Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (45 page)

She stands up straight, hands behind her back, a scarf tied loosely around her neck, draping down over a breast, a flower pinned to the scarf. Theodore Roethke stands, huge, imposing, dour. In an accompanying article Harvey Shapiro tells of how publicly Roethke liked to display his wounds, how he told Shapiro of his hurt that John Crowe Ransom had rejected “My Papa’s Waltz,” though Roethke was famous by then and the poem had been widely anthologized. What remained, still, was Roethke’s pain, perhaps the pain of rejection meshed with the pain of the poem’s subject matter — abuse at the hands of his drunken father. Shapiro also tells of Roethke’s claim that he’d bummed his way to Yaddo after escaping in drag from a mental institution on the west coast earlier that summer. “He liked to romanticize his mental illness,” Shapiro writes. Perhaps, but something honest still comes across in that picture, the despair clear for anyone to view head-on.

In the front row, William Carlos Williams sits cross-legged, dignified.

“He dreamed of my legs,” my mother tells me.

“William Carlos Williams dreamed of your legs?” I ask.

“At breakfast one day he said he’d had a dream about my legs. ‘That girl has nice legs,’ he said.”

We have to keep going back over histories, our own and the histories of others, constantly revising. There’s no single truth…except that, perhaps. History is not always recorded and not always written by the victor. History is not always written. We carry our secret histories behind our words, in another room, in the eyeglass case on the dresser in the bedroom. Maybe someone comes along and finds the right pair. Maybe we have too many, unsorted.

My mother’s former landlord, Loyce, wants to know the history of the “L.” I was gone for the past week in Hawaii, and that’s the only reason I haven’t called before now. Loyce has left messages on my answering machine twice, ostensibly to see about getting back my mother’s deposit to us; minus a charge for mowing, the ad for renting the apartment again, a reasonable charge for her time, and of course, for painting over the “L.” She’d also like the keys back from us. But the “L” is the real reason she’s called. My mother wrote an “L” on the wall of the apartment in indelible magic marker before she left. “I’m dying to know the story,” Loyce says. “I know there’s a good story behind it.”

Loyce appreciates a good story, and this is one of the things I appreciate about Loyce, that and her compassion. She moved to Bellingham several years ago to take care of her ailing mother, and now lives in her mother’s old house on top of a hill with a view of the bay and the San Juan Islands. So she understands our situation. She knows that my mother can’t live alone anymore, that all of us were taken by surprise by her condition when she moved here five months ago. Until then, my mother had been living on her own in South Bend, Indiana, where she taught writing until ten years ago. She’d been living on her own since I moved out at the age of sixteen to go to boarding school, and had been taking care of herself since 1966 when my father died. But in the last several months things have fallen apart. Our first inkling was the mover, a man in his sixties who worked with his son. He took me aside on the first day and told me that in his thirty years of moving he’d never seen an apartment as messy as my mother’s. When he and his son went to my mom’s apartment in South Bend, they almost turned around. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want,” the mover told his son.

No, the first inkling was my brother’s call from L.A., where my mother was visiting a few days prior to her big move. The van had loaded in South Bend and she’d flown off to L.A. to visit him and his family. The night before her flight from L.A. to Seattle he called me near midnight and said, “Mom’s hallucinating.”

I asked him what he meant, what she was seeing, and he told me that she was seeing all these people who didn’t exist and making strange remarks. “When I picked her up at the airport, she said there was a group of Asians having a baby. She said they were a troupe of actors and they were doing a skit.”

Still, the next day, he put her on the plane to me, and I picked her up and brought her to her new home. Since then, we have gone to three different doctors and my mother has had brain scans and blood tests and sonograms of her carotid arteries and been placed on a small dose of an anti-psychotic drug. One doctor says her cerebral cortex has shrunk and she’s had a series of tiny strokes to individual arteries in her brain.

At three a.m. one morning, the police call me up and tell me that my mother thinks someone is trying to break into her apartment.

“Is there anyone living with her?” the policeman asks.

“No.”

“She says a handicapped woman lives with her. You might want to see a doctor about this.”

I take her to doctors and try to convince my mother that she needs to live where she can be safe, but she refuses even to consider it. “I should have stayed in New York,” she tells me. “I never should have left.” And then, “I should never have come here. Why can’t you be on my side?” And then, “I’ll move down to L.A.. Your brother is much nicer than you are.”

I spend a few nights at her apartment, and she tells me about the Middle Eastern couple who have taken over her bedroom and the children who are there, and the landlord comes over and puts a lock on the door from the kitchen to the garage, though we know no one was trying to break in. And homeless people are living on her back porch. And she keeps startling people in the garage who are removing her belongings.

But finally.

After my cousin David flies up from L.A., after visiting a dozen managed care facilities, after my brother says he thinks it’s the medicine that’s doing this and I talk to the doctors and the doctors talk to each other and they talk to my mother and she says, “The doctor says I’m fine,” and I say “No, he doesn’t,” and she hangs up, turns off her hearing aid.

And coincidentally, a friend of my mother’s in South Bend wins second place in a poetry competition run by the literary journal I edit. The poems were all anonymous, and I had nothing to do with the judging, but my mother’s friend has won second prize for a poem about her delusional mother, called “My Mother and Dan Rather.” I call her up to tell her the good news of her award, but she assumes, of course, I’m calling to talk about my mother. So that’s what we do for half an hour. She tells me she’s distanced herself over the last year from my mother because she seemed too much like her own mother, and she tells me that several of my mother’s friends wondered if they should call me and let me know what was going on.

I almost forget to tell her about her prize.

No, the first inkling was two years ago. My wife, Beverly, wondered aloud about my mother’s memory, her hold on reality. I told Beverly my mother had always been kind of scattered, messy, unfocused.

And finally. After I come into her apartment one day and feel the heat, I go to the stove and turn off the glowing burners. My mother has a blister on her hand the size of a walnut. Beverly tells me that it’s insane for my mother to live alone, that somehow we have to force her to move. “What if she sets the apartment on fire? She might not only kill herself, but the people next door.”

“I know,” I tell her. “I’m trying,” but I also know that short of a court order, short of being declared her legal guardian, I can’t force her.

And finally. I convince my mother to come with me to the Leopold, an historic hotel in downtown Bellingham that has been converted into apartments for seniors, one wing assisted living, the other independent. We have lunch there one day. My mother likes the food.

And finally, she agrees to spend a couple of weeks there in a guest room.

Famous people stayed at the Leopold, I tell my mother. Rutherford B. Hayes. Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale. This doesn’t impress her, of course. She has known more famous people than can fit on a plaque. But she has a nice view of the bay, somewhat blocked by the Georgia Pacific Paper Mill. And she likes the food but the apartment is only two cramped rooms, and across the street at the Greek restaurant, people party until two each night and climb trees and conduct military rituals. And the Iraqi Army rolled through the streets one night. And a truck dumped two bodies, a man and a woman dressed in formal evening attire.

“They sometimes flood the parking lot,” she tells me, “and use it as a waterway.”

Or, “Look at that,” pointing, reaching for nothing.

She keeps returning to the apartment, driven by the woman I’ve hired to clean it. My mother wants to drive again, and I tell her no, she can’t possibly, and I read articles and watch programs that tell me not to reverse roles, not to become the parent, and I wonder how that’s possible to avoid. One day, I walk into her apartment and find signs she’s posted all around on the bed, in the guest room, on the kitchen counter. “Keep off.” “Stay out.” “Go Away.” I ask her about these signs and she tells me they’re just a joke. She’s become wary of me. I tell her she’s safe, ask her why she feels so threatened. She tells me, “I’ve never felt safe in my life.” During this period, my mother writes her “L” on the wall of the kitchen.

And the weeks at the Leopold have turned to months, and now most of her belongings are stuffed into a heated mini-storage unit. More of her belongings are stuffed into the basement of The Leopold.

Finally.

I almost don’t want to tell Loyce the story of the “L” when she calls. I’d like to keep her in suspense, because sometimes that’s stronger than the truth. She probably thinks it’s about her, that the “L” stands for Loyce, but it doesn’t. It stands for Leopold. One day my mother was at the apartment, after we finally convinced her she had to move, and I gave her a magic marker and asked her to mark the boxes she’d like taken to the Leopold. Apparently, she thought she was marking a box, but she was really marking the wall. This is what she really wanted. That was not lost on me. She loved that apartment. She wanted her independence, but this was just too much for me to move.

Loyce and I say goodbye after I assure her I’ll return the keys and she assures me she’ll return most of the deposit. It’s already eight-thirty and I told my mother I’d be over around eight, but I had to read to my kids first. I haven’t see them in a week. I’ve just returned from Hawaii.

In Hawaii, where I’ve been researching a new book, I probably had more fun than I should have. Not the kind of fun with life-bending consequences, but fun nonetheless, hanging out with a former student, eating out every night, smoking cigars, drinking. For ten dollars a day more, I was told at the airport, I could rent a convertible — a Ford Mustang, or a Caddie, and I’m not ready for that, so I take the Mustang. Stupid. The wife of the friend I’m staying with laughed when she saw it in her driveway. “Oh,” she tells me. “I thought maybe Robbie was having a mid-life crisis.” No, it’s me probably, even though I hate to admit it. I refuse to believe such a thing could happen to me at this pre-ordained age, a month from forty, that I could be saddled with such a cliché crisis, such mediocre regrets.

Olivia wants to read to
me
tonight, all seven stories from an Arnold Lobel book. “They’re short,” she assures me. We compromise on three, her three favorites. One of these she read last week to her class while I was in Hawaii. Beverly, who sometimes works in Olivia’s class as a volunteer, has already told me that the class was enthralled by Olivia. “She acted so confident. She took her time and showed them the pictures.”

The one she read to her class, “The Journey,” is about a mouse who wants to visit his mother, and in a sequence of transactions, acquires a car, roller skates, boots, sneakers and finally a new set of feet. When he reaches his mother she hugs him, kisses him and says, “Hello, my son, you are looking fine — and what nice new feet you have!” Olivia’s whole class broke out in hysterical laughter, she assured me.

I’ve brought my mother a box of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts. She looks at it, bewildered. “Oh, I thought it was a book,” she says.

I make tea for us, but she only has a few tea mugs and they’re dirty, so we have to use beer steins. “I’ve ended up with such an odd assortment of things,” she tells me, and she blames this on the movers.

A week before my trip to Hawaii, I visited her and she showed me a notebook in which she’d kept a journal during the midseventies. My mother has kept journals from the time she was sixteen, a series of secret histories written in any notebook she can find. But now, she cannot read these histories, and she asks me to read this one to her.

“I might use it in a story,” she tells me. “It’s about Moe and Helen.” Moe is Moe Howard, of the Three Stooges. He was a cousin of ours by marriage, and whenever she visited California, she’d stop by to see them. Moe, who had such a violent on-screen persona: Think of him saying, “Wise guy, eh?” Poking the eyes Larry, Curly, Shemp, or one of the later pseudo-Stooges, Curly Joe and Joe Besser. I met him once, a frail old man with white hair, too quiet to seem like Moe. Off-screen, he was a gentle family man, kind and grateful to his fans, never refusing to sign an autograph. What my mother wants me to read to her is an account of the last time she saw Moe and his wife Helen, when they were both dying.

 

Seeing Moe and Helen was touching — a beautiful hill of purple flowers outside that Moe said was all theirs — a beautifully furnished, expensively comfortable house through which they glide, ghost-like. They don’t kiss me because of the possibility of germs. Helen is in a loose purple nylon dressing gown. She has been recuperating from a breast operation and says in a slightly quaking voice that she will be going to the doctor soon and will probably have cobalt.

Moe is red-faced and very thin. His thinness, wispiness, makes him look elfin — because he used to be heavier, he seemed bigger. His hair is white. He smiles proudly, talking about his appearances at colleges and his memoirs which comprise
many books. Talk about the film I am supposed to have made with him. He reminds me that I acted in it (at the age of about 19) 8mm, I think, with his children. But it is packed somewhere with thousands of feet of other film.