The Farewell Symphony (43 page)

The next day I sent Daniella a bouquet and a note: "So sorry about the noise I made last night, piling books. You'll be pleased to hear 'Books' won't be back."

My mother was happy and healthy and back at work; she reported to me (with that candor about her intimate life that I took for granted but that my friends found so peculiar) that Randy, her lover, had treated her missing breast with wonderful tenderness. At fifty, he was fourteen years younger than she: "I was so worried and anxious that he'd reject me. You wouldn't understand, dear, but men, normal men, are funny about things like that. They're not tough like women—or like you. Aesthetics is so important to them. Maybe it's because a breast takes them back to their infancy. Freud was undoubtedly right. Men need to be nourished. And then our age difference. . . .We think we've outgrown Freud what with the new thinking, the new emphasis on the physiological, Fm surprised that psychoanalysts are still in business, what can you be doing with a shrink, why don't you just accept yourself as you are? Fd never let anyone tinker with my mind."

This gust of strong-willed self-satisfaction gave way to gently ruminative self-satisfaction. "Randy just leaned over and kissed my scar—it's horrible, Fll have to show it to you, just for scientific interest—he leaned over and kissed it in the dark, he'd turned out the light, he's so diplomatic like that, he lowered the strap of my nightgown and kissed the scar, I felt so vulnerable, you can't imagine how a woman feels when she loses a breast, it's as though she has been castrated, for you, for men, it would be the equivalent of castration, so I was feeling very vulnerable when he kissed me." Mother liked Randy more than any of her earlier lovers, she said. "He's the only one who ever liked to go grocery shopping with me. We just push our cart up and down the aisles without any rush and we choose what we need. We're very cozy. And, honey, he always says the most beautiful prayers. Just today at dinner he said, 'Oh, Lord, thank you

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for protecting us on the I-90, especially at that dangerous intersection where the traffic comes in from Gary.' Isn't that beautiful? He's such a feeling, religious man. He's like my father. I don't think Randy has any Irish blood, but he has that deep Irish soul like my father." She remembered her original subject: "And honey, he was so sweet, he said when he was kissing my scar, 'Hello, little missing boozy, my girl's not complete any more but I don't mind,' isn't that sweet? I cried, I tell you, I wept."

I didn't think what Randy had said was veiy gallant, much less sweet, i:)ut I didn't say so. My mother spoke about the most delicate things in her own life with the irony-free manner, rough-and-ready vocabulary and clarion tones of a bad actress in a black-and-white film of die forties. My sister and I were always wincing. "Oh, Mother . . ." we'd complain.

"I don't know why you two are so sensiti\e. I just call a spade a spade, but you're always cringing and wincing."

Anne was miserable. She had been living in a small apartment on the Near North Side and drixing up to a North Shore college where she was studying for her master's in social work, but she'd become such a drinker that her ex-husband had insisted on taking back their children. Even though he'd loved my sister so deeply and suffered so much because of her, he quickly remarried and at last turned very cold toward her

"You can hardly blame him," my mother said during one of our weekly phone calls. "I just don't know what's wrong with Anne. Here she had a nice-looking husband—"

''Mother, he's not nice looking."

"Well, maybe not by New York narcissistic standards, but he was a perfectly presentable—"

"Randy boor."

"She should have been glad he was attentive, most men are unfaithful after a few years of marriage, look at your own father, when we were just a young couple living in a furnished room in Gary, Indiana, why, we had to share the bathroom with another couple, but I didn't mind, we received a book once a month from the Book of the Month Club and we read it out loud to each other, we read Will and Aiiel Durant's The Story of Philosophy out loud, and then he dragged home a filthy disease, he gave me gonorrhea —"

"Mother, you've told me all that a thousand times."

"Well, I'm just establishing what men, most men, are like and how Anne was wrong to reject her husband, so upstanding and devoted, diis is just between us, I'd never tell her—"

"Mother, Anne is a lesbian."

"She's not, she's just imitating you, she's always been impressionable."

One night, very late, my mother called, sobbing, to say my sister had tried to commit suicide again. "The poor litde thing, we've been frantic, we didn't know where to look for her. She had another bout in the hospital, I didn't tell you, I didn't want to upset you, and when she was released she thought her shrink would be there, I guess she's in love with him, well, he wasn't and she never left the parking lot of the hospital, talk about acting out, she'd stashed some pills in the car, just in case, I guess, that girl is so unstable, though I always showered her with advantages—"

"Mother, tell me about Anne."

"Well, don't snap my head off" (she said "snap" instead of "bite"). "Although I can understand that you must be terribly upset. It seems that her shrink had gone on vacation. She must have felt terribly abandoned. Of course I would have been there upon discharge but she won't take my calls. I'm the villain. Her doctor—oh, brother, you've never seen such a weak-chinned, limp-wristed, weasly little shrimp as this doctor, who's not even an MD. He's only a social worker who subscribes to some sort of barmy 'contractual therapy' where you sign a contract to do certain things and not others—"

I felt threatened by my sister's breakdown, especially since I'd grown up thinking she was our hostage to normality, the only one of us three who wasn't weird. Ever since I'd been a child, my mother, my sister and I had formed a rag-a-tag tribe of three. We were like mice curled up inside a drawer in the attic who can recognize one another by the family smell. We fought, we complained, we had our shared jokes. Our mother kept up a perpetual litany of self-praise and some of it spilled over onto Anne and me. We were both "brilliant," of course, although Anne was "practical" and I was "in the clouds." We were the Three Musketeers. We took long car trips together, making five hundred miles a day as we drove across the Mississippi and on down to Texas to see our grandmother. We'd stop in roadside motor lodges where for five dollars our mother would rent a bungalow for the night ("Isn't this exciting, kids?"), one that would smeD of backed-up sewage and where nothing was clean but the water glasses in glassine envelopes and presumably the toilet seat, which when upright retracted into a machine that treated it with germ-killing ultraviolet rays. If there was a TV, as there only sporadically was and then only after the mid-1950s, we had to feed it with quarters. Often it had glued to it a translucent plastic sheet dyed blue at the top for the sky and green at the

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bottom for grass. Sometimes the bed would vibrate with "magic fingers" if it was fed quarters. The motel owner would roll down the hill a metal cot on wheels for me, which opened up with all the grace of an iron lung and was as comfortable as the rack. More than once we'd be awakened by bedbugs. Tiny red dots would appear around our ankles and across our tummies.

When we'd get to Ranger, Texas, where our grandmother lived with her second husband, Anne and I felt like Yankees and city sHckers. We settled down, slightly in awe of these very old counti-y people. Our grandmother, Willie Lulu, had been one of twelve children. Her parents had been homesteaders who'd come in a covered wagon from Louisiana to Texas a couple of decades after the Civil War. We went out to their original farm, where one of my great-uncles still lived. My own mother had lived there as a girl after her real father had died and before her mother had remarried. There were pecan trees by a stream. There was a smokehouse behind the main house; the main house had started out as a log cabin that had gradually been engulfed by the rooms that were added on in every direction. My mother remembered her Grandmother Oakes, who'd sit in a leather chair reading the Bible and chewing tobacco. Her pale-eyed husband never said a word. The family picture of all twelve children and the parents on the porch looked like road kill caught in the headlights.

Our grandmother, Willie Lulu, had ended up somehow in this nearly abandoned town of Ranger, which still flew a tattered banner over the main street that proclaimed, "Oil Capital of the World," even though the wells had long since run dry. Folks had to drive fifty miles to the nearest movie theater. Willie had a httle house on one level of just five rooms and a kitchen. There was the front parlor we never went into, as rarely visited as the front door that led into it. In that room were armchairs and a sofa of tufted veheteen and an empty cut-glass flower vase on a pale blue mirrored coffee table. In a bookcase, which was a separate piece of furniture covered with a doily and sheathed with clear glass doors that could be unlocked and swung open, were housed all the volumes of the Harvard Five-Foot Shelf of Classics, including the poems of John Greenleaf Whittier and James W^hitcomb Riley, Charles Dana's memoirs, Two Years Before the Mast, Lowell's Breakfast Chat, a rhymed verse translation of Dante and many other treasures. They must have belonged to my step-grandfather; Willie could read only by mo\ing her lips. Then there were

two bedrooms, each heated by a gas burner. There was a family room where everyone spent the whole day and finally a dining room next to the kitchen where we ate our fried chicken, collard greens, black-eyed peas and biscuits and gravy.

She chopped all her hair way back so that it looked like a crewcut growing out. Her eyes were nearly white with cataracts and she could no longer see to sew though she could read and write letters. Willie wrote her letters in pencil and spelled phonetically. She and my mother corresponded every day they were apart. Willie was always smiling, a bit lop-sidedJy because her face was palsied on one side. She had three ripe, heavy wens on her face, one beside her mouth. Willie dressed up with a hat and black shoes and a store-bought dress with a belt of the same color to go around her broad waist when my mother would take her in the car to see other relatives in far-flung Texas towns, but at home she wore a short-sleeved house dress and backless slippers. Her arms were heavy and crepey and jiggled when she moved. She babied her husband and even bought him his clothes and cut his hair, but at the same time she respected him as an educated man. If she caUed him "Mr. Wentworth," he called her just "Willie."

The back door was always open in the summer, night and day, though a screen door kept out the flies. A fan swept us all in its fugitive breeze. A grape arbor produced tangy, almost bitter dark blue grapes with cloudy, blue-grey skins. When Willie would call her chickens to feed them she'd produce a high wail as strange as a Bedouin's ululation.

Work was minimal when we were there. Most of the time we sat around "visiting." We'd go over every litde thing, such as the weather or the mileage our car was getting or the immoral goings-on of the local high school coach, who was bedding several of the married women in town. My grandmother would stand on her porch and watch his progress from house to house, as though he were the rooster servicing all the chickens. My mother would talk a lot about her plans. I noticed she made them sound even more idealistic and humanitarian than when she was alone with us, although her tone was always somewhat exalted. If a joke was good, there was no reason it shouldn't be repeated, and hours later a silence could still be filled with a reprise of the punchline ("And that, son, is the difference 'tween courtesy and tact"), which would trigger off a new chorus of laughter that would reduce my mother and grandmother to tears.

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Of course we couldn't say anything strange or negative about our life up north, because my mother was so eager to shine in Willie's eyes. I suppose we half-suspected, Anne and I, that we were deeply disturbed, and we were relieved to look like a happy, successful family for a moment in our grandmother's eyes, even if she was an old woman whose face was scored with lines, as though the person tracing out portions with a knife on the soft icing had gone mad and continued to score it senselessly into ever smaller pieces. We wanted to be approved of by our grandmother, even if she said, "Why, ain't that nice," to almost anything upbeat and would shuffle back to her kitchen the instant the talk took an "ugly" turn. If she was forced to listen to something harsh, the most she would say was, "WeU, I declare."

She had a certain reseiA'e that worked as a reproach to her garrulous, self-dramatizing children. Just when everyone else was leaning into the conversation, Willie would step outdoors, pretending to chase a neighbor's cat away. Or she'd head for the kitchen to dry her dishes and arrange them. Our mother turned to her stepfather, "WiUie would never let me do chores. When I got married I didn't even know how to boil an egg. If I so much as offered to dry a dish she'd say, 'I want you to study. Anyone can do chores. You've got to make something of yourself so that you can be of service. You were put on this earth to help humanity.' " At that my mother would tear up and grab her stepfather's hand. "You two have always believed in me. When I was going through the X-A" (our code word for my parents' divorce) "it was your faith in me that kept me going"

Willie had a cat she liked but she kept it outdoors. As a farm woman she had no truck with household pets. Her favorite chicken was called Biddy. She was a good laying chicken and Willie stole Biddy's egg every morning. I asked her if she'd ever kill Biddy and eat it, but all she would say was, "Eat that stringy old thing?" Typically she concealed her real affection under feigned disdain.

Willie's first husband, Jim, had died when my mother was just twelve. I confused the stories: sometimes it was said that Jim, who worked repairing or maybe laying train track, died of malaria, which he'd contracted when the railroad was being built through miasmal Houston. Other times it seemed he'd suffered a sunstroke. All that remains of him are a few beautifully penned postcards to my mother from a hospital in Colorado where he'd gone to "rest" (could he have had tuberculosis and they were afraid to name it?) and a tintype of a handsome young man—deep-set pale eyes,