So we beat on, boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the past.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Fading Memories
It was an unseasonably warm day in June and I had just gone to lunch with Harry Banks, who ordered rich cream linen wallpaper from Belgium after I mentioned I was thinking of linen for the living room walls. It felt as though gifts like these were sliding unassumingly and easily into my hands lately, as though the universe suddenly felt shameful about all that it had taken away and wanted to begin to bring some of it back. My acceptance of these gifts was tentative, almost cloistered. I wanted to believe again, but my trust was still shy. At home, I opened the sliding glass doors and settled on the sofa to work on an essay about the role of witchcraft in women’s literature.
I can’t remember now what made me glance up at the leather-bound photo albums on the shelves across from me. But because I had ordered the room perfectly, I saw almost immediately they were out of order. 1974 was after 1976. I put my essay on the floor and pulled out 1976. The pages smelled like hot dusty floorboards, and I flipped through photos of Keith, blowing out four candles on his birthday cake, a snap of Chris in his PJs attempting to escape out the back door, and me, pregnant with Keith, a belly so big it looked like I was having twins.
But when I got to the page where Brian should have been posing outside the camper on that day, dressed in cut-offs and plaid shirt, smiling at the camera like it wasn’t the last photo he would ever pose for, the photograph was missing. All that was left was a blank space. And when I flipped the page, the next picture slots were empty, too. I kept flipping through the pages for the one of Brian’s twenty-seventh birthday in a family hug, or the one on the Fourth of July with the four of us in front of Op-Sail and the parade of ships on the Hudson, Brian in a suit and tie, after he had worked the night with Charlie sweeping the site for bombs. I turned the pages back as though by magic, the photos would reappear. And when they did not, I felt sick, almost faint. I kept the photo album in front of me, the silent blank pages like a stretching emptiness that haunted that afternoon.
“Did you take pictures of Brian out of the albums?” I asked when my mother came home that night. The boys were in bed, teeth brushed, stories read. I was standing at the sink, doing the last of the dinner dishes.
“Yes, I did.” She walked out the sliding door, and I heard her light a cigarette. Drying my hands quickly on the dishtowel, I followed her out.
“Why?” Her hand shook when she raised the Pall Mall to her mouth. “Mom?” She turned to face me, and I saw the tears in her eyes.
“Because I thought they made you too sad.” She had styled and sprayed her hair and was wearing a low-cut black dress and the matching three-inch heels she favored because they showed off her long legs. It reminded me again of those days when she was getting ready to go to work, me sitting on the bathtub, wishing for a little piece of her.
“I watched you go through those pictures time and again, Kathy.” She inhaled smoke from her cigarette. I looked down at the album I had carried outside with me. “And knew how much it hurt you to see Brian.” Her face, pale and lovely in the moonlight, was starting to look older, worn. “So I got rid of them.”
The hurt was so strong that I had trouble saying the words. “Those photos didn’t make me sad, Mom, they made me happy to remember the wonderful times we shared.”
I saw her swallow, but she didn’t say anything else. She just looked out at the trees, smoking, as though I wasn’t even there.
__________
When I opened my eyes the next morning the thought of those lost photos came to me immediately, as though they had been waiting for me while I slept. The hollowness they left behind felt almost physical. I closed my eyes and thought of my mother, two years before, sitting on the chair beside my bed. Even in the midst of my terrible grief, I had some shining splinter of hope that this was a new mother who would be there for me, able to single me out when I needed her, to tell me that she loved me.
It occurred to me in a flash how strangely lucky I was. Somehow I knew to be hungry for her love, somewhere in me I knew what true affection could be. Perhaps without that innate knowledge, I would never have been able to find Brian in the midst of the poverty that raised me. It was this thirst that had brought me my marriage and the boys who lay sleeping in their beds. It was this thirst that knew instinctively to keep photographs like the ones my mother had thrown away. Whether my mother had this thirst or whether she had learned, by some miraculous feat, to bury it, I understood that without it I could never save her. And she could never save me.
That morning Timmy came by early, and I watched him up on the ladder, a tool belt hanging from his hip. “Hold it steady,” he called down to Keith and Chris, their combined eighty pounds pushed against the bottom step. He fitted the loose gutter back in its place and banged it a few times with a rubber hammer.
On the ground, he gave them a quarter each. “Hold on to that for ice cream,” he said, and I watched him put a hand through his blonde hair, cut short before it could curl up, my mother’s blue eyes smiling from his pale face.
“Let me take the boys this afternoon,” he told me when he sat down at the kitchen table. “We’ll go to Adventureland.”
I dropped four sugars and a dollop of milk into his tea. “Mom has to go.” He made a movement with his eyes and I looked up in time to see my mother standing in the doorway.
“Fine,” she said. I watched her take her Pall Malls off the counter. “I’ll go.” She headed for the porch. “I’m sorry,” she said before she closed the door behind her.
“What’s going on?” I waited until I was sure she couldn’t hear me, and then I told him about the photographs. He paused with his cup mid-air. “Why?”
I shrugged, feeling the tears well up. “She thought they made me sad.”
Out the window, a coat tossed over her nightgown, we watched her smoke. “I’m going to get her an apartment.” I had stayed in bed that morning deciding what to do. I couldn’t continue with college without my mother to help me with the boys, but I couldn’t live with her any longer.
My mother stabbed her cigarette into the ashtray until sparks flew into the air. Timmy gave a quick shake of his head as if to clear the image. “I understand.” He took a sip of his tea and put down the cup. “I’ll take the boys today, give you a little time to sort this out.”
After she closed the door to her room, the first phone call I made was to Gracie. With Matthew away at college, Gracie was on her own, and as I dialed her number I devised another plan. I told her the story I had told Timmy, and when I finished she was quiet.
“I can’t imagine what made her do that, Kat, but you need to understand she was thinking of your best interests.” I drummed my fingers against the kitchen counter to calm my nerves.
“I know, but she can’t live here anymore. I’m taking her to look for an apartment, and if you’d like to, you can move in with her.” I figured it would be good for all of us. My mother wouldn’t be alone, and Gracie could help with the rent.
__________
The brick complex on Main Street, just a few blocks from the house, showed signs of wear. There were a few flowers in window boxes where tenants made an effort, and a small a patch of grass. My mother walked quietly around the two-bedroom facing the street and when I stopped in front of her, she said, “This is fine.” I took out my checkbook and paid for the first month.
The truck Danny showed up with looked like this might be its last mile. It was loaded with the tables and chairs and boxes my mother had stored for the last two years, and the remnants of Gracie’s small house. With the help of Patrick and Timmy, my mother and Gracie moved into their own apartment.
Early Sunday, the bathroom mirror was fogged from her shower, and my mother was frying bacon and eggs in her new kitchen, fragments of her pe
rsonality already decorating the apartment. On the dresser in the bedroom was the bowl Harry Banks had brought back from Denmark and would now forever be my mother’s. In it were coins and movie-ticket stubs. Next to the bowl was a photograph of me with my arms around the boys, our smiles bright and shiny before they were made dull by loss. On the night table was her lifeline of prescription bottles, along with two packs of Pall Malls, and on the closet door, where most people would hang a mirror or a shoe rack, was her faded photograph of John F. Kennedy.
In the kitchen hung the potholder with a chef’s hat, and on the table, her yellow tea cup the size of a bowl, and the glass ash tray that Danny once tried to kill Patrick with, already half filled with crushed butts.
Gracie’s room held a double bed made smooth by her particular hands, a dresser with a lamp, and a clean ashtray. It looks like a prison cell, I thought, but kept that to myself.
“Grandma, we bought you bagels and cream cheese.” Chris put the bags on the table and took out his cinnamon raisin.
“I thought I would help you unpack, but it looks like you and Gracie have been up all night.”
She cut the bagel and smeared a thin layer of cream cheese for Chris and popped Keith’s in the toaster. “We were up late. Most of it is done. Not that I had a lot to unpack.” She buttered Keith’s bagel and cut it in fours the way he liked it.
“Tomorrow we’ll go shopping. Pick out some new curtains,” I said.
As we drove to Macy’s, the boys strapped in the back, I asked her the question that had been on my mind ever since I found the empty photo albums.
“Did you really throw away all those photos?” I kept hoping that maybe she hid them somewhere.
Without turning to face me, she said, “I did. I’m sorry. Now I realize what I’ve done was wrong, and I can’t undo it. I know you will never forgive me, but I want you to know I really did it for your own good. I hope you go on with your life and meet someone who will make you happy.” Her voice was low and wispy, like a dandelion adrift in the breeze.
Since Brian’s death I had come to trust in her love, put behind me the mother who never sat me on her lap, read a book to me, or came to my school plays. I tried not to think about feeling like a motherless child and thought she made up for her indifference by giving up her freedom and taking care of my sons, but now she had stolen my memories, something I could never replace. Brian, in his innocent death, had brought us pain, so she had rendered him invisible, plucking him out of our lives as though it were possible to find solace in that blank space.
__________
They say time heals all wounds, and it occurred to me as the boys grew and I continued toward my college degree, that time was, indeed, a strange and often beautiful companion. It was comforting to know that it clocked on regardless of the tragedy or horror that humans brought forth. I learned this long ago from my mother’s bachelor cousin, Delaney, and I thought of all those clocks, chiming in his apartment. Delaney was the only kind man in my childhood, and he had collected clocks. The combination of the two allowed me to understand the constant comfort of time advancing onward.
On Saturdays, Delaney rode the bus from Newark, New Jersey, to Penn Station, and then the subway to the South Bronx. Annie and I watched him walk down the street with a greasy bag of jelly donuts in his hand and a Brownie camera strapped around his neck, mumbling to himself. Though he was strange, we loved him because he took us to the zoo or the Botanical Gardens and bought us lunch, and because he was the weekend alternative to taking clothes stuffed in pillowcases to the laundry mat or washing the kitchen floor. He had no friends, no interests outside of playing the organ at Sunday mass. He never had a girlfriend, never had sex, and never drove a car.
We were his entertainment, his reason to put on a suit and tie and ride a bus and subway for four hours every Saturday. He took us to lunch at the Boulevard Diner where Annie ordered grilled cheese, I ordered a hamburger, and Delaney had tuna fish. Before we headed out, he would tell us we could invite a friend next time, if we wanted to, but Annie and I shook our heads in unison, picturing his chin, wet with mayonnaise, his tie stained with fish, his trousers doused with crumbs.
Sometimes, Annie and I ventured to his Newark apartment. It smelled the way old people’s apartments tended to smell, moth-bally and stale, except that it was filled with clocks. And this had made it an enchanted, almost magical place. The clocks chimed and bonged and coo-cooed every half hour, reminding us that no matter what happened, time would clock on ceaselessly, an advancing constant.
When he died, Delaney left everything to Annie and me, including a clock that had been a hundred years old when he bought it, which sits on the mantel in my home. The clock-maker said it was a treasure, and I agreed. It is the showpiece of my living room, striking every half hour. During the years after the hijacking, it reminded me of how true it was that time healed. My children were adjusting, I was getting an education, and I was trying to forgive my mother.
The forgiving was gradual. It started with the reluctant acknowledgement that while I hated that those pictures of Brian were gone, I understood it was a desperate attempt to protect me. My mother surprised me by making it possible for me to go to class, taking the boys when I needed to study.
I understood too, when I looked at my boys running across the lawn, trying to goal a soccer ball, that mothers have their own lives—a fact a child cannot fathom. Sometimes in their grief and silence they cannot look their children in the eye. Sometimes they commit desperate acts to save them. And so my mother and I had a gradual coming together in those years, respectful, tentative, healing.
I had learned something else about time in the wake of the hijacking. It also dragged with it those things your mind could not erase. Time would not erase the bomb exploding in Rodman’s Neck. It was still fresh and hot and terrifying in my mind. I still wanted answers to that question I had set a trial date to investigate: Why did the bomb explode? Was it rigged? Set to go off when the bomb squad approached? “We don’t know,” Charlie had told me each time I had pestered him for answers.
But someone did know, and when I thought of Julie Busic, tall and blonde, killing another woman’s husband for a foreign cause, I had a sneaking, uneasy suspicion that the answer lay with her, and I would think of her in prison, killing time for that vicious, horrible crime.
…who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly . . .
— Theodore Roosevelt
What Then?
1978
I have always wondered if, in the aftermath of grief, the universe balances out its harshness, and even those things that look like problems turn out to be gifts. I am not sure what happened next could have happened if my mother was still living with me. And perhaps my mother had opened some kind of space in that photo album, even if it wasn’t her space to open.
It started on a hot day a few weeks after her move, when Timmy said, “Why don’t you come to the Hamptons with Jean and me next weekend. Get out and meet some people.” Jean and Timmy had been married for a year, a perfect match, we all thought.
“I don’t think so,” I answered. We were sitting at a picnic table in my Northport back yard watching Gracie play catch with the boys. She had settled into the apartment with my mother, but it was temporary, she told me, as she intended to marry Billy.
“I’m not ready to meet anyone.” I didn’t think the Hamptons was my scene anyway—swarms of rowdy people crammed into sweltering shacks, listening to music loud enough to burst your eardrums.
“Aw, come on,” Timmy punched me lightly on the arm. “Beaches and outdoor bars,” he said. “You’ll love it.”
“Go on, Kat,” Gracie called. “Let Mom and me have some fun with the boys.” And so I went on a weekend trip to the Hamptons with my brother and his wife that would change my life.
My
overnight bag held shorts and tank tops and a toothbrush. Hot air blew through the rolled-down windows of Timmy’s banged-up Chevy, and my hair whipped against my face. There was no AC, so we made do, and sang along to “You’re The One That I Want.” The kids and I had just seen the re-run of Grease at the old Northport Theater, and I knew all the words.
The day was heating up, and I began to regret not packing a bathing suit, but I lost fifteen pounds since becoming a widow and had not regained enough to fill in a flat chest and narrow hips, and there was my white skin that had not been exposed to the sun in two years.
Timmy pulled onto Dune Road and I watched waves crash against the dunes. On one side was the Atlantic, on the other, Peconic Bay, where houses with docks poked out of the sand. It was a million dollar view, but I was distracted by the thought of my mother letting the boys eat the bags of candy I knew she had stashed in her linen closet.
“The house isn’t much, and there are four other renters,” Jean called back. “But we don’t spend a lot of time there. We usually stay at the beach all day and then listen to bands play under the stars.”
A refrigerator and two threadbare couches filled the mud-colored living room. I opened the fridge and found it filled with beer, not an inch left for food. My feet stuck to the kitchen floor, which was big and bright and very yellow. “Why is the refrigerator in the living room?” I asked.
Timmy laughed. “Convenience.”
Jean showed me to the room the three of us would share, where two single beds were separated by the length of my foot. As I changed into shorts, I could see sun shining through the cinderblock walls.
The Cat Ballou was in full swing, a guitar player strumming to a song I had never heard, “Nibblin’ on sponge cake, watchin’ the sun bake; All of those tourists covered with oil.” I seemed to be the only one who didn’t know the words. Timmy parted the crowd and offered me a draft. “It’s all they serve.” His shrug was apologetic.
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