The Afterlife (16 page)

And she recalled, of those straitened Depression days when he was an infant, how she left him in the care of his grandparents and went off on the trolley car to work in the drapes department of the department store downtown. She had lost a tooth, a bicuspid, and the upper partial plate containing its replacement was uncomfortable, and one day she didn’t wear it to work and was chastised by the department manager, Mr. Wertheimer, for not wearing it. The image of her missing tooth, this tidy black hole leaping up within her young woman’s smile, seemed erotic, too, along with the thought of his then-slender mother’s charm as a saleswoman. “On my good days,” she claimed, “I could sell anything. But then the people would bring it all back for exchange on Monday. As if I had bewitched them. Mr. Wertheimer said there was such a thing as being
too
good.”

But not all her days were good days, she told Joey. She took her periods too hard, they knocked her flat for thirty-six, forty-eight hours; and this brought the conversation back to her body, her body arching over his life like a firmament, and he would leave the hospital building and find relief in the body of the city, Alton with its close-packed suburbs, a city he loved as his mother loved her farm, because it had formed his
first impressions, when the wax was soft. He ate at aluminum diners where each booth still had its individual jukebox, shopped at hardware stores for parts and tools the sandstone farmhouse in its decrepitude needed, and bought a new vacuum cleaner to replace his mother’s old Hoover, which had on its front a little electric light like that of his toy electric train as it circled the Christmas tree. He got himself a haircut in a front-parlor barber shop, the kind of shop, with a radio playing and a baby crying in rooms out of sight, and a spiral pole out front, that he thought had disappeared, because such shops had disappeared in New York. A small child of his, years ago, had knocked the porcelain lid off the toilet water tank and it had shattered. Now, between visits to his mother, he went about the city with the cardboard box of fragments, dusty and cobweb-ridden after years in the attic, to plumbing supply houses, where overweight, hard-smoking, not quite sardonic men would return from digging in their cavernous storerooms and give him, for a few dollars, old spare lids that did not, it would turn out, quite fit. He kept trying. Alton had lost factories and population since he was a boy, and appeared in smaller letters on the maps of Pennsylvania, but it was still a place where things were made and handled, where brute matter got its honest due. He still shared the city’s blue-collar faith in hardware and industry and repair, a humble faith that had survived all his heady traffic in sheer imagery—slogans, graphics, layouts.

What was life at bottom but plumbing? After a week, the hospital had cleared out his mother’s lungs, and now the cardiologists wanted to operate on the malfunctioning heart that had let the pulmonary edema occur. The angiography had revealed coronary arteries stenosed all but shut. “Oh, Joey—I could go any day,” she blurted to him after the test results had been described to her. She showed him with a forefinger and
thumb how small and pinched the lumen had become. “Worse than they thought.” She was sitting on the bed with her hair wild and one shoulder bared by a loose tie in the hospital johnny. Her facial expression was girlish, womanhood’s acquired composure all dissolved. Their intermittently shared life was being lifted into new octaves, and mother and son seemed in these moments of hospital conference simply a man and a woman, both with more white hairs than dark, taking counsel because no one else whose advice would count was left on earth.

To his relief, she did not want the open-heart operation, thus sparing him the trouble, the expense, the tests, the trips to Philadelphia. He tried to suppress his relief and to argue for the coronary bypass that was recommended, though she was well over eighty. She said, making a wryly twisted mouth just as her father used to when discussing the county’s politicians, “Of course,
they
recommend it. It’s what they have to sell. They’re in business, just like their fathers, only peddling different things. They pass me around, one to another; I’ve yet to see a Christian.”

In the frankness that her closeness to death allowed, as her composed womanhood melted, an anti-Semitism was one of the things that emerged. She could not see the predominantly Jewish doctors as saviors and allies but only as opportunists and exploiters. She even developed with one solemn young cardiologist a banter that cast her as a Palestinian: “You’ve taken me away from my village,” she said. Joey was dismayed; his third wife, the briefest one, had been Jewish, and she and his mother had seemed especially friendly, and as he imagined now his mother’s unspoken feelings in those years it was like seeing silverfish tumble out of old books. On her less lucid days, she seemed to think that the doctors and their allies (“One big fella, looked just like Danny Thomas, came and cut
my toenails; now, how much do you think
that’s
going to add to the bill?”) were scheming to do her out of her house and its priceless eighty acres—that she was territory they wanted to seize and develop. Each day she spent in the hospital, the little sandstone house pulled at her harder. “Get me home,” she begged Joey.

“And then what?”

“Then we’ll take what comes.” Her eyes widened, watching his, and her mouth as it clamped shut over “what comes” was very like a child’s, stubborn in its fright. For, however close their consultations, however fervent their agreements, both were aware that she was the star and he merely the prompter: though his turn would come, the spotlight burned upon her. She was center stage, in this drama whose climax everyone knows.

When, six months later, she died—instantly, it seemed to the coroner—in the kitchen, just under the room where she had been born, the neighbors, who were patient Mennonites and Lutherans, took a day to discover her body and another twelve hours to find him in at his apartment telephone number. He had been working late. It was midnight when he let himself into the old farmhouse. The door keys had been lost long ago, in that distant, fabulous era after they had moved. When his mother was to be away for more than a day, she would lock the doors from the inside and go out through the cellar bulkhead. Her neighbors knew this and had left the house like that after her body was removed. Joey had brought no flashlight; after parking the car by the barn, he walked to the slanted cellar doors by moonlight, and within the dark cellar was guided by memory. A Lally column here, a pyramid of paint cans there. His father and he had laid this cement floor one frantic day when three cubic yards of ready-mixed
concrete were delivered in a giant gob by a truck. He would have been fifteen or so, his father in his late forties. The cellar floor of these old farmhouses was typically dirt, the red clay of the region packed more or less hard, except when the foundation walls wept in the spring and it turned to mud. His father had talked with construction men, and set out boards to frame the platform for the furnace, and dug a clay pipe into the dirt for drainage, and stretched strings here and there to determine the level and pitch, but none of these preparations encompassed the alarming dimensions of the slowly hardening concrete when it arrived early that Saturday morning. With rakes and shovels and boards and trowels they pushed and tugged the sluggish stuff level, into the far corners, under the cellar stairs, and up to the mouth of the drainage pipe. His father’s face went white with effort, as it had when he struggled with the chimney stones several years before, and the ordeal went on and on, by the light of a few bare bulbs, this panicky race with time and matter, as the concrete grew stiffer and stiffer, and in drying pushed its water toward the surface, and exuded its sonorous underground odor, its secretive smell of stone. The floor had come out surprisingly well, out of that day’s sweaty panic—smooth and gray and delicately sloped so that hardly a puddle lingered after a flooding. It sometimes seemed, in the mottled perspectives of hindsight, that there had been a third man in the cellar with them, something of a professional, for it seemed unlikely that he and his father, a would-be poet and a soc.-sci. teacher, could have made such a satisfactory cellar floor. But if there had been such a man, Joey had mentally erased him, jealous of this arduous day at his father’s side fending off disaster, doing a man’s job. He was just becoming a man, and his father was wearying of being one; this was the last project so ambitious that he tackled around the house.

In the basement’s absolute blackness, Joey’s city shoes slithered on the smooth floor, and then thumped on the wooden cellar stairs; he pushed the door open into the moon-striped kitchen. A warm whimpering hairy body hurtled up against him, and he thought that his mother had not died after all. But it was the dog, who took his hand in her mouth and unstoppably whimpered and whined as if telling him a long story, the story of her hours alone in the house with her mistress, with the unresponsive, cooling body, with her doggy hunger and bafflement.

Things work out. One of Joey’s former wives, Peggy, who had remarried into the Connecticut suburbs, agreed to take the dog. The cats a man from the county humane society came and trapped and carried away to be gassed, a few each day, frantically fighting the cage. Joey stacked the magazines and catalogues and Christmas cards and tied them with baling twine from the bucket and carried them to the barn to be trucked by a Mennonite neighbor to a landfill. The Boy Scouts no longer collected paper and bottles; nothing was precious any more, there was too much of everything. As his family assembled, Joey impressed them with his efficiency, portioning out the furniture and heirlooms among his children, his ex-wives, the local auctioneer, the junkman.

For himself he kept little but odd small items that reached back into his boyhood in the brick house from which they moved to the farm—a brass tiger that sat on the piano there, when he still took piano lessons, and a curved leather-backed brush he remembered his grandfather using on his black hightop shoes before setting off on foot to the Lutheran church. He kept some of his father’s college notebooks, preserved in the attic, penned in a more rounded version of his legible schoolteacherish hand. He kept a set of Shakespeare,
with limp maroon covers, of which the silverfish had nibbled some pages into lace.

His mother as a young woman, a feminine purchaser of slips and stockings and jewelry, drew suddenly close to him, after the decades in which she had been old. Inexpensive pieces of silver and turquoise and jade, Art Deco–ish, from the Twenties and Thirties, in surprising quantity, testified to a certain vanity, a voluptuous need for ornament. His mother’s many country sun hats were hard to throw away, though none of the assembled females wanted them. Joey’s two daughters sorted through the clothes for him. He couldn’t bear to touch and discard the dresses hanging in the closet, dozens of garments pressed together in an anthology of past fashions, all the way back to a fox-trimmed spring coat whose collar he remembered with an odd vividness, its tingling black-tipped red-brown hairs close to her face: his mother was carrying him, against her shoulder.

In the toolhouse, where his father had left a pathetic legacy of rusty screws and nails neatly arranged in jars, and oily tools, half of them broken, mounted on rotting pegboard, there were also antique implements worn like prehistoric artifacts: an ancient oblong pink whetstone pointed at either end and soapily warped by all its use, and an old-fashioned square hoe worn into a lopsided metal oval, its edges had struck so many stones. Such wear couldn’t have occurred in the merely forty years they were here, but must have been the work of generations; these tools had travelled back and forth across the county, surviving many moves, to end in his impatient hands. They seemed sacred—runes no one else could decipher. He was the last of his line to have ever hoed a row of kohlrabi or sharpened a scythe while standing knee-deep in the nodding damp grass of an orchard.

Relatives and neighbors spoke to him with a soft gravity, as if he were fragile in grief. He knew he and his mother were regarded as having been unusually, perhaps unnaturally close; when in fact between themselves the fear was that they were not close enough. Why grieve? She was old, in pain, worn-out. She was too frail in her last half-year to walk to the mailbox or lift a case of cat food or pull a clump of burdock: it was time; dying is the last favor we do the world, the last tax we pay. He cried only once, during the funeral, quite unexpectedly, having taken his seat at the head of his raggedly extended family, suddenly free, for the moment, of arrangements and decisions. An arm’s reach away from him gleamed the cherry-wood casket he had picked out in the undertaker’s satiny basement showroom three days before. The lustrous well-joined wood, soon to be buried—the sumptuous waste of it. She was in there, and in his mind there appeared a mother conceived out of his earliest memories of her, a young slim woman dressed in a navy-blue suit, with white at her throat, dressed to go off to her job at the downtown department store, hurrying to catch the trolley car. She had once reminisced, “Oh, how you’d run, and if you just missed it, there wouldn’t be another for twenty minutes, and you wanted to cry.” She had laughed, remembering.

His tears came and kept coming, in a kind of triumph, a breakthrough, a torrent of empathy and pity for that lost young woman running past the Pennsylvania row houses, under the buttonwood trees, running to catch the trolley, the world of the Thirties shabby and solid around her, the porches, the blue mid-summer hydrangeas, this tiny well-dressed figure in her diminishing pocket of time, her future unknown, her death, her farm, far from her mind. This was the mother, apparently, that he had loved, the young woman
living with him and others in a brick semi-detached house, a woman of the world, youthfully finding her way. During the war she worked in a parachute factory, wearing a bandanna on her head like the other women, plump like them by this time, merging with them and their chatter one lunch break when he, somehow, had bicycled to the side entrance to see her. She was not like them, the tough other women, he knew, but for the moment had blended with them, did a job alongside them, and this too renewed his tears, his naïve pride in her then, when he was ten or eleven. She had tried to be a person, she had lived. There was something amazing, something immortal to him in the image of her running. He remembered, from their first years on the farm, a crisis with the roof; it was being reshingled by a team of Amishmen and they had left it partially open to the weather on the night of a thunderstorm. Crashes, flashes. Joey’s parents and grandparents were all awake, and he, boy though he still was, was expected now to wake and help, too; they rushed up and down the attic stairs with buckets, to save the plaster of the walls and ceilings below. There was a tarpaulin in the barn that might help; he found himself outdoors, in the downpour, and he had retained an image of his mother running across the lawn in a flash of lightning that caught the white of her bare legs. She would not have been much over forty, and was still athletic; perhaps his father was included in this unsteady glimpse; there was a hilarity to it all, a violent health.