Lately I visit my mother three or four days a week to check in. I call the day before to let her know I’m coming. I call again before I leave home to remind her. Today she swears I did not call yesterday, that in fact I have not called in weeks There’s no point in arguing And when I get to Commerce Street she’s no longer angry at me for my neglect. It’s almost as if I just called yesterday.
Sometimes she’s here, sometimes she’s not. On good days she goes by the GV office for a while Kevin is overwhelmed by his new job and he’s happy to have her help On good days she does all the fun things you imagine a retired person would do. She meets Erica for lunch, she goes to galleries, to readings, to movies, and she remembers these things and tells me about them. On bad days she tries to stay home. She’s still well enough to know a good day from a bad day; she says if she wakes up with a headache she knows it’s a bad day and tries to stay home. She tries to hold on to the thought, I must stay home today Sometimes it doesn’t work and she goes out looking for the past. She walks over to Jefferson Market and wonders when it closed (it moved across the street ten years ago), she tries to have lunch at Pere Francois and cannot understand how it’s turned into a McDonald’s overnight.
I come by with take-out from Empire Szechuan and it’s a bad day and she’s confused. But at least she’s happy to see me.
“Honey, you’re back from school!”
“I’ve been out of school for years, Mom I brought dinner. Cashew chicken ”
“Oh, I remember now. You know, now that I think about it, you were right to drop out. Brown’s a good school, but I learned so much more when I was done with school than when I was in it. You’ll learn a lot working at a bookstore ”
“I don’t work in a bookstore anymore, Mom. I work at the computer place, remember? The computer place that you hate.” The specialist told me I should never humor her, I should always try to bring her back to the here and now
“Oh Oh, that place.” She frowns and I know that she’s here again
I set up dinner on the table and we eat and talk about books We’ve both just read a new autobiography called My New York. The author, Jeremy Conwinkle, is a novelist who took one of Michael’s classes at Columbia
“What an asshole,” says Evelyn. “I never even met the kid, he acts like Michael and him had some kind of a big thing going on. It’s like that with everyone he writes about. James Furman was not ‘a gentle soul who couldn’t fit in with the rigors of academia,’ he was a prick and a rapist who was fired from Columbia for raping a freshman girl in his office. And Billy Connolly sure as hell wasn’t some kind of mentor, father figure, to his students. He hated them, each and every one. He used to bring their papers to Michael’s office to laugh at them, like they were a joke, until your father told him to stop What an asshole.”
“At least he had some nice things to say about Dad.”
“Well, your father was a nice man,” Evelyn says, sharply. She thinks I’m still mad at my father for dying.
“I know. All I’m saving is, this guy said that. He said Michael was a nice guy.”
“He was a nice guy,” she says. “You don’t remember him before he was sick. You don’t know.”
I pick at my chicken. “I know. I remember. I have nothing but good memories.”
“And one bad one. And that’s the one you remember.”
She’s accusing me I don’t want to fight “Mom, that’s not true. Come on. You know that’s not true.”
She relaxes a little. “Anyway, he wasn’t perfect This guy makes him out to be like some kind of saint.”
“That he was not”
“It wasn’t his fault.” Evelyn’s sharp again. “I mean, he was sick. It was an illness. He couldn’t help it.”
“I know,” I tell her. “Today, things would have been different. They’ve got medications, treatment.”
Evelyn puts down her fork and lights a cigarette. I do the same. It’s so rare that we even mention his name, between the two of us.
“I don’t know if it would have helped,” she says. “You know, when we got married, I was so naive. I thought all he needed was a nice house, a home, a regular girl I thought he had too much stress at Columbia, he was lonely, his parents were such assholes—I thought that was all there was to it”
“People didn’t know then what they know now. No one knew it was a biological thing. They thought it was from having a bad mother ”
“Which he had All that money, they gave him everything, and you know I don’t think that woman ever said ‘I love you,’ not once in her life, not to him or anyone else. And his brother. You don’t remember him ”
“Not really.”
“He had his own problems. Such a cruel man. You should have seen how he treated his wife And the kids’ I felt so bad for them I wonder where those kids are now ”
“Probably in a mental home somewhere.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. The whole family was nuts. I thought if I could just get Michael away from them he would be fine”
I light another cigarette. “It worked for a while,” I tell her, even though she knows this better than I “It’s not like he was never happy.”
“For a while it was okay When we first moved to Twelfth Street it was okay. Then it got bad again, then worse, and worse and worse. Oh God. I remember when they first put him on medical leave. He was so depressed he would just sit in his office all day and stare at a book. He wouldn’t go to his classes, he wouldn’t grade papers, he wouldn’t even come home until like, midnight I was devastated. I thought it was my fault—”
“It wasn’t your fault, Mom,” I interrupt. I don’t want to continue this, this I could have, I would have, I should, if I knew. It goes nowhere We can’t change the past from this kitchen table.
“Now I know that. But then—Andrew Kleinman and I drove him up to Silver Hill for the first time. This was supposed to be like, the best place—”
“It was the best place.”
“Well, you should have seen what they did to him. They gave him medication, it didn’t help He tried to hang himself with a bedsheet Then they gave him electroshock. He was a fucking mess after that, his brain was like Swiss cheese, but he was better Less depressed So he came home ”
It’s too late not to talk about it now, Evelyn is determined, so I try to make the best of it “His memory came back. You started the magazine, you had me.”
“When you were born, that was when he really got better. I mean, he loved the magazine, but he really loved you, honey.”
“I know, Mom. I loved him, too He wasn’t sick again until I was like five ”
“Not bad like that, no. He had slipped back into it a few times before, but somehow he would pull himself back out When I think of what he went through—what we put him through. The therapies we tried, they seem barbaric now, like torture. Insulin therapy, electroshock I was just trying to keep him alive He would go to the hospital, they would starve him, shock him, give him drugs, he would come home.”
“What else were you supposed to do?”
“I don’t know. The last time, I didn’t even want him back I never should have let him come back ”
“Mom—”
“I should have sent him back to the hospital. Or just away, just sent him away. I could have gotten a divorce ”
“He was your husband,” I’m yelling at her. “He was my father He didn’t mean for it to happen like that It was an accident, the whole thing was an accident, you know that.”
“I would have killed him. If I knew. You know that I would have told you he had an accident, told you he was sick, he had been hit by a car, anything—”
Anything rather than what did happen. I stand up and go to the window and lean out Evelyn keeps talking, saying she would have killed him. She must have gone over it in her head a million times. She would have killed Michael, cleaned him, arranged him flat and smooth and waxy in a sterile coffin. She would have pulled me onto her lap and let me hold Barbie close, nestled me in her lap and run a hand over my hair and told me that my father had died.
But it happened like this-
I was home from school with a stomach ache Probably something I ate; Evelyn had made a feeble attempt at chicken Parmesan the night before Michael didn’t know I was home. He had fallen asleep on the sofa the night before and now, at noon, he was still sleeping and Evelyn didn’t want to wake him She went out for some errands and told me to stay in my room and wake Michael if I needed anything I wouldn’t have gone to wake him if it wasn’t important, but my stomach was worse and I needed medicine. He was sick again. My mother had been gone a long time and I went to wake him up. He wasn’t in the living room I thought he had woken up and gone into the office, like he did when he wasn’t sick It was always okay for me to go into the office, even if there was a meeting It would be okay now, I would go very quietly and no one would even know. Michael was almost never mad at me, and he wouldn’t be mad at me now
He wasn’t in the office Or in the kitchen, or the bathroom He was in the bedroom, lying in bed dressed in a fresh pale blue oxford shirt, neatly pressed khaki pants, and black brogue shoes on his feet He must have gone to bed after my mother went out
Until I kissed him, I thought he was sleeping. I climbed into bed with him and kissed him on the cheek, to wake him up, and then I knew. When my lips touched the hard bone of his left cheek, above the graying stubble, close to his hairline I knew, my father was gone
I stayed in bed with him Maybe if I stayed close, he would come back. I lay curled up by his side, my head on his chest, for a few minutes, or an hour, or a lifetime. The house was quiet. I can think of nothing else like the sensation of feeling my father not breathe, of hearing his heart not beat Nothing else has ever been so still, no other sound has ever been so silent. Then I heard Evelyn’s keys in the door, I heard her walking through the big empty house, saying my name quietly, looking, unconcerned. She opened the door to the bedroom softly and smiled when she saw the two of us asleep together. Her hair was still dark then and her face was smooth, unlined Her smile was beautiful. It wasn’t until she sat on the bed next to me that she saw
“Oh my God,” she whispered. “Oh my God.” She shook him, and as soon as she touched him she was sure, too. She kept whispering “Oh my God,” and she picked me up, roughly, one arm around my neck and another under my knees, and took me away from him Then, I started to cry.
The next thing I remember I was in the living room. Three police officers and two paramedics had come. My mother was in the bedroom, yelling out sobs and throwing bottles of perfume against the wall One of the police officers came over and sat on the sofa with me and held my hand. Everything was quiet except for my mother’s screaming and the bottles breaking and the click-clack of the police radios No one else spoke.
Then I was in the hospital. I wouldn’t, couldn’t speak A nice nurse named Janine brought me a different chocolate animal from the gift shop every day, an elephant, a bunny, a Scottish terrier, a cat I lined them along the window sill and made up a story for each The elephant was a philosopher, the bunny was a writer, the terrier a policeman, and the cat was a little girl Different doctors gave me shots, some hurt and some didn’t A young doctor tried to make me laugh. I ignored him. Evelyn came by and held me and cried and told me I would be okay, everything would be okay
She lied.