While I Was Gone (40 page)

Daniel drove me to the airport, one of Mother’s boarding students would borrow her old Buick and pick me up in Bangor. We were as polite and careful with each other as usual on the drive into Boston. I commented on the yellowing sweeps of the willows, on the odd batches of crocus or squill here and there. Daniel smiled or nodded, and in turn told me about the resolution of a crisis they’d been having at church, a kind of political struggle over deacons. For a while closed my eyes and rested, let him think I was sleeping if he wanted to.

As we drove through the city, though, slowing, stopping, starting, I sat up, looking around.

We were entering the airport. Suddenly Daniel said, “It’ll be good for us, this time apart.”

I looked at him.

“We just had time apart. When you were in Philadelphia. ” He smiled thinly at me.

“Ah, yes. But that was my time away. My busy time. This time apart we can think.”

“I thought then.”

“You had time to.”

“Yes,” I said, not wanting to consider what he might think about while I was gone. But then we pulled up to the terminal, and there was all the distraction of where to park, whether he should bother to park, whether he should even get out of the car. In the end, we doubleparked, and he did get out, to embrace me quickly, the lightest touch of his cool lips on my cheek. Then I walked away, into the terminal, out to the gate.

As I flew north, I moved into what seemed like another country, an earlier time of year. You could still see snow lying under the trees in the woods, and the rest of the landscape was bleak and colorless except for the deep green of the pines.

It was Susie who picked me up, holding a card against her chest with my name printed on it in big letters so I wouldn’t miss her.

“That was clever of you,” I said, as we walked to the car.

“I was wondering how I’d recognize you.”

“Your mother suggested it,” she said. She was short and plump, with dark, curling hair. I was trying to remember what Mother had told me about her. Math? Or physics? Something unusual for a woman, as I recalled it.

“I was wondering how I’d recognize you too.”

“How is she doing?” I asked.

“Oh, she’s her same old self, really. In the hospital I think they had her doped up, and she seemed, like, really old?” She had the same verbal tics as everyone else her age, whatever the specialty was.

“She is really old.”

“But, like, disoriented? And irritable. That’s what struck me, I think. How irritable she was? I never think of her as complaining.

She’s so… like, brave, don’t you think?”

“I do,” I said, realizing that this was true.

In the car, I asked her to tell me about herself and the other students. She was chatty and seemingly comfortable. It was math, her field, but she’d hit a wall, she said, and didn’t know if she’d go on.

“It’s like there are different sizes of the gift,” you know what I mean? and I always thought I had this really huge gift? But now I look around me at all these math boys….” She shook her head.

“I don’t think so.”

I commiserated on having to think about starting over at her age, which was… ?

“Twenty-four.”

“Twenty-four,” I said.

When we came into the house, Mother’s voice floated down the stairs.

“Yoo-hoof”

“Yoo-hoo yourself,” I yelled back, and Susie laughed.

I went upstairs and dropped my bag outside Mother’s door.

“Josie,” she said, reaching her arms up. She was white everywhere, her shn, her turtleneck, her hair lying in a long frizzing braid on one shoulder—except for the cinnamon-colored streaks in it, reminders of her long-ago dark auburn. She was dressed, the turtleneck under a cardigan, navy-blue slacks with one leg rolled up over the cast.

There was a big woolly sock on that.

I leaned over and hssed her, smelling her talc and the light camphor odor from the heavy woolen blankets she still used.

My bed would have them, too, layered one over another, their very weight seeming to press you nightly into uncomfortable sleep. The girls had always complained of this on visits to her.

“I woke up with dents in me,” Sadie had said. Sadie.

We talked for a few minutes, and then I went to change and unpack. When I finally sat down next to her bed and poured her some tea out of the pot I’d carried up on a tray—tea with lemon, and arrowroot biscuits, the old familiar afternoon snack—she threw herself back dramatically into the pillows and said, “It’s my own damned fault.

If only I’d been wearing sensible shoes.”

“Why, what were you wearing? Manolo Blahniks?”

She squinted at me from behind her bifocals.

“What’s that?”

“I was being silly. They’re spike heels.”

“Well, no.” She smiled.

“I had on those shoes I wore to Boston.”

“Mother! They don’t come more sensible than that.”

“Well, but I mean I should have had on flat heels. I should have had rubber soles.”

“Oh! Snow tires.”

She laughed.

“More or less. It was vanity. And now I pay the price.”

I laughed too.

“Well, sooner or later we all pay that price, I guess.”

“But this is serious, you know.”

“You’ll be fine in no time,” I said dismissively. Her doctor had assured me this would be the case.

“No, don’t say that. I mean, I know I will, this time.

But it’s the beginning.”

“It’s the beginning of exactly nothing,” I said.

“Josie, my girl, it’s the beginning of the end, and you know it. Slow or fast, it doesn’t mater from here on out. It is the beginning.”

She raised a hand against my protest.

“And don’t you pretend it isn’t the first thing you thought of.”

“Mother, it’s not.”

“Well, the second or third thing, then.”

I set my cup down.

“Listen, lady,” I said.

“I’ll admit it, the thought occurred, way down the list. But the moment I talked to the doctor, stopped thining about it altogether.” This was almost true.

“You’re going to be fine. He says so. I know it. Susie knows it.”

She huffed, a liale sharp exhalation from her lips, and then she took a neat bite from her coo he When she’d swallowed, she looked at me.

“It’s not that I’m afraid, I want you to know that. The only thing I worry about is dementia. And leaving home. I want to die at home.”

“Now, that is premature.”

She ignored me.

“I want you to know something,” she said.

“I’ve signed one of those living wills. I know it’s not binding, but I’ve signed it. Fred has it. He’s the executor.” She pronounced it murderously, executor.

“I’ll have the lawyer send a copy to you too. But I wanted you to hear it from my lips as well, I want to stay at home.” She smacked the bedelothes with her hand on the beat.

“I’d rather die sooner at home than later in a hospital. Those two nights were plenty enough for me, thank you. It was like being already dead. It was more like hell than anything I’ve ever lived through.”

This was her mood, then. When I talked to Daniel on the phone that night, I called it “cheerful morbidity” and made him smile. I could hear it in his voice when he spoke again.

I

THE DAYS AT MY MOTHER’s HOUSE PASSED SLOWLY, MINDlessly, and I was relieved—even happy, in a way—for that. We played checkers, Mother and I, and gin rummy. She beat me, because, as she said in disgust, I didn’t even try to remember what cards had already been discarded. The first few days, I had her waling up and down the long upstairs hall for ever lengthier intervals. The second afternoon, I persuaded her to come downstairs, siting down first at the top and sliding the crutches along with her. I stood a few steps below her, moving backward as she descended, encouraging her progress, but I didn’t help. After she’d struggled to get herself up, to get her crutches tucked under her armpits again, she said, “Good thing they built these old houses with sturdy newel posts,” and burst into tears.

I tried to do a chore or two for her each day. I went shopping, and made her about a week’s worth of dinners, which I froze. I bought her a small backpack to haul things around in. She wore it reversed, hanging off her front, so she could get at it more easily. I did several big loads of laundry, since it seemed it would be a while before she could easily manage the trip to the basement carrying anything. I returned her library books and got her new ones.

I went to the store and bought a jigsaw puzzle, and we started it on a card table I set up in front of the fireplace. It was pleasant, the idle, pointless, un freighted conversation about color and shape, about who was working on edge pieces, about where our separate clusters of pieces might fit together. One day late in the week, as we were working on it, seemingly out of the blue she said, “I feel bad.

Taking you away from Daniel for so long.”

“It’s not very long, Mother.”

“Still. It disrupts your life.”

I smiled.

“We’ve been having a disrupted life,” I said.

She looked up sharply.

“It’s been a hard time between us. Actually, it’s not a bad time to be apart for a while.”

“Well, hard times happen, Josie.” She was watching me now.

“I know,” I said.

“Do you? I used to worry that you didn’t know that. That that’s what made you so…”

“So what?”

“So restless, I guess. Like the time you ran away from that hapless Ted.”

“But you see, Mom, it all worked out for the best.”

She sighed, testily.

“I suppose so.”

We fell silent again. The puzzle was a Monet haystack, the pieces were covered with blurry pastel brush strokes.

Suddenly she said, “You know, Josie, there’s something I’ve always meant to tell you, and it’s bothered me that I didn’t. I don’t know that it makes any difference now, but I feel I should. I feel I ought to do those things I’ve neglected to do.”

I raised my hand, to ward it off, I suppose, whatever intimacy it was going to be. I didn’t want it. I wanted everything I knew about my mother to stay the same.

“No, now you listen to me. Sit still and listen.” And abruptly we were not working on the puzzle. I looked at her. Her lips were pressed against each other firmly, resolve. Then she began.

“It’s about your father. You know, your father and I… well, he was married once before. Before he and I married.”

I looked away sharply. I was shocked. Had she imagined—how could she have imagined?—that I’d never known? It was true that we’d never spoken of it, but there was so much we’d never spoken of.

Sex.

Childbirth. Anger, love, sorrow… All these were encoded or contained in the language of everyday life. Or simply never referred to in our family. I thought I was going to laugh. In relief, I suppose.

This was all there was. This, this was the most terrible secret in my mother’s life, the one she had to tell before she died. How wonderful. How extraordinary.

“His first wife died,” she was saying solemnly.

“I’d known him for some years by then. Working for him, don’t you know. She died awfully slowly. She was ill for years. She was ill—they didn’t know it, but she was ill even before they were married, so right from the start they were coping with that. By the end, her whole insides were eaten up, more or less.” She gestured at her own belly.

“I suppose that’s some of it. You just didn’t talk about cancer in those days. That made it kinda… private. And then I think your filther and I were… I suppose I’d have to say ashamed. It seems odd w, {from this great distance, that we would be. But we were happy tpther, even before she died, you know what I mean….”

I nodded, quickly.

“And that shamed us. We… we really didn’t speak of it, even to each other. How happy we were. At her expense. We just… well, what we felt, I suppose, was that we couldn’t help ourselves. I know I couldn’t. I just… well, I fell in love with him. He was so shy, don’t you know. He asked for so little for himself that it broke my heart, really. I just… I just began to do the things for him that a wife would do. I’d pack him lunches when he went botanizing. Sometimes I’d even go along. It was lovely.” Her face had softened.

“I’d take a book and sit on a blanket and read, and of your father would go, and come back every now and then to show me what he’d found.”

I thought of Daniel and me, in the boat.

“It sounds lovely,” I said.

“But that, that early happiness… well, it cost us something. Later.

There were things we never…”

She sat straighter.

“We paid a price,” she said firmly.

“Nothing is free, is it?” Her voice was stronger now. She smiled at me, a liale vaguely.

“Well, he told Freddie. And I was to tell you. But you were littler, and the time never seemed just right. And then, so suddenly, he was gone. And you were so devoted to him, it seemed a terrible thing to me to do anything that might hurt his memory.”

I was wondering again that she could have thought I didn’t know this, especially after Fred was told. Did she not understand the hard currency of painful knowledge that siblings paid each other off in?

Did she not understand how everything slowly—or quickly—rises to the surface in family life?

“Well, that’s my secret,” she said. She was waiting for my response.

“And it’s not so awful, is it?”

“I hope not, dear.”

“No. It isn’t.”

“It doesn’t change anything, does it?”

I shook my head.

“I hope you can think of your father and me… well, we’re the same, aren’t we?”

I reached out and touched her hand.

“Mother, of course.”

She let my hand rest on hers a moment.

“What was terrible, I suppose, was the not telling it.”

“It didn’t hurt me, Mother.”

“Well, so you say, Josie. But you don’t really know, now, do you?”

“No, but I suppose it’s part of who I am by now.” Of course, I didn’t mean the not knowing, since I had known. I meant the not speaking, the keeping of the secret. And I meant what the secret itself gave me so young, the seductive sense of another self, another possibility.

And what if we’d been uterly open? Made jokes about the first wife? What if we’d been that kind of family? Well, I would have been different, surely. But not because I knew the secret. For it wasn’t the secret—the secret that wasn’t a secret anyway—that led to the austerity in our lives. It was the austerity that led to the secret.