They shared the bottles of Early Times. They shared the cartons of Camels and the swizzle sticks and chewing gum. They had shared more than that once upon a time and where the past disappeared to, neither of them could say. They bought a house and my mother swore she would never leave it until the day she died. And after she died, the house was torn down and he married somebody else. He isn’t any happier now. Somehow his twenty-eight years with Vanessa conditioned him to misery and he married a woman who makes him suffer equally. She doesn’t drink much, this new wife. She doesn’t drive him out into the rain but she complains about him all the time, and rails and chides him for his frailties. Sometimes he smiles at me in a way I recognize. It is the smile of a man being taken away on a stretcher to surgery. It’s probably the same smile he smiled when they found him that night in the dark of the field.
Whether my mother ever smiled that way I cannot say.
My father is a very gentle man. He is a man of great intelligence, a man who has known the law, and some of life and a little bit of the land where he grew up. He is a tall man, lean and soft and graying, and his memory fails him now and then. He is a tired man and he’s been tired all his life, a weary, driven man who cannot sleep. Once he told me that he wanted written on his grave: Here lies the loneliest man who ever lived.
My parents were lost people, refugees, and not from any country that I’ve seen, not the victims of the known wars on this earth, but refugees in subtle battles fought somewhere inside and won and lost and borders crossed and flags laid down. My parents were the displaced . . . not of this world but from their lives, separated from themselves somehow when all those inner wars came to an end.
They never found between them any separate peace, no common enemy, no alien pain but only something savage, undefined and dread.
My inner child is like the sad-eyed waif in those paintings that used to be so popular. Time to grow up, I think.
clue
IN THE WINTER of 1959, my mother spent five days with me in Charing Cross. Peter and I had moved into the little house on Carousel Lane with all our matching Danish modern furniture and almost a year of marriage behind us. We were waiting for the birth of our first child, trapped for the Christmas holidays in a small southern college town emptied of students. It was a dreary season.
The snow had piled up silently in a patchwork of soot and dog urine and the world plodded patiently through it. Nights came early and the skies were pearl gray with clouds. We were bored with each other, bored with the B-grade movies at the State, bored looking for a bootlegger in a dry county, bored waiting for the baby, already one week overdue. We talked, watched television, smoked, and thought of home. I did not even know I was unhappy.
Vanessa came, with her birdlike energy and incessant chatter. She’d stopped drinking the summer before. I don’t remember now what crisis precipitated the abrupt end to her long and intimate relationship with alcohol. She’d been hospitalized. There was an intervention of sorts—nothing formal or staged. Some combination of threats and dire warnings got through to her and she quit cold. During the six months she’d been sober, she’d begun to complain of pain on the left side of her jaw. The family doctor and an ear-nose-and-throat specialist found nothing and we wrote it off as hypochondria, a burgeoning need for attention that seemed like a small price to pay. The pain was, in point of fact, a smoldering ember of esophageal cancer catching fire in her throat, but the diagnosis wouldn’t come for another month. For me, there were a few false labor pains. How irritable I was, grotesque and clumsy. It is the evenings I remember. The house was full of light, sealed off by the chill of December, isolated, close. We sat in the warm green of the living room, playing children’s games. One was a Perry Mason detective game with little plastic cars, symbolic criminals, and dice. There was a maze of paper streets, cardboard city blocks through which we ran, inch by inch. And we played Clue with its secret list of suspects, the tiny plastic weapons and the floor plan of a house.
“I believe the murder was committed by Mr. Black in the billiard room with the . . . let me see, oh yes . . . the rope.”
“Very clever, Peter. Your dice.”
Over and over again, Clue and Perry Mason, television, the hands of gin rummy, naps and false contractions, the constant flow of conversations which had no beginning and no end, no rise, no fall, only words as level and as stale as the snow outside. The year dragged its feet like a sulky child and we could not escape the weight and pull of time.
We experimented with tea. It was the twilight ritual. There were five different kinds in all: Jasmine, Formosa Oolong, Gunpowder Green, Earl Grey, and English Breakfast tea. They came in metal cylinders, probably only an ounce or so in each, given to me by Vanessa as a Christmas gift. We prepared the tea in a squatty china pot, white with a pattern of floral blue. The cups were thin and they sat unevenly on hand-painted saucers. Boiling water, a strainer, one rounded teaspoon of leaves. We debated them one by one. Jasmine with its heady fragrance, its biting taste, a pale yellow tea with a gentle debris in the bottom of the cup . . . Formosa Oolong with its taste of curio shops and cheap silk . . . English Breakfast tea, flat to the taste and tawny . . . Earl Grey with its smoky flavor, Gunpowder Green, which was sharp and unpleasant.
She left before the week was ended. She had come to see me through Christmas; she would return when the baby was born. I remember her cheeks, downy, patterned with surface veins; the way she closed her eyes when she laughed and the faded cap of hair. She went home on the Greyhound bus, smiling at us through the window in a pantomime of good-byes. She was wearing her gray fur coat and a cotton scarf on her head, nodding and chatting to us through the tinted glass . . . another of her endless stories . . . talking and smiling, talking and saying good-bye. And God! the guilt of the moment afterward . . . that I was relieved to see her go.
night visit, corridor a
AT FIRST, YOU think you’re in the wrong room. You’re nineteen and you’ve flown to New York to see your mother after her surgery. Your luggage has been lost, sent to La Guardia on the plane you missed, so that you arrive in the city strangely free. You check into the St. Regis Hotel and then you take a taxi to Memorial Hospital through streets grown dark, in a month that is bitterly cold in a city you love at once because it is vast and unknown to you. You pay the driver and you stand for a moment on the sidewalk. The hospital itself is massive and old. The concrete steps look ancient and drab and the lamps on either side are turn-of-the-century wrought iron with milky globes. It is a building alive with light and you view it with the same sense of mystery and excitement you feel for all hospitals. They represent a kind of freedom to you. Your mother has spent many hours there and so have you and by now, a bond has been formed between you and the sight of that concrete world with its miles of brown corridors.
You climb the steps and move into the lobby through revolving doors. The whole of it reminds you of some elegant hotel, a very exclusive club to which you have gained access through your mother’s suffering. It seems odd to you that she’s come so far to suffer when she suffered so well at home, but this, you learn, is a special kind of suffering in which you can only participate indirectly. You inquire at the desk and you’re given the number of her room and the floor she’s on. You go up in the elevator, feeling strangely that you’re moving back in time. For a moment that puzzles you and then you remember that you’ve seen the city before, or a version of it anyway, in a book of Peter Arno cartoons depicting the war years in New York. That same feeling pervades, from the gray night outside to the charcoal lines of the building; a sense of simplicity, a sense that something somewhere is remotely funny if you only knew the reference points. The elevator is exactly like the ones in old, respectable department stores and you add that notion to the other notions in your head.
By the time you reach your mother’s room, you feel disoriented so that you’re not exactly surprised to see the stranger in her bed. You cannot immediately connect this woman with your mother though
you notice, almost at once, that she’s as thin as your mother is and lean in the aching way of alcoholics. This woman is sober though, with a long blank face and a cleft chin, a flap of gauze across her throat and a look in her eyes that chills you when she turns. It’s Vanessa. The sight of her alarms you, like a nightmare, because so many parts of it are familiar that you have to struggle wildly with the rest. Trembling, she gets out of bed and reaches to embrace you, pantomiming joy, surprise. She has not known you were coming and she acts out her amazement. She reaches for her Magic Slate and scribbles a message to you—simple, angular writing more familiar to you than the sight of her face. You laugh and chatter, light up a cigarette and smoke and all the while you register what has been done to her.
The catalog of change is fearful, horrifying. They have cut down through her lower lip, through her chin, and across her throat, a razor-thin incision that curves up along her left cheek. They have taken away her vocal cords and most of her tongue. They have left her a hole in her throat through which she breathes. She motions to you that she wants a cigarette but when she tries to puff at yours, she can’t even draw smoke. The flap of gauze at her throat moves ineffectually and she acts out her disgust. A pack and a half of cigarettes a day for twenty years are probably responsible for the cancer, but you can’t help admiring her spunk. She has written you in a letter that she was angry that she survived the surgery and you can see why. She has no sensation in her lower lip, can taste nothing, and she tells you, as though it were a bother, that the stump of her tongue makes her feel that she’s constantly choking. Still that valiant little body of hers, after years of abuse, has resisted this staggering blow. The day after surgery, she was sitting up, watching television, writing notes on her Magic Slate, jokes about her “face-lift.” She has learned since then how to change her own bandages, how to suction mucus from her windpipe, how to insert the tubes through her nose three times a day for her liquid meals. She tells you, in silent detail, how she’s had a wisdom tooth removed on top of everything else and she’s tickled about it, pantomiming What next? with a shrug.
It’s odd to talk to her this way. Your own voice sounds loud and the messages you give her seem not to the point. You tell her about the flight, the loss of your luggage, of your room at the St. Regis which looks out on that blazing city. Her room is high up too, she says, but the view is different. She asks you about Peter Blue and your baby, a girl only eight weeks old, and together you think back to that January night, before all this, when she was whole and sat with you through labor. You see? you say to one another mutely with your eyes, all the best things have happened to us in places like this, all the best things have come to us just this way. And you know that the whole of your relationship probably has to do with holding hands in rooms no bigger than this, in cities no better known to you than the one where you now reside.
So you hold her hand and watch TV and you try not to think what it means, her life or yours. At ten, when you leave to go back to the hotel, her eyes fill with tears and you hug her briefly. Oddly enough, you try not to care because caring is too painful. The caring is made up of things you can’t deal with yet, things you won’t understand or accept for a long time to come. So you kiss her good night in a quick way and promise you’ll be back by morning. She walks with you as far as the nurses’ station where she introduces you, mutely and proudly, to the nurses sitting there.
The elevator doors slide open and you step inside, turning then to look at her once more as the doors slide shut. And you understand in that moment how like a prison this place is also, how like a prisoner she is, shut away now in the captive silence of her head. And you understand that she’s always been this way, locked away from you, locked away from life. And you know that death is the only way she can ever be free.
You go out to the street, out through the glass revolving doors to the bitter cold beyond. An icy March wind whistles down the deserted street and the night stretches out before you, stark and chill. A taxi pulls up and you step inside, glancing back at the hospital once as you close the door.
april 24, 1960
THE PHONE RINGS and you say, “I’ll get it,” moving into the downstairs hall to the telephone stand. Peter Blue, who’s been your husband for a year and a half, is sitting on the couch in the living room watching a baseball game on TV. It’s a Sunday afternoon and he’s drinking beer, bent forward slightly, elbows on his knees, chin propped on one fist. From time to time, almost idly, he lights a cigarette. He’s excited by baseball games, which he watches most weekends while you sit, not quite involved, but hoping to be.
The phone rings again and you take up the receiver, glancing as you always do at the photograph of your older sister which hangs there on the wall. The picture was taken when she was six. She stands, smiling broadly, hands at her sides, wearing a light wool coat. Her hair is arranged in long dark ringlets to her shoulders and her two front teeth are missing. Whenever you see the picture, you remember the story that goes with it, of how you were meant to be there, too. You were three at the time and frightened of the photographer who’d been out hunting squirrels. When he came to the house with the gun, you believed he meant to shoot you, too, and you wept so hard you were not allowed to stand there with her on the steps.
“Hello?” you say, and your father’s voice comes through the line.
“Hello, Kit?” he says, his voice tilting up with uncertainty. “This is Daddy. Oh,” he says, and he sighs then before he goes on. “I just thought I better call and let you know. Vanessa died a little while ago.”
“Are you all right?” you ask him, not knowing what else to say.
“Yes, I’m all right. I’m just waiting here for Dr. Belton.”
“Do you want me to come down to the hospital?” you ask.
“Oh, no, that isn’t necessary. He’ll have to sign the death certificate and then I’ll be home. It shouldn’t take long. They’ve put in a call for him now.”
“Do you want me to do anything?”
“No, just tell Del for me if you would. We’ll talk more about it when I get home.”
“All right, Daddy. We’ll see you soon then.”
“All right, that’s fine. Bye now, sweetie,” he says, and his voice holds ever so slightly the tremor of tears locked away.
Del stands at the head of the stairs and you see her now as you set down the phone. She’s twenty-three and a long way from the girl in the photograph.
“Vanessa died a while ago,” you say.
“Well,” she says, “did Daddy say when he’d be home?”
“Pretty soon he said. He’s waiting for Dr. Belton now to sign the death certificate.”
“Well,” she says again, “I’ll be down in a minute.”
You move back to the living room and tell Peter Blue that your mother has died and you sit down with him on the couch and watch TV for a while. It isn’t that you don’t care. It isn’t that the death doesn’t give you pain. You wished her dead many times and you’ll have to deal with that in the years to come. For now, you simply don’t know what to do with the death. And Peter Blue doesn’t know. He tries a consoling pat to your shoulder but you haven’t asked for that and you shrug him off. You don’t even know, in that moment, how annoyed you will be with Peter Blue for offering all those wrong gestures and all those conventional sentiments when you’re struggling so hard with the fact of Vanessa’s death. His clichés are just a distraction, just an impediment to the pain which you reach for tentatively in your head. You can’t even tell him why he’s wrong to pat you that way and you have to pretend you’re simply shifting positions on the couch.
By and by, your sister Del comes down and sits in Vanessa’s rocker nearby and the baseball game goes on, a tableau of men on a field of gray. For a while you take refuge in the sight. Del lights a cigarette and so do you and the silence in the living room is peopled only with the sounds of shouting fans. The announcer tells you what is taking place but it’s all the same to you. You don’t eve
n know which teams are playing and you doubt that you’ll ever care anyway. You’re twenty years old today, on this Sunday when Vanessa’s elected to die. You add the fact of your birthday to the fact of her death and you think what a strange anniversary that will be next year, what an odd celebration, birth and death. Both have been a freedom to you—both have set you free but you won’t understand the freedom any more than you’ll understand your own life for a while yet.
Upstairs, there are two babies sleeping, your daughter and Del’s son, and Del’s husband, Andy, will be home later in the day from a visit with his mother, who lives next door. Your life is crowded with people upstairs and down and you’d like to get away from them. The need to be alone is the same need you felt when your daughter was being born and you lay on a hospital bed for two days, thinking, God, go away, just leave me alone to bear this pain in peace, just leave me alone to call out if I must, to cry. But you sit there on that couch with your sister and Peter Blue and you all avoid, at any cost, the mention of death as though it would be out of place. You’re all pretending the baseball game is real, that Vanessa’s death is the game you can shut off at will. And you wonder, sitting there, who won Vanessa’s life and you feel a faint moment of relief, not knowing yet that the loss is yours, too.