Kinsey and Me (26 page)

jessie

“
YOUR MOTHER WAS
a wonderful person,” Jessie says to me, her forehead furrowing as she speaks. Her
face is a warm coffee brown and her cheeks are high, her teeth very white and her
black hair streaked with gray. She came to work for us when I was sixteen and my father
had just had his ulcer surgery. That was fifteen years ago and now everything is different
except Jessie and me. When I see her, we talk about the house, about Daddy and Mildred,
about my mother too. Somehow Jessie is the only person in the world now who remembers
Vanessa as I do and we talk together about everything that was, as though we can between
us reconstruct some portion of the past forever lost to us.

“I remember when Miss Mildred brung me out to the house for an interview and your
mother set on the couch in the living room and ast me did I know how to make hot breads.
And I don’t know . . . just something about her face and the way she spoke made me
think to myself, Now, Jessie, I believe this is where you should stay. I didn’t have
any idea in the world that I’d be with her that long but seems like it just worked
out that way. Miss Mildred ast me some questions too but I never did care for her
even then. I won’t call her Mrs. Conway, you know. To me, your mother was the only
Mrs. Conway.”

“Oh, Jessie,” I laugh, “what do you call her then?”

Jessie laughs too and her white teeth flash into view. “I try not to call her anything.
Oh, sometimes I call her Mrs. C. but mostly I call her Miss Mildred. That bothers
her some, I can tell, but she won’t let on,” she says, and then she goes on, talking
almost to herself.

“I don’t see much of your daddy since he married her. Miss Mildred, you know, she
didn’t like having me around once your mother was gone. It was too much reminder of
everything that had gone before. I was just as glad when I started working for Del
though she don’t say a whole lot to me. Your sister don’t say nothing to anyone. And
I love Del, so don’t get me wrong. It isn’t that. But she and your daddy are kinda
close-mouth, you know. Miss Mildred now, she’ll say anything. Like she says to me
one day, ‘Jessie,’ she said, ‘Jessie, I want you to know how sorry Mr. Conway feels
that he don’t see more of you.’ She didn’t say she was sorry. Just him. So I didn’t
let on I noticed that and I said, ‘Why, Miss Mildred, what do you mean? He comes down
to visit with me now and then.’

“‘I mean, up to the house,’ she says.

“And I said, ‘Why, Miss Mildred, I love to go anywhere I’m invited.’ She didn’t mention
any more ‘up to the house’ after that. Up to the house, my foot. You know she don’t
want me up there. If she want me to go ‘up to the house’ she knows where I am.

“You know, I went up there one day when I got off work from Del, and Miss Mildred
she didn’t like that much, I could tell, so I didn’t go unannounced since then. Your
mother would never have done me that way.”

“Well,” I say, “she was a good lady, I suppose.”

“Yes, she was,” Jessie says firmly. “She was just a real sweet person. I remember
on the day she died . . . well, not the day she passed away, but the day she took
them pills. She come out the back way when I went home from work that day. Followed
me out to the porch and gave me a potted chrysanthemum. She’d already said she meant
me to have it whenever the blooms were gone so I could plant it in my backyard, but
she give it to me then and I remember thinking, Now why would she do such a thing?
But it wasn’t ’til later I knew. She hugged me real tight and waved good-bye and that
was the last time I seen her alive.”

death review

I
AM SITTING IN
Dr. Sherwood’s office, typing on a Remington Twenty-Five electric machine, not even
much amazed to find myself working again in a hospital atmosphere. Outside my office
door, the patients walk up and down in their robes, reaching in occasionally to snitch
a pastel mint from the blue glass bowl on my desk. Carts are rolled by with a rattle
of breakfast trays and a bell pings relentlessly as the elevators go up and down.
And the stretchers go by with their cargo wrapped in sheets and the nurses stroll
past my door and the second hand on the big clock in the hall sweeps up and around
as it nudges the minute hand. Across the hall, two attendants discuss a money-order
chain letter presently making the rounds. For a twenty-dollar investment, the friend
of one has made two hundred and forty dollars in four days.

I came to Pacific Coast Medical Center last Wednesday as a Western Girl but I’ll be
here a year or two. Somehow in a week of working, I’ve come to understand that this
is true. And I don’t much mind. I’ve worked in a hospital once before and I’ve worked
in a doctor’s office too. I know what it’s like to share an elevator ride with a man
on a stretcher going up to surgery and I know what it’s like to see the same man come
down and I know what it’s like to catch sight of four tumors in bottles down in Pathology,
formaldehyde like a tide pool in which they’ve been caught unwittingly. I know what
it’s like to hear Dr. Sherwood call down on the telephone and inquire if the doctor
there has an interesting death to report for the monthly death review.

I review death too, sitting out here at my desk; at least I review the death I’ve
known intimately . . . which was hers, my mother’s, eleven years ago. The intern on
the floor complained this morning that he’d been given a patient with cancer of the
lungs, which he thought uninteresting. And for a moment I hoped to myself that I’d
die of something smart. I don’t resent his obsession with obscure disease, his desire
for peculiar contagions and growths of an unknown sort. I don’t even resent that death
and the dying are commonplace to him. He’ll go down someday with the rest of us, dying
of something dull, and he’ll pay just as much attention as we do. He’s just young
right now and caught up in the point of view that medical death shouldn’t be a wasted
event for a man with so much to learn.

My mother died of an overdose of sleeping pills after extensive surgery so that the
cause of death was probably listed as Despair. I would list it, I think, as Fortitude
or Courage or Hope or one of the other rare virtues she suffered from. She was a burning
woman in a burning world and she drank herself down to death and she smoked until
her throat caught fire and they had to douse the flame and excise the scorched tissue.
After the surgery, what could she do but finish the job she’d begun? They had saved
her when she didn’t want to survive, rescued her life with their brand-new stainless
steel tools when she was already done. After cancer, she did them one better with
phenobarbital and from that, there was no salvation. They pumped medication into her
arms and legs, filled her with blood and glucose and oxygen but she knew she had won
and the silence of her death had a smug quality. And what was there left for me to
say except “Good show.”

So I’m back in a hospital job again, maybe looking for her in the files or looking
for her on the carts rolling by or hoping for word of her in the medical journals
on Dr. Sherwood’s desk. I’ve even thought of asking him to send for her medical records
in New York as though in the cataloging of heart, lungs, and temperature, I might
learn something new about who she was and how she’s related to me. Instead, I sit
out here and type and smile at the patients in the hall and hope that some medical
secretary years ago smiled at her and offered her a pastel mint for all her pain.

a letter from my father

A
FEW DAYS BEFORE
your twenty-ninth birthday, he writes you a letter, this father of yours, and in it,
he tells you what he remembers of you.

“In the course of thinking back over your twenty-nine years,” he says, “I called to
mind many charming memories (and some distressing ones as well); and among the highest
ranking of them all was when you were three, just before I went into military service.
I sat on your bed and you knelt to say your prayers, and after praying for all the
regular and proper people, and thanking God for all the regular and proper things . . .
you concluded with ‘And God bless Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Easter
Bunny’s Helper.’ I don’t know where the helper came from, and I didn’t want to laugh
at your prayers, but I nearly exploded in an effort to contain my laughter until you
were in bed, had got kissed good night, and I could get downstairs.

“And in the same year, when the day came for me to put on my uniform and leave for
Fort Knox, I didn’t see how I could possibly say good-bye without crying all over
the place, so I had to think up something. You won’t remember, but what I suggested
to you and Del was that instead of saying good-bye, I would come to attention, and
so would you and Del—and then we would salute each other, as I had taught you to do.
Del burst into tears and ran upstairs to her room, but you came to a very exaggerated
state of attention, with your chest out and belly in, and chin very straight—and we
saluted—and then I went out to the taxi, scarcely able to see what I was doing. I
looked back and waved, and you waved too; and then I looked up at Del’s window, and
she was standing there, with a handkerchief against her mouth, and she waved finally.
A memory that is very sweet, and very upsetting and almost unbearable all at the same
time.

“Then when I came back from military service, I remember the warm evenings, sitting
on the front steps, when you and Del would beg me to tell a story. And in those evenings
I made up Silly Mongoose, and the story about the little white dog and the blind horse
that the French family had to leave behind when they fled in front of the German armies
in 1940—and other rambling tales I can’t remember anymore. Sometimes I would start
one without the foggiest notion of where it was going, or how it would end . . . and
those seemed to be the ones you liked best. Both you and Del liked the sad stories
best (but with a happy ending just in the nick of time) so I invented sad ones, and
more of them. One time I got so engrossed in my own story that I was crying with you!
Doesn’t seem possible but it’s true. I had to find a happy ending for that one and
in a hurry. Then I blew my nose and felt better.

“Another bittersweet memory is when they brought you down from the operating room
after your tonsils were removed. You were groggy with sedation and kept urping up
frightening amounts of blood and with your eyes still closed, the first thing you
said was ‘I want my daddy.’ So I sat by your bed and you hung on to the index finger
of my right hand forever, and I would not have moved away for any amount of money.”

That letter is the story of your life, all the stuff of which you are made, so that
reading it again, a year later, you are amazed to see how carefully your character
has been described in the course of those paragraphs. Twenty-five years are missing
in his recollection of you and in those twenty-five years you have lived out all the
consequences of the first four or five. There was a time in your life when you didn’t
believe in psychology, when you didn’t believe that intelligent, rational people were
the product of anything more than their own intelligence and their own rationality.
Now you believe in everything; past, present, and future. You believe in memories.
You believe in the suffering of truth and all that it requires. You believe that you
are exactly the life-sized projection of that child sitting on the front steps of
that house, listening to stories that were rescued, always, at the brink of truth.

You do remember the day your father went away. You remember your own confusion about
your sister’s sudden tears and her running to her room. That was not what your father
had asked you to do. Your father had told you to salute and so you saluted proudly
and you knew, even at the age of three, that you would do anything he asked, at whatever
the cost.

Now that you are nearly thirty, you are writing letters to him and what you say to
him is this: we did, yes, fail in our lives, the four of us; you and Vanessa, Del
and me. We died of all the unwept tears and all the things we never understood.

You talk to him about your mother’s death, about her need to die, about the ways in
which her death has set you free, and how her death has bound you, broken you, and
mended you again. You tell him, as a mother would, that you have loved him, whatever
his failings, that you forgive him, that you have failures, too, which require forgiveness
of him. You tell him that you have loved your life, that you are at peace with the
person you have become and that he may have that peace too in your behalf. “We none
of us die of grief,” you say, “but only of not grieving quite enough.”

And what you want for him is that he may weep too, for himself, for the ruin of all
those years. You want to say to him, “Oh, my father, don’t you see that we are healed,
all of us, by being exactly what we are, by loving, by remembering, by opening up
the wounded places in our lives and letting go?”

You want to tell him you treasure all the relics of the past. You know now that you
are a living museum, full of rooms and crooked corridors that repeat themselves at
every turn. And you want to tell him that by loving you, he can love himself too,
that he can choose again rightly for every cloudy choice he’s made, that he can learn
to have his life instead of giving it away.

And you wonder if he’ll hear you, years and years away, across the wide far country
of your life, across the sins and resurrections of your soul. You wonder if he’ll
understand that, groggy in your life and full of pain, you call to him before you
have even opened your eyes, that his presence there when you were four has reached
across the world to you and touches you where you are now.

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