My sister is stunned. “Do you know who I am, Mom?”
“Yes,” she said. “You’re my daughter. I have three children.”
“But Mom, that man is our father.”
To which my mother replied, not hiding her disdain, “No. How could I have had children with that man?”
* * *
Joseph, my father, is a good man. He carries the privilege of goodness, if one can say that, in the sense that as a white man, although unassuming, he was often given the benefit of the doubt in his daily dealings with the outside world. Throughout most of my life, I observed how he was always presumed intelligent (which he is) and in charge (which was daily contradicted by my mother’s stern rule at home). He was a man of few prejudices, a fact that I appreciated as I grew in awareness of social injustice and of my own sexual proclivities. Unlike my mother, he never had to discriminate, because he had never suffered overt discrimination. Yes, there was the horror of war, which he speaks of with a boy’s tentative bravery and nostalgia. Something was lost there, or perhaps it was lost somewhere else; for in the world of confrontation, my father is a man riddled by fear.
His mother’s life was one of serial “husbands,” and Joseph’s own childhood, one of serial “uncles”; familial language that taught him little about family. At the age of six, his father—a British Canadian—signed papers giving Joseph up for adoption to Hallie’s third husband, an actor by the stage name of Dale_____.
This was the early-1930s period of “family” when Joseph, along with his little sister, Barbara, traveled up and down the southern coast of California, trailing behind their newly constituted parents. Dale and Hallie performed in tent shows pitched upon sandy and boardwalk beachfronts, the sound of breaking waves muffled behind a showman’s megaphone announcements. A few years later, the actor would leave his “family” with nothing but his invented last name, which Joseph would carry for the rest of his life.
For most of my father’s school years, through the late 1930s, Hallie raised her two children as a single mother, working with the WPA Federal Theater Project in San Francisco, my father’s birthplace. While in high school, Joseph lied about his age and enlisted in the service. Soon after, World War II broke out and the United States Army would become “family,” and for the first time in his life, Joseph had to clean and cook (KP duty) for himself and others. Then one day “family” disappeared in a sinking ship off the coast of the Philippines. Joseph was bunkered on the island within earshot of the bombing. Death so near, he imagined their cries as his own.
After six years of service, he returned home to the States to find “family” missing in action; his mother had remarried (this time to a “homosexual”) and was soon divorced again, and Joseph could not resume the boyhood he had left in the scattered beach towns of Southern California. He was a young man now, free and white, with little more than the telegrapher skills he had learned in the service and a boy’s bruised heart.
Joseph would endure a few lonely desert outpost jobs until he landed a spot working the graveyard shift at freight yards in Los Angeles. One Friday night, in the dancehall hours just before his midnight shift, Joseph buttoned up his out-of-style double-breasted suit and took a drive over to the Trianon Ballroom in South Gate. There, Joseph spotted “family” in the body of a five-foot-one, one-hundred-and-five-pound, drop-dead-gorgeous MexicanAmerican woman. She was older, he learned, and had been around the block of heartbreak more than a few times. She could certainly teach this young man a few things about “family,” or so thought Joseph’s mother. So, with Hallie’s approval, and although “family” sent him away more than once, Joseph would not be dissuaded.
And with the ink still wet from Vera’s divorce, Joseph married “family” and had children to make more “family” and when “family” almost died at forty-five when that one-hundred-and-five-pound “family” started shrinking away to eighty-five pounds in a Southern California hospital, well, Joseph saw quickly he was no “family” at all without Vera. No “family” at all for their three would-be orphaned children. And he drank hard for the first time in his life and got the car crashed and let the roaches wrestle with the Wheaties. And good thing for him and for those three would-be orphaned children that “family” gained weight and got well again. And “family” came home and warned, “I don’t need you. You’ll be alone,” if he didn’t put that bottle down. So he put that bottle down finally, but couldn’t figure out how to lift up “family” the way he knew she wanted.
Then suddenly, it is nearly fifty years later and “family” is back down to less than those eighty-five pounds and has forgotten how to cook and clean and keep “family” and can’t even recognize the stranger across from her cup of coffee. So he-who-is-not-her-husband has to do a lot of growing up real fast and takes “family” to the restaurant two times a day, rolling in and out of the car on two useless hipbones, and even learns how to boil an egg and make oatmeal for her each morning. And he-who-is-not-her-husband does a little grocery shopping every few days right out of the drive-through dairy. He takes his own clothes to the laundry service and even picks up “family’s” meds. These he gives to “family” two and three times a day, even when she refuses them, stubbornly turning her back to the expectant glass of water and the small pastel-colored hill of tablets. He very patiently waits, takes a breath, and pushes the pills toward her across the white broken-tiled kitchen bar, returning the small glass of water to the place in front of her. All the while, “family” berates him, batters him with her poison tongue. “I don’t need you,” she lies. And he remembers hearing the same refrain from her a half century before: Men can come and go. All you’ve really got are your children.
* * *
Eventually I would come to understand that the early abandonments my father suffered had made him very frightened in old age. If there is no family really, his actions told me, on whom can I rely? Nearly nine years younger than my mother, he was afraid the money would run out before he did. He made small compromises in my mother’s care because care is expensive and time-consuming. He refused to recognize the days she went without bathing, the soiled clothes she wore day after day, the house smelling of his own denied incontinence because to acknowledge this would mean a change of life, a life they had constructed out of the fragile agreement of years of simply coping by looking away from each other and the disabling fact of old age.
* * *
My father had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. How silver it was I didn’t learn until his ninetieth birthday, when a Powerpoint display of his early life, gathered from recently uncovered family photographs, revealed a pre-Depression world of the latest-model automobiles and tastefully interiored homes.
In a studio portrait, the four-year-old sailor-suited Joseph Slatter plays poignantly with a toy sailboat. His dark-haired mother, Hallie, draped in the feathered fashion of the day, presses her cheek up against the lily head of her firstborn. Two years later, his father, the craftily entrepreneurial Burt Slatter, would float away from his family in an ocean of alcohol, not to return for decades. It was 1929, after all.
“This is an American story,” Celia tells me. The boom and bust of wealth: the belonging and then the boot. But perhaps it is also an American story when a silver-spooned white boy ends up broke in Elvira’s MexicanAmerica. Not versed in Spanish, he would ironically survive all the Spanish-speakers of my mother’s generation and emerge the repository of their stories, recalling dates and details long forgotten by Elvira and her siblings in the last years of their lives together.
In the years ahead, my father’s skin would grow thinner and more translucent and he would easily return, culturally, to the Anglo man he had always been. His marriage would become a memory propped up by the elegant aging face of Vera emblazoned upon a throw pillow. It would sit upon my father’s assisted-living bed, placed there daily by the hand of a Spanish-speaking attendant.
HALLOWEEN SHUFFLE 2003
“It’s the dementia ta
lking,” my father insisted.
True to her conviction, my mother moved out of the stranger-husband’s bed and into the guest bed in the back of their small bungalow home.
And, of course, it was. But none of us could predict how long this delusion might last or if the next day Vera would wake up and suddenly recognize our father as her life companion. That day, she did not, and for many, many days and weeks to follow. This man was never her husband, she announced to everyone indignantly—her daughters, her last surviving sister, her doctor. She was done with the pretense.
Perhaps dementia really was the gift of old age, for JoAnn and I could not help but respond to the deeper messages relayed in Elvira’s “locura.” She was our mother, after all, flesh of our flesh, our soon-to-be ancestor, our tribal leader and once fierce matriarch, reduced to about six dozen pounds of bone-hard fury. As her Mexican female offspring, we saw in her the map of choices that had been drawn out for us, too. She was our mirror that day, the carnival fun-house kind—distorted and exaggerated, and fundamentally marvelous. She offered hope for change: that the human spirit really wants truth; that the human spirit really wants freedom; that the human spirit speaks even through a thick wall of dementia to remember the heart’s history more profoundly than any chronology of facts about who married whom and who begot what children.
How my sister and I wanted to fight for our mother’s right to this final freedom. Delusional or not, our freedom was also at stake here, our desperate need to believe that each of us has the capacity to change our lives, to choose a life not dictated by fear or, worse, habit. If you can’t free yourself when you’re looking at ninety, when can you?
Maybe our response to our mother’s change of heart was a naïve refusal to accept the fundamental reality of her illness. We felt, regardless of her doctors’ diagnoses, that her feelings deserved to be taken seriously. And then one morning you wake up to a phone call in which your mother announces that she no longer recognizes her husband of fifty-plus years. How could I have had children with that man! And you don’t know if it is a moment of pure illumination, springing from the mind that resides wholly in the heart of a deeper knowing, or if the accumulated plaque in your mother’s brain just closed off that synapse connected to the memory of her marriage.
We began to investigate alternative living arrangements that would allow our parents access to each other but would also provide my mother the space from my father that she demanded. Since she could no longer take care of herself independently, we arranged for the two to live in separate quarters at the same assisted-living facility. He would be close by and she would be taken care of, the burden of which was debilitating to my father, to say nothing of how emotionally exhausted he had become from my mother’s abuse. If getting away from “that man” was the pretext for allowing my mother a more tranquil heart, three healthy meals a day, and a monitored med intake (while supporting our father’s right to remain her husband), we were going to move on it. My father agreed, though he was unsure about the move in general and, specifically, any move away from my mother.
My sister and I were not completely confident about this strategy. It was not the scenario we had anticipated in our younger years when it appeared our resilient mother would survive our father. The fact that our mother would become mentally disabled while our father remained of sound mind forced JoAnn and me to quickly rewrite what would become the last pages of our mother’s life.
It had been several weeks since my mother had declared her independence from my father and moved to the back bedroom. My sister had managed to get a woman, una mexicana, to spend several hours, three or so days a week, assisting my mother around the house. This woman was an irritation to my mother, that much was clear, but she was permitted entrance into the inner sanctum of Elvira’s home under the pretext that it was for my father, who had finally agreed to hip surgery.
The attendant had been with my parents no more than a week when I received a call from my father. “She’s saying words to me that I never before heard come out of her mouth. S-h-i-t,” he spells it. “And “h-o-r-e,” he spells it wrongly, and I remember what a polite man my father is. The attendant tells him that she’s seen worse, both husband and wife terribly cruel to each other. “You are kind to her,” she tells my father. My mom gets on the phone, irate. She accuses my father of having an affair with the home attendant, which I knew was not so. Her language cruder than I ever remember, I can barely stand her vulgarity, even under these circumstances.
I plead with her, “Mom, you never used to talk to me this way.” She doesn’t give a damn, she says, and I know it is her illness, but there is something else at work here. I hold fast to my belief that this is just another way of my mother saying she wants out. I cannot ignore the fact, nor can I stay on the phone and endure the obscenities rushing from her mouth. I find an excuse to cut the connection against her rising fury.
Twenty minutes later when I call back, my father picks up. He reminds me once again of the dates for his hip surgery. Since the day he agreed to the operation, his health has been the singular subject on his mind. “Put Mom on the phone,” I say. As he hands it to her, I hear her, suddenly meek, asking her husband, “Do you want me to be there in the hospital with you?” Vera is now holding on to the last semblance of what it means to be a wife. Does he still need her? she is asking.
“Of course,” he answers.
I promise to personally pick her up and stay with her and take her to and from the hospital as much as she wants. But I can’t shake the profanities from a half hour before. I can no longer count on the mother I know being on the other end of the telephone line when I pick up the receiver.
I couldn’t save her, I was quickly beginning to realize. And maybe there was relief in this, a small, pitiful, selfish relief that I did not have to drop my life to pick up hers. Yet there were times when I knew that the only thing that would satisfy my own anxious heart was to gather her up and bring her home to me. It remained my final exit plan for my mom, if lodged nowhere but in the back of my own forgetful mind. I had always imagined that my loyalty to my mother was such that I would do anything to make her life bearable in her old age. But nothing would make it bearable, I was beginning to realize—assisted living, living with me, anything involving living. Meanwhile, JoAnn and I continued to try to negotiate a settlement of place and heart for our mother.
We had already been stung by our first attempt, sixteen months earlier, to get our mother a daily attendant, and over the course of those sixteen months we had learned the hard way the difference between Elvira’s theoretical agreement to something and its practical implications. In this case, we knew our mother’s agreement to consider assisted living, which had surfaced in several conversations with her, fell squarely into the category of theory.
After JoAnn and I visited a number of facilities within a few miles’ radius of my sister’s new home in Orange County, and landed on one that was to my father’s liking, my sister and I moved in for the attack. This was no chess game, but a battle of courage in the face of my mother’s desperate fear. We had to convince her that we were on her side when everything about our actions told her we were the enemy.
* * *
On that Halloween morning, my mother had awakened remembering neither our discussion about assisted living nor her recent “divorce” from my father. As such, it was relatively easy to get her and my father up and out of the house to meet my sister at Prestige. We noticed that many of the newest facilities carried names marketed to intentionally contradict the reality of elders’ increasing dependence as they aged. “Sunrise” perversely offered elders a place to live in the quickening sunset of their years.
But that day I am grateful for the lie in the euphemism (which I guess is the point), as I am for the resort-hotel style of the building, with its fireplaced lobby and elegant dining room of pastel tablecloths and upholstered chairs. My mom likes the joint, which briefly relieves us, her traitor-daughters, who usher her in fo
r a complimentary breakfast. She innocently eats her basted eggs and perfectly crisped bacon as her family moves in for the kill.
My mother is in rare form, charming the staff with niceties; but we know she isn’t getting what’s going on. As far as she can see, we are … window-shopping. “This is very nice,” she says. “Someday when I’m older…” and I don’t even bother to hear the rest. This day was less than one week before her eighty-ninth birthday. For an instant, my sister and I catch each other’s glance. Our eyes shift back to our plates as we each strategize the next move. Suddenly, the goodwill emissary salvadoreña server does the job for us. “It’s a great place to live,” she says. “You will be very happy here.”
That was it. The meal was over. Bolting upright in her chair, Elvira tosses down her fork. She can barely stay in her seat, she is so incensed, scooping the napkin up into a ball in her lap, her eyes darting around the room for an exit.
“Mom, you can’t take care of yourself anymore,” I say. The server, realizing what she has done, slinks away.
“Fine, throw me in the trash can, if that’s all I’m good for.” She was right. No amount of finery was going to make this place anything other than a trash can to my mom. Plain and simple, it was not her home.
“I don’t care what you damn kids do to me,” she continues, her anger spilling out into the lobby. She spies my dad. “And look at him. You think he loves me?”
“I do, honey…” he mutters weakly.
“I don’t want your lies no more. I’m getting out of here!”
But this time we will not relent; it took too much effort to get her here. We will not let her leave without at least speaking with the director. “He just has some questions for you,” I plead. “You can go home after that, Mom.”
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