Mom’s letters began more often to mirror her condition. She frequently dropped dates. Sometimes there were other lapses. But just as frequently the letters were lucid and perceptive. She wanted to know in February 1988 who we liked in the Democratic primaries and whether Bush or Dole would prevail among the Republicans. “Who can lead us out of the woods?” she wondered. She wrote with charm about the change of seasons: “I look out one window and see red, red poinsettias (Christmas and winter) and another to see jacarandas (lavender and spring).”
Dad grew more demanding. By the spring, I began to suspect him of wanting me to take her off his hands, to bring her back to the States while he stayed there. It was as if the extra attention she required and the extra household duties he now bore were cheating him of his full measure of retirement. He also ranted jealously about the “time, effort, and money” we were spending on the little boy we were trying to help raise.
By June he was in high dudgeon. “It is time you gave some thoughts to your aging parents,” he wrote.
I had hoped you would have been down here before this and we could have discussed the situation. You know how ancient I am, and with a heart condition; anything can happen at any time. If anything did happen to me, you would have to see that your mother was situated without delay, where all her meals were provided, and where someone would be sure to see that she got out of bed at a reasonable hour every day. There are days when it is hard to get her going particularly if the weather is cool.
The other side of this, is that if I suddenly found myself alone I would probably go back to England. I have no desire to live anywhere in the U.S., least of all in Florida. The U.S. is a less civilized country than it was forty years ago, and I do not think it is going to get better any time soon. In England my health needs would be taken care of. I would be out of the clutches of the A.M.A.
Dylan Thomas would have tipped his hat to Dad, for in his old age he was raving at the close of day. Not altogether rationally, I thought. He hadn’t been back to England since he left, in 1923.
“Oh, yes,” he added, trying to rub more salt into my conscience. “If I should check out I want you to take my Bible, the gift of the Governors of Christ’s Hospital to me when I left school, and read it!”
I wrote back, just as angry as he was, at his polemics, his hysterical demands for my attention, and his ridiculous faith that I could change what he would not.
Every time I have suggested possibilities you have been reluctant to cooperate. A visit to Chapala won’t resolve these issues any more than they were resolved last October when I was there because you will only entertain one point of view—yours. If you were more accessible as you were in Waynesville or Ft. Myers, I could see you more often but you’re not. I’ve asked you for information about your assets so I can help you preserve them, not for me but for you, and at the same time try to find a program of assistance, but you have never been willing to tell me anything. I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but I still think mom would be most happy in Florida among friends and in a warm climate, but at her expense you have refused to consider it even after I said I’d help pay the rent at the Presbyterian Apartments. You say you won’t go back there, that medicine costs too much and so on, but I think one reason for mom’s lassitude is the absence around her of people she knows. Moving to another area of the country, with which none of us is familiar, would not improve her situation. Nor can I imagine that either of you would be happy in the New York area. We’re not going to be here forever, and one of the places we have in mind is Florida. Meanwhile, I have offered what assistance I can afford to hire the help you need in Chapala, but you always find some reason that won’t work.
He answered,
I do not feel I am to blame for all the dissension you accuse me of. Mamacita and I are in complete agreement that we would rather live closer to you; we are also in agreement that there is nowhere that we would be better off than we are here. We can live on our income here, and we have a good climate. Living in the U.S. we would have Medicare, of course. But Medicare does not mean anything; unless you also have supplemental insurance the doctors won’t even look at you. With our income we cannot begin to buy supplemental insurance. For 1/3 the cost of supplemental insurance in the U.S., we can pay into the Mexican social security health system and have complete coverage: doctors, hospitals, ambulance and medicines. I do not know where you get the idea that I am forcing your mother to live here against her will. Nothing could be further from the truth. We both agree that there is nowhere in the U.S. where we could live as well as we do here.
It was difficult to argue with him about the U.S. health care system, which demanded either money or impoverishment. Dad, as usual, had the solution. “The answer, of course, is that you buy a house down here. You would then have a place where you could really get away from it all, with no interruptions, built-in house sitters who pay rent, no heating or cooling problems. You can get a good place here for $50,000 or less.”
I read this and felt the burden of his expectations. A house in Mexico wasn’t in my plans, or in my budget. I had seen sacrifices made on my behalf and I was grateful, but my gratitude wasn’t all-consuming. I wanted to do what I could for my parents, what they would let me do, but I, not they, would have to calculate the cost. I was in the grip of the “sad, strange irony” E. M. Forster describes in Where Angels Fear to Tread as Gino lifts his child by Lilia and kisses him. It is the tie that binds parents to children but not children to parents: “If it did, we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.” Get away from it all? My second book was now well along, and I had just signed a contract with a major magazine. Barbara and I continued to be part-time parents to the Hispanic boy, now ten; it was exciting, fun, and gratifying, a way of coping with the panorama of need New York presents at every turn. More, there was a sense of possibility with him, a simulation of the parental tie. The last thing I wanted was to get away from it all. And if I had, it would not have been to Chapala, with its dwindling lake and swarms of tourists.
That summer, a new owner took over the garden. Both my parents had extensive dental work, Mom hoping to alleviate the pain in her face; their income failed to cover the expense, and I began sending monthly checks. Toward the end of the year, they talked of moving to Brownsville, Texas. “We could walk across the International Bridge to Matamoros for the Mexican social security for our medicine,” Mom wrote. “I know it gets terribly hot and I’m not sure the air conditioning would be good for my facial neuralgia. Anyway, we can discuss it at length when we see you.”
A story took me to the Pacific coast of Mexico that December, and I stopped to see them on the way. They no longer trusted themselves to drive to Guadalajara, and one of their neighbors met me at the airport. “Your mother’s just not the same Clare we remember,” the man said as we swayed along the road to Chapala in his old green Chrysler. He told me how they’d met. He and his wife, snowbirds from Minnesota, had been wandering the streets of Chapala looking for a place to stay. Mom had seen them from the window of the restaurant where she and Dad were eating, decided they looked lost, and waved them inside. “They were the first people we met here,” the man said. “They made us feel at home, and we’ve been friends ever since.”
Mom was nodding in the living room when I arrived. Dad was bending over a crossword puzzle at the dining room table. They looked up together, briefly frozen. Then they rose and we converged in hugs and greetings.
I stayed only a few days. I felt as if I was visiting an old house where someone has stayed too long, past the covering of furniture and gathering of dust. We went to La Viuda for breakfast the first morning. They no longer had to order; the waiter knew what they wanted and brought it. We were walking back through the garden when one of their neighbors emerged to walk her tiny dog. Once they’d been friendly, but now Dad turned on her. “If that goddamned dog comes near me, I’ll kick it over the roof,” he threatened, his face dark. Mom pulled at him, and he turned and with his rolling walk disappeared into the house. Mom spent the afternoon in her patch of sunlight, holding her heating pad against her face. When the light was gone, she opened her eyes and saw me watching her. “I’ll tell you, Nick,” she said, “old age is not for sissies.”
We all were sitting at the table the next morning when the new owner lumbered across the garden to my parents’ door. “Here comes El Gordo [Fatty],” Dad said. The man knocked and entered without waiting, came across the porch and into the living room. He was a big man, size 46 at least, all wrong, too big and too soft and too pink among the leathery brown Mexicans, too full of bustle and insistence to wait until mañana. He had come to raise the rent.
Apology radiated from his unlined face. He was making improvements; he gestured to the stacks of plastic pipe that lay alongside freshly dug trenches, which would improve drainage in the garden. He had to cover expenses. Running a machine shop in Chicago had been nothing like this.
We listened. The man left. Dad looked trapped and embarrassed. I felt a rush of sympathy for him, even as I saw the opportunity to bring them home. All he wanted was to meet his basic needs, health among them, and to have some money in his pocket. The ingredients of dignity were all he asked.
Dad looked out at the garden and his beloved birdbath. He looked back at me and frowned and shook his head. “I don’t like it, Nick,” he said. “But it looks like we don’t have any choice. We’ll go back and apply at the Presbyterian Apartments.”
“When will you go?” I asked. “I’ll meet you there.”
“I don’t know,” he blustered. “We can’t leave right away.”
I suspected him of foot-dragging, but I had forgotten that Mom couldn’t easily leave Mexico without the car. Regulations were designed to prevent North American tourists from undermining the Mexican economy by selling their cars to Mexicans. She would have to put it under bond at the airport, which they didn’t want to do, or apply for special permission papers. That’s what they chose to do, and settled down to wait.
I left to meet Barbara in Mexico City. Before we went on to the coast, I called them. It was obvious that Mom didn’t remember that I’d been there.