Wait Until Tomorrow

I am traveling across North Carolina in an Amtrak train—warehouses of brick and corrugated steel, tanks, leafless trees and evergreens, brown or pale yellow lawns, small clapboard houses with metal carports attached to the sides, factories, anonymous brick buildings, trucks. We pass over highways and see people heading to work, cell phone towers, roofing businesses. I love the train, the easy forward momentum. These trains don’t seem to rock the way trains used to. They glide like steel serpents.

A blue-suited steward comes through collecting tickets. We pass small towns; I notice a faded painted sign “Central Grocery” on old brick. We pass enormous steel water towers like spaceships gleaming in the blighted rural area. An old man in a Stetson hat creakily gets out of a truck. Some houses still have their Christmas decorations up. The houses are tiny. I wonder who lives in them. A brown-and-white dilapidated trailer, more manufacturing plants where something happens but I can’t imagine what. An electrical forest of towers and wires. Backyards and apartment complexes. A college campus—brick buildings with white porticoes—where I once tried to get a job. I’m glad I didn’t. The train blowing its one chord, sometimes long, sometimes short—an indecipherable Morse code.

I’m on my way home to Charlotte after visiting Emmy at college. As we walked across the campus, she told me about the phone call she recently had with Hank, how the conversation was unstrained and happy, how they laughed together. The two of them seem to be finding their way back to each other.

The train continues west and the sun slides by in window-sized patches as we round bends. Outside I watch the scenery: farmland, wetlands, a tiny log cabin, a blue tractor in a shed, a strip shopping center, a brick Baptist church, a hawk scouring the land for breakfast, a landfill with a dump truck spilling black dirt, and a backhoe with its head on the ground as if it is sleeping.

I’m worried about the requiem performance. Everyone is expecting Mom to be there. They have a different idea of who she is. They think she will be happy and honored. I think so too, but I think that it will be her ghost who is happy and honored. I believe that her former self still lingers near her body. I believe that even though she may fall asleep during the performance, some part of her consciousness will register this homage to her work.

I haven’t been able to do much to make sure the performance goes the way it should. My brother Jo has taken the reins, and I’m glad for it. But he is trying to make all the arrangements long distance. There’s a committee of Mother’s old friends working to make it happen, and apparently there have been unspecified problems. Have we imposed too much, I wonder. We don’t have money to pay for anything. The most important thing to me is getting a good recording of it, but so far I haven’t had much luck finding someone who can do it. I have to trust that Jo will make it happen. He seems pretty confident.

At least Mom has been better mentally, more alert, more like her old self since she got over her cold. And I know I have no choice now. She has to go to Jacksonville where the requiem will be performed. The only hitch in the plans is that Emmy can’t come with us, so I’ll have to get my other brother and his son to help me transport my mother. She’s so afraid of travel now and of leaving the confines of the Sanctuary. I will have to find some way to convince her.

“Mom, you know how much you love me?” I will ask. “I need you to do this for me. I need you to not be afraid, to be strong and to be happy. Please do this for me.” If I can just frame it that way and tap into that old drive of hers, then she’ll do it. She’ll go to the ends of the earth. All my life I have known this, that if I really needed my mother to do something for me, she would battle dragons. I once used this power to persuade her to get drugs for me from her friend the dentist. I still feel bad about that.

The truth is that it’s not for me. It’s a chance for others who have loved her and learned from her to get a chance to express their feelings. It’s a chance for people who have never heard the requiem to hear it. And it’s one more chance for her to realize the impact she has had. And no, it won’t just be her ghost that will get it. She’ll thrive in all that attention. I only have to get her there.

The mystics say that old age is a time of return to the essential self. What looks like the worst thing imaginable to us is actually a spiritual process at once beautiful and liberating. I have judged my mother’s aging time and again, but I also know that there is something holy and ineffable about the slow erasure of her worldly persona. And the requiem feels like a way to honor not just her, but the transformation that is taking place.

The train is moving again. Small white houses, a giant piece of concrete pipe in a section of scrub—of no discernible purpose. A lot full of hundreds of cars. A sign on the fence that says “If you can read this, you are on camera.”

We are slowly moving through a tangle of wood, some trash on the ground, big muddy puddles, bare trees with brown desiccated leaves. The ground is covered with leaves and sticks. A few pines lift their green branches like chalices; they toast their imperviousness to the weather.

Soon I will be back in Charlotte. I will drive to work. I will teach my classes as always, collecting papers, listening to presentations. Though at first I won’t even want to be there, my students will suck me into their world as they always do. And suddenly I’ll start caring. Yes, you can turn that paper in next week. Sure, I’ll look at what you’ve written. Now, what are you really trying to say right here in this opening paragraph?

My brother David and his son Edward are still sleeping in Emmy’s room when I pop out of bed (something I haven’t done in weeks) and take a shower. I’ve been dreading this day in a way. Feeling like it was more of a chore than an exciting event. I joked that getting mother into my car would be like getting Merlyn in the dog cage before an airplane trip, requiring a combination of earnest cajoling and brute force. But this morning feels like a rose in full petal. I make oatmeal with blueberries, walnuts, and raw honey and manage to impress my brother—which is something that, after all these years, I’m still trying to do.

While David showers and Edward goes off with Lorri to take our broken TV to the dump, I decide to squeeze in a short walk. The cold morning air nips at my cheeks, but the sun shines like a Happy New Year hat. It’s February 20, the day before the day.

I shiver in my fleece jacket and puff up the hill. At the top of the hill, I emerge from under the trees, and the sunlight massages my blue-jeaned legs. I cross the street into the next neighborhood. As I walk along the sidewalk past the brick houses, I notice two trees with branches bare of leaves but filled with birds. Redbreasted robins. Spring is sneaking up on us. The sun hovers over the horizon, and its beams slide across the planet to illuminate the breasts of the robins so it looks like the trees are full of gold coins. I am paralyzed with delight and wonder. Suddenly the birds all take wing. I stand on the sidewalk, head tilted up, watching them whirl around like a tornado of feathers above my head. Then I see the cause of the disturbance coasting slowly over the houses at the end of the street. Two hawks with nowhere to go and nothing in particular to do. The robins are spinning en masse—little missiles. As the hawks pass them by, they settle back down.

We go to pick up my mother at the Sanctuary. Edward is twentytwo now, a college graduate getting ready to enter the Navy. My mother looks up at him in wonder. Of all the grandchildren Edward is the one who makes a point of being her grandchild. He’s always had this inborn loyalty to the concept of family. He’s the only grandchild who came to our father’s memorial service. He tried to understand why our father didn’t relish the company of his three children, but our bitter answers left him only more baffled.

The drive down is easy as well. We stop periodically at rest areas. We have a drill. Edward gets the wheelchair out of the back. David maneuvers Mom in the wheelchair and I bring her into the bathroom, take the leg rests off and get her onto the toilet. I’ve developed my own little patter: “Okay, plant your feet, Mom. Plant them under your knees. Are your feet planted? Now I want you to grab the bar here and stand. Stand all the way up. One two three. Good. Okay. Now pivot, move your foot, pivot, pivot, and go ahead and sit down, Mom. Good.”

I schedule eight hours for the trip but it takes less than seven. And then we are in the hotel. My brother Jo and his girlfriend Laurie are there with Sharen, my niece, who is going to sing the soprano solo in the performance on Sunday.

We’re all parked in the little sitting area of David’s hotel room when Jo pulls out the newspaper. The front page of the Florida Times-Union on Saturday, February 21, shows a contrite Tiger Woods and the words “I am so sorry” emblazoned above his face. But we are not interested in section A. We are interested in the next section—the state and local news. And on the front page of section B—above the fold even—is this headline: “City’s Music Master Returns.” The story takes up a solid column at the bottom of which is a picture of my mother from 1967. She looks like a movie star, like Joan Crawford or Jane Russell. She wears an old movie-star-style blouse with a collar that points out like the petals of a flower. Everyone comments on the blouse. The story continues inside, includes quotations from yours truly, and mistakenly refers to my brother David as “Mark MacEnulty.” We get a laugh out of this, but none of us is too worried about the name mix-up because the writer has the essence of the story—the grande dame is back for a special appearance at her old home, the Church of the Good Shepherd.

It’s true. He spent countless hours making scores for the chorus and orchestra and organist. He raised money. All his talents and skills from his former stint as conductor and managing director for a community orchestra in Illinois have paid off. I had planned to pay for any expenses myself. But it turns out all I’m paying for is gas, some food, and a hotel room.

Our family friend Karen managed to find the chorus and conductor for us, generate publicity, and get us a deal on the hotel rooms. And now she’s invited our family over for dinner at her house. But when Jo and David are together, conversation and reminiscence take precedence. I actually do have a duty—herding this family of cats outside and into our respective vehicles.

The dinner is wonderful. Even though not everyone is here, there are more of our family members in one spot than have been together since Sharen’s wedding ten years earlier. They start telling Roz stories at the table. Karen tells us about a man who, for some reason, stopped Mother on one of her walks and began to tell her his woes. He had lost his wife and now his dog. He told my mother he couldn’t see any reason to keep living. And apparently she agreed with him. I’m thinking that’s not the sweetest story in the world. I’m thinking she was a more sympathetic person than that. But perhaps her methodology in this case was to shed light on his self-pitying.

This day has gone so well that it’s inevitable that I screw up. I do this by taking a bite of the incredibly delicious chocolate cake that Karen made. Oh hell. You might as well tell a crackhead “just one hit.” I scarf down my piece and half of my mom’s. While this may not seem a terrible sin, you have to know that chocolate has caffeine and my body is akin to a finely tuned scientific instrument geared to detect the most minute portions of caffeine in any substance. I am not going to go to sleep for hours.

We come back to the hotel. The bed is too high for Mom, so I put her in the fold-out bed in the “suite” area. There’s a wall between us but it only goes halfway into the room. The time we spent together today was fun, and we’re both feeling rather sisterly. I lift her from the wheelchair and she drops onto the bed. Then I stand on the bed and pull her into a prone position. I place pillows under her head and feet and cover her with a blanket, leaving her feet uncovered per her instructions. At ten thirty I actually lie down in the king-size bed as if I’m heading directly to that adored world, that realm of happiness: sleep. But it is not to be. The chocolate cake, which by the way was the tastiest piece of cake ever created by human hands, has sent its caffeine brigands to hijack my brain. They are celebrating Carnivale with lights, music, and dancing.

Eventually, however, the relaxation herb I take kicks in and I can just begin to taste the elixir of sleep. Around midnight, as I’m finally thinking I might go down the tunnel, the horror show begins. The whimpering, the groaning, the moaning, the tiny grunts.

I beg, I plead, I cajole, I threaten, but Mother cannot be quiet. For hours, every time I start to drift off, she cuts off my oxygen supply. The CIA should employ my mother to torture terrorists. At about five in the morning, out of helpless desperation, I take the comforter and a pillow from the bed into the bathroom where I shut the door and lie on the floor. I quickly drop down into oblivion and for maybe forty-five minutes it works. I cannot hear my mother.

But she can’t. And I can’t help myself either. We’re playing our roles—the victim and the martyr. Later I will realize she does not know what she’s doing, but right now I’m cranky as hell and desperate for sleep. Later when I’m complaining to all and sundry about my sleep deprivation Sharen will mention that her other grandmother was the same way. The call it “sundowners.” The sun goes down and some old people lose their minds. Her other grandmother thought people were trying to kill her at night.

“She’s killing me,” I tell him. He shows up at my door a few minutes later. We get her out of bed. I take her into the bathroom and clean her up and get a pretty dress on her. Jo takes her downstairs for breakfast. I try to get some sleep. But it’s hopeless. I cannot sleep now. I get up in frustration and head downstairs, too.

That day I am a zombie. The performance is at 6 p.m., and I can’t begin to imagine going there and smiling at people and trying to traverse the pathways of common conversation. People I haven’t seen in forty years will be there. And I’m going to look like someone who just escaped from a mental institution. I look in the mirror and am frightened.

We order gator tail for an appetizer. I don’t eat mammals and have even stopped eating fowl, but a gator is a different story. I will eat a piece of gator in the hopes that someday I’ll stop having nightmares about the scary bastards. I order for Mother, just like I used to do for Emmy. We gorge on fried shrimp and fabulous creamy key lime pie—de rigueur Florida fare. Then we zoom over to the church so Sharen can vocalize before the rehearsal. David wants to take pictures. Mom wants to stay in the car. I wander around with Edward, showing him where the choir kids all scrawled their names on the wall.

The day is bright with a yellow sun in a merciful sky. But I’m totally off my game. My brain is filled with awful buzzing. Pam, Gary, and Theo arrive from Tallahassee and call me on my cell phone, but I can’t go hang with them. I send them off to eat. The big night is finally here and I’m in misery.

When we get back to the hotel, I leave Mom with David and Edward. For an hour I sleep! Sleep, glorious sleep. When I wake the world has been magically restored. Everything that was fractured is now whole. The night is almost here, so I slip into pantyhose, a shimmery dress, and high heels. I brush my hair and put on makeup and damn—I can actually pass for a member of the human species.

I return to the bathroom with my mother’s pills. Although the night before was one of my worst nights ever with my mother, today is filled with tenderness and connection. I stand behind her in the bathroom, facing the mirror, gently massaging her face with oil and then lightly rubbing in foundation.

We have been as close on this trip as we have ever been. My disappointment that Emmy’s schoolwork prevents her from being with us sits like a stone in my gut, but I realize that this time is for me and my mom. If Emmy were here, it would not be the same. I would be focused on my daughter and not on my mother.

“Your mother is so eloquent,” Pam tells me as we head outside. “Her language is sophisticated and playful for someone her age and in her situation. It’s such a contrast—there she is in a wheelchair, with her memory going, but her mind is still journeying all over the place.”

We arrive at the church; nothing is as I imagined it would be. It is so much better. The church is not too cold as we feared it might be. A half hour before the concert and already the place is getting filled. Edward takes charge of pushing Mother’s wheelchair. And the homage begins. Friends from thirty, forty, fifty years ago file in. They all want to see her. I watch her face as it lights up in recognition over and over again. She yelps in delight when her old friend Henson shows up. Another woman introduces herself to me, and my mother wheels around. “Did I hear you say Kaye? Kaye Bullock?!?” She knows everyone. She laughs joyfully. And they are so pleased to see her, to hold her hand, to tell her she hasn’t changed.

By six o’clock, the church pews are filled. We have seats in the middle. I have Mother’s wheelchair right next to me. Theo, Pam, and Gary are on my other side. Jo, Laurie, and Edward are in the row behind us. David is in the balcony with his camera. The new organist—a young man—plays a couple of pieces as an opening act, to let my mother hear the organ she played for thirty-two years. She was a ship captain and the organ was her vessel.

Then the priest comes out to give an introduction to the requiem. He starts by telling the audience about her past service to the church and to the community. Most of us know all this, but everyone wants to hear him say it anyway. He’s a good speaker, and at the end of the introduction he looks down the aisle and says to my mother, “Welcome home.”

Then everyone (somewhere between three hundred and four hundred people) stands and turns to face my mother, clapping and clapping. Holy shit, I’m thinking. I wasn’t expecting this. Tears roll out of my eyes in hot beads. Finally, the clapping ceases and the performance begins.

The concert is heartbreakingly beautiful. When my niece Sharen stands up and sings the soprano solo, her necklace glitters in the light from the hanging lanterns, and her voice soars into the nave. I have loved her madly ever since she was five and I was fifteen and we lived together one year in my brother’s house in Webster Groves. We pretended we were sisters. When I was in prison in Florida she came to visit me once. She was a teenager, and I remember running down the sidewalk to the visiting park, my hands waving in nervous excitement. When I saw her as Maria in West Side Story at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, I wept the whole time. She has that kind of effect on me. So now when her voice arches its back and fills the room, my chest tightens and for one holy moment I am fully present—right there in the now with my fingers wrapped around my mother’s hand.

Daylight leaves and the stained glass windows grow dark. The musical complexity of the piece is evident to my ears now. Layer upon layer of voices and orchestra. A beautiful young African American man sings the tenor part. His mother sits a few rows in front of us. Even from behind I can tell she is beaming. Sharen told us earlier that he was originally a gospel singer and that he enjoyed the challenge of this classical piece. Tonight he is meeting that challenge in full metal jacket.

Not only is my blood family here, but my church family is here, too—all those gentle people who hovered in the background of my childhood. Not one of them ever judged me when I went off the rails—or if they did, they’ve let it go by now. And I am happy because my friends are here, too, and they had no idea that my mother is this woman—this woman who composed such a work of art. Maybe the rest of the world doesn’t know about her. But everyone in this room does. We know we are privileged tonight.

I clutch my mother’s hand throughout the performance, watchful to make sure she doesn’t drift off. But my fears abate. She’s thoroughly engrossed as if hearing it for the first time. And in a way she is, because in the past she was always behind the organ. This is the first time she’s had the chance to hear her music the way her audience has heard it.

At the end of the concert, Edward runs to the back of the church and comes back with flowers for my mother and once again it happens. The people stand and turn to face her and they clap for all they are worth. Somewhat abashed, she raises a regal hand and waves, saying graciously “Thank you. Thank you.”

I thought I would feel relief that the whole thing was over. I thought that I would be happy once it was successfully completed. But instead what I feel is a rare elation. I want this moment to last forever. My brothers and I exchange hugs and high fives. My godfather hugs me. My former flute teacher shows up to warmly shake my hand. And her husband Bill, who owned the music store where Mother shopped for music and manuscript paper, is there, too. His child was one of the sons who died, one of those who inspired the original requiem. Bill is ninety years old now. I can still remember smelling the sweet musty smell of his music store and following my mother around as she perused the sheets of anthems.

When Mike was a teenager he played drums in a band that would later become Lynyrd Skynyrd. Mike ultimately chose surfing over drumming. The early band played many a Friday night in the church hall across the courtyard from the sanctuary.

A few days earlier Mike and I were talking on the phone. His father had recently died, and Mike had warned me to make sure that all my mother’s assets were in order. He was having to pay an attorney to straighten out his deceased father’s financial affairs.

A hundred grand? I swallowed. “I don’t think that will be a problem for us. Mom is basically living on Social Security and our monthly contributions.” If you’re middle class you’re supposed to have parents with “assets.” We feel we’re entitled to some kind of inheritance. My brothers and I had thought that surely our father would have left us something. He didn’t. But standing here tonight, I don’t care about that. I’ve gotten all the legacy from my mother I’ll ever need.