CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Visiting Hours
When Ira had completed half of the twelve shock treatments, we started to visit him regularly as a family. He smelled of antiseptic and had a vacant, fragile look in his eyes. “Just give him a pep talk,” my mother advised before our visits. “Tell him he’s looking better, getting better every day. Be upbeat. He needs cheerleaders.”
Already she had begun to rehabilitate his reputation. He’d never really been psychotic, she explained, not psychotic like other people who were psychotic; he’d just been an endearingly neurotic man who’d gotten depressed when his mother had died and had a breakdown. He wasn’t really a drug addict either; he just liked taking too many pills.
We sat in one of the public areas, a sort of living room with low-slung couches. I tried to ignore the ashen-faced man in the corner who talked in circles, the woman with the deeply lined face who couldn’t stop wringing her hands. Most of the other patients in the facility seemed profoundly depressed or were alcoholics on their third or fourth admission. None seemed any worse off than my father. He might have been the most deranged among them.
My mother clung to trivialities. “The nurses seem nice in here,” she would say, or “Looks like you can get a baked potato with lunch if you want it.” It was maddening. What did any of that matter? She was letting them wipe out my father’s memories; who knew what would stick and what would go? I felt guilty for abandoning him and yet, hadn’t he abandoned me first? What could I do to save him? I was only sixteen. My mother was in charge. I was struggling to save myself.
That spring of 1968, my brothers and I volunteered to serve in Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Ben would drive us to the campaign headquarters on Carondelet Street near MacArthur Park in the city. We’d fold fliers, stuff envelopes, cross names off lists, make phone calls to get out the vote.
When Kennedy was scheduled to appear at the Greek Theatre, the volunteers were invited to usher. I felt important, out of La Crescenta and in an urban environment, part of a movement to change the world. I was meeting young people from all over the city, collaborating with them. After we’d seated everyone else, Paul and Ben and I got seats up-close with the other volunteers. I watched Kennedy carefully, trying to discern if he was for real. The young people in Gene McCarthy’s campaign said Kennedy was ruthless, an insincere opportunist who’d only decided to publicly oppose the war in Vietnam after McCarthy had proved it a winning proposition.
I didn’t want to be fooled. I had become wary of my own gullibility. I was beginning to realize how my father had taken me in, and the negative effects it had had on my life, and yet . . . and yet . . . a part of me still wished to fall under a trance, to believe wholeheartedly in someone. Part of me still wished for a good father who would stay true to his word to take care of me.
On stage, Bobby looked fragile, not polished. Thin and a little hunched over. His eyelids twitched and his hands shook as he spoke. His shaking reminded me of my father’s. He had the hint of a stammer. He kept pushing a wayward shock of brown hair out of his eyes. He seemed more than a little anxious but didn’t let the anxiety stop him. At the same time he seemed exhilarated. After a while, his passion overtook him and he lost his nerves. He sparred with the audience. He was spontaneous, funny. He seemed the opposite of calculating to me; he seemed to be making it up as he went along. And including us young people in the process. It was as if he already knew that he was doomed, and that knowledge had set him free. It was as if he’d come through something so terrible in losing his brother that he had nothing left to lose.
As he spoke, I imagined myself planted among his offspring in the footage I’d seen of him rollicking on the wide lawn in an impromptu touch football game. In that fantasy he was my father. In another, I imagined myself holding hands with him, kissing him. In that fantasy, he morphed into the lover who appreciated all my talents and abilities and never rebuffed me.
I fell in love with his spontaneity and his vulnerability. I fell in love with being embraced by a big noble cause, bigger than my family, bigger than my school, bigger than my own obsessions, bigger than La Crescenta. Under Bobby’s leadership we could bring justice into the world for the poor, the oppressed, for black people. We would end the war in Vietnam and bring the troops home. We would seek a fairer world, a more just world, a better world, as he’d laid out in his book.
That day at the Greek Theatre, I committed fully to the campaign. I pinned a Robert F. Kennedy button on my clothes and didn’t take it off, even when I went to school, even though I knew it would garner me ridicule or worse. I let myself love him without reservation or fear.
I remember what I was wearing when we went to visit my father that Tuesday night in June on our way to the Ambassador Hotel: a short, pink, full skirt with petticoats, a resurgence of a fifties style, brought into the sixties with a round silver buckle at the waist. The petticoats rustled in a satisfying way as I walked. I wore a ruffled white blouse. Riding up in the elevator to the locked ward, I kept looking down at my own waist to catch a glimpse of reflection off that buckle’s shiny surface.
My mother had driven her own car, and I had come with Ben and Paul so we could go to the election night party afterward. We met my father in the dayroom. It had pale yellow walls—a color chosen to be cheerful but not too arousing, a decor that would work for both the manics and the depressives. They had finally made my father shave. Without the beard that had covered his face for months, his skin looked baby-pale. He had lost so much weight so quickly that his skin hung in folds around his jowls and neck. He shook all the time now. I tried to remember how much he’d been shaking when he left the house for the hospital. Had he been shaking like this before the shock treatments? This trembling seemed to emanate from somewhere deep inside him, a small motor always turned on.
Though I could not stop what was happening to him, I felt a responsibility as his daughter to chart the harm being done, to serve as the recorder of events. I would have to be the guardian of his memories now too.
He gave us a weak smile that night when he first saw us. He was more communicative than he’d been on prior visits, when he’d just sat and fumed. As our conversation progressed, his facial expression turned placid, empty. Then suddenly, apropos of nothing in particular, his eyes filled with tears and his lip started to tremble, as if he were about to cry. Whatever had led to the tears flitted quickly from his mind. The tears aborted, an incongruous smile appeared in their place. It was as if he could not hold on to a thought long enough to sustain the emotion it carried.
He was in the midst of an enforced forgetting, an attempt to wipe all his slates clean.
My mother still held on to the belief that the doctors could simply excise the craziness and restore Ira to the state he’d been in before his breakdown. To me he seemed so radically transformed that I could not imagine ever getting him back.
Overly formal with us, Ira showed off his institutional setting with some pride of ownership, as shy as a third grader sharing his classroom at back-to-school night. In recent weeks, my mother had tried to recast the institution as a kind of summer camp where my father would have the benefit of fresh air and healthful nourishment, and would come back refreshed and rejuvenated. I tried not to imagine the shock treatments, the wires hooked up to his head, electricity surging through his brain. I was still trying to get a grip so the same thing would not happen to me.
“Want some ice cream?” he asked. “We have ice cream here.” My mother and I said yes. With great care, he went over to the small hotel-room-sized refrigerator and got three cardboard cups of vanilla ice cream and three small wooden spoons (there was no metal flatware allowed in the hospital). He carried them over to us, using his chin to support the stack of cartons in his shaking hands. We sat at a Formica-topped utility table that seemed slightly lower than normal adult table height. Up-close, my father smelled like talcum powder. After a while I realized that the talcum powder was only an overlay for something more medicinal, more chemical coming off his skin.
While my father ate his ice cream, he made the squeaky, half-grunting whimper in the back of his throat that guinea pigs or possums make when cornered. Tears began to collect in my own throat and made it hard to swallow. My ice cream melted and pooled in its carton, the cardboard growing damp and limp in my hands.
My mother had instructed us to engage my father in conversation about topics other than his health, paranoid fantasies, and the fact that he was being held against his will.
“Try to draw him out, get him interested in the world again,” she’d said in preparation for the visit.
Paul tried: “We’re going to Robert F. Kennedy’s election night party at the Ambassador tonight. The California Democratic primary was today, did you know?”
We weren’t sure if my father ever watched the TV that was on all the time in the communal living room.
“Remember I told you we’ve been volunteering in Bobby’s campaign?”
My father looked blank. He shrugged his shoulders, as if presidential campaigns belonged to some before-world he could not quite fathom. He resided in the realm of breakfast trays, pill time, arts and crafts, and procedure day.
“He’s going to win,” I added.
“Do you remember when you went to the Democratic Convention in 1960 and fought for Adlai Stevenson?” my mother said. He shrugged again.
“Daddy, are you proud of us for volunteering?” I said. He didn’t answer.
When my mother went off to the ladies’ room and was out of earshot, my brothers reading magazines across the room, my father’s mood darkened. He grabbed my forearm with amazing strength and snarled into my hair, “Your mother’s letting them scramble my brains. You need to get me out of here.”
I pictured the tensed muscles in my mother’s strong forearm, morning after morning, beating the eggs with a fork before scrambling them, and then imagined my father’s open skull, his brain clogged with an eggy, liquefied mess.
“Do you hear me?” he asked. He was shaking my arm till it hurt. His rancor filled the air like stale smoke.
“What do you want me to do, Daddy?” I said. “Mommy’s in charge. She thinks this will help you. I’m only sixteen! There’s nothing I can do about it. Just get better and then you can leave.”
“Aacckk”—an expression of pure disgust. He let go of my arm. “If you’re still my daughter, you’ll get me out of here.”
I shook my head silently and did not let his eyes find my eyes.
My mother returned from the ladies’ room and my brother Paul came over to where we were sitting.
“We have to go soon,” Paul said. “We don’t want to miss Bobby’s victory speech.” My father gave me a scornful look that told me I should be spending my spare time engineering his rescue. Why was I putting energy into Bobby Kennedy when my own father needed me? He would be holding me accountable; he would never forgive me for going along with this betrayal.
When my brothers and I arrived at the Ambassador Hotel, a large group of volunteers had already assembled in the Ambassador Ballroom on the lobby level. CBS had just declared Kennedy the winner, and the mood in the room was jubilant. Bobby would appear first in the Embassy Room upstairs, and then make a second speech, thanking the volunteers. A number of reporters, crusty-looking middle-aged men, with earphones that connected them to other reporters, huddled around the front of the room near the stage.
When we got word that Bobby had completed his victory speech upstairs, we began to chant: “We want Bobby, We want Bobby.” We felt exuberant, charged, alive, together. We were young and coming into power. Our chant went on for several minutes. The crowd grew more insistent, the chant shifting to the more raucous “RFK! RFK!”
What could be taking him so long? They’d told us that he had only to come down the elevator. Maybe he was a phony, after all, like all the other politicians, maybe he didn’t care about us low ly volunteers. The chant became angrier, as if we were jilted lovers who’d been stood up.
Then a dash of worry entered the room. The worry was always there in the background; after all, his brother had been murdered. Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King had also been assassinated. Lots of people hated Bobby Kennedy; these were volatile times, and he looked so fragile when he stood on the stage, as if he knew and had already forgiven us.
I wandered away from my brothers, near the front of the room where some reporters were congregated. I wanted to eavesdrop; I might become a journalist one day. And then I saw a reporter, a short man with a few strands of black hair combed over his bald head, grip a headphone tighter to his ear. He said, “What did you say? Are you sure? Are you sure?”
I saw something—a prelude to anguish—wash over his face. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” he said.
It scared me. I wasn’t sure what it meant. The crowd was still shouting, revved up. I went over to where Ben was standing. “There’s something wrong,” I said. “I think something bad happened.” I pointed toward the reporters, who had begun to huddle at the front, and then to move quickly out of the room. The people near the front of the room, on the right-hand side, where the reporters had been stationed, had stopped shouting. From where we stood, we could not hear them, only see the expressions of alarm on their faces. The message hadn’t transmitted yet to the other side of the room or the back, where people were still chanting, clapping, laughing, still trying to will Bobby to us.
Later, this would seem unbelievably cruel, this uneven delivery of information, this slow-motion loss of innocence—the disconnect between one side of the room and the other. Within seconds, the agony on the right side of the room moved through the crowd like a wave in a sports arena. Someone took the microphone and announced that Bobby had been hurt, and I heard a communal gasp of shock, and then a groan as the news traveled into our bodies. Finally the room filled with the sound of sniffling and then imploded with sobbing. Some people keeled half over, as if they were going to collapse, while others tried to steady them.
A man took the podium and made a more official announcement: “I want everyone to stay calm. Senator Kennedy has been shot.” Another gasp from the crowd. “He’s alive and he’s speaking. He’s on his way to a hospital. The best way we can help him is to have an orderly clearing of this room. Please do not run. Let’s stay calm and walk out of this room.”
Hotel security and police appeared everywhere to usher us out, telling us that we had to clear the room, that it was important to exit the room in an orderly fashion. If he can speak, he must be all right, I thought.
“Let’s leave the room now,” the security guard kept repeating slowly, as if talking to children. People resisted, distrusting authority, suspecting that they were being humored. They hung back, as if by staying in the place where they had expected to see Bobby, they could reverse time, as if they might still conjure him up. Some grew irritable, as if to say, But don’t you understand, he was on his way here? We’re here waiting for him and if we just continue to wait then this bad thing you just said won’t be true. Don’t you see that we have to continue to wait?
“Walk, don’t run,” the security force kept repeating, and then, “Let’s have an orderly egress from the room.”
Dazed, I grasped Ben’s hand as we wandered into the massive lobby of the Ambassador, where all the rules of public decorum had changed.
Grown men, men I did not know, men dressed formally, in suits, ties askew now, shirts partly unbuttoned, took out their handkerchiefs and wept openly. Women gone white, their lips dry and caked, took off their shoes, and sat on the floor in torn stockings. A young Latino man fell to his knees crying, crossed himself, folded his hands, and began to sway back and forth, and pray in Spanish. People staggered, weaved, walked into walls as if drunk. A very distraught young man upended a heavy round coffee table, saying “No, no, not again. Not again.”
When I saw that, I became afraid for myself and noticed that I was trembling. It seemed that the potential for violence was everywhere. What if this was a conspiracy? The CIA? The Mob? Rumors raced through the crowd; the police were looking for a woman in a polka-dot dress. Someone had seen her flee the scene. I held on to a few words: He was speaking. He’s on his way to a hospital. I held onto them all the way home. All the next day. He was speaking. He’s on his way to a hospital. People did not speak if they were about to die, I figured. They wouldn’t have taken him to a hospital if they didn’t believe they could save him.
Bobby lived through Tuesday night and all of Wednesday. They transferred him from one hospital to another; they performed surgery on his brain. I didn’t go to school on Wednesday, and my mother didn’t expect me to; we hadn’t gotten home till after 2:00 a.m. On Wednesday, my brothers, mother, and I kept the TV on all day, although mostly they just repeated the footage of Bobby lying on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel, a kitchen worker beside him, rosary beads placed in his hand. All day people conducted a vigil outside the hospital. Wednesday night at 10:00 p.m. or so, I went to bed.
On Thursday morning, my mother woke me.
“It’s time to get up for school,” she said.
With consciousness, it all flooded back over me. “How’s Bobby?” I said.
“He died,” she said, as if I should have known. It must have seemed obvious to her that he would not survive. But it had not seemed obvious to me. The abruptness of her words stung. I wailed and then started to sob.
Then came a strange, seemingly incongruous memory. I had been four when Princess, a neighborhood collie, had been hit by a motorcycle on the corner across the street from our house. Once Paul had taken my hand and put it on the bump on the back of Princess’s head, and then placed it on the bump at the back of my own head. “You’re blood sisters,” he’d said.
All the neighbors heard the crash and lined up on the sidewalk to see what had happened. The dog started to get up, and I heard a man say, “Princess is all right,” and I repeated loudly, with all my four-year-old self-assurance, “Princess is all right,” and then the dog lay back down and was still.
The next thing I saw was the boy up the street who owned Princess sobbing over her. “What’s he doing?” I asked.
“Doesn’t John have the right to grieve his own dog?” my mother snapped at me. As if I should have understood that Princess was no longer all right. I was ashamed of not having understood, of being caught unawares. I was ashamed of having hoped. Now I’d been caught hoping again, believing a man’s words again: He’s speaking. He’s on his way to the hospital. And I’d been trapped again by my mother’s rebuke.
“I’m not going to school!” I screamed. “How could you expect me to go to school when Bobby is dead?” What was wrong with my mother? How could she even think I would go to school? How could she be so cruel as to send me to that place where the majority of my classmates would not be grieving him, where some of them might even be celebrating his assassination, where I might hear the words “nigger lover” again? My mother threw up her hands in defeat; it was toward the end of the term and final tests, and I had already missed the prior day. “Whatever you want,” she said, “I can’t argue with you. I give up.”
That night on TV they kept playing a particular clip of him; I remember it as though it were on a continuous loop for hours. I watched it alone, sitting as close to our living room TV as I could get and still focus my eyes, close enough that I could almost touch Bobby’s face on the screen. At midnight, as my brothers lay in their beds in their shared bedroom and my mother lay in her bed at the other end of the house, I could not stop watching it. He was campaigning in Oakland at the end of May with football legend Rosey Grier. Rosey always sang “Spanish Harlem” on campaign stops, and on that stop, Bobby sang along. As he sang, his voice cracked and he smiled disarmingly; he could not carry a tune. He sounded like a thirteen-year-old boy whose voice was changing as he struggled to recite his haftarah at his Bar Mitzvah. Only he wasn’t embarrassed. He had transcended shame and gotten to humility. He took delight in allowing the crowd to see who he really was; exposing his own vulnerability made him jubilant. No one could fake that. And the crowd loved him for it; his openness opened up everyone else around him.
He’s right there, I thought, watching him. Wholly present. Completely himself. I could see exactly who he was, and I felt that if he had known me, he would have been able to see exactly who I was too. He seemed nothing like the other politicians, all veneer and pose and affectation. He wasn’t cool like Gene McCarthy; he didn’t have that superior, effete tone; he didn’t hide or fake his emotion. He was right in there with the people. Bobby was a tender soul like me, and I was that rose trying to grow up through the cracks in the sidewalks of La Crescenta, a miscast, and Bobby, Bobby would have seen my beauty.
As I watched the clip, I cried and cried. At one point, I parted the curtains and looked out our big picture window at the La Crescenta street. It was dark, not a streetlight or house light on. I tried to tell myself that if my father had been home, if he had not gone crazy, he would have been watching with me. He would have commiserated with me. But the fact was, I couldn’t even be sure of that; my father’s emotional reactions had always been unpredictable. Even if he’d been sad, my father might have been expecting me to console him, rather than acting as a father taking care of his child. I felt completely alone.
The indifference of the universe, the fact that the living room, the neighborhood, the night sky, did not in any way reflect this loss that was monumental to me, made me feel as if shards of glass were being scraped into my open flesh. How could the world not be broken? A truck had driven through the center of my chest, and yet nothing around me outside of the reporters on the TV reflected this assault.
He had been the one I’d been holding onto. I had not cried like this in a long time—unselfconscious, deep, wracking, uncontrollable sobbing. So this is grief, I thought. This was what people meant when they talked about heartbreak and desolation. I cried so hard that I felt like I couldn’t breathe, felt like I was going to throw up. The intensity of my own emotion scared me; what if I couldn’t stop crying? What if I could never stop crying? I always had trouble believing that any current state—emotional or physical—was temporary.
I wandered in the dark to the other end of the house to my parents’ bedroom. This was my mother’s room now, orderly, neat, quiet. Nothing strewn around; no food trays, no pill bottles; no tummel. My father’s side of the bed was still made; my mother had barely mussed the sheets when she’d encased herself between them. In his absence, my father’s pillow had begun to gather dust.
Already used to sleeping alone, my mother would not have considered stretching out to the middle of the bed, moving from the narrow space to which she had consigned herself. She was turned on her side with the sheet pulled up over her head protectively. A warning not to approach. I leaned down and whispered, “Mom?” She didn’t stir. “Mommy?”
She squirmed slightly and threw her arm over her eyes. She had learned to sleep defensively, guarding her rest against my father’s nighttime escapades.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I can’t stop crying; I can’t stop crying for Bobby.”
I was wishing that, given the extreme events of the past few months—Bobby dead and my father disappearing—the rigid rules of our exchanges could be relaxed. If only she could beckon me to lie down beside her; that was the invitation I’d been waiting for all my life. Not just concede to giving me affection for my sake, not just allowing me to hug her, but relishing it. Hugging me back without reluctance. She didn’t have to cry for Bobby, though she had supported him too, she could have cried for my father, she could have cried for the jeopardy the business was in, she could have cried for the way her life had gone; it didn’t matter to me what she cried over, only that she cried with me.
But that behavior would not have been in my mother’s nature. She had steeled herself for the months that lay ahead. She apparently had begun to guard herself against feeling early in her life and could not change now.
“Mommy,” I whimpered. If the invitation did not come that night, it would never come.
Clinging to her grogginess, my mother did not sit up or even open her eyes. She did not want to wake up. She did not want to have to deal with me. She probably regarded my crying and my appeal to her as manifestations of my self-dramatizing histrionics. Of his histrionics passed down to me. After all, I didn’t know Bobby personally. I’d only worked in the campaign for a few weeks. In her mind, this was adolescent self-indulgence.
“You’ve got to get a hold of yourself,” she said. My mother had gotten an iron hold of herself in the days since she’d institutionalized my father and was suggesting I do the same. Get a hold of yourself was her usual advice, and she had a point when I was acting crazy, but this didn’t feel crazy. Crying wasn’t crazy. Sorrow and grief weren’t crazy. In fact, expressing this deep emotion made me feel saner than I’d felt for months. I wasn’t notting or obsessing or deducing strange connections between unrelated things. I wasn’t trying to control an uncontrollable universe. I wasn’t hanging on to what could not be held onto. I was grieving someone I’d allowed myself to love. And I was trying to learn how to let go.
I would cry all night if I wanted to. I would cry for as long as it took. This wasn’t crazy. This was normal. All I’d come to her for was some reassurance of that fact, and a small modicum of comfort.
“I don’t know how to get a hold of myself,” I said.
I’d seen all those grown-ups cry at the Ambassador and there was nothing wrong with them. I’d seen them put their arms around one another and cry together. I’d seen Bobby cry for his own brother at JFK’s funeral, and cry in the streets of Atlanta when Martin Luther King was gunned down. “Tell me what to do,” I sobbed, but even as I asked, I’d already moved past the question.
I’ll never be like you, I was thinking. I’ll never be more like you and less like my father. But that doesn’t mean I have to be crazy like him. Though I couldn’t have articulated it, that night I began to make my way to a decision. If I had to choose between feeling—between naked expression of emotion—and being remote, locked in, exerting a murderous hold on myself and my feelings, I would choose feeling. But feeling didn’t have to mean my father’s version of feeling. Emotion and hysteria might not be the same thing. Could it be that hysteria, even though it might have the appearance of feeling, was really a way to avoid feeling?
In the whole period of my father’s decline, I’d never cried the way I cried that night for Bobby. I couldn’t cry when my grandmother died and was afraid to cry when my father wailed and sobbed so many times right in front of me. I’d felt like I had to keep my wits about me when he pleaded with me to call the FBI and help him convince them of my mother and uncle’s diabolical plot. I had swallowed my tears when I’d visited him in the mental hospital the night of the assassination.
I cried for Bobby in a way I could not cry for my father. Perhaps what moved me the most was what Bobby had done with his own brother’s death. He had not folded up into himself as my father had when his mother died; he had not collapsed and left his children to fend for themselves while he regressed. Instead, grief had washed him clean, opened him up, purified him to feel more deeply the pain of others. He’d quoted Aeschylus the night of Martin Luther King’s assassination: “In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
Accepting loss could lead me to take risks. Trying to hold on was a doomed attempt to avoid sorrow. It was futile to try to screw nature or stop time. Loss accepted with grace could help me do something good for the world. Like Bobby, I could turn my grief into love.
In the weeks after the assassination, the campaign volunteers formed a new group called the Kennedy Action Corps. We were supposed to rally to carry out Bobby’s mission without him. We were supposed to take up the cause the way he had taken up the cause after his own brother’s death. Though I’d had a glimpse of it, I was a long way from getting to acceptance myself, a long way from acquiring Aeschylus’s “wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
Going to headquarters only made me feel more despair. It reminded me of the hope we’d felt during the campaign, and then of the night Bobby had been murdered. No matter what we did, it looked like Nixon was going to get elected. After a few attempts at participating, my brothers and I stopped going.
On Father’s Day, we brought my father home for a visit, and then he returned to the mental hospital to complete his shock treatments over the summer.
Present, Living Room, Sunday, 3:00 p.m.
My brother Paul sits on the floor in the sunken 1970s-era conversation pit off my living room. He is putting together the metal tracks for his toy train. He’s had the train, a 1955 American Flyer, since the year it was released, when I was three and he was eight. I watch as he pulls the conveyance out of its boxes, a black engine with a tender behind it, loaded with a molded, texturally accurate bed of fake coal, and the four deep green passenger cars with windows that look like drawn shades with lights behind them.
“I used to pretend I was sitting behind one of those windows,” I say, “and going to parts unknown in your train.” I pat my brother’s shoulder. “The train still looks exactly the same to me. It hasn’t shown its age.”
“It’s held up pretty well.”
“It’s not falling apart like some of the things you refuse to throw away.”
“It makes me sad to throw things away,” he says. “I know,” I say.
The train is one of his few objects that Gary and I allow him to keep in our house. It is one of the few mementos whose value we recognize. I have no sympathy for Paul’s antiquated Polaroid cameras and binoculars, the forty years’ worth of Life and Look magazines—”But some of them have Bobby Kennedy on the cover,” he’ll say, knowing how to get to me.
He also has reel-to-reel tape recordings of my father screaming at him. “Proof,” he says. Proof.
Maybe I like the train because of its refusal to show its age. Its relatively slow decay does not remind me so much of my own aging.
“I can’t believe that Eva is really gone,” Paul says. “I invite her to come and visit, but she never shows up.”
“I don’t think she’s the type who would want to haunt anyone,” I say. “She’d think she was being a bother.”
“I miss her.”
“I miss her too,” I say. “Every day. I feel her with me when I’m cooking. She spent so much time at the stove. When I stir a pot of spaghetti sauce or stew, I feel her guiding my hand . . . not really . . . just the memory.” As far as I can tell, my mother and father aren’t anywhere. They are gone, poof, as my mother used to say. Still I want to give my brother a small piece of comfort. “Maybe she’s with you and just quiet,” I offer. “She was pretty quiet even when she was alive, right?”
“I would know if she were around,” he says.
I think of my mother’s final days, and all we did to not lose her.
“We did so much not to let go of her,” I say. “We kept her going too long. It was selfish. I still feel guilty for all the treatments we put her through at the end.”
Neither Paul nor I could accept her impending death. While Ben protested, we subjected her to a feeding tube, breathing treatments, a central IV line.
“Let her go,” Ben said, “just let her go,” but we couldn’t. We were holding out for what we’d never gotten from her. She seemed to be holding out too.
“I’m going to miss seeing how the story turns out. Who wants to leave in the middle of the story?” she’d say. And over and over she would express her worry about Paul. “Promise me you’ll take care of him; he’s not as independent as you are.”
I was at her bedside nearly every day during her last months, during her excursions back and forth between the emergency room, the ICU, a hospital room, and finally the rundown, honky-tonk, incongruously bright pink convalescent hospital where she died. Heart failure, recurrent pneumonia, scleroderma, Parkinson’s disease. High fevers, dementia, delirium.
One day she thought she was back in the kindergarten classroom, teaching.
“Come on,” she said to me and the nurse and housekeeper in the room, “help me gather up these papers that the kids have strewn all around. Pick them up; pick them up!” She couldn’t leave the bed but kept pointing to an empty spot on the floor and commanding our help.
Another day she was preparing for a party in the house on Teasley Street.
“We’ve got to clean up, the guests are coming,” she said, “C’mon, Nathan and Sonia and the boys.”
I knew enough not to dispute these fantasies but was never sure how deeply to enter into them with her.
In the hospital, I wiped her forehead with a wet cloth after she emerged from a life-threatening bout of pneumonia. She’d had a troubling dream. “I was locked in a trunk at the bottom of the ocean,” she said. “Why didn’t you come and rescue me? I kept pounding and pounding on the trunk.”
“You were too far away,” I said. “I couldn’t hear you.”
She would be incoherent, babbling, for hours at a time, for days at a time, and then start to make sense, and I would ride the tail of that sense for as long as I could.
“I woke up in the middle of the night frightened,” she said, “and I went to my mother in her bed and asked her to get up and be with me . . . ‘I’m going to frow up, I’m going to frow up,’ I said. ‘I’m too tired,’ she said. She didn’t want to have to get up and take care of me.”
“What?” I said.
In my mother’s delirium her pronouns would get confused, you and I and he and she and me. Was it the influence of her Filipina nurse who had a similar tendency in English, or crossed circuitry?
“Did that happen to you?” I asked. “I think you’re remembering something that happened to me, when you were the mother.”
“To me?”
“To me, Deborah, your daughter. I’m the one who couldn’t pronounce ‘th’ and said frow up instead of throw up. Remember?”
“No, to me. I was a little girl and my mother, my mother . . .” She looked baffled.
Had it happened to her first? Had she only been repeating with me what had happened between her and her stoic Russian mother who did not countenance middle-of-the-night drama? Perhaps her own mother rejected her and set a pattern she could not help but repeat. A chill went through me.
“What do you remember?” I said. “Please try to concentrate and tell me again what you’re saying.”
She had submerged once more into delirium; I could never get her to talk about it again. She just could have been confused, or finally, on her death bed, felt as I’d felt as a child.
Then one night as I leaned down to kiss her goodnight, she surfaced, completely lucid. She opened her eyes wide, still green and clear, and took my face in her hands. “I love you now, and I’ve always loved you, and I’ll love you forever,” she said.
The words seemed to come out of her mouth so easily; why had it taken this long for her to say them? She’d seldom used the word love when I was a child; she was skeptical of parents who told their children they loved them all the time, as if that were a form of spoiling that would devalue a precious commodity.
I’ve hoarded those words ever since. Hoarded them like Paul hoards his artifacts from the past. I never told him. I never told anyone. I felt embarrassed, wondering if I had kept her alive those weeks, put her through all those interventions, invasions, held her hostage until she would say what I’d been waiting my entire life to hear. I kept waiting for those words to free me, so I could, in turn, release her.
On the early morning when my mother lay unconscious, dying, Paul appeared. He lay down on the bed beside her and took her into his arms. She was limp, her eyes up in her head, her extremities pale and blood-starved, her chest and arms mottled with blue. He stroked her head. He ran his fingers through her hair. He spoke to her. “It’s all right to go,” he said. “Go toward the light.” I could not lie down next to her; if I did, I would not be able to resist the pull to go with her.
Paul puts the train on the tracks and watches it make one successful revolution after another. I remember when we played trains together on the green living room carpet. My brother got to operate the train, and I was in charge of creating the toy villages and cities, the fire stations, and horse corrals, the air field that the train passed. There were sheep and lambs and pigs and horses enclosed by a white picket fence. A whole other world inside the tracks, inside the house on Teasley Street. A story we made up together.
“Doesn’t it feel like yesterday when we played trains?” he says.
“Some days it feels like a lot of time has passed, and some days as if no time at all. Then I look in the mirror, and there all those years are, barreling through my flesh.”
“I feel like sixteen. I think I stopped at sixteen,” Paul says.
“I look like a grown-up on paper,” I say. “I look pretty good on paper, I guess, but some days I can’t get past five.”
“You were cute at five.”
“You know, I’m writing a memoir about our family,” I say. “Do you want to read it?”
“I’m not sure. I bet if I wrote it, though, it would be a much different story.”
“To the writer belongs the story. You could write your own version; no one’s stopping you. Maybe if you wrote, you wouldn’t have to hold onto so much actual stuff. Maybe you could find some peace in writing about it.”
“Has it given you peace?”
I laugh. My brother knows better.
“At least it takes up less room in my house.”