Elsewhere: A Memoir Part 11

"You look exhausted," she said now, taking my hand. "What a long haul this has been for you."

I started to say that it'd been a tough few days, all right, but then realized she was going all the way back to Arizona, maybe even to Helwig Street. "I just wish you could be happy, Mom."

"I used to be," she sighed, and in her inflection was the same profound mystification I'd heard the week before when she asked me to explain why, despite her formidable will, the hands of the clock would only go in one direction. "I know you don't believe that, but I was."

Here and There

IT WOULD'VE TAKEN about forty minutes to drive out-island from Edgartown in the summer, but in late December, with so few tourists on the island and no mopeds or cyclists clogging the narrow, two-lane roads, it took about half that long. To me, the winter landscape was starkly beautiful, but I found myself wondering if my mother would agree. Given that the alternatives were Gloversville and coastal Maine, she'd wholeheartedly embraced the idea of scattering her ashes in Menemsha Pond, a place the rest of us would regularly visit, but today it wasn't hard to imagine her taking one look at the frigid, windswept, gunmetal-gray landscape and saying, What an awful, awful place. Was the island simply the last in a series of wrong places for her? Is that what the previous night's dream, in which I'd carried her through the streets of that nameless town in search of an unknown destination, was trying to tell me?

Emily and Kate both planned to speak at this interment, and driving out there I found myself wondering what they'd say. Their approaches to dealing with my mother had always been different, Emily infinitely patient and loving and accommodating, Kate deeply sympathetic to her isolation and loneliness but far less able to surrender to her unreason. In Illinois, when they were still young and Barbara and I had obligations at the university or just needed a night out, my mother had been their occasional babysitter. Once we were out the door, the three of them would caucus in the living room and decide on a theme for the evening's entertainment, after which, while my mother watched TV or read, the girls would raid my wife's closet for costumes, practice their lines in their bedrooms, then stage a play or musical for my mother's edification and critical evaluation. Both girls had fond memories of such evenings, of having the undivided attention of an appreciative adult, though things had changed by the time we moved to Maine. As teenagers, they weren't so malleable or as easily delighted. More important, by then the roles were reversed. On those rare occasions when Barbara and I both had to be absent for a few days, my mother would come over to the Waterville house to look after them, but they both understood without having to be told that it was their responsibility to keep an eye on her. We'd tried hard not to undermine their affection for their grandmother, but of course they'd borne witness to her mood swings and meltdowns, not to mention our difficulties in keeping her relatively calm and stable.

Though they'd been told a good deal about my mother as a young woman, her yearning for a life of dancing and clever repartee and nice clothes and personal freedom, the old GE photo we found after her death had knocked both girls for a loop, and I knew they were still trying to reconcile it with the grandmother who later in life made them sit still when they visited her apartment and instructed them not to touch anything; whose shirts and slacks and sweaters hung in the closet sheathed in plastic, nothing allowed to touch anything else for fear of wrinkles; whose refrigerator reflected the same obsessive distance, the milk carton always a respectful three inches from the orange juice. As a young woman, my mother had in many ways been ahead of her time, determined to make it on her own in a man's world. Back then, GE was almost exclusively male, and the men she'd worked for and with had both accepted and admired her. In this respect she wasn't so different from the brave, trailblazing women our daughters had studied in their college courses, who helped to inst.i.tute workplace reform and equal-pay-for-equal-work legislation. How could this woman in the photo be the same person who'd lectured them so tirelessly, and often inappropriately, on highly conservative gender roles (This is what the man does and That is what the woman does). To prepare them for marriage, my mother had given them to understand that in every relationship, one partner or the other had to rule the roost, and that in good marriages the roost was ruled by the rooster. As the girls grew older, it became clear to her that these lectures were falling on deaf ears. Kate in particular worried her, and my mother had warned us throughout her adolescence that we were allowing her to grow up headstrong, that her unflinching independence was decidedly unfeminine. In the end, despite having fewer sharp temperamental edges and always lavishing on her grandmother such generous forbearance, Emily fared little better. When she fell in love with Steve, our shy, brilliant son-in-law-to-be, my mother wondered out loud if he'd be man enough to tame and rule her. ("I suppose I could slap you around a little," he'd offered, when Emily reported this concern to him, "if that would make her feel any better.")

We'd timed our arrival for sunset. Tom, Kate's husband, a talented photographer, had brought along a camera to doc.u.ment an occasion whose exact nature we'd not discussed, preferring spontaneity. Menemsha, a hive of activity in season, was deserted now, which suited us fine given that what we intended, though unscripted and benign, was quite possibly illegal. A few fishing vessels bobbed in the swell against a nearby dock, and every now and then a voice or two would be borne in on the wind. Somewhere out in the harbor a buoy clanged, surely the loneliest sound in the world. A pickup truck rumbled by, its driver leaning forward for a better view of six well-dressed out-of-towners congregated at the water's edge. It wouldn't have required much imagination for the fellow to guess our purpose, though I suspect he'd have been surprised to learn that the person whose ashes we meant to scatter had been to the island only once, for a single week some fifty years before, determined to show the little boy she had in tow that beauty existed in the world.

With the sun hovering a few inches above the western horizon, I clambered down, urn in hand, over jagged rocks that were wet and slippery with moss to where the water was lapping the sh.o.r.e, thinking to myself that it would be about right if I broke my a.s.s trying to accomplish one last foolish thing on my mother's behalf. Not much is left of a human professionally reduced by heat and flame, and it took me just a few seconds to scatter that biblical dust in the churning waves, where it swiftly mingled with sand and silt and tiny pebbles. By the time I scrambled back up the embankment, the sun was sitting on the western waves, large and red but without the power to warm. Emily spoke first, thanking her grandmother for the gift of this island that over the years had played such a magical role in the lives of our whole family; then Kate recalled with bittersweet affection her grandmother's ability to imagine vividly a happier, better future, even if she couldn't quite see herself in it. When they were done, I read the Shakespeare sonnet that begins "Fear no more the heat o' the Sun," partly because it was appropriate to the occasion and one of the most beautiful poems in the language, but also because I hoped it might hide from my loved ones the fact that I myself had nothing to say, that while part of me was here with them on this beloved sh.o.r.e, another part was wandering, as it had been for months, in a barren, uninhabited landscape not unlike the one in my dream. I realized I'd felt like this for a while. Though life had gone on since my mother's death-Kate had gotten married, I'd finally published another book and gone on tour with it-some sort of internal-pause b.u.t.ton had been pushed, allowing another part of me, one I'd specifically kept sequestered to deal with my mother, to fall silent. Since her death, Barbara and I had gone through all her things and settled her affairs, but we'd barely spoken of her. After thirty-five years, for the first time, we were alone in our marriage, and neither of us seemed to have the heart to discuss what that meant. There might have been more to say if the girls had been around, but Emily was living in Amherst and Kate in London, and the rest of my family still in upstate New York.

We therefore scheduled a family memorial service for the following summer in Gloversville, the sort of gathering my mother would've liked-just family and friends and food and swapping stories, like the one about the Christmas when she, all dressed up, was trapped astraddle a s...o...b..nk, everybody laughing too hard to help her get unstuck. But in the meantime, not much had been said; and when you say nothing, it speaks volumes.

The last year of my mother's life had been particularly grueling. The specialist who'd diagnosed her congestive heart failure had explained how things would likely go over the year or possibly two that remained to her. Given how hard her heart was now working, she might suffer a major heart attack, but it was far more likely that her decline would be gradual. For a while, at least, she'd continue to feel sluggish and tired, nothing more. Over time, though, she'd be increasingly short of breath, especially when she exerted herself. Every now and then there'd be days when she'd feel better, even energetic, her breathing less labored, and he advised her to stick with her normal routines for as long as she could, to continue her weekly trips to the supermarket and to the hairdresser. Eventually, however, her good days would be fewer and farther between; she'd become housebound, then bedridden. Toward the end she'd require morphine, not for pain, but to make her breathing easier. I was the one choking back sobs as the doctor delivered this grim prognosis. My mother accepted it with near-perfect equanimity. She was being told what would happen, not what might, and certainty never frightened her, even certain catastrophe. She wasn't scared to die. As we drove home, she actually comforted me.

Living, on the other hand, in the greater scheme of things a relentless march of inconsequential minutiae, continued over the ensuing weeks and months to generate crises. Appearances, as always, weighed far more heavily on her decisions than they should have. No doubt recalling the enormous oxygen tank that stood sentry behind my grandfather's chair on Helwig Street, the one my grandmother used to glare at homicidally every time he got up to leave the room, muttering "Ugly" beneath her breath, my mother wasn't anxious to start on oxygen. Her living room was arranged just so, to accentuate her "pretties," the menagerie of small, ornate objects (a ballerina, a cut-gla.s.s bowl, etc.) she'd been collecting down through the years, and a few were given pride of place on the sill, where they made it difficult to open or close the windows. As the perimeter of her world continued to contract, it was imperative for her to keep control over what remained, and an oxygen tank, unsightly and utilitarian, represented a serious breach of taste. Of course the technology had come a long way, and the small, boxlike oxygen machine we eventually rented could be tucked away behind an end table, but that didn't matter; she knew it was there, unwanted, a violation. We also got her a small, portable tank for when she needed to leave the house, but she'd seen people out in public with such unwieldy contraptions, and she didn't want to be one of them. She would use it when she came to our house, but refused to be seen in stores or restaurants with a breathing apparatus. The plastic tubing, once inserted, made her nose look like a pig's snout, or so she claimed, and she couldn't bear to be seen looking like that. Hearing she was ill, people at Megunticook House were concerned, but after going on oxygen, she let it be known that she didn't want visitors, even people she liked. And so, in short order, her world shrank to her own two rooms, the apartment of her one good friend across the hall and, when she was feeling up to it, our house across town.

For what seemed like a very long time, my own world wasn't much larger. With few exceptions, I declined speaking engagements and canceled personal appearances. Except for visiting our daughters in London and Amherst, we stuck close to home. Faced with an undefined period of staggering health-care expenses, I hunkered down with the novel I was working on, while Barbara, who'd recently gotten her real-estate license, kept busy learning the ropes of a new profession. For a while I did most of what needed doing-shopping for my mother's groceries, making small repairs in the apartment, taking care of trash and recycling-but before long it became necessary to hire professionals to help with more intimate duties. Moving her in with us was something I refused to even consider because it would have made a nurse of my wife, and besides, what my mother seemed most adamant about was keeping things just as they were for as long as possible, especially her apartment, so I promised to make that happen.

Even in terminal illness, her emotional cycles continued, exacerbated now by physical ones that proceeded as expected and predicted. There were good days and bad days, and it was the good ones we all came to fear. On bad days, when her energy level was low, her breathing difficult, my mother fussed and found fault less. On bad days her Meals on Wheels were a G.o.dsend, the people who delivered them saints. When listless, she understood she was too ill to be left alone, that she needed help with almost everything, even getting up from the sofa to go to the bathroom. On days when she woke up feeling better, though, watch out. Then the Meals on Wheels were inedible, and (again, shades of Woody Allen) the portions inadequate. When a delivery was running late, she'd call and tell them not to bother; when it came anyway, she wouldn't ring whoever was bringing it into the building. The health-care workers, who'd all been warned, bore the brunt of it when she went on the warpath. Some quit. Others-several of whom she'd taken an aversion to at first sight-she refused to let in the door. She knew as her condition deteriorated that she was becoming increasingly dependent on them, but on good days she couldn't see why people who most of the time just sat and watched television with her were paid so much. We'd never discussed what these costs amounted to, but she knew it was expensive and not covered by Medicare, which was partly why she was so unreasonable on this subject. To her way of thinking, to justify such expense, the people we hired should always be working, vacuuming or scrubbing the bathtub, as if they were maids with medical training. Did they have to be in the apartment with her when they weren't needed? Couldn't they wait out in the hall? Couldn't she ring for them? "Maybe you don't care if you're getting ripped off," she said whenever I tried to explain what their duties were and weren't, "but I do."

That spring, before we went to London for a few days to visit Kate, we planned our absence, hour by hour, with Vickie, who ran the health-care service, making sure my mother's days and evenings were all covered. Night had become a particular bone of contention. Not long after she was diagnosed, she'd gotten a push-b.u.t.ton necklace that would summon help in case of an accident, but she didn't want anybody in her apartment overnight. Only after intense negotiation did she reluctantly agree to have someone stay for the duration of our London trip. I was still worried, so we came up with a contingency plan. If she took a turn for the worse in the run-up to our departure, I'd remain behind. For a while it looked like that's what was going to happen, but after a string of bad days she rallied, and her doctor a.s.sured us that she'd be stable until we returned. I called one last time from the airport to make sure, but she swore everything was fine. The night person had just arrived, and they were watching TV. I should go and have a good time. Something in her voice gave me pause, though, and when we landed at Heathrow seven hours later, I wasn't surprised to find there was a message on my cell from Vickie. My mother had waited until we were safely onboard our plane, then fired everybody.

A month later she had a minor heart attack that put her in the hospital, and things got even worse. She claimed the recommended regimen of physical therapy was simply too difficult to do, though the nurses said she'd never so much as tried. They'd also recommended what they made the mistake of referring to as "psychological therapy." I explained that this was all about rethinking how, after you'd suffered a heart attack, you rose from a chair and got out of bed in the morning, but my mother was having none of it. There was nothing wrong with her head, and she knew perfectly well how to get out of a chair. Which left the hospital staff little choice but to return her to Megunticook House, where it soon became apparent she was going to need a lot more care. Whether she liked it or not, somebody had to be there at night to help her get to the bathroom. The problem was that of all the workers sent from the agency to help her, she liked only a couple. They of course had families and lives of their own, and there were more hours in the week than any two people could cover. Shift changes were especially problematic. My mother particularly hated falling asleep with one caregiver in the next room, then waking up to another the next morning. Moreover, she didn't want the night attendant to stretch out on her sofa, fearing for its springs. "It wasn't made for people to sleep on," she complained, "especially not obese Mainers." I tried to catch her caregivers near the end of their shifts, in part so they could bring me up to speed on what had transpired but also to find out how badly they'd been abused and insulted and to apologize. They were no sooner out the door than my mother would use what little remained of her failing heart and lungs to berate those she considered lazy or stupid and to bemoan the fact that her favorites weren't always available. Vickie, she believed, was saving all the good ones for her favored clients, whose families insisted on top-quality care.

There were times when I seriously considered wringing her neck, but then the cycle would end, and there she'd be again, my mother, lost and frail and afraid, with barely enough energy to draw her next breath, her heart a sledgehammer in her chest-anxious, it seemed, for this terrible struggle to be over. In the weeks before she entered the hospital for the last time, she couldn't get comfortable. In the living room she'd struggle to her feet and announce that she couldn't stand it there any longer and was going to bed early. I should go home. (By this time I was visiting, literally, morning, noon, and night.) But twenty minutes later she'd emerge from the bedroom saying she couldn't bear lying down, that sitting up was better. In addition to sapping what little strength remained, these short journeys were also treacherous. Forgetting she was tethered to the oxygen machine, she often managed to tangle her long lead of plastic tubing when she went around corners, pulling it free of her nose, which she sometimes didn't notice or immediately realize was why she suddenly couldn't fill her lungs. Back and forth she went, ninety pounds of pure will and desperation, life reduced to purposeless, exhausting motion, until another heart attack, after which even that tortured, senseless motion became impossible.

MORPHINE. A BLESSING. During the last month of my mother's life in the hospice wing at the hospital, the drug did its almost-mystical business of protecting the self from itself, of relaxing her so that she could "breathe easier" both literally and metaphorically. Under its influence her features sometimes unclenched, allowing me to glimpse in the tiny, mummified figure in her hospital bed the confident, lovely, brave young woman I'd known as a boy. When a new dose was administered, she'd smile and slip under the wave, and often, exhausted, I'd follow her down, falling asleep in my chair as if I, too, were connected to the drip. At other times, powerful though it was, even morphine failed to vanquish the anxiety that had come to rule her life, and then her eyes would grow small and hard with concentrated terror and defiance, the old, unwinnable battle still raging on. I tried to calm her by saying I was right there at the foot of the bed and promising I wouldn't go anywhere. But knowing she wasn't afraid of death, I was curious, as well, and asked more than once what was scaring her so. "That things, you know ...," she'd begin, but having gotten that far, she'd grow confused and frustrated.

"Can you explain?" I persisted, hoping that, even at this late date, if she could just articulate her fear, I might be able to help her dispel it.

"You know," she said, as if she suspected I'd somehow forgotten something I knew perfectly well, that I could summon the memory if I just concentrated hard enough. "That things ... you know ... won't ..."

"Won't what, Mom?"

"You know," she insisted, smiling weakly now, "won't turn out right."

MY MOTHER WASN'T the only one confused and disoriented those final weeks. Meaning to visit her, I'd often drive over to Megunticook House, realizing only after I'd pulled in to the parking lot and turned off the ignition that she wasn't there anymore.

One night not long after she moved into the hospital's hospice wing, I went home early and fell into a deep, dreamless slumber from which I was awakened, bewildered and panicked, when the telephone rang a few minutes before midnight.

"Rick?" she said, perhaps not recognizing my sleep-thick voice.

Had I forgotten, I wondered, to go over to her apartment after dinner?

"Rick?"

"Mom?" I said. "What is it?"

"I need you to come."

"Mom, it's midnight," I said, staring stupidly at the clock on the nightstand. Had five whole hours pa.s.sed? How was that possible?

"I pressed the b.u.t.ton."

"What b.u.t.ton, Mom?"

"For the nurse. Ten minutes ago. She never came."

"She will," I told her. Barbara put a hand on my shoulder and rested her forehead on the back of my neck. "Be patient."

"It's you I need."

"I'll see you in the morning. I promise."

Silence on the line, then. Had she hung up? No, she was back, needing me to understand. "It's terrible here," she said. "You have no idea."

IT'S YOU I NEED ... it's terrible here.

Seven small words, but embedded in them, somewhere, is the reason that a man who makes his living with words isn't able to offer any when Emily and Kate finish speaking. The closure that death is supposed to bring has somehow eluded me, which must be why in last night's dream I was carrying my mother toward that unknown destination and why it felt like I'd be doing so forever. Although it's been several months since her death, when the phone rings in the middle of the night, I still expect to hear her voice on the other end of the line, wanting to know where I am, why I've abandoned her.

It's terrible here. I've belatedly come to understand that for my mother here was really the place inside her head where everything played on an endless loop. There was the place she never stopped trying to get to, where she'd be happy. Don't I deserve a life? She must have asked my grandfather this before me, the question serving as explanation for why she was leaving Helwig Street for Arizona. How had he answered it? He'd served in two world wars and was exhausted and slowly strangling, his lungs full of leather dust. I can imagine him telling her that n.o.body, including her, was ent.i.tled to anything, but of course I wasn't there and he might well have said nothing of the sort. She never asked me if I minded her tagging along. She just told me about the job awaiting her in Phoenix and painted a vivid picture for me of the new, free life she'd have when we arrived, leaving me to challenge her right to it.

Or am I misremembering? Did she ask me, and I just forgot? It's possible. That I honestly can't recall something so important seems right, somehow. The mechanism of human destiny-that intricate weave of chance and fate and free will, as distinctly individual as a fingerprint-is surely meant to remain life's central mystery, to resist transparency, to make blame a dangerous and unsatisfactory exercise. I don't blame my mother for anything, certainly not for her ongoing unhappiness, any more than I take pride in having managed to parlay the same genetic character traits that bedeviled her-stubbornness, defiance, an inclination to obsess, an excess of will, a potentially dangerous need to see things my own way-into a rich and satisfying career.

It's you I need. From the time I was a boy I understood that my mother's health, her well-being, was in my hands. How often over the years did she credit me, or my proximity, with restoring her to health? My rock, as she was so fond of saying, always there when she needed me most. My own experience, however, had yielded a different truth-that I could easily make things worse, but never better. Or at least not better enough. I was, just as she said, always there, but to me that meant always failing, never being able to cure what ailed her. I could help her step back from the precipice and restore the status quo, but the status quo was neither health nor happiness.

Now, standing with my family in the deepening dark, I feel profoundly what a terrible mistake she made in trusting me, in believing that we were cut from the same cloth, that one day I'd see things as she did, that given time I'd grow into the soul-mate role that she'd planned for me. She seemed not to grasp that I'm by nature a problem solver, that I'm fundamentally optimistic and believe most problems have solutions. When she asked me if she didn't deserve a life like anybody else, she probably thought of it as a rhetorical question. Who would deny another human being the right to a life? She couldn't have known that I'd take it as a riddle I was supposed to figure out, a problem that had a solution I'd eventually discover if I just kept looking, that I'd never give up.

But of course I now realize that isn't quite true. At some point along the spectrum of what we like to think of as "real time," I simply flatlined and, without admitting it to myself, conceded defeat and started just going through the motions. This was why my dreams were haunted. Because I'd given up on someone I loved, someone who'd never, ever, given up on me. I couldn't speak because the only thing left to say was I'm sorry, and the person I needed to say it to was gone.

High and Dry