The Liars' Club: A Memoir (45 page)

She took to her bed. From the kitchen, I could hear her rummaging through the fruitcake tin where she kept pharmaceuticals. What was she looking for? I wondered. Some powerful pagan god,
name of Valium or Thorazine or Halcion, was the only answer I came up with.

Mother’s particular devils had remained mysterious to me for decades. So had her past. Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth’s direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free. Several times, I’d flown to Texas ready to push against the figurative door of the past. But the resistance I met was both invisible and fierce. Even when Daddy could still speak, he wouldn’t. He’d put on I’m-just-a-dumb-ol’-cracker face. “Shit, darling, I can’t remember none of that.”

Lecia could confirm what I dredged up. But like me, she lacked basic facts, the whys and wherefores of Mother’s past. In her world, though, people who whined about their childhoods were woosies, ne’er-do-well liberals seeking to defraud the insurance industry out of dollars for worthless therapies. “Unconscious mind, my ass,” she said. “Get over it.” She went back to scrubbing Comet off some sink porcelain. (She worked her butt off all day and had a full-time, live-in cleaning lady, but spent hours every night in rubber gloves. Her house was as gleamingly sterile as most operating theaters.)

Nonetheless, truth was conspiring to assemble itself before me. Call it fate or grace or pure shithouse chance. I was being guided somehow into the chute that led down the dark corridor at the end of which truth’s door would fly open.

After I found the wedding rings, Mother became stonily resolute about not discussing them. Or her past. “I can’t take care of your daddy with you beating on me about all this,” she said. She pressed on her temples with both hands, as if her skull might explode from internal pressure unless she kept it squeezed tight. “I have two headaches, one behind each eye, each one the size of a Kennedy half-dollar.”

I talked long-distance to a former therapist who had me write out all my questions for Mother on a spiral pad. I read them back to him:
Whose wedding rings were those? Who were the two kids Grandma Moore showed me school pictures of? After she died, why did
you go nuts? What were you doing with the knife that night? Why did you tell Dr. Boudreaux you’d killed us? What happened to you in the hospital?

He pointed out that they weren’t
cruel
questions. In my family lingo, though, they were. More than mean, they might prove lethal. The night I approached Mother with my spiral pad, she locked herself in the bathroom for hours. That left me to pace the dim hall outside like a lioness wondering if she was in there holding a Gillette super-blue blade to her wrist. “Call the police when she does that,” the therapist said the next day. But until he gave me an ultimatum, I wouldn’t knuckle Mother to talk. He refused to take my calls. He hung up on me three days running, saying he couldn’t help me if I wouldn’t take some risks.

“You’re not gonna give up on this wedding-ring business, are you?” Mother finally said. I said no ma’am.

We set out to get drunk. Our favorite Mexican waiter scribbled our order for two pitchers of margaritas on his green pad with no sign of judgment. His busboy son then promptly delivered a basket of steaming chips along with sinus-opening salsa in an earthenware bowl.

The wedding rings were Mother’s, of course. She confessed that right off. She’d first married at fifteen. No, she hadn’t been pregnant at the time. Grandma Moore just wanted her out of the house. The first baby came a few years into that, a boy. Let’s call him Tex for the sake of simplicity.

After Tex’s birth, my teenaged mother began to long desperately for escape from Lubbock, particularly from the hawklike vigilance of her very critical mother-in-law, whom we might describe metaphorically as a broomstick-wielding German housewife with a gaze merciless as the sun’s. So when the young husband graduated from college—let’s say in business—his wife urged him toward a job in New York City. In 1942, the family set off from Lubbock, a dust trail blowing up behind their Ford, baby boy cooing in a willow basket in the backseat.

Once there, my young mother became enraptured by the whole shining and steel-girdered metropolis. Tex’s navy-blue buggy got
lugged down subway stairs and shoved along the wide corridors of various museums. She wanted to paint the human form, which desire puzzled her husband. Why would she want to sit around staring at naked strangers? Quarrels erupted. The whole endeavor was put on hold with the arrival of a new baby girl, blond and green-eyed like Mother. Let’s call her Belinda.

After the birth of Belinda, the wicked mother-in-law flew north on her leathery wings and assumed control over the household. The young wife responded with an act shameless enough to border on scandal: she took a job, full-time, doing mechanical drawing for Bell Labs. Pearl Harbor had been bombed. The husband’s employer was military; now the wife’s job was adjudged essential to the war effort. The mother-in-law pouted, but didn’t want to seem unpatriotic. She grudgingly cared for the children while Mother worked.

And it was from that job that Mother returned home one evening to find her entire house empty, her family gone.

It was winter. Imagine it. During the short walk from the train, a dry snow falling fast had accumulated on Mother’s hair and the shoulders of her charcoal coat in a pattern of flakes I picture like a lace scarf, like the white mantilla a girl wears at her First Communion.

Mother crossed the threshold into an empty house. The radiators were cold. She followed the pale plumes of her breath from room to bare room, throwing light switches to no avail. Even the phone was dead.

The neighbors had seen the moving truck pull away that day, the loading of it supervised all morning by the old woman. The young husband arrived by car after lunch to pick her up with the kids, toddler Tex standing in back, the infant girl in the old lady’s arms.

I was crying by this time, and so was Mother. Our waiter was poised behind the hostess desk, motionless as a figurehead. He stared politely away from us, into the drafty and cathedrallike mall space, our unstudied menus tucked in his armpit. At a side table, the busboy was filling salt shakers with a small plastic
funnel and deep attention. The salt poured from the giant bag like swift liquid while Mother dabbed at her eyes. She slipped a paper napkin flat under her lower lashes to blot any mascara.

The neighbors let Mother sleep on their foldout couch. They also fed her and took her out to a bar down the block. She wasn’t yet old enough to have voted. “And that’s the first night I got drunk. Oh, I’d taken a drink before, but they got me pie-eyed.”

Next day at her husband’s office, she found his desk drawers cleaned out. A few unsharpened pencils rolled around among the paper clips. The boss wore a watch fob across his portly middle. He wouldn’t tell her where the young husband had gone, claiming those whereabouts were top secret, a matter of national security.

Still, she stayed numb and dry-eyed. Surely her kids were nearby. The war made searching for them hard. Nights, the whole Eastern seaboard got blacked out after curfew. Buses and trains were booked with GIs, so travel was nearly impossible. “Even if you had ration stamps, which nobody did, there wasn’t any gas.”

Her parents had also moved from Lubbock proper to a farm in Morton. They didn’t have a phone. Letters meandered slowly back and forth. When Grandpa Moore threatened to shoot the young husband, he did so by postcard. And the Lubbock branch of the husband’s family had likewise vanished, leaving no forwarding address, no bank records, nary a trace.

Like a forties movie where calendar dates get torn off in a flurry, some months passed. Mother blankly plodded through. “I’d tell myself the kids would show up next week, or my parents would track them down soon as they could find a detective to hire. Everybody who could do anything was off in the war.” She took a studio apartment in Manhattan and signed up for night classes in painting at the Art Students League, after which she drank till blackout. Days, she worked hungover at the labs.

Six months after the kids disappeared, Mother’s daddy dropped dead unexpectedly. “Cerebral hemorrhage,” the death certificate read.

The call came in to Bell Labs while she happened to be at the
switchboard, filling in for a friend who’d gone to the women’s room. Mother felt awkward accepting the call for herself from the operator. Then the very dry voice of her aunt Audrey came worming through Mother’s headset, right into her ear. “Your daddy passed away last night,” it said, and Mother responded by yanking all the cords she could lay hold to from the switchboard, grabbing wires with both hands and just pulling blind, so every call hooked through that switchboard broke off suddenly into the monochromatic hum of dial tone.

Mother got a Defense Department waiver to ride trains to Texas for the funeral. But troops bumped her off in Chicago, where she was stuck for days. Bumped again in Amarillo, she hitched a ride with a truck driver who carried her to the aunt’s white-picket fence.

Grandma Moore had slipped into something like madness. She’d locked herself in the back pantry where they shelved canned peaches and dusty jars of chowchow. Mother peeked in, and Grandma looked up from her lace shuttle, her face on its delicate bones showing not the least surprise. “Everybody’s saying your daddy’s dead, Charlie Marie.” She’d been doing a floral pattern and went back to it. Her lips pursed. “But he isn’t dead. He’s just real, real cold.” Mother remembered the dry sound of silk thread sliding through, the knot creating a perfect clump of lilac on a lace branch.

In the parlor, the fair-haired aunts were nonplussed by Grandma Moore’s decline. They were crisis vultures. “Somebody else’s trouble just thrilled them to death,” Mother told me. After supper, they hid from their husbands to smoke out on the gazebo.

Mother was bringing out glasses of fresh lemonade when she overheard what must have been the family wisdom on her loss of those children. “Charlie Marie must have done something awful to run that man off,” one said. “And him taking the babies,” another said. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire,” piped in a third.

The kids were found wholly by chance long after the funeral, when Mother had gone back to New York and Grandma Moore had returned to her version of sanity.

My grandmother was finishing an egg cream from the wrought-iron chair of a Lubbock drugstore when her insurance man stopped by. He asked about my mother’s whole-life premium, which had gone unpaid for some time. “Her husband sends us money orders for his policy. But he’s not covering Charlie’s,” he said. “You want to let her policy lapse, or what?”

Within five minutes, Grandma had the young husband’s address. Within two days, my mother had flown from New York City to the small Western town—let’s say it was Reno, Nevada—where the husband lived.

The town constable picked her up. He drove her to the house where her kids were ensconced. The young husband had just remarried, it turned out, claiming his children’s mother had run off years before to parts unknown. Maybe she was even dead. “Hell, I didn’t even realize I was divorced, much less dead,” Mother said, which caused the constable to cock an eyebrow. He knew—because she’d told him—that the black alligator handbag on Mother’s lap held a court order from a New York judge assigning her full custody of the two children.

The house was a sprawling ranch with a winding brick walk that led to a broad, brass-knockered door. The young husband had done well. That door swung open on the evil mother-in-law. The constable blushed and stuttered explaining his mission to her. She finally stepped back a few paces to let them enter.

A small boy hid behind her apron, and a blond toddler girl was idly stacking blocks on the immaculately vacuumed Oriental rug.

Mother stooped down and held out her arms to the girl, who stood, shrieked, and fled behind the long sofa, cowering. Just the crown of her blond head bobbed up shining.

“That was the first time I thought,” Mother said. In the small table space between us were many stemmed margarita glasses, the crusted salt missing on each where her mouth had sipped, or my mouth had. We’d long since stopped leaving lipstick marks. “I just got the papers and hopped on a plane when I heard they’d been found. I didn’t think. I had a studio apartment back then,
on Jones Street.” Tears made her face slick, but her voice stayed flat, as if those tears had a source in the gray eyes of a different woman, one whom Mother knew only in passing.

The mother-in-law was a broad battleship of a woman. She walked behind the sofa, the boy still scuttling to hide himself in her voluminous skirts. The old woman hefted up the weeping toddler girl, who quieted to snuffles.

Mother collapsed in a ladderback side chair. She bent over her handbag with the court order unfolded on top and wept. The constable stood like a soldier under orders before the long silk draperies. “I knew then they were better off there,” Mother said. “With their daddy, I mean, and whoever the woman was. I didn’t even have beds for them. I didn’t have anybody to watch them while I was at work. I hadn’t
thought
, just hadn’t
thought
about any of that.” Mother says the word
thought
like she’s stomping out something, or as if the weight of it fell on her like a blow.

Then Mother did what seemed at the time the Right Thing, though had she Thought, she may have Thought Twice about how Right the Right Thing would wind up being, for surely it drove her mad. She sat in that ladderback chair and tore up the papers giving her sole custody of the two minor children, Tex and Belinda. She tore them up under the smug smile and predatory eye of the monolithic Mother-in-Law. The constable showed visible relief. But the kids were still skittish, which was partly why Mother didn’t even hug them good-bye, for they would have winced in her arms. “I couldn’t have stood that,” she said.

“What’d you do then?” I asked.

“Then I flew back to New York and started looking for somebody to marry who’d help me get my kids back.”

The room around us had vanished completely. We were held close in this timeless bubble of bad neon. “But after I got married, whoever it was”—she waved her hand at the various husbands—“would lose interest in getting me my kids. And I’d get sick of them and run off. Your daddy would have taken them, finally. Your daddy was the only one.…”