My father and I set sail. First stop was Trinity College, up in Hartford. After that we went to Williams, Wesleyan, Middlebury. He let me do the driving. I shifted the VW Bug as Dad sat placidly in the passenger seat chain-smoking L&M Kings. The car, which he had bought new in 1963, had no seat belts. I would total it just a few months later in a spectacular wreck on the first day of my senior year. I’d nearly lose my right ear in the crash. But they’d put it back on all right.
It was the summer of 1975. Gerald Ford was president. Saigon had fallen to the Vietcong back in April, the same week this girl Dell had broken my heart. First rejection, then communism. I watched the last chopper take off from a roof in Saigon and thought: Figures.
At Trinity, the dean of admissions got up in the middle of our interview and went over to the window. “Hey!” he said. “I see a rat!”
I didn’t apply there.
At Wesleyan, I heard the Grateful Dead playing from a dormitory window. Well the first days are the hardest days, don’t you worry any more. People were sitting on Foss Hill, reading books. Someone threw a Frisbee to a dog. On the sidewalk I saw a crushed-flat can of Maximus Super beer. I’d never seen an actual can of it, but a friend of mine had a poster with this beautiful girl on it, holding a can. I wanted to look like her, although I did not share this longing with my father.
I figured Wesleyan would be a pretty good place to go to school, if they had cans of stuff like that lying around.
THIRTY-SIX YEARS LATER, Zach and I set sail on the very same ocean. We drove all the way to Ohio to visit Kenyon and Oberlin. On the way home we stopped off at Gettysburg, took the college tour, and then crouched behind the wall on Little Round Top, imagining Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the Twentieth Maine staring down the Alabamians. My gentle, pacifist son picked up a long stick, turned in my direction. “Affix bayonets!” said he.
Before that, he’d been behind the wheel of the Hyundai as we drove from Oberlin, Ohio, to Gambier. He didn’t have his license yet. As we hurtled along the highway, we listened to the radio. The Youngbloods came on: Some will come and some will go, but we will surely pass. We are but a moment’s sunlight, fading on the grass.
As my son weaved from one side of the road to another, I clutched the oh-my-God strap on the passenger’s-side ceiling, quietly reviewing the Lord’s Prayer. At one point we had to merge onto a six-lane highway as giant tractor-trailers barreled toward us, air horns blasting. “What am I going to do?” Zach cried as we accelerated toward our certain deaths. “Where am I going to go?”
“You can do this,” I said, hoping that saying this would make it so. “I know you can do this.”
We failed to die. That night we sat at the edge of the Kenyon campus at an inn named after the college. I drank a cocktail that was Kenyon purple. I had stayed at this same place with my father back in the summer of 1975. He’d tried out the bourbon.
Over dinner, Zach and I talked about some of the things he might study. He was getting more and more enthused about theater, although he said he would also major in bio because “you have to exist in the world.”
“You know what I want to do, Maddy?” said my son. “Next year, for my senior project? I want to direct a full-length play.”
“Which play?”
“I don’t know. What plays do you think would be good?”
It didn’t take me long to come up with a suggestion. “Our Town’s good.”
“Our Town?”
It had been my class’s senior play, back in high school. I still remember looking out at all the adults in the audience, tears streaming down their faces. I couldn’t figure it out. What were they all so upset about?
EMILY: I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back—up the hill—to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, good-by world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners. Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking … and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths … and sleeping and waking up.
I described it to him. It was the story of a small town, not unlike the one we lived in up in Maine. It was about the preciousness of life and how hard it is to be aware of the gifts we have been given.
“Plus,” I said to my son, “it will make all the adults cry their brains out.”
Zach looked thoughtful. It was the same look I’d seen when he’d crouched behind the wall at the end of the Union line. “Hm,” he said. “I have to admit that’s appealing.”
“It’d be an incredible amount of work, though,” I said. “You, directing a whole play.”
“You don’t think I can do it,” he said. From the Kenyon campus, a young couple approached. They had books and sunglasses and a Labrador retriever.
“Of course you can do it,” I said. “Have I ever doubted you?”
I sat there in the twilight with my purple Kenyon cocktail. My father and I had had a conversation like this, thirty-six years earlier, perhaps at this same table. I told him I wanted to be a writer. Dad looked at me with concern. You don’t think I can do it.
“It’s not that,” Dad had said. “It’s just—I don’t want you to go hungry.”
The young people on the quad threw a Frisbee, and their dog caught it in his mouth. I sipped the Kenyon cocktail. Zach was watching the couple and their dog.
“I am going to direct that play,” said Zach. “You’ll see.”
Oh earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?
I THOUGHT A LOT about my father on that trip. It was hard not to wonder about the many ways Zach resembled my own seventeen-year-old self, not only with his long hair and glasses, but in his humor and imagination and ridiculous, buoyant hope. And if Zach was walking in my shoes, was I not walking in those of my father, vagina notwithstanding? Was I not, after all this time, still more of a father than a second mother to him? What was the difference?
If you’re a father, Edward Albee had said to me, it means you’ve had sex with a woman, your wife or someone else, and impregnated her.
I hadn’t known how to respond to this. I’d sat in Edward’s incredible loft, surrounded by primitive sculptures and modern paintings, flabbergasted. You think that’s what it means? I’d said. Seriously?
You never birthed those two, Edward replied. Isn’t that a different quality of parenthood?
It was a different quality of parenthood.
But there is a lot more to parenting than birthing, just as there is a lot more to a novel than its opening sentence. James Joyce, for whatever it’s worth, had once managed to write a novel that didn’t even have an opening sentence. riverrun past Eve and Adam’s from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to
Does it mean making, Edward had asked, or is it the being?
I think it’s the being.
There was a time once when motherhood and fatherhood were states as simple to define as woman and man. But as the meanings of male and female have shifted from something firm and unwavering into something more versatile and inconstant, so too have the terms mother and father become more permeable and open-ended. I understand the reluctance many people have to embrace this thought; a world in which male and female are not fixed and unmoving poles but points in a wide spectrum is a world that feels unstable, unsafe, unreal. And yet to accept the wondrous scope of gender is to affirm the vast potential of life, in all its messy, unfathomable beauty. Surely, if we make room for the mutability of gender, we have to accept that motherhood and fatherhood themselves are no longer unalterable binaries either.
How many different kinds of fathers and mothers are there? My friend Richard Russo had loved his father even though he’d essentially been abandoned by him. You can either take what he’s offering—maybe he should be offering more—but you can either enjoy it and let the rest go, or you can be bitter and resentful.… For me, it was … just an easy choice. He was endlessly, endlessly entertaining. Augusten Burroughs, on the other hand, was still trying to come to terms with his father, a man whom he’d long thought of as a monster, although Augusten’s dad surely had never chosen monstrousness for its own sake. But what’s a father? What did you really take away from [your sons]? You took the ability for them to call you Dad, or Deedie to call you her husband.
Dr. Christine McGinn had told me that gender is a mystery and said, I think it always will be a mystery. She had been born male, but she’d changed genders, and using the sperm she’d saved, she and her wife had had twins. There she was: Christine McGinn, her babies in her arms, breast-feeding. And every one of us is in heaven.
Timothy Kreider was adopted and raised by a loving family. When he made contact with his biological mother and his half sisters at age forty, he felt the world move beneath him. I felt totally blindsided by this affection for them. I mean, I adore them horribly. I can’t help it.
Veronica Gerhardf, our former nanny, had become pregnant herself in her late twenties, then learned that her child would be stillborn. After the birth, she held her lost child in her arms and wept. She named her Penelope, after Odysseus’s wife. She spent all day making this quilt and then at night she spent her time unraveling it so that she’s never done. For us it meant the task that is not completed, the end that is never met. It meant the promise unfulfilled.
Only 7 percent of American households, according to the Population Reference Bureau, now consist of married couples with children in which only the father works. As it turns out, the biggest outlier in our culture is not same-sex couples, or transgender people, or adoptive parents, or single fathers, but the so-called traditional American family itself.
What does it even mean, at this hour, to call anybody traditional? Surely it is not the ways in which we all conform that define us, but the manner in which we each seek our own perilous truth.
DJ Savarese, considered retarded at birth, wound up going to Oberlin. You are the dad I awesomely try to be loved by. Please don’t hear my years of hurt. Until you yearned to be my dad, playing was treated as too hard. Until you loved me, I loved only myself. You taught me how to play. You taught me how to love. I love you.
Every single family in the world is a nontraditional family.
I used to worry about my sons, about the ways in which our family’s difference would be a hardship for them. One day, when he was about eight, I’d dropped Zach off at a bowling alley for a friend’s birthday. I looked at the other kids there, putting on their rent-a-shoes, trying out different bowling balls. There were white kids and African-American kids. One boy was on Ritalin because of his attention deficit disorder. One girl’s mother was in the hospital after suffering a nervous breakdown. One kid was being raised by two dads. Another one had six fingers on one hand, four on the other.
As my son entered the bowling alley, all the kids cheered. They loved him. “Hi, Zach!” they shouted.
Then they looked at me. What could they say to a father who had become a woman? What possible words were there for these children to describe the world we lived in now?
“Hi, Maddy!” they said.
ON THE WAY back from Gettysburg we pulled into my mother’s house. They had her in a hospital bed on the first floor now. She didn’t recognize Zach and me at first, but after a moment her face lit up and she spread her arms wide and gathered us all to her.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” said Mom. “Now you can take me home.”
“But, Mom,” I said. “You are home.”
I could see disappointment and betrayal play across her face. “Oh, Jenny,” she said. “Not you too.”
Zach gave me a hard look. “I’ll carry our stuff upstairs.”
The aide pulled on my elbow. “Just play along,” she said.
“How are you feeling, Mom?”
“Well, I have a lot of pain in my back still. But the main thing is, I just want to get out of here. If I were back in my own house, I know I’d feel better.”
The aide gave me an urgent look. “Have you seen the doctor recently?”
“Well, your uncle Dave was here,” she said. “He made me a strawberry pie.” This made a little bit of sense, since my uncle Dave was known for making pies. On the other hand, he had died seven years ago, so if he’d come by to visit my mother he’d brought that pie from a long way off.
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate what you’ve done for me,” said Mom. She looked around the room, which was filled with her favorite paintings, a green sofa, a big green chair.
“What have I done for you?” I asked Mom.
“Bringing all these things from my house. Setting everything up to look just like my room. Did you have this place built right on the side of the hospital? It must’ve been so much work.”
I looked at the aide, who was now sitting down on the sofa with the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Mom, we didn’t build a room on the side of the hospital and fill it with your things and make it look like your house. This really is your house. You’re at home, just like you wanted to be.”
My mother gave me the same look she used to give me back in high school. “I can always tell when you’re lying,” she said.
“Mom,” I said. “I’m not lying. This really is your house. You’re right here. I’m with you.”
She shook her head in disappointment. “Jenny, she said. “I was counting on you to be the one person who would tell me the truth.”
“But, Mom—”
The aide, who had clearly been through this conversation before, cleared her throat. “Mrs. Boylan,” she said, “the doctor is coming tomorrow. We’ll talk about all this with him then.”
“Tomorrow,” my mother said. “All right then. Jenny, you make sure you’re here when the doctor comes. And tell your father I need to speak with him.”
I felt my throat close up. “Okay, Mom,” I said. “I’ll tell him.”
I WOKE THAT NIGHT from a strange dream. I turned on the light and found myself in my high school bedroom. I had often dreamed as a child that I would wake from a mysterious slumber and find myself magically transformed to female. Back then, though, I’d always imagined myself waking up as a young woman, some sort of beautiful teenage thing. It hadn’t occurred to me that someday I would sit up in the middle of the night as a mother of two. I lay back on my pillow thinking how strange it was that most of the wishes I had ever had in this life had come true—although almost never in the manner that I had expected.
A phrase came to me from the dream world I had just left. “My mother is a fish,” I said out loud. Then I turned off the light and went back to sleep.
In the morning I remembered this whole incident and thought, My mother is a fish? What?
It didn’t take too long to recall the line from Faulkner. The little boy Vardaman thinks it. In As I Lay Dying.
I DESCENDED THE STAIRS to the kitchen, got a cup of coffee, waiting to see what my mother was up to. “Guten Morgen,” she said to me. I looked at the aide, whose name was Monica.
“Don’t look at me,” said Monica. “She was like this when I got here.”
“Meine Schwester,” she said, taking me by the arm. “Du bist so schön.”
My sister, you are so beautiful.
German had been my mother’s language until the age of seven, when she and her family had come to America through Ellis Island, fleeing the chaos of the Weimar Republic in East Prussia. It had been important to her, at one point, that I understand the difference between Germans and Prussians. The Prussians were scholars, she said. The Germans? Were not. Other times, she felt bad that Prussia was a country that they didn’t have anymore. “They carved us up between Russia and Poland,” she said sadly. “I come from a country that no longer exists.”
The country might not have existed anymore, but she seemed to have settled happily back into its language after eighty-seven years. Using what was left of my high school German, we had a nice little talk together, although in order to sustain it I had to pretend that I was my aunt Gertrude.*
My mother looked tired and sad. “Es tut mir Leid,” she said. “Aber müssen wir nach New York zuruck gegangen. Wir müssen ihn finden.” I’m sorry, but we have to go back to New York. We have to find him.
I knew where she was headed with this, and it was not a particularly good place for her to be traveling. After my mother’s family had landed in America, my grandfather had abandoned his family. He would be gone for years at a time, only to turn up unexpectedly, drunk as a gas station. I used to have to pull him out of the pigpen, my mother used to explain. I was afraid the pigs would eat him. One time he showed up with part of his third finger missing.
Then he disappeared for good. Years passed. The suspicion was he’d finally fallen into a pigpen someplace where there was no one to pull him out.
The phone rang at my aunt Gertrude’s house in 1965. The New York City morgue was on the line. “We’ve got your father,” they said.
My mother and her sister took the train to Manhattan, got off at Penn Station, walked over to the medical examiner’s office on Thirty-third and First. On the wall was an inscription in Latin: TACEANT COLLOQUIA EFFUGIAT RISUS HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE.
Let conversations cease. Let smiles fade away. For here is the place where death is glad to help the living.
The two sisters were brought into a room where a body lay upon a table. A man in a white coat pulled back the sheet. They didn’t recognize him at first. Then they saw that the body was missing a finger.
“That’s him,” said aunt Gertrude. My mother nodded.
“He had your address in his pocket,” said the man in white. This unsettled my aunt. Considering that they hadn’t heard from him in thirty years, it seemed odd that he’d know exactly where she lived.
Later, in hearing this story, I thought of the line from Father Brown (and quoted in Brideshead Revisited). “I caught the thief,” said Father Brown, “with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”
“What do you want done with the body?” asked the man in white. “Shall we release him to you?”
My mother and my aunt looked at each other. It didn’t take them long to decide. “We don’t want him,” said my mother. “He abandoned us; now we’ll abandon him. See how he likes it.”
They left the morgue and got back on the train and went back to Philadelphia without him.
My grandfather was buried in the potter’s field of New York City, a small island off the Bronx called Hart Island. Prisoners from Rikers Island bury the dead there in pine boxes, one stacked up on top of the other.
In my twenties, I had gone to Hart Island to do a story for a magazine. It was a spectacularly haunted place, accessible only by a ferry run by the Department of Corrections. In addition to the potter’s field, the island featured an abandoned mental hospital and the remains of a nineteenth-century village. The prisoners from Rikers, dressed in orange, shoveled the graves as guards stood there with guns trained upon them and the sun shone down.
I had no idea at the time that I was standing upon the grave of my grandfather.
“Wir müssen nach New York zuruck gehen, Gertrude,” whispered my mother. She clutched my arm fiercely. “Wir einen Fehler gemacht. Wir müssen ihn retten.”
We have to go back to New York, Gertrude. We made a mistake. We have to rescue him.
It appeared as if my mother was having second thoughts—fifty years later—about having abandoned my grandfather. This wasn’t completely out of character, either. Of all the people I have ever known, my mother is the one least likely to bear a grudge. At age ninety-four, just as when she was a child, my mother was still trying to pull her father out of the pigpen.
I imagined going up to New York, retrieving my grandfather’s body from Hart Island. When I’d written that story, back in 1984, I’d learned that people did that all the time.
The world is full of second thoughts.
Zachary entered the room. He was sleepy. “Good morning, Grandmama,” he said. My son wrapped his arms around my mother.
“Hello, Zach,” she said, in English. “I understand you’ve been looking at colleges.”
“Yes I have,” he said. “I’m thinking of majoring in biology and theater. And I want to start an Amnesty International chapter.”
My mother looked at him proudly.
“I wish you’d known your grandfather,” she said. “He’d have been so proud of you, Zachary. So proud.”
Then her eyes fell to me. “Oh, Jenny,” she said. “When did you get here?”
“I just flew in from Maine,” I said. “And boy are my arms tired.”
She gave me a familiar, exhausted smile. “Always with the jokes,” she said, and looked at Zach. “The two of you. I don’t know which one’s worse.”
“She’s worse,” said Zach.
“Well, you’ll be glad to know I’ve been talking to real estate agents,” said Mom. “I’ve decided I don’t want you to take me back to my house. I’m buying a new house. I’m moving to a place I’ve never been before.”
Zach cast a worried glance at me. “That’s good, Mom. We really didn’t want you going back to the old house. We don’t think you’d be happy there.”
“So you admit it,” Mom said. “This is a room you had built onto the hospital. And filled it with all of this duplication furniture.”
Monica looked at me. She nodded and mouthed the words, Say yes.
“Okay,” I said. “I admit it.”
“It was a very, very sweet thing to do,” Mom said, squeezing my hand. “I just don’t understand why you couldn’t tell me the truth.”
“We thought it might upset you,” said Zach.
Mom thought this over. “Yes,” she said. “I see. But it’s going to be all right now. I’m moving on. Don’t you think that’s exciting? I’m making a new beginning.”
“I’m glad you’re moving, Mom,” I said. I felt my heart in my throat. “It will be nice to have a new house.”
She reached up and squeezed my arm. She sang, “Du, du liegst mir im Herzen! Du, du liegst mir im Sinn. Du, du machst mir viel Schmerzen, weißt nicht wie gut ich dir bin!”
Which of course means, You’re in my heart, you’re in my mind. You cause me such pain! You don’t know how good I am for you.
“Is that German?” Zach asked me.
“Prussian,” I said.
Mom looked at Zach proudly and turned to me. In German she said, “I’m so proud of my son.” Meaning Zach. Then she looked at me. “Es tut mir Leid für dich, Gertrude,” she said. I’m sorry for you, Gertrude.
She didn’t say why she was sorry for her sister, but I had a guess. My aunt Gertrude had never had any children of her own.
LATER, I SAT by myself in the living room in what had once been my father’s chair. The piano sat silently in the corner. It was as if the whole house was waiting now, preparing itself for what was about to happen.
I looked up at the mantelpiece. Just before Christmas in 1985, some carolers had come to the front door and sung for my mother and me. Said the north wind to the little lamb, do you hear what I hear? There were footsteps on the stairs behind us, and down the steps came my father, bald from the chemo, wearing his bathrobe. “Oh, Dick,” my mother had said. “You shouldn’t be out of bed.”
“I wanted to hear the music,” he said.
My mother and my father and I stood there in the front hallway, listening to the carolers. Some of the people singing were in their twenties. When we’d first moved into the neighborhood, they were little kids.
Said the king to the people everywhere, listen to what I say. A child, a child, slumbers in the night, he will bring us goodness and light.
My mother guided my dad back up the stairs when the singing was done. I heard their footsteps go down the hallway, the springs in my father’s bed groaning as he lay back down.
I stood and leaned against the mantelpiece, and the tears poured out of me. It was a few months later that the maestro came for my father, in his tie and tails, and asked him to come away and conduct his orchestra.
Now I sat in his chair as my mother drifted through time and space. There were footsteps as someone came down the stairs. For a moment I half expected to see my father in his bathrobe. How are you, old man?
Instead, there was my son. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“Oh, I’m sad, Zachy,” I said. “I’m just so sad.”
He gave me a good, long hug. “I know,” he said.
I blew some air through my cheeks. “I am glad that you are with me, Sam,” I said. “Here at the end of all things.”
“Mr. Gandalf told me not to let you out of my sight,” my son replied, right on cue. “And I don’t mean to. I don’t mean to.”
I TALKED TO Deedie on the phone. She and Sean arranged to fly down to Philadelphia in order to say good-bye. Then the two of them and Zach would get in our car and drive back to Maine. I would wait with Mom. My sister was on her way from the UK. Time was running swiftly now.
As we waited for Deedie and Sean to arrive, Zach began to sketch out his college admissions essay, sitting in the library of the old house.
This is what he wrote:
Oprah Winfrey asked me what my family was like.
It’s 2001, and I was seven years old. We were sitting around the dining room table. I looked over at my father and said, “We can’t really call you ‘Daddy’ any more now, can we?” She said, “No. I don’t suppose you can.” She was a year into her transition. “But you could call me Jenny. That’s the name I’m using now that I’m female.” I laughed. “Jenny?” I said. “That sounds like the name of a girl donkey.” “Well,” she said. “What would you like to call me?” I thought about this for a moment. “What about—Maddy?” I said. “That’s half mommy and half daddy—Maddy.” I sat back in my chair, satisfied with my work. My younger brother, five at that point, sat up in his chair and said, “Or Dommy.” We all laughed at this.
It’s 2008, and I was fourteen years old. It was the day before I started my first year of high school. I was nervous, not just because this was high school, but because I’d finally left the public school I’d been attending for nine years. Would I be able to handle all the work? Would I have friends? Maddy sensed that I was worried, and told me to come down to the dock. We live on a lake in Maine, in a small town called Belgrade. We walked down to the dock in silence, and sat in the Adirondack chairs by the water. Together we gazed upward at the vast mystery of space. Stars twinkled in the sky; the Milky Way was just barely visible. A few clouds drifted across the almost-full moon. There were no human noises; we heard the chirping of crickets, the hooting of great horned owls, the long mournful call of loons. We sat there looking at the sky and at the water for what seemed like a long time. Although not a word had been exchanged, I felt like things were going to be fine. We walked back to the house together.
It’s 2011, and I’m seventeen. It was a beautiful summer day. The family had decided to go to our favorite local tavern, The Village Inn, across the lake. It was the first time that our family had been together for what seemed like a long time—my brother had been at music camp for the last three weeks, and I a camp counselor for eight. My mother was sitting next to my brother, and Maddy was in the stern with a smile on her face. As my brother took the wheel and guided our slow aluminum boat across the lake, the sun reflected off the water of Long Pond and illuminated the four of us, each one contented by the presence of the others.
It’s 2010, and Oprah was having a “Most Memorable Guests” Special. “So Zach,” Oprah asked, “what’s your family like?”
I smiled. “My family is good,” I said.
SEAN SAT BY his grandmother’s side. She was very sensible with him. Mom wanted to know all about the pieces he was playing at summer music camp.
“It’s Handel, and Vivaldi,” said Sean. “And Grieg.”
“Grieg, what pieces by Grieg?”
“In the Hall of the Mountain King,” said Sean.
My mother started singing it, softly and slowly at first, then more loudly and swiftly. It was alarming to watch her singing it. “Dee-dee, dee-dee, dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee, dee-dee-dee.”
“Mrs. Boylan,” said Monica, “we don’t want you to get riled up now.”
Mom relented. “Oh,” she said. “I used to think that was the scariest music in the world.”
Sean took this in. “It’s fun to play, though,” he said.
Hildegarde thought this over. “Is it?” she asked.
THE NEXT MORNING, just before dawn, the boys and Deedie prepared to head back to Maine. Mom was still asleep.
“We love you, Hildegarde,” Deedie whispered. She had known my mother for twenty-four years; her own mother had died when Deedie was twenty-four. Sean looked at her, his lips tight. Zach’s eyes shone.
“I appreciate you understanding about my staying here,” I said to the boys. “I’m glad you’re okay about my having to spend time with her now.”
“It’s all right, Maddy,” said Zach. “Someday, you’ll be the one who’s all old and feeble. And then it’ll be my turn, to stay with you.”
It was a nice thing to say.
I stood in the doorway and watched as the three of them piled into the van and headed down the driveway. There was a flash of headlights against the neighbor’s house, the sound of tires shushing against the wet street, and then they were gone.
For a moment I stood there, listening to the silence. I thought about how many times I had passed out of these doors, on my way to some adventure. I remembered climbing into the Oldsmobile Omega at dawn on the first of September 1976, the car packed full with my steamer trunk, a pair of stereo speakers, a coffeepot, all of the things I’d use in my freshman dorm room at Wesleyan. As I walked out to the car, I saw Orion rising in the sky above the cherry tree. A way a lone a last a loved a long the
My parents came outside. Dad was jangling his car keys. One of his arms was around my mother’s waist.
“Okay, old man,” he said. “You ready?’
LOTS OF THINGS happened after that. My sister arrived, and we spent a week sitting by my mother’s bed. We had been estranged, the two of us, ever since I came out as trans, but without putting the details of our truce into words, we put our differences aside. It was only the second time in eleven years that we had been in the same room together. The first time hadn’t gone so well.
Mom switched over to German for long stretches, then she fell silent. One day, she just cried softly, without using words. Then she closed her eyes. A few days later, I was sitting by her side, holding her hand, when all at once she said:
“Oh!”
It was as if, after ninety-four years, something had finally taken her completely by surprise.
I turned to Monica. “Get my sister,” I said.
A second later, the two of us were sitting on either side of Mom’s bed, each of us holding her hand. My sister ran her fingers through my mother’s hair.
“Good-bye, Mom,” she said. “Good-bye.”
“We’re both here,” I whispered. “We’re together. It’s going to be all right.”
Mom took another little gasp, once again surprised by something she had not foreseen. Then she didn’t breathe anymore.
IN THE DAYS that followed, neighbors and friends came over with station wagons filled with corned beef. My nieces and nephews arrived from England. They were such smart and beautiful young men and women. Oh, how I wished that I had known them for the last decade, and that they had known their cousins. Zach and Sean hung out with them, a little nervous. All six of them went out to the swimming pool.
Zach was a little reluctant to take off his shirt. “I’m the only cousin who isn’t buff,” he said regretfully.
Later, my sister and I walked arm in arm across a cemetery, holding an urn in our hands. We placed orchids in the tomb.
At the memorial service a few days later, Deedie read a poem my mother had chosen for the occasion. My sister delivered the eulogy. I did not speak, but I did sit down at the piano and play “Träumerei” from Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood. She had always loved that song. In German, the title means “Dreaming.”
Later that night, Sean somehow convinced everyone to go to a Japanese teppanyaki house. The adults drank sake. The cousins caught pieces of shrimp tossed adroitly into their mouths. We all sat there in a new and unfamiliar world, watching smoke puff from the cone of an onion-ring volcano.
Nine months later, Zach directed Our Town. He cast his own brother as Simon Stimson, the troubled choirmaster who takes his life. There in the graveyard, my younger son looked out at the living and said, “That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another.”
Deedie and I sat next to each other, holding hands, softly sobbing. It was just as I’d promised my son the summer before: All the adults were weeping out their brains. Interestingly, a couple seats over from me was a person whom I could not immediately read as male or female, as mother or father. I’d never seen him or her before.
I looked back at the stage. The Stage Manager said, “Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”
When the play was over, there was a brief moment, as the house was plunged into darkness and all the adults sat there crying. Then the lights came on, and our children were alive again. They stood there, bowing and grinning, as they basked in the applause of their mothers, and their fathers, and everyone in between.
The cast called out for their director to join them on the stage, and there was Zach, standing before the crowd.
It was just a few hours before his eighteenth birthday. I thought about the night he was born, all those years before. Snow faintly falling. Charles Ryder reaching forward to touch a plover’s egg. Uh-oh.
The audience cheered. Zach smiled. His eyes searched the house for his parents. It took a moment, but he found us in time.
MY MOTHER HAD DIED on the fifth of July. The night before this, Independence Day, my sister and I sat together on the back porch of the old house, drinking white wine in the dark, together again after all the lost years.
“I always thought this house would last forever,” I said, looking up at the ramshackle mansion. “No matter where I lived, or what happened to me, I always knew it was here. Like the mother ship. I could always come home.”
“I know, Jenny,” she said. “Now, after all this time, this whole world is about to go psshhhhh.”
I sighed. She was right. Everything was about to go psshhhhh.
“I don’t know that I’ll be coming back to America anymore,” she said softly. “After she’s gone. There isn’t any reason to, anymore. There’s nothing for me here.”
In the next room, my mother lay quietly dreaming. Where did she go, that last night of her life? What did she see, as she slowly traveled farther away from shore? Did she see her own father, standing by the sea with his nine fingers? Did she tell him she was sorry that they’d left him on Hart Island?
That’s all right, he said. I’m sorry I wasn’t around, when you were so small.
Something went boom. We could not quite see the fireworks, but we could see the sky flickering blue, and green, and white. A neighbor’s dog was barking. The sky flickered.
We sat there in the dark, my sister and I. I could smell the fragrance of the newly mown lawn. From the quiet street I heard the laughter of children. Two small figures ran down the side street, sparklers in their hands. It was a great night for them, the stuff of dreams.
We are but a moment’s sunlight, fading on the grass.
That boy and girl ran down the road and disappeared. Light from the fireworks flickered off my sister’s face.
I wouldn’t be hearing the voices of those children again. It made me wonder where they’d gone.
* In previous works, I gave her the pseudonym “Nora.” There’s a chapter about her in She’s Not There in which I describe the morning my aunt became convinced she’d died. My mother had recommended that the best response to this situation was for my aunt to drink a nice glass of milk.