The Farewell Symphony (57 page)

She'd retired or rather she had been forced into retirement by her clinic, which was no longer functioning. She had no pension and no savings. Her cancer had reappeared and she'd had her lower intestine removed and been outfitted with a colostomy bag. Her lover. Randy, managed to be transferred to the West Coast and he was never heard from again.

After she left Fox and me. Mother went up to her Michigan house, which she had to sell if she was going to have some capital to live on (though after paying off the mortgage she'd probably receive only thirty thousand dollars, which wouldn't take her far). One night while eating alone at a steak house she started flirting with two men who kept buying

i' her drinks. By the time she got home she was so drunk she couldn't navi-

!, gate her car into the garage and had to leave it out on the driveway.

I Inside she fell in the bathroom and cracked two ribs. She couldn't move and her peristalsis seemed to have frozen. Even when she irrigated

I "Rosie," as she'd named her stoma, it refused to respond. And she was in-

' capable of leaving the bathroom. She heard the phone ring occasionally,

' but she couldn't move to answer it.

I Three days later, still immobilized, she made a bargain with God that

if he'd save her life she'd never have another drink. "It was like a miracle,"

she told me over the phone. "Suddenly the shit—excuse the word, but it's

the only one that will do—the shit came exploding out of my body."

She'd been saved, but only for new horrors. She was selling her Michi-

I gan house and moving her things to storage or to her new Chicago apartment on Lake Shore Drive or to a maid's room she'd rented in the same building and dubbed "the crow's nest." Standing beside the van when it

;. arrived and directing the movers became a task that rendered her hysterical. She became impossibly entangled and the workers, frustrated, simply dumped most of her furniture in her new living room. She wept and shouted and the building management called me and alerted me to "a possible problem."

The next thing I knew my mother was trying to give away most of her money to "that pitiful Dot," a secretary she'd once had, a pale, skinny complainer who, nevertheless, earned a decent salary and in any event appeared to be better off than my mother. Dot called me, upset, assuring me that she'd refused the check but that my mother had become so vehement that she didn't know how to react. I told her to accept the check and tear it up when the dust had setded.

Then my mother had flown to Texas and was staying with my Baptist cousins. One of them phoned to say, "Honey, I just don't know what to do with her. She never stops talking, she's either excited as a flea or she's desperate and scared, bless her heart. She won't eat, the weight is just dripping off her, she's giving her money away to everyone she meets, why, she gave the waitress a ten-dollar tip yesterday and all she'd had was a dollar cup of coffee. Then last night, oh, it must have been four or five in the morning, she woke me up and said her room was invaded by thousands and thousands of bugs swirling around her. WeO, honey, you remember how we get these litde millers down here in Texas, I think you Yankees call them no-see-ums, anyway, there were just three or four millers flying around the ceiling light, but she said, 'See! There are thousands! They're

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from outer space and they're going to destroy us.' Now, you know I keep a nice house, don't you? I just can't go on. My husband's been real sweet to her because he respects all the good she's done throughout her life although we're both sad that she hasn't found Jesus as her savior. She keeps saying He's a good wise man . . . like the Buddha, I declare! And she says she's going right to the top, to God, she likes the big guy, the chief executive, no Mr In-Between for her, but I reminded her that Jesus said, 'I am the Way' "

I hopped on the next plane out of Miami for Dallas and Amarillo. When I arrived in the terminal my mother was in a short pleated skirt and she had a pom-pom shaker she'd made out of clipped crepe paper "She thinks she's a cheerleader," my cousin said with a rueful smile. "She's cheering your arrival."

My mother and I left on the very next plane for Chicago. During the flight my mother chattered constandy She stroked the stewardess's hand and told her, "You're a lovely woman and a very fine person. I can tell. I'm a psychologist. This is my son, a famous author, who's a chip off the old block, because I'm no slouch, I was the executive director of a medical clinic for mental retardation at Cook County Hospital, a pioneer in my field." Like an excited little girl she whispered to me, "Do you see this sad, sad old lady behind us?" I looked back and saw a nice tranquil farm woman in a flowered dress she'd probably run up herself Her forearms and face were sunburned. She was leafing through a Woman s Day with the stagy off^handedness of an extra; she must have known we were discussing her. She was clearly at least ten years younger than my mother.

"Do you think I should offer her some money? Just a few thousand dollars? That way she could buy some stylish new outfits at Neiman-Marcus, ha\e that old grey washed out of her hair, have a complete make-over— and feel like a million dollars! I'm sure she's a fine woman. . . ." Tears stung my mother's eyes. "She reminds me of my mother!"

When we arrived in Chicago I took my mother direcdy to St. Luke's Hospital, where her doctor had arranged for her to be admitted to the psychiatric floor. I'd assured my mother that her doctor just wanted to check her heart medicine and make sure she wasn't being over-stimulated, given how excited she was.

But when she realized my perfidy (her doctor wasn't even there and she recognized the psychiatric floor), she let out a sob and crawled across the floor to me: "Darling, I beg you, I'm your mother, you can't do this. . . ."

And she clutched at my trousers and gripped my calf through the fabric with her surprisingly strong hands.

"Mother," I said, "it's just for a few days. You have delusions, you're losing weight, you're in a manic phase."

She said nothing but lay on the floor, sobbing.

I was appalled by what was happening. My mother was no longer a kindly litde grandmother but a weeping madwoman abject at my feet. I'd tricked her into accompanying me to the hospital and now I was locking her up against her will—in the very hospital where she had many colleagues and had worked over the years. She had staked her whole life on being a psychologist, a diagnostician of other people's ills, and now I'd turned the tables on her As her child and her friend I had no right to say that I knew she'd gone too far, that she was now a danger to herself. My nephew, I felt, had been harmed the day he'd been classified as mentally ill, a definition like the crack in a bell that would mute its timbre for the rest of his life. Now I was the one declaring my mother mad and com-mitdng her. Had I no conscience?

A day later she'd checked herself out of the hospital and simply disappeared. I was icily angry with her doctor who said, "Look, that's the law. Unless we have a psychiatric hearing before a judge with several expert witnesses and a whole dossier of evaluations, our hands are tied. She's smart, your mother, she knows the law, she's used it often enough in committing crazy kids she was working with."

A week later my mother phoned. She was calmer, she said, but pleased because she was writing her memoirs day and night. "Fin in a hotel, dear, but I won't tell you where. I can't trust you now. But don't woriy I've found the very best cure for insanity: room service. I'm very worried about your smoking. It will kill you sure as rain."

I encouraged her to write. "That will help you to integrate all the traumas you've sustained recendy. Writing is a way of re-asserting the mastery of the ego." We actually talked to each other that way, in psychological jargon, though we scarcely knew what we were saying. It was our funny way of saying very tender things to each other while sounding scientific.

She finished her book and, as she said, discovered in room sendee the exact degree of social contact and above all one-way control essential to mental recovery. She moved home. In the meantime she'd managed to give away most of her money. I began to send her five hundred dollars a month and eventually a thousand, which, with her Social Security, allowed

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her to live decently. Although my sister was in AA and now that she'd finished graduate school was working as a psychotherapist with drunks, neither she nor I had figured out that since our mother had so abruptly stopped drinking she was having DT's of the pink-elephant variety.

Now she calmed down and, at last, in her seventies, said farewell to love and sexual adventure, which had brought her nothing but suffering all her Ufe, although her chapter about Randy was titled "Love at Last."

I paid for her book to be published by a small \anir\' press and Mother sold A Life in Progress to her lady friends at the church, who must have been surprised by the passages about my father giving her the clap soon after their marriage in the 1930s, or about my mother's last lover kissing with resigned acceptance the place where she'd lost her breast through the mastectomy, not to mention the parts about the binge drinking, the stalled stoma "Rosie" and the miracle of the flowing shit.

My sister, who was now li\ing with a new lover, a woman teacher, came with her to Key West for the New Year. Eddie had the first of his many annual parties and we were invited, along with many famous writers. Tennessee Williams came, so did James Kirkwood, but in those days there were not so many writers li\ing in Key West as there would be later. Peter Taylor was visiting with an old school friend of his from Nashville, a fine old Southern lawyer, white haired, dressed in a blue and white seersucker suit.

My sister seemed happy, but I knew she was as resdess as L that she craved intimacy and couldn't endure it and that despite feminine sentimentality (the exchange of \ows beside the campfire when, as an adolescent, she had been Captain of the Blues, and now the exchange of friendship rings with her partner), nevertheless she was as disabused and suspicious as L quick to spot the ludicrous, never surprised when things didn't work out.

Since Gabriel had flunked his final exams in high school, he'd left his teenage commune and gone to li\e with my mother. Now he was staying in "the crow's nest," my mother's "ofllce," where she stored all those thousands of diagnostic tests she'd administered over thirty years to sad, squalling children. Gabriel and my mother were thick. They had an intensely acrive mutual-admiration club. He was preparing for university' amidst all these records of retardation.

I seldom thought about my family, but it kept encroaching on me. My

stepmother called me when I got back to New York and told me my father was dead. He'd been sitting watching TV and, as he was lighting his cigar, he'd suddenly stood up and said, "I can't feel anything in my feet. My God, it's moving up my legs. It's all over me." She said he should sit down. He did and he was dead, the lit match falling from his hand.

It seemed wrong that he should die before me. He was the law-giver, I the criminal, and it was as though the warden had gone and the prisoners were now allowed to creep away, one after another, without reprisals. Yet his absence made me nervous, as though he'd always been the lowering cloud cover above me and now a cold winter wind had blown it away and there was nothing between me and the stars except space. The closed, snivelling, resentful world of childhood had at last ended, the smouldering sense of rebellion against authority, the petty urge to wound, the cringing fear of reprisals. It had been replaced by—well, by space. Empty, untenanted night. I felt grown up now and experienced the gain in maturity as a loss.

My sister and I agreed to meet two days later at a certain time in Toledo; she'd be flying in from Chicago, I from New York. There we'd rent a car and drive to Findlay, Ohio, where the service would be held.

I was staying with Fox. He held me all night and got me up at six a.m., plenty of time to catch my nine o'clock flight from Kennedy Airport. I hailed the first taxi (it was still dark outside) and only when we were beyond the city limits did I notice that the driver was a Haitian who didn't know the route—didn't, indeed, know where we were or who he was, since he was completely incoherent on drugs or drink and incapable of driving. Nor did he speak English. I kept looking for another taxi I could hail, but the dawn streets were deserted. I couldn't believe my bad luck— on the day of my father's funeral I was in the hands of a drug addict who didn't know how to find Kennedy Airport. He seemed to me like one of those symbols of death in a movie by Cocteau.

At last we stumbled by chance on La Guardia, not the airport I wanted but good enough. At least here I would find other taxis.

But I missed my plane. I called my sister from the airport and told her that I'd be on the next flight. She was understanding, as was the airline, which even had a special bereavement fare. I was so used to having all the occasions of my life ignored by society that I was astonished to have my grief shared, as it were, by a company.

As soon as my sister and I arrived at the funeral home and walked into the viewing room I realized that the coffin was open and that my father's

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head—small, waxen, painted—was propped up on a pillow in order to be visible to everyone. I was horrified by the sight and turned my back on it. No matter where I walked in the room for the next hour and a half I kept that horrible litde spoiled fruit out of sight. I was sure that he was rotting in his box—it smelled of meat that had gone off. I understood why there were so many flowers needed, in order to disguise the shocking odor.

My stepmother's family came from a little town near Findlay and a few of her friends and relatives dropped in to offer their condolences. When my stepmother introduced me to them I could see their eyes going from my face to my father's effigy behind me to verify whether there was a resemblance. Since no one except my stepmother's brother and his wife had actually known my father they were deprived of anything to say beyond, "I've heard he was a fine man. I know your stepmother is going to miss him." They patted my hand and hers. I glittered with a huge smile as though I were at a wedding, not a funeral.