The Escape Artist

by Helen Fremont

  Silence.

  “Mom, you called me about Dad’s service, and—”

  I heard my mother break into a sob. “Helen? Can it be… Helen? Is it you?”

  “Yes, Mom, I just got your message.” She had called me only an hour or two earlier.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you called!” she said. “Dad’s service is on Monday. I hope you can attend.” Suddenly she was all business.

  She gave me the address of the funeral home, I promised to be there, and we hung up.

  I couldn’t know it at the time, but four years later, my mother would be diagnosed with dementia. In retrospect, it is likely that she was already suffering from the beginning stages of the disease in 2001. Her inability to recognize my voice on the phone alarmed me, but in other respects, her brusque response to my call was not so different from how she had always been.

  * * *

  It wasn’t a funeral. It wasn’t a memorial service. It was at some random funeral home in downtown Schenectady. Lara and my mother had arranged it, but my father wasn’t even there. He was in a box of ashes in the basement at home. The funeral home provided a large room where people could show up, express their condolences, and either hang out or leave. My father had always said he didn’t want any kind of service or ceremony—no hoopla, nothing that would draw attention or cost money. Just burn him and be done with him. But this place seemed about as far as one could get from my parents’ taste. It was like a mobster’s idea of swank. The wall-to-wall carpet was busy with burgundy and white doohickeys reminiscent of fleurs-de-lis; the wallpaper was striped with garish hints of silver and gold. A few love seats in an aggressive shade of pink or green sat back-to-back, and an end table offered a small glass bowl of peppermint pinwheel candies. It took me a while to notice two cloth-covered consoles along the wall. My father’s old leather medical bag and stethoscope were displayed on one table, next to two issues of the Harvard Review in which his personal essays about the Gulag had been published. They’d also laid out his violin in its velvet-lined case—a sort of miniature open casket with his bow leaning against it. On another table rested an intricately carved rectangular wooden box that he had made for my mother in Rome as a surprise for her twenty-eighth birthday in 1947. It was large enough to fit documents and letters, photos and knickknacks. The lid had warped with age, and the delicate trim he’d carved out of ebony had started to break off. The broken pieces were loose inside the empty box that would no longer close.

  * * *

  Donna and I had driven the Mass Pike from Boston earlier that afternoon, and arrived at the funeral home at dusk. My anxiety was through the roof—I was afraid to see my mother after such a long and painful silence. She was the one person whose love I still longed for. Would she be gracious or cold? Would she pretend nothing had happened, or would she pretend not to recognize me at all?

  The prospect of seeing Lara also made me nervous. Ever since her flip in 1996 over my writing, I had ceased to trust her—or rather, I’d ceased to trust myself around her; I was afraid I’d be lulled back in by her charm. I missed her terribly, and my longing for her scared me.

  When Donna and I entered the funeral home, a clutch of people I didn’t know were milling about on that hideous carpet. My eyes landed on a beautiful woman in an elegant black wool dress that made her look like she belonged on Fifth Avenue. Cultivated, sophisticated, a commanding woman of good taste: my mother. Her hair was swept up in a wild burst of silver and white with some darker notes, like a very rich, very lush black-and-white photograph.

  Mom walked briskly toward me, saying, “Oh, here she is,” as if I had just stepped out for a cup of coffee. Before I could say a word, she linked my arm in hers, and off we went. My sister, I realized, was on her other arm; I could feel Lara’s eyes assessing me. We said nothing. Mom was steering us around the room as if we were the prow of a ship, the three of us, aligned and intertwined, moving as one.

  Donna had simply disappeared. I don’t know how it happened. One minute I was walking into the funeral home with her at my side, and the next minute my mother—how radiant she looked!—collected me as if I were a package she had been expecting. She didn’t even pause to greet or thank the delivery person—Donna, my wife. And I was too caught up in the world that is my mother to notice that my wife had fallen by the wayside. I was pulled into the world I knew by heart, that I knew in my bones: Planet Mom.

  My mother was introducing Lara and me now to Mr. So-and-So, who had been a patient of Dad’s, and to his wife, whose parents and even grandparents had also been his patients.

  I smiled and nodded, and on the opposite side of my mother, Lara did the same. Off we went to greet someone else. I let myself be paraded. It was surreal, my hopes through the roof. Just like that, I seemed to be welcomed back into the fold as if nothing had happened. A wonderful relief, a giddy sense of possibility, and also that unreal quality that I recognized so well: the whiplash of going from three years of estrangement to instant intimacy, without passing Go, without a moment’s pause. Like an alternate universe we had all just stepped into, over an invisible threshold.

  Hours later, when the room emptied, Donna materialized, together with our Italian cousin Nina—Renzo’s daughter—who now worked on Wall Street. Nina’s girlfriend, Claudia, and Lara’s partner, Jess, had both stayed back at Mom’s house with Jess’s kids, aged five and two. My mother turned to me. “Are you coming home?” she asked. “We’ll have dinner—there’s plenty for everyone.”

  Donna and I agreed, and we drove back to the house. I hadn’t been there in years. It was strange to enter now—the dark brick floors of my childhood, the majestic Oriental rugs, the immense fire in the fireplace. Nothing had changed. Everything had changed. I had changed.

  By the time Donna and I arrived, the house was already full of lesbians. We were everywhere—cooking a giant pot of pasta in the kitchen, setting the table, finding extra chairs, playing with Lara and Jess’s kids. For the first time, I met Claudia, and marveled at how young and sharp she and Nina looked together. Earlier at the funeral home, Mom had made sure that none of our partners were present or came near us. She’d introduced only Lara and me to the guests; occasionally she might introduce our cousin Nina. I was used to playing it straight around my mother. But now in the privacy of our home, Mom seemed perfectly happy to be the matriarch of a family of six lesbians and two little girls conceived with the help of an anonymous donor. Dad’s death had left the family completely free of testosterone.

  Dinner was boisterous and good-humored. Wine helped. I started to relax a little, enjoy myself. We laughed and told stories—some involving Dad’s battles with squirrels and snow and peanut shells; others about our own foibles. Although Lara couldn’t meet my gaze, I felt relieved to be welcome at home. We seemed to draw closer with each story, each peal of laughter. As if we were a family again.

  “How long are you staying?” my mother asked at the end of the evening.

  “Just overnight,” I said. “We’re staying at a motel on State Street.”

  “So come for breakfast!” she said.

  Donna and I exchanged glances. I was quietly elated that my mother had invited us, but I also wondered whether perhaps we should quit while we were ahead. I tried to assess how Donna was holding up, whether she could take any more of this. She was doing the same with me. Optimism won out, and we exchanged an oh, what the hell shrug.

  * * *

  By the time we got to the house at nine the next morning, everyone but Mom and Lara had already left. Jess had driven the two kids back to Burlington; Nina and her girlfriend had taken the train to New York. Mom made us a fresh pot of coffee. Her homemade babka, sprinkled with powdered sugar, rose proudly from a platter of crumbs, half of it already ravaged.

  “Sit, sit!” my mother commanded, and rushed around, pouring coffee, cutting giant slabs of babka onto plates. Lara hesitated before sitting across from me. She seemed uneasy in my presence and shifted sideways in the chair, facing Donna, w
ho sat next to me.

  Donna smiled at her. “So, how are you doing?” she asked Lara. Donna had always liked my sister, but had been jolted by Lara’s outburst five years earlier, when she had called in a rage, backed out of our wedding, and slammed down the phone. It was the first time Donna had seen that side of Lara for herself.

  Lara shook her head. “It’s really rough,” she said. “But you know, it’s also sort of bittersweet. Dad was so debilitated—this past year, it’s been really touch-and-go. So in a way, it’s almost a relief. But still… I don’t know… have you ever lost someone close?”

  Donna nodded. “My mother died in March.”

  Lara’s eyes went wide, and she looked as if she’d been sucker-punched. I was pleased. It didn’t seem to have occurred to her that our lives might not have gone swimmingly this past year either.

  “Oh, wow,” Lara said. “I’m sorry. Um… how did…?”

  “It was very sudden,” Donna said. “She had a heart attack.”

  “Oh,” Lara said. “So you’ve been through all this.…” She looked uncomfortable.

  My mother said nothing.

  Lara slouched lower in her chair. She had avoided eye contact with me ever since I’d arrived yesterday, and now that we were sitting directly across from each other, her discomfort was even more evident. I studied her closely, interested in how she would handle my presence, and surprised by her obvious difficulty in playing the part of friendly sister set for us by our mother. Instead, Lara stared at her hands, picked at her cuticles, and turned to face Donna. “So how are you doing now?” Lara asked.

  Donna shrugged. “Well, I just finished chemo. I had a recurrence of cancer, and surgery last year. So I was still on chemo when my mother died. I had to interrupt treatment for a week to go to Atlanta.” Donna didn’t mention that after surgery, six out of the eight lymph nodes had tested positive for cancer.

  I enjoyed seeing Lara’s reaction. It seemed to take the wind out of her sails. I dared Lara to look at me, but she kept her head down. She even had trouble looking at Donna now.

  My mother remained silent, but I could see that she had been following the conversation closely. Her face was attentive, but she said nothing.

  “Oh,” Lara mumbled. “I’m sorry.”

  Donna changed the subject. “The babka is delicious!” she said.

  My mother beamed. “Would you like another piece? Another cup of coffee? Helen?”

  We shook our heads.

  I realized that I was hoping for something like sympathy from my mother. At least some acknowledgment that Donna and I had been through our own nightmare during the past year. But Mom seemed utterly unaffected by our news.

  “I was afraid I would lose her,” I said to my mother. “It’s a very aggressive cancer.”

  My mother’s eyes flashed. “This was my husband!” she said.

  I felt as if I’d been slapped. I kept quiet.

  Lara abruptly pushed away from the table. “I’m going to do some work outside,” she said. She had been fidgety all morning, and she was already halfway across the room before my mother called her back.

  “Wait, Lara! Wait, before you go—bring me one of your cards, would you? You know, your new business card.”

  Lara rolled her eyes. “Mom—”

  “It won’t take a moment—just bring the card. Please, darling?”

  Lara sighed and left the room.

  “Wait till you see it!” my mother said excitedly. “I am so proud of her! You know, she was just wonderful to Dad over these past years.… I don’t know where I would be without her. She helped with everything—the doctors, the medication, the paperwork.… It’s her thoughtfulness, you know—she is so generous, so loving and devoted.”

  I found my throat tightening with hatred for my sister and irritation with my mother. She’s just lost her husband, I reminded myself. I have no right to expect anything from her I’m lucky she’s even invited me into the house. Still, it grated on my nerves, her going on and on about what a fucking hero Lara was.

  My mother smiled. “You know, whenever Dad asked, Lara would drive home to be with him. He wanted her all to himself, so she would come alone, without Jess, without the kids. I think this was a very important time for them—they repaired their relationship, you know.”

  I said nothing, but thought acidly, Wow, it must have taken quite a while to repair Lara’s memories of Dad repeatedly raping her as an infant.

  “Oh! Here it is!” My mother jumped up when Lara came back with her wallet. “Look at this!” Mom said, holding Lara’s business card out to me. “Just look at this!” My hackles went up, the old jealousy. At forty-four, I was still angered by my mother’s rapture over my older sister.

  Lara dropped her head, apparently uncomfortable herself under the circumstances. I almost felt sorry for her. She tried to slip out of the room, but Mom called her back.

  “She’s a professor! Do you see?” Mom said. “Here, look—take it, read it! You see? She’s a professor, chair of the department at the medical school!”

  I pretended to look at the card—I noted the university’s seal in red and black ink—okay, so she’d rated a card with color. Big deal. I used to have a business card with two colors too, till Massachusetts suffered budget cuts and everything went back to black and white. Mom motioned for me to pass the card to Donna. “Imagine! Chair of the department! A professor!”

  Lara managed to escape out the back door and started attacking the yard with what looked like some kind of giant machete. My mother sat down, still beaming, staring at the card. “You see,” she said in a more solemn tone. “It was all worth it.” She nodded thoughtfully. “All those years… We had some hard times.… But it was all worth it.”

  I was too stunned to say anything. On the one hand, I was relieved that Mom acknowledged those “hard times.” That was not like Mom. Usually she swept anything unpleasant out of memory, and certainly out of mention. She edited the story of her life over and over, as one might crop a photograph in a darkroom, so that she could bear to see the image of herself reflected back at her. I hung on to this tendril of validation from my mother, and choked back my rage. Lara’s career achievement made it “all worth it”? Thank God Donna was here, I thought. I needed a witness. I needed someone to tell me that I hadn’t made all this up.

  My mother poured herself more coffee and began talking animatedly about the last year with my father, how crippled he was from Parkinson’s, how she’d insisted on taking him outside on forced marches to keep him moving, holding on to him with a thick leather belt she tied around his waist so he wouldn’t fall over.

  I could picture her doing this, my eighty-two-year-old mother marching Dad up and down the long driveway, feeding him when he could no longer hold a spoon, cleaning him, nursing him with her matter-of-fact love. She told us about the times he passed out at breakfast, the times his heart stopped and she had to call an ambulance, the times she’d followed in her car, and then taken him home once they’d brought him back to life. She had been through such a hard year, I thought. Yet she was not complaining; on the contrary, she spoke about these ordeals as if they had been a series of challenges and accomplishments. She even joked about how she had felt like Dad’s personal trainer, proudly dragging him around when he could barely move. She was nothing if not a survivor. The two of them, tough, stubborn fighters.

  Outside the window now, I could see my sister hacking up giant tree branches, hauling them across the yard, and raking up the smaller branches as if she might rip the tree’s roots right out of the earth.

  My mother kept talking vivaciously, filling us in on every detail of the past few years. Donna listened quietly, while I jumped in now and then with a comment or a question or a laugh. It felt so good to be talking and catching up like this, to feel the warmth in Mom’s voice, the evident pleasure we took in each other. She said nothing at all about my book, nor the cause of our break in communication for three years. But she did mention the “de
al” she had made with my father.

  “What we agreed on, Dad and I, is that he would have a separate relationship with you. Of course, his Parkinson’s was very bad, you know, he could barely hold a pen. But I agreed that as long as he could still address the envelopes to you, I was willing to attach the stamp and put his letters in the mailbox.” She leaned toward me, smiling warmly. “But I was so relieved,” she said, with a confidential nod, “when he finally forgot your birthday this year, so I wouldn’t have to post the card to you.”

  Strangely, the content of Mom’s words slid right past me and Donna; we were both enchanted by the tone of her voice, the sweetness in her face. It wasn’t until we were driving back to Boston that afternoon that we began to make sense of what Mom had actually said, the meaning of the words she had spoken.

  “Did she really say that?” I asked.

  Donna nodded.

  “Wow. That’s pretty wild.” And yet, it was so like Mom. She had always seemed so comfortable with contradictory feelings. Had I challenged her, I’m sure she would have thought nothing of it. Of course she loved me, she would have said blithely, but surely I could share her relief when Dad forgot my birthday?

  We stopped on the way home for Donna to call her father from a phone booth. She had been calling him regularly since Lucy’s death; today was her parents’ anniversary. “I think Helen and her mother are finally reconciling,” she told her father. Afterward she told me that he was genuinely relieved. I smiled, my grief at having lost my dad now mixed with gratitude for the reawakening of my relationship with my mother.

  * * *

  Later during our drive, Donna told me what Lara had said to her as we were getting into our car to leave. I was hugging my mother good-bye, while Donna was talking with Lara. “You’ve certainly been a saint through all this,” Donna told her.

  Lara looked at the ground. “You wouldn’t say that,” she said, “if you knew what I’ve done.”