by Ann Leary
“But we’re not doing it as a group,” Denis said. “You’ve already answered the easy ones, and now you’re tormenting everybody with the ones nobody knows.”
“Here’s one you’ll know: Who was Superman’s mother? Four letters. C’mon, this is the last one I’ll ask.”
SO I SAT in my metal hospital bed and participated in the puzzling. I couldn’t figure out a way of explaining how annoying it was without hurting her feelings. I’ve never been able to confront my mother about certain tendencies she has, because, according to a therapist I started going to later, I suffer from fears of abandonment. “Doesn’t everybody?” I asked her. “Who wants to be abandoned?”
My mother doesn’t believe in therapy, which is a shame, not because I think she would benefit in any way from it but because her childhood was a veritable treasure trove of dysfunction, and it lies fallow, purposely locked away in her mind. I think it’s a crime that analysts sit listening to people like me whine about this slight or that misunderstanding when somebody like my mother walks about with rich secrets buried beneath the perky mantle of modified reality she has created. It’s like somebody with a collection of rare first-edition books stored away in a damp, moldy basement, unaware of its worth to collectors and curators.
Whenever I ask my mother about her childhood, she sighs heavily and acts as if I’ve just asked her to conjugate verbs in Latin. It’s all too tedious for words, is the impression she likes to give, but the tidbits I’ve wrenched from her in moments of weakness or drunkenness are astonishingly sad. Her father, Eugene, went off to fight in World War II and never returned. He returned from the war, but not to her home, and her mother, abandoned and bitter, moved my mother and her brother from Philadelphia to rural northern Pennsylvania, where my grandmother could thoroughly indulge her alcoholism and depression. My mother was a lonely child who couldn’t bring friends home from school for fear they would find my grandmother “out of sorts.”
Once, when my grandmother had suffered some form of collapse, my grandfather came to get the kids. My grandfather was a salesman in New York, living in a single room, so he dropped my mom and her brother at the home of a friend who had a wife and children. My mother, who was apparently about seven years old and had never met these people before, cried inconsolably for a day or two. When Eugene came to get my mother, he had some harsh words for her in the car. This caused her to cry again, whereupon he turned around and ordered her to stop. And I imagine that there was something in his tone or demeanor that was terrifying, because my mother did stop crying, and to this day she is proud to be able to say that she’s not an emotional person.
Denis’s mother, Nora, on the other hand, is happy to tell stories about her childhood, and who wouldn’t be, with a childhood as quaint and picturesque as hers? There were six siblings in her family’s home, which was on a dairy farm, and their house had no electricity or running water. Each day the milk was hauled to the village in the back of a pony cart. A large stone fireplace heated the entire house, fueled with sod that the men and children carved out of nearby bogs. The children walked three miles to school each morning and then three miles home in the afternoons. In the evenings, for entertainment, the family sat around kerosene lanterns and told stories, or somebody would play the fiddle, or a child would dance.
Each spring Nora’s father sprinkled holy water, blessed by the parish priest, on his fields as a blessing for the new season’s crops. One year, when Nora was quite small, she and one of her sisters were sent to Killarney to fetch a bucket of holy water from the church. It was a long walk from their farm to Killarney, and Nora and her sister began fooling around a little bit on the way home. Eventually Nora started swinging the bucket of holy water over her head and was marveling at the powers of centrifugal force when the handle broke. The holy water spilled all over the road and trickled down into a ditch. Nora and her sister were terrified. A spanking was in store for them, they knew, if they showed up at home with an empty bucket, so they filled the bucket with water from a nearby stream. That evening the family said a prayer and Nora’s father took a branch from an evergreen and dipped it into the bucket of water. Then he sprinkled the stream water all over his newly seeded fields. Nora spent many sleepless nights worrying about the day when the seeds would sprout, rotted with blight, reeking and fermented. “But,” said Nora, “wouldn’t you know the beans and potatoes came in that year bigger and healthier than any year before or since!”
The day Denis’s younger sister was born, their father, John, wanted to buy Nora flowers, but payday wasn’t until the next day, and he had no money. As he walked to the hospital, a five-dollar bill flew across the street and plastered itself against his pant leg. This is a favorite Leary story, as it summarizes how things often turn out for them, luck and birth and family all happily intertwined.
PART TWO
Special Care
SIX
IN THE UNITED STATES, neonatal units are referred to by the clinical-sounding term “Neonatal Intensive Care Unit,” or NICU (pronounced NICK-you). In Britain they are given a cuddlier name—“Special Care Baby Unit,” or SCBU (pronounced SKI-boo). One day, when my mother was visiting, a sister named Chris came to see me. She was from the SCBU and brought a photo album filled with pictures of premature babies. She said that the neonatal staff, when possible, thought it was helpful to prepare parents for what their baby would look like and what life was like in the SCBU.
I opened the photo album. I had seen preemies on news programs, and the babies in these photos were of the same breed. They were almost indistinguishable from one another, with their pinched faces and tube-filled noses, their splayed poses seemingly inspired by science-lab frogs. Each infant’s date of birth and gestational age were printed underneath its photo. In some cases there was a picture of a fat, healthy, finished-looking baby next to the preemie, with a later date printed underneath. “Is that the same baby?” I asked, hopefully, and Chris said, “Yes!” and then she showed me some more before-and-after photos. Most of the after photos revealed perfectly normal-looking babies, and when I commented enthusiastically about this, Chris said that most babies who leave the unit are normal in the long run, but she reminded me that many of the babies are only a few weeks premature when they’re born. Chris then offered to take us downstairs for a tour of the unit, and my mother and I accepted gratefully.
From the third-floor ward, we took an elevator down to a narrow corridor that led right into the SCBU. There were four separate rooms in the SCBU, Chris told us, and we began by looking in Room D, which was the room for babies who are almost ready to go home. These babies were either born recently, only slightly premature, or had been born several months before and had graduated to Room D, after making their way through Rooms A, B, and C. In Room C, there were four other relatively healthy babies, all in the three-to-four-pound range. Rooms A and B held smaller, sicker babies, and although I had seen photographs, I was overwhelmed by the sight of these tiny infants.
Very-low-birth-weight premature babies have straight limbs. This, to me, more than their tiny size or wizened facial features, is what causes them to appear most unbabylike. A full-term baby spends its final few months tightly hugged by the womb and is born with knees and elbows folded, a chubby package designed to fit perfectly in the crook of an arm. Preemies lie flat, like marionettes before a show, their legs and arms straight, skin draped across bone. The heat in the isolette makes their skin dry, and Chris told us that their lips must be dabbed constantly with Vaseline to keep them from cracking. These tiny babies didn’t cry—they just slept—but I sensed their awful solitude. I imagined that if they had any consciousness or sensibility at all, it would be that life now was hard, and it had once been warm, fluid, and easy.
Chris showed us a baby who’d been born at twenty-seven weeks’ gestation, which was about my baby’s gestational age. He was lying on a flat table, and Chris explained that when premature infants are first born, they’re placed on these warming beds, whic
h are basically just heated tables. This helps the infants stay warm and also allows the doctors and nurses easy access to them. Once their body temperature becomes stable, they’re moved into an isolette—the covered incubator with two holes on the side for caregivers’ arms. As we gazed at this baby, his grandparents arrived to have a first look at their grandson. They stared at him silently, and then, as we turned to leave, I heard the grandfather say quietly to his wife, “The poor little mite.”
Chris wheeled me back to the elevator. The ride up to the ward was silent. She told me that if I had any questions at any time I could send for her. When she left, my mother said, “That was so nice of her, wasn’t it?” and I burst into tears. My mother turned away from me then, and I saw that she was crying, too, my mother who never cries.
WHEN I WAS very young, we lived in Maryland in an old house near the Chesapeake Bay. On Saturdays my father used to take my brother and me out rowing on the bay in our dinghy. We would tie a fish head to a piece of string and lower it into the water. When we pulled it up, there would be a crab, or sometimes two or three, attached to the fish, and my dad would scoop it up in a net for my mom to cook when we got home.
One Saturday my mother, father, brother, sister, and I all crowded into the dinghy, and my father rowed us out to a little island for a picnic. My brother and I explored a nearby pine grove while our parents and baby Meg stayed on the beach. In the shadows of a winding path, partially hidden by a fern, I found a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. I didn’t know what it was at first. It was almost all head. Its legs were curled beneath the mottled gray body, and its wings were just tiny buds. I had never seen anything so naked and frail. Looking closer, I saw that it had a tiny beak and that its eyes, which bulged from the side of its head, were covered by thin, filmy eyelids. The bird opened its beak wide, then closed it, and I carefully picked it up. I was amazed at its weightlessness. I cradled the bird in my hand. When I held it up in front of my face, its moist head drooped against my thumb.
Carefully, tenderly, I carried the hatchling down to the beach in my hands, but when I showed it to my parents, my mother smiled sadly and said, “You shouldn’t have touched it.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because now the mother won’t want to take care of it.”
We all walked back to the place where I had found it, and we looked in the trees above for a nest, but there wasn’t one.
“You have to leave it here,” my mother said.
“But it’ll die,” I protested.
“It’ll die anyway,” my mother said. “Leave it alone.”
I held the bird against my face and felt the soft pulse of its heart against my palm. I started crying. When my mother tried to get the bird away from me, I became hysterical. Finally she relented angrily, shaking her head and stomping back to the dinghy. I pulled up the bottom of my T-shirt and made a little hammock for the bird, then climbed into the boat.
On the way home, I held my hand over the small, warm lump in my shirt and thought about my bird and our future together. I would name him Sweetie and feed him from an eyedropper. When he grew, I would walk around the neighborhood with him on my shoulder, and all the neighborhood kids would run out to the sidewalk to watch us pass. I would teach Sweetie to fly, and the day would come when I would set him free, only to have him circle back to me after one glorious soar above the neighborhood. Sweetie would live the rest of his life as my half-wild bird friend. When I left school each afternoon, he would swoop down from the tree where he’d spent the entire day watching me through my classroom window. I would walk home with Sweetie flying just above my head, and the other kids would point to me and shout, “There she is! There’s the girl who tames birds!” and they would crowd around me murmuring in awe, begging to be my friend. As my father rowed us back to the mainland, these thoughts built to a crescendo of ecstatic delusion. Catching my mother’s eye, I smiled with delight. She mistook the smile for a gloating smirk related to her defeat in our battle of wills, and she said, also smiling but staring fixedly into my eyes, “You are a spoiled brat.”
That night I tried to feed the bird from an eyedropper filled with milk, but the milk dribbled out the sides of its beak. I dug up a worm and tried to place it in the baby’s beak, as a mother bird might, but the baby didn’t seem to know what to do with it. I tried to ignore the stabbing pangs of guilt I felt when I recalled my mother’s words about how I shouldn’t have touched the baby bird in the first place. If I had left it on the island, would the mother bird be feeding it now? I imagined the baby nestling down with its mother for the night, its nude, unfinished form tucked safely beneath her warm, feathered breast.
My mother helped me fill a shoe box with grass and leaves, to keep the bird warm, and we put the box high on a shelf where our cat couldn’t get it. The next morning I woke my dad up early and begged him to get the box down for me. I waited expectantly as he carefully lowered the box. Surely the bird would be stronger today, I thought. Maybe its eyes would be open. Maybe it would recognize my scent and understand that I was its new mother. But it had died in the night, and my father buried it beneath a bush in our backyard. “It’s better to leave them alone,” my father said as he carried the box outside.
SEVEN
DURING OUR SECOND week in London, Denis visited with me during the day, and during the evenings he made his B and B money performing at the Comedy Store and various other clubs in and around London. It’s hard to imagine now how Denis managed to perform onstage and be funny during such a crisis, but he’d been doing stand-up for years. It was his only source of income. Often one gig would be our entire rent. He got onstage when he was sick, when he was tired, even the night several years earlier when his beloved father had died.
He’d never had such a succession of knockout performances as the one he was experiencing in London, however. It seemed that the British audiences loved Denis’s edgier material, so he came up with some new stuff, and they loved that, too. The producers of the Paramount City show booked Denis for a repeat performance on the Saturday after his original show, and we were very grateful for their generosity.
The day of that second Paramount City performance turned out to be one that would find itself on the pages of Britain’s history books. It was March 31, 1990, the day of the infamous poll-tax riots in London. Until that March I had lived my entire life happily unaware of anything associated with British politics and national affairs. I knew that the prime minister was Margaret Thatcher, that she was a Conservative crony of Reagan and Bush, and … well, that was about it. How was I to know that Thatcher was devising an overhaul of the nation’s system of taxation in a manner so unfair and illogical that thousands of people would take to the streets in a demonstration that would turn violent and cause my husband and Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler to stand trembling in the vestibule of the Paramount City Theatre, watching their driver’s car be set afire? When Denis arrived at the hospital that evening, hours after he’d said he would come visit me, I listened with skepticism to his tales of walking through rioting crowds.
“Really, all you have to say is that you wanted to hang out with Mark Knopfler,” I said to him.
“Honey, I’m telling you, there were people turning over parked cars. I saw a mounted cop take out a guy with his bat, right in front of me!”
“Right, right, whatever,” I said. “Please lower your voice. There’s no reason everybody in this room has to hear your convoluted excuses.”
* * *
I MET DENIS at Emerson College in Boston, in the fall of 1982. The summer before, I’d been planning to return for my third year at Bennington College in Vermont, when I awoke one morning with the urgent realization that I couldn’t bear another Vermont winter. I wanted to be in a city. I applied to Emerson’s Department of Creative Writing and Literature just a few weeks before school was scheduled to begin in the fall, and, amazingly, I was accepted.
The head of the writing department, Dr. James Randall, had
encouraged me to sign up for a class called Comedy Writing. Dr. Randall explained that Norman Lear, an Emerson alumnus, sent a representative to review material from the class each winter and had hired a few writers for his television shows over the years. The girl who was hired the year before was now living in Los Angeles and earning an astounding $700 a week. At the time I was earning $120 a week working in a flower shop on Charles Street. Seven hundred dollars every week seemed like a scandalously exorbitant amount of money. What would a person do with all that money? I wondered greedily. I hastily signed up for the class and left Dr. Randall’s office dizzy with hope and longing. I’m funny, I thought. All my friends tell me I’m funny. I walked down Beacon Street and envisioned myself sitting around a table with my classmates. I watched them read my material and convulse with laughter, pounding their desks with their fists and gasping for breath, tears streaming down their faces. I imagined the flight to Los Angeles, accompanied by the scout who refused to leave me in Boston another minute. Then I saw myself at a table surrounded by staff writers, who were writhing in their seats, screaming with laughter at my script suggestions. The Mercedes convertible, the house in Malibu, the closet filled with Italian shoes—it was all suddenly within my grasp thanks to Dr. Randall’s suggestion that I take a class taught by a comedy writer named Mr. Leary.
On the first day of the comedy class, nine other students and I sat in a classroom when a young man walked in and leaned on the desk in the front of the room. At first I assumed that the skinny blond guy was another student, but he greeted us in a welcoming sort of way, and then he sat on the desk. The teacher’s desk. This couldn’t possibly be Mr. Denis Leary, the teacher on my registration form, I thought. It occurred to me that he might have been the student assistant/gay lover of the teacher (I had just transferred from Bennington) and was filling in while Mr. Leary screened calls from Hollywood agents desperate for writers.