Lucia had written:
My father’s favorite saying is “Family Above All.” Growing up, our family has always been my father’s #1 priority and still is to this day!
I closed my eyes against my own yearning and jealousy. I couldn’t let myself imagine what it would be like to have a father like him. I would not let myself go there. It was senseless. It was pointless.
And yet. Could he possibly be? How accurate were these tests? The women in that picture could so easily have been my half-sisters. We had the same eyes, the same hair, and the same bone structure. A genetic test for popular consumption wasn’t likely to be foolproof. Maybe I was more closely linked with this family than it predicted.
What if that were indeed the case? The man’s blood type was O+. What was mine? I didn’t even know. Would I donate a kidney to a virtual stranger? I would if he were my father.
They would surely accept and embrace me then. They would reason that I was blameless, while my mother, elderly and skeletal and dying, would be no threat to anyone anymore. I saw myself recovering in a hospital bed, thronged by weeping and grateful women. There would be talk of how God worked in mysterious ways.
It was such a rosy fantasy that I clicked on the page they had created for prospective donors. Within a minute, I felt a pang of the sharpest disappointment.
The man was only sixty-one: too young to be my father.
I sat very still at my desk. He was theirs. He wasn’t mine. Or if he was mine in any sense at all, it was only in the most distant and tangential way.
But wasn’t even that worth investigating? The whole family looked lovely, and they might be the only blood connection I’d ever find on my father’s side. Maybe they would know exactly who he was.
A diaper salesman at Morrisania? I imagined one of them saying. That was my cousin Vinny!
One thing was certain: I’d never know unless I asked. And how could I not ask?
Lucia had posted her mother’s phone number within the paragraph so anyone who might want to be tested could talk with her directly. My hands were trembling as I dialed her cell.
“Hello?” It was, as expected, an older woman’s voice, but a warm and maternal one.
“Mrs. Fiore?”
“Yes?”
Here I began the fumbling, uncertain ritual—it was a ritual to me by now—of explaining this unlikeliest of calls. “My name is Stephanie,” I said. “I got your number from your daughter’s Facebook page. She posted it in connection with your husband’s . . . health situation.”
“Yes?” she said again, but this time she sounded breathless with excitement. Naturally she thought I was a prospective kidney donor.
“I was on your daughter’s page for a different reason,” I added hastily, hoping to head off her expectations. “You see, my mother is very sick, in fact she’s in the final stages of lung cancer.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Thank you,” I continued. “I guess because she’s dying, she recently told me a few things she’s kept secret all my life. She told me she had an affair with an Italian man from the Bronx, a man I’ve come to believe is my father.”
“Oh my,” she said, sounding confused.
“So I’ve been searching for him, and just today I learned from an ancestry service that your daughter and I are related.”
“Oh, oh,” she said after a moment. “Oh my heart. What are you telling me? Are you saying my Sal could be your father?”
“No,” I said, alarmed. “Not at all! I’m saying my father might be his cousin. Or your cousin, for that matter.”
“I always wondered if there could be someone else,” she went on, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Oh, but my heart can’t take any more trouble. Not this. Not now. There’s too much to bear already.”
“Mrs. Fiore,” I cut in. “Please! There’s absolutely no chance of that. Your husband is sixty-one. I just turned fifty. He was eleven years old when I was born.”
“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” she said rapidly under her breath. “And thank you, St. Joseph. You frightened me, honey.”
“I’m sorry,” I said sincerely. “I was just calling to see whether you might know of a cousin—on your side of the family or your husband’s—who was living in the Bronx in 1967. I know that for a while, at least, he was selling diapers at Morrisania Hospital.”
There was a long pause. “I don’t know about that, honey,” she finally said. “Sal doesn’t have much to do with the rest of his family. It’s a long story, but I don’t think we ever knew anyone who worked at a hospital or sold diapers. His father had a check-cashing business.”
“I see,” I said slowly.
“He’s at the hospital right now,” she told me. “He’s on nocturnal dialysis, you see. That means he gets it while he’s asleep. But I’ll ask him when I see him. I’ll be visiting him in the morning.”
“I appreciate that,” I said. “I’m so sorry to even show up at a time like this, Mrs. Fiore. I just don’t know where else to turn. Your daughters are the only lead I have in connection with my father.”
“You poor thing,” she said. “Of course we’ll try to help you, sweetheart. Like I said, I’ll talk to him in the morning and if we can think of anyone, we’ll let you know.”
After hanging up with Mrs. Fiore, I wanted to crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head. This was it. I was done.
I couldn’t go on like this: lurking on the fringes of happy, intact families, tugging on the sleeves of wives and daughters, timid and apologetic and begging for scraps. Even if they were polite to me, even if they were kind, to them I would always be unwanted, unwelcome—a threat.
Jim and Andrea came home with a pizza, and I sat with them until Andrea went to her room to do her homework. Then I told Jim I could feel a migraine coming on.
“I’m just going to lie down for a little while,” I said. “If I fall asleep, we’ll talk tomorrow, okay?”
Then I lay in the dark with my arms around my pillow and stared at the ceiling. When Jim eventually came to bed, I pretended to be asleep. I lay awake for many hours after my husband fell asleep himself. I felt as angry as I’d ever been.
I was angry that it had taken my mother more than fifty years to tell me the truth about my father. I was angry that she didn’t even remember his name, that I had nothing to go on and no way to find him. I was reduced to these humiliating overtures and set up for rejection again and again. She had been so heedless and selfish. Even now, she didn’t get it. She didn’t understand my anguish, or she didn’t care.
The following day, I left work at three to return to my mother’s hospice facility. By the time I pulled into the parking lot, I really did have a headache. I had barely slept, and it seemed that all the tension of the last twenty-four hours had gathered between my temples and behind my eyes.
“Mom, all my life you told me that my father was the dumpster rapist,” I said not a moment after walking through her door. “Do you have any idea what kind of shame that made me feel? Why would you tell your own child such a vicious lie?”
She was in the padded rocking chair by the window filing her nails, and she barely looked up. It was as if she had been expecting me and my outburst all day. “Louie would have killed me for sleeping with other men,” she said placidly. The nail file didn’t falter for a moment.
“But you kept it up long after he was dead.”
“Well, I guess after a while I started to believe it myself.”
“Mom,” I shot back, “you invented a blood link between me and a rapist, and the irony is there were so many wonderful real relatives you somehow never saw fit to mention! I have a legitimate connection with the Thorntons, for instance—people I could be so proud to claim as my own! But you hid that from me all this time. Why?”
I wasn’t expecting a real answer, so it startled me when my mother blurted: “Because after I was raped, I was garbage to them!”
I was surprised into silence. For a
moment it was so quiet I could hear the snip of the gardener’s shears outside the window.
“Is that true, Mom?” I asked after a long moment.
“Yes, it is.”
“Did you feel they blamed you?”
“I don’t know about that. All I know is that it ruined me in their eyes. They never looked at me the same way again.” To my amazement, her eyes filled with tears. “They could hardly look at me at all,” she added.
“That’s terrible, Mom,” I said, stricken. “I didn’t know that. Now so much makes sense to me. Why you were always running away. I didn’t know. You never told me.”
“I don’t like to remember it,” she said.
“I understand,” I told her. In that moment, I also understood something else: Even if my father hadn’t been her literal rapist, I was still in the deepest sense a product of rape—her gang rape. All her children were. We were the result of her self-abdication.
“No, you don’t,” my mother told me. “Honestly, Stephanie, you can’t understand what I’ve been through in my life.”
“Yes, I can.” I said, surprised by the vehemence in my voice. “I have been through a hell of a lot in my life, Mom. I was sexually abused, too. Maybe not for ten straight days in some hidden room, but on an ongoing basis for more than a year in my own foster home, by the people who were supposed to take care of me. I’ve been violated, I’ve been homeless, I’ve been hungry and cold and afraid and alone. I lost sight in one eye because you never took me to a doctor. I’ve been through plenty in my life, Mom, and I had to get through it by myself. I had to process it all on my own.”
She was quiet then. I dropped onto the window seat next to her bed, spent. After a long moment, she met my gaze and nodded.
“We are both survivors, Steph,” she said. “We have that in common, I guess. We don’t have much, but we have that.”
At this, whatever was left of my rage evaporated.
“Yes,” I said softly, “we do have that, Mom.”
“And you’re right. I’ve spent my whole life running from what happened to me.”
“Mom, we can both stop running now. We have the truth, and now we don’t have to run anymore.”
This sounded so good to me as I said it that I almost expected to hear violins swelling into song. At that moment I felt like the heroine of my mother’s story as well as my own. As if I’d freed not only myself from some intergenerational cycle of wretchedness, but freed her as well.
But driving home after my hospice visit, I was struck by how deftly, as always, my mother had turned the tables on me. I’d come in fired up and furious, intent on finally confronting her about the sadistic lie she’d told me throughout my childhood. Wanting her to acknowledge the ways I’d suffered at her hands.
She’d turned it around, made it all about her—about all that she had suffered, her own victimhood. I’d ended up comforting her as usual. At most, she had extended her survivor status to me and offered me a space beneath that umbrella. She had taken no responsibility for her part in it, and she never would.
I had to accept that she simply wasn’t capable of accountability. It wasn’t even a matter of choice. If my mother could live differently, then surely she would. Who would choose to be broken and alone at seventy-six? Who would choose a life of psych wards, jail cells, chaos, poverty, and estranged and angry children?
My mother’s trauma had broken her. She had never really recovered. She had no capacity for love or introspection. As I’d learned in the wake of her Easter visit, no transformation had taken place on her part. With so little time left in her life, I had to face the overwhelming likelihood that none ever would.
Chapter 28
AT FIVE THIRTY in the morning on December 29, my bedroom door creaked and our dog barked. The call came just a moment later. I like to imagine that my mother paid me one final visit as she departed from this world.
All my life I’ve heard stories like this, of otherworldly dispatches, coincidences too outlandish to have happened by chance. A framed photo of a friend falls over on the night table, its pane of glass cracking into a mosaic. A phone call follows within the hour, to relay the news of that friend’s death—at precisely the moment the photo fell.
A woman hears her sister saying goodbye so clearly that she actually looks around for her, even though her sister lives across the country. Again, the call comes soon afterward, and again the time of death matches the inexplicable communiqué.
Sometimes the case for a visitation is more of a stretch:
All her life, she loved monarch butterflies. It was her thing. She had monarch-patterned scarves, monarch stationery, a monarch brooch. Well, the last time I visited her grave, a monarch landed on the edge of her headstone and stayed there for the longest time. I knew it was her.
Or: I knew she had sent it.
It was a message. A sign. That she was okay. That she was still with me.
I have a secret weakness for these stories. I tend to believe them. I’ve climbed out from the crushed insides of two totaled cars without so much as a scratch. If I can feel divinely protected after a childhood like mine, how can I feel skeptical about someone else’s butterfly messenger?
I like to imagine my mother sweeping by our house on her journey from this world. My childish imagination has her floating by in a mist of stardust. She peeks in on me, tucked snugly between Jim and our dog, and feels reassured, as a mother should.
My need to invent a watchful and attentive mother is strong even now. My need to believe in a transformation endures. But as wishful as it sounds, I do think a transformation finally took place. The last weeks of my mother’s life were unlike any other time during our half-century together.
WHEN HER MEDICAL team told me that my mother was actively dying and it was time to move her to hospice, I chose Gracelen Terrace for its cleanliness and natural light, its tranquil neighborhood and well-kept grounds, and because somehow it reminded me of the motel where my mother had been a maid, the last place our family felt secure and happy.
Gracelen Terrace is a long, low-slung building in Southeast Portland. If you took four or five houses from a Monopoly game, laid them end-to-end, and painted them white, leaving only the trim in its original green, you’d have the nursing home. Lilies and flowering sage added splashes of color by the entrance. Beside the birdbath in the courtyard, a stone angel peered at her own upturned palms, which hovered before her face as if supporting an invisible book.
As with all the other places she had lived since her diagnosis, I decorated her hospice room. Knowing how she hated fluorescent tube lighting, I brought in a floor lamp and a desk lamp, both with pink shades to bring a warm glow to the space. I brought luxurious bedding, bright throw pillows, a small velvet armchair, and half a dozen framed photos.
She had reached out one day to touch my faux fur coat with a look of yearning, and so I brought in a throw for her that was made of the same material, cream-colored and kitten-soft. After every sponge bath or bedding change, someone would tuck the throw back in around her body. She loved the feel of it beneath her fingertips, stroking it even in her sleep.
Each week I brought in freshly cut tulips, always in the same color—a flaming and luminous pink. The same shade as the ocean sky at dawn, my childhood color of hope. Even as the sun was setting on my mother’s life, I hoped it would rise in the better place that the chaplain said she was destined for. I prayed he was right about that, but it wouldn’t take much. Any place was better than the world as my mother had known it since 1953.
ONE EVENING DURING this time, I spoke with my son Josh, who had moved to New York City. He too had recently taken part in a deathbed vigil. He and several of his musician friends had gathered for a few days at the bedside of a female friend dying of bone cancer.
“She wanted us to sing for her, so we did,” he told me over the phone. “We sang her out, we sang her on her way.”
“That’s so beautiful,” I whispered, struck both by the visual an
d his phrasing.
We sang her out. We sang her on her way.
I was no singer, but I could love my mother out. I could love her on her way.
ON HER LAST lucid evening, she and I went to an Elvis concert in the dining hall after dinner. The impersonator was a middle-aged man with all the usual accoutrements: sequin-studded white jumpsuit, dyed-black pompadour and sideburns, dark shades and heavily ringed hands. He swaggered around the floor, crooning the lyrics of “Love Me Tender” and “Blue Christmas,” serenading old women in their wheelchairs and high-fiving the elderly men. My mother loved it. I felt a surge of joy every time she laughed at his antics or clapped with appreciation. She still loved music, however it came.
“Stephanie,” she said in her room just afterward, as I was getting ready to leave. “Hand me my purse.”
She was sitting in her nightgown on the edge of the bed, bare feet dangling over the side.
“Sure, Mom,” I said, taking the beaded macramé bag from the dresser and setting it down beside her. “What do you need?”
“And my shoes.”
“Your shoes?” I asked, confused. Was she thinking of trying to go somewhere? “Do you mean your slippers?”
“No, my moccasins,” she said, referring to the shearling-lined shoes she hadn’t touched in weeks.
“Mom, what do you need shoes for?” I asked. “It’s bedtime.”
Even as I said this, I was bringing them to her. Obeying her was a habit it seemed I would never break.
She set the shoes beside her on the bed and then began pulling things out of her purse: a lipstick, half a roll of cough drops, loose change, and a lone key. One by one, she shoved them into the toe of her left moccasin, out of sight.
“There,” she said. “A perfect fit. That’s much better, don’t you think?”
“Better than what?” I asked, hearing my voice go high with alarm. “Mom, what are you doing?”
American Daughter Page 25