Forty-Seven

The last traces of Lagavulin Scotch dripped onto my partially melted ice cubes. I gave the bottle a little shake, looked down its neck, shook it again, and rested it next to Click and Clack’s tank. The boys were awake, keeping me company under a small pool of light in my kitchenette. A pad of paper lay on the counter before me, its top page blank except for a moisture ring from my glass. The ring was the only progress I had made toward writing my mother’s eulogy.

I said to Clack, “You know, in some places Catholics don’t write eulogies.”

Clack did his statue impersonation.

“I know, right? Lucky bastards.”

I had started the job in my home office, sitting in front of my Linux box, facing a blinking cursor. I had realized that I couldn’t write a eulogy on my desktop computer, so I had switched to my laptop in the kitchen. The blinking cursor was in a different place, but that didn’t help me write.

Obviously, the pain of the wake was blocking my eulogy writing. I opted for self-medication. I grabbed a half bottle of Lagavulin from the cabinet, a rocks glass, and some ice. Poured myself a drink and stared at my screen, downed the smoky liquid, poured myself another glass, and watched the cursor blink on the white screen. I couldn’t write a eulogy while distracted by my background picture of Fenway Park, so I set the editor to full screen mode. The empty eulogy filled the screen. The cursor blinked at me.

“I don’t know what to say,” I’d told Clack. Clack waived a claw.

“You’re right, buddy. I can’t do this on a computer. It’s too
personal.”

I’d closed the laptop, brought it back into my office, and returned with a pad of paper and a pen. The pen had MIT emblazoned on it. I had bought the pen just after my parents had dropped me at school. It was my first independent purchase.

My mother had cried that day—not in a big flamboyant way, but sniffling, her eyes puffy as she kissed me goodbye.

“I’m just ten miles from home, Ma,” I’d said.

“You’re all grown up,” she had said. “It doesn’t matter how far away.”

I had turned from her with a jaunty “here I come, world” step, and entered the dorm. I never slept in my childhood bedroom again.

My glass had gone empty. I had refilled it. Now it was empty again and I was staring at the blank paper, trying to dredge up memories of my mother so I could share them, while at the same time pushing them away because they hurt. I remembered the time that she called me a “baby” on the playground. I think I was seven. Then there was the time she slapped me in the face for saying, “goddammit, Ma.” There was the time we ran into Mr. Musto, my middle school math teacher, in the supermarket, and she commended him on being able to teach “my little retard.” I couldn’t count the number of times she had called me a son of a bitch, apparently missing the irony of the insult every time. Why couldn’t I remember the good times?

There’s a story about a funeral in a Jewish shtetl. The rabbi was presiding over the funeral, standing over the body of a horrible man who had hated everybody in the village. Everybody in the village had returned the favor. Still, the villagers had come to his funeral.

The rabbi asked, “Will anybody say something nice about this man?”

Silence.

The rabbi said, “Surely, somebody must have something nice to say about this man.”

Crickets.

The rabbi said, “We are not leaving this funeral until somebody says something nice about this man.”

An old guy in the back of the crowd shouts out, “His brother was worse!”

Could I say that about my mother? Perhaps say, “She was kind of crazy, and her last parenting act was to threaten me with a knife, but there must be others who were worse.”

I said to Click, “They probably don’t want to hear that. They probably just want to hear about the times she was a normal mother.”

I tried to remember normal times. Christmas mornings. Breakfasts. Gin rummy. Watching TV. They all slipped away into darkness, replaced by a knife waving on a goat path in a filthy house.

The empty glass tugged at me. I tottered over to my booze cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Johnny Walker Red. Said to Click, “I’m drunk enough that this will taste okay. You want some?” Click demurred. I refilled my glass.

Lucy had offered to keep me company tonight. I had thanked her but said no. I needed to write this eulogy, and I had guessed that it might take all night. I drank some Johnny Walker Red. I was right; I was drunk enough that it tasted okay.

I pictured the people who would sit in the audience at the church. Auntie Rosa would be sitting out there. Sal would be there. So would Sal’s sisters, Cousin Adriana who lived in the North End and Cousin Bianca who lived on Long Island.

Cousin Bianca was now Bianca Goldman, having married Ben Goldman and converted to Judaism. It had nearly killed Auntie Rosa, and my mother wasn’t too happy about it either. Yet the Goldmans would surely be there, with their unbaptized son, Jake.

My mind skipped and jumped around the family tree, around my dad and his philandering, around the dead second family, Talevi and his threats, Graxton and his loans, Sal and his brutishness.

There must have been something to write, but I never found it. I woke up the next morning, my head pounding, my alarm clock blaring, and the pad of paper on the counter having nothing more on it than another moisture ring and a new whiskey stain.

I got dressed, put the empty sheet in my pocket in case something came to me, and headed toward the North End.

It was time to bury my mother.