of dust blanketing everything, plaster peeling from the ceiling, windows opaque with grime. Cockroach metropolis in the slimehole of a kitchen. Green mold scumming whatever used to be food in the refrigerator; just to open the fridge door could knock you over with the stench.

  She must somehow have got it together to scribble a few checks each month for Mrs. Washington to mail—the co-op maintenance, telephone and utilities, Washington herself. But Mrs. W. tells me she hasn’t been paid for a month, so I sent her my own check for what was owed her; what else could I do? It’ll take weeks to sort out what’s left of Hope’s “financial affairs.” Meanwhile, the notion of attacking that apartment, cleaning it up, and getting it on the market as fast as possible so there’s money for the nursing home—it’s overwhelming.

  I vomited up the light lunch Iliana made me eat before going there. I stood in Hope’s shit-streaked bathroom, leaning over the sink heaving and weeping—because it was there she fell, it was from there she’d started her creep toward the phone. Iliana cleared a space on the sofa with one efficient sweep of her arm, sat me down, plonked herself beside me, sighed, and announced that if Hercules could manage the Augean stables alone, then two women ought to be able to handle this together, since the jobs were about on the same level.

  How can you not laugh through your tears at the preposterousness of this situation? How can you not love a friend like that?

  I’m too wasted to write more now. I think I’m even beat enough to fall asleep without the usual Thinking About Everything first, which would be a blessing. Tomorrow we start the clean-up. And tomorrow I find out if I can stay at Ginny’s again; she’ll let me know for sure if she’s decided to go to the West Coast Book Fair. And tomorrow I have to call Laurence and let him know that I need to make another loft-raid, for some work-clothes in which to approach Hope’s Augean stables. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow …

  April Fool’s Day, 1983.

  I can go to Ginny’s, thank god. Excellent timing, because Charlotte and Zach return on the 4th and that’s when Ginny will be taking off for California. So I’ll apartment-sit and plantsit there for five days. That takes me to the 9th. Then what?

  The irony is that if I didn’t have to sell Hope’s co-op in such a rush, all the work to clean it up could have yielded a more permanent-temporary place to stay. Hello irony, old friend.

  We certainly have started cleaning it up.

  First there were the huge plastic trash bags we’d brought with us, into which we threw the contents of the fridge and the pantry cupboards, the old magazines and newspapers and circulars and junk mail, the gummy stuff in the medicine cabinet and on the bathroom shelves, and the barely touchable stinking bed linen. Then there were more huge trash bags, which we filled with old clothing of hers that she hadn’t worn in years—high-heeled platform shoes, moth-eaten fur hats, holey-fingered gloves, the works—to be donated to the hospital thrift shop. Then there were the plastic bags for the Julian Travis Shrine in the bedroom: in went the doll collection, the 1950’s Teresa Brewer-Pat Nixon-style dresses, all the wee pastel-dyed slippers—also destined for the thrift shop. Iliana refused to let me throw out the photographs or awards; she thinks I’ll write about all this someday and they might be useful to jog my memory. Hilarious thought: that I could ever write about this, and that my memory—which wants nothing more now than amnesia—would need jogging. But she insisted, so those went into the “for storage” pile. (Arguing with Iliana when one is feeling strong is a job in itself; in my state, forget it.)

  The rugs were picked up to be cleaned and kept by the cleaners in summer storage, an arrangement they little know could go on for many seasons. The pots, pans, and cutlery are hopelessly beyond scouring and had to be thrown out. The dishes mostly cracked, chipped, not worth saving or selling. The same with her appliances (rusted iron, battery-corroded radio; three lamps with electrical shorts, broken bases, and torn shades; a crudded and inoperative toaster, similar-state electric fry pan, and so forth). Records and books will go into storage, along with the scrapbooks—through which Iliana began to leaf during one of our container-coffee-from-the-nearby-deli breaks. I tried to stop her, but she’s unstoppable. To my surprise, her eye saw things in the phot
ographs I’ve never seen: a set jaw, a sidelong sullen look, expressions of rebellion in my five-year-old face, a whole body language of resistance … I’ve neither the time nor the interest at this stage to re-examine the copious images of The Ideal American Girl, but something in her perceptions of those artifacts felt cleansing. All I’ve seen whenever I’ve looked at them was an obedient, grinning little monkey. I don’t think Iliana was seeing solely through eyes of love, either; when it comes to a photographic image, she’s uncompromising.

  After four or five hours of wading around this charnel house each day, both of us are bushed. Yet she manages to get us back, either to her apartment in the Village or to Charlotte’s uptown, for showers, and then she sweeps me off to a “decent” (her word) dinner, whether I’m hungry or not.

  Dinner for Iliana is a ritual of civilized behavior: a not necessarily posh restaurant but one with a leisurely atmosphere, good food and service, a bottle of wine. At first it felt like an indulgent waste of time, but it does work. I relax for a bit. It’s extraordinary how she manages to create graciousness in the midst of my furor. She’s like a walking incarnation of that line of Baudelaire’s: “Luxe, calme, et volupté.” What a bizarre thing to pop into my memory so long after Barbara introduced to me Baudelaire … Anyway, we sit there at dinner and for a moment I almost forget what a mess my life is. Of course, it’s as daft as if the two of us were having a nice meditative chat in the trenches while the next day’s battle rises over us with the dawn. But I do love being with her—and it’s more than gratitude, which is also boundless. Yet I’m terribly afraid. I don’t want to fall in love with Iliana. I don’t want to fall in love with anyone. I don’t want to prove Laurence right. I don’t want to use her as some sort of liberating angel. Most of all, I cannot handle one more iota of stress.

  Meanwhile, it’s equally true that she relieves the stress. Shopping-bags full of Hope’s unsorted financial papers, stock certificates, etc., get carried back to her Grove Street apartment each night—because it’s the one place they can be until I organize them for the attorneys; they can’t go to the loft and they certainly can’t ricochet about with me from stayover to stayover. This weekend we’ll take a break from cleaning the co-op and I’ll go to her place and begin the sorting out, because at least some of the papers should be in the hands of Hope’s lawyers before I have to go out of town next week on two speaking dates.

  Meanwhile, too, back at the hospital, she just lies there. Dr. Grimes is being quite helpful. He says he’ll have her condition stabilized in about three weeks, barring complications—but that if I can’t find a nursing home and get the apartment sold to pay for it by that point, he can perhaps manage to stretch her stay in the hospital for another week or two beyond that. She has no place else to go. Neither does her daughter. The two of us, as she used to proclaim merrily, against the world.

  Oh, Momma.

  April 12, 1983

  Now at Leonora’s. I’ve been trying to keep the separation under wraps, but word is out at Athena. It’s just as well, since I frankly need to know who’s going out of town when, and for whom I can house-sit. Besides, as Iliana chortles, it’s good for the soul to learn a little humility. If I ever doubted that women were the best folks around I’m certainly learning it all over again.

  There it was, out of the blue, a call from Leonora saying that she would be taking her vacation to visit her family in Alabama for two weeks at Easter, and “would appreciate it” if I’d stay at her place on the Upper West Side, cat-sit, and look after her plants. No questions asked. The “feminist diplomacy” of women is awesome, though. When I went up to Leonora’s so she could give me keys and instructions, she managed to reek sympathy for my situation with no mention of any situation over which she might be reeking it. She showed me around her apartment, briefing me on its idiosyncrasies, and happened to explain that such-and-such vase had been a wedding present to celebrate her first marriage, such-and-such candelabra a wedding present to celebrate her second, and such-and-such items (microwave oven, cable TV) divorce presents to herself to celebrate her liberations. “Sweetie,” she tossed off in passing, “I’ve now been married to a white man and to a black man; one from Group A and one from Group B, Chinese-restaurant-menu style. The white one wore a gold earring, the black one wore a Brooks Brothers vest, neither one took out the garbage, and both claimed I was indispensable to their happiness. Of course,” she wound up slyly, “that was peachy by me—until I saw through the satisfaction of being indispensable for irrelevancies.”

  That was it. Nothing more was said.

  So here I am. My major problem in this apartment is that Leonora is five-foot-ten, tall enough to be a high-fashion model—“the Radcliffe Kikuyu,” she calls herself—so I am forever climbing up on things to get at other things. I’m sure the cat food, for example, is placed at normal height for her to reach; to me it seems stored at attic level.

  The only other problem is that Leonora’s is quite a distance from Hope’s apartment and from the hospital. I spend my life in buses and subways; only when approaching drop-dead state do I indulge in taxis. There’s the co-op over in Sutton Place, way on the East Side in the Fifties; there’s the hospital, also on the East Side, but twenty blocks north; there’s the loft, on the West Side but farther south in Chelsea; there’s Iliana on Grove Street, also on the West Side but way downtown in the Village. Yesterday—or was it the day before?—I seemed to circle the whole of Manhattan. That’s not counting trips to the lawyers’ offices (which are midtown), or to Athena (over in the West Side Forties jewelry district). It seems I go to Athena a lot these days, to deliver or pick up people’s housekeys, to pick up or deliver free-lance manuscripts. Charlotte seems acutely sensitive to the money crisis: I’m still waiting for colleges to pay, I’m still carrying all the loft bills, I’ve had to cover some of Hope’s urgent bills and make a payment on her medical costs as well-since her insurance records are in a mess and it will take time for the lawyers to straighten that out. Nor can I get a bank loan, because I’m free-lance and have no collateral. Never mind waving copies of your published books at a bank. They wouldn’t give a two-dollar loan to George Eliot if she rose from the grave and needed a twentieth-century shirt on her back; if she didn’t have a regular payroll salary, she could go floss her mill. Familiar problem: I remember Rick McPherson moaning about actors’ being unable to get bank loans because of being employed “irregularly.”

  Today Laurence and I crossed paths. It was at least civil. So naturally I cried for an hour afterward, sniveling on the street and pretending I had a cinder in my eye when people gawked. Also today, Hope looked directly at me, then shut her eyes against me. I sit each day for at least an hour by that hospital bed and try to talk with her:

  “Hello, Momma. It’s me, Julian. I love you. How’re you feeling?”

  Silence.

  “Spring’s hinting around out there, Momma, just faintly. It’s still chilly, but there’s a mild touch to the air.”

  Silence.

  “Hey, Little Momma, the doctor says you’re getting better. He says your heart is strong and you’re a real fighter. But you and I always knew that, huh?”

  Silence.

  “Would you like me to get you anything, Momma? Now that you’re off intravenous and you’re rehydrated, they say you can and should eat. ’Course, I know how vile hospital food is. But I could bring you some soup, or custard, or ice cream? Maybe a little chicken? You love barbecued chicken. I could smuggle some in?…”

  Silence.

  “Sorry I wasn’t here yesterday till the evening, Momma. I came right from the airport. I had to give a speech in Kansas.”

  Silence.

  “I got paid for it, Momma. It wasn’t a benefit.”

  Silence.

  I discard the wilted flowers I had brought a couple of days earlier. I put fresh flowers and fresh water in the vase on her bedtable. Silence. I kiss her hello. I kiss her goodbye. No physical response. Silence. It took me some tim
e to get up the courage to ask Grimes whether this was her condition or not. The reply, as I feared, was that she is capable of speaking and does so to the nurses and to him, though in slurred language and sometimes in a “displaced, depersonalized, and disoriented” fashion. But apparently there are also times when she recognizes her favorite nurses and garbles on chattily with them. For me: silence.

  The co-op dissolution moves on apace, thanks to Iliana’s help. She’s a dynamo. Bossy as hell, sometimes, but then again she’s usually right. I simply do not see how any of this could proceed without her. She claims she has the time and the will to do it, that helping “gives her pleasure.” I fail to see how scouring that filthy apartment could give anyone pleasure, to which she replies with the omniscient “Ta ta ta.” What’s more, she can be irresistibly funny in relating details of all her phone conversations about this: a crazy Argentinian exile keeping track, while I’m out of town, of the status with lawyers, realestate agents, co-op-building board, furniture and antique appraisers. I must sell whatever is minimally valuable—which seems to amount to the sideboard, the Sevrès plate, a few pieces of silver, her mink coat, and her jewelry—because she’ll lose money on the apartment sale since there’s no time to hold out for the price such a co-op normally would bring. Someone’s going to get a bargain.

  In the middle of all this, here I am, turtle with her home on her back, having schlepped my portable life—file folders and suitcase—to Leonora’s. Each friend’s home yields its own phenomena. Ginny, for instance, has few records but lots of tapes, most of them of the voice: operas, lieder, English folk songs, Bach cantati. Charlotte and Zach’s tastes run to symphonies (Beethoven and Brahms), Liszt, and scads of Broadway musicals. Now I’ve hit Leonora’s—which turns out to be Mozart, Aretha, and Grace Jones. It’s all very educative.