“Okay, kids.”
Terry started the car. We began the drive. I couldn’t resist. Addressing the back of my mother’s head, I said, “Mom, do you remember what Granddaddy told us about his will? Right before he died?”
“What are you asking me? I just got out of the hospital! I’m sick, Don! I’m sick! Can’t you let me have some peace?”
“Don! Stop!” This from my sister.
I leaned back in my seat. I’d made our mother cry. We rode home to the sounds of her sobbing and coughing. Later, at the house, she got in her bed and announced that she wanted Terry to keep her company for the night. I had to go to the hotel.
The next day and the day after that, I manned the hotel bar phone. No one I spoke with had heard of another will. I opened the yellow pages and read the names of Asheville attorneys. I was determined to catch my mother in what I was certain was a deliberate deceit. How could she? How dare she? I told myself that I wanted to get to the bottom of the matter. I was curious. That was all. Had there been another will? Where was it? Had my grandfather mentioned another lawyer?
Hurricane Floyd had by this time changed course and spun away from the Florida coast. The danger to my father and his wife had passed. At least there was that. But what about the toxic spill beneath my mother’s house? What about the Environmental Protection Agency? What about radiation therapy? Would my mother accept radiation? Would she consider a nursing home? Which nursing home?
In the afternoons, I cleared my papers from the bar and walked down the hill to the house. Had you been a resident of one of the homes in that part of town — one of the stone bungalows whose porches, in my memory of them, were painted durable green or brown shades that echoed the colors of the forested mountains in the near distance; or one of the bigger houses whose more spacious porches were decorated with comfortable chairs positioned to give a view of the lawn — and had you been sitting out front or standing at a window, you might have seen a man stalking past, wearing lace-up moccasins without socks, khaki shorts held up by a narrow belt, and a white dress shirt, tucked in. He probably would have had his hands shoved into his pockets, and his head might have been lowered, eyes glaring at the road ahead. Would you have imagined that this anxious man was plotting to bring down shame and maybe even the law on his own mother, who, at that moment, was lying on her back in huge discomfort, possibly imagining dying, or imagining smoking and drinking, or trying, with help from her pills, to lose consciousness and sleep for an hour or two, while in the kitchen her daughter made a few last phone calls of her own, penciled check marks beside things-to-do notes on a yellow pad, and boiled water for tea?
“You look like your father,” my mother said to me one afternoon when I came in the house. She was correct. The shorts-and-shirt outfit I was wearing was pretty much a copy of his summer uniform.
It had been a long time since my father had left my mother for good, and for years I’d listened to her criticisms of him. Yet I recall that once, when she was just beginning her new life in North Carolina (before death began waiting, as it were, around the corner), I asked her to tell me about the time when they’d first separated, and she surprised me. I know that her discovery of his love affair, early in their marriage, must certainly have wrecked some part of her confidence in herself as a sexually compelling woman, a confidence that she never, I think, regained, and that her drinking, by incrementally destroying her body and undermining her feelings of well-being and clarity of mind, helped to obliterate further.
And yet in spite of what I know, or think I know, today, it is also true that my memories of my parents’ early bad times are obscure to me. I see, for instance, an edge of olive-green carpet on a wood floor, and blue-spined paperback books, old Pelican editions, lining a low shelf. I hear a Miles Davis record, Porgy and Bess, playing in the background. The place is Gainesville, and I am six, and, looking up, I see the back door of our house. The kitchen is empty; curtains fall across black windowpanes. It is night, the shouting has stopped, and the door is open: someone has left.
Thirty-five years later, I asked my mother to fill in a few gaps. In calling forth her memories of her life with him, or of her life alone with two small children, I risked her anger at me — at me—as if I were my father, and she were delivering the last word on our marriage.
Instead, she told me about the music and art he’d introduced her to, and about the poetry they’d read, and about the wild parties they’d thrown for their friends at the University of Florida, Butler and Charlie and Conrad and Maud and others whose faces still appear from time to time in my thoughts. As my mother spoke about her young marriage, the muscles around her mouth loosened, and her eyes grew soft. Her gaze, which rested directly on me, seemed to become clear — her memories felt good to her — and, exhaling smoke from her cigarette, she smiled.
Three years later, after she’d told me that I looked like my father, I stood in her Black Mountain living room, her sick bay, and, peering down at my feet and bare legs, at my shirt coming untucked from my shorts, said, “I guess you’re right, Mom. I do look like Dad.”
“That’s all right, Don,” I remember her saying. And I answered, “I hope so, because there’s not a lot I can do about it.”
But what about the will? Looking back it can seem to me that the existence or nonexistence of my grandfather’s will is important less as a substantive question in its own right, more as a quandary, unanswerable, mysterious. In remaining mysterious, the will became — and becomes — a source of power, the power, in this case, to enact betrayal and deprivation. My mother had betrayed the memory of her father. Was she now, in her abandonment of her children, giving us permission to betray her? Was she inviting us, one last time, to fight and be punished? Who would disappoint whom, and who could suffer with the most grace? And who, in the war between a mother and her children, a war of shame, could ever set things right?
A few days before my sister and I left Black Mountain, I sat on a stool at the empty hotel bar, and, as I’d done before, opened the yellow pages to Attorneys. This time I saw, as if it had been listed only that afternoon, a name that struck me. Maybe my grandfather had mentioned it once. I picked up the phone and dialed the number, and a receptionist answered and connected me to the lawyer, who, when asked if he’d known my grandfather, Don Self, acknowledged that he had. Had they worked together? Yes, he told me, they’d worked together. In order to preserve client confidentiality he could not speak about the particulars of their business. However, in an approximate way, the lawyer ratified my suspicions: My grandfather had wanted a trust for his daughter and grandchildren to be provided through his will. But then he’d died.
What to do? It was not a matter that could be safely discussed with my mother. I remember watching her sit up in bed. First, she had to reach out with a hand and clear the plastic air hose from the mattress, so as not to crush it beneath her. Next, working from an inclined, sideways position, she lowered her legs off the bed — leverage — and, using her full strength, shoved herself upright. She hunched forward and supported herself with weak arms, her hands placed beside her knees on the edge of the bed’s high mattress, her feet, blue from her poor circulation, hanging down like a child’s. She was still coughing, of course. I remember that she would look around the room with a fogged, faintly wary expression on her face, as if she did not quite understand where she was, or whether the locals were friendly. Merlin, her black cat, whom she believed to be a direct reincarnation of the Arthurian necromancer, would sometimes be curled beside her, and she might speak to him in the cooing voice she used when conversing with cats, even those she didn’t know. I remember that the house smelled like ash, though my mother had stopped smoking. Everything — rugs, curtains, bedspreads, tasseled chair cushions, Merlin — remained smoke-permeated. It drove my sister crazy. I remember holding Terry in my arms when, one afternoon, standing outside in the scratchy, untended yard behind the house, she broke down because our mother had become argumentative over the nurses
who’d come that day for interviews. Terry and I piled in the car and escaped west toward Asheville, then up the Blue Ridge Parkway in the direction of Mount Mitchell, which I’d climbed on my bicycle when I was in my twenties. Now, crossing from slope to slope, rounding the parkway’s elegantly graded bends in the road, I could occasionally see, looking from the car’s rolled-down windows, tiny squares and rectangles in silver and white and black and red — barn and farmhouse roofs dotting the valleys below. As we ascended, the air temperature dropped, and we passed through clouds that had settled in the mountaintop hollows. I leaned back in the passenger seat, watching for hawks in the sky, and my sister told me about her family’s boat trips on Puget Sound, about her children’s schools, and about her painting — still lifes and landscapes, mainly. Listening to her talk about her life, I was reminded of car rides across the mountains with my grandfather.
I do not, however, remember what day it was — the end of Terry’s and my stay in North Carolina was close — or the hour (a memory of sunlight falling through my mother’s living-room windowpanes, illuminating dust in the air and a section of far wall, makes a picture of afternoon becoming evening), when, after opening her eyes and finding me near, my mom whispered:
“Don, I know we need to talk about things.”
That is what I remember her saying. Maybe she said something slightly different. But it was clear what she was referring to. Everything was clear. I nodded my head.
She called, “Merlin, come here, Merlin.”
“Merlin!” I said.
The cat leapt from the floor to the bed. “There you are. How’s my Merlin?” said my mother.
I scratched his back, and he lowered his chin and raised his tail, and his fur shedded away in tufts.
The day before Terry and I left North Carolina, we drove into Asheville and shopped for fresh fruit and vegetables. The grocery store had decent fish, and I bought sole. My sister and I had finally set in place the health-care and legal provisions required for our mother’s care. We’d scored a victory of sorts. Our mother had suggested a willingness to consider radiation. It looked as if the oil spilled beneath her house would be cleaned up after all. Terry and I loaded the car with supplies, and, on our way home to Black Mountain, we listened to a radio show playing field recordings of Appalachian music — old, plaintive ballads describing betrayal, repentance, redemption, loss in love, alcoholism, and conversations with the devil. These days, it is not merely the subject matter, familiar and disturbing, that makes this music of Tennessee and the Carolinas difficult for me to bear. Rather, it is something heard in the singing, that discernibly nasal, heavily accented, prayerful quality of voice — the voice of the region in which my mother and her family had been born — that can cause me to reach out and shut the music off. That day with my sister, I listened with something like joy. I cannot speak for Terry, but I believe that she, too, heard, rising up from the hissing, popping shellac, the cadences and the rhythms and the slightly downward-falling inflections that occur, in milder form, in our own voices.
We got back to the house and unloaded the groceries into the kitchen. It was a gorgeous, bright day on its way to ending. As on previous days, I was wearing my version of my father’s clothes. Our mother was dressed and moving about. I offered to cook. Dinner was simple. There was the fish, simmered in a pan on top of the stove. There was asparagus. Rice. A salad. Glasses filled with iced tea. While I made dinner, my mother and my sister sat at the old, dinged-up wooden table that had been, during the years when Terry and I were growing up, our family’s dining-room table. This table had been bought by my father and the woman for whom, back when Terry and I were five and six years old, he had left my mother. Now it was here.
And in my mother’s living room, stored in a plastic urn inside a cardboard box, our grandmother’s ashes rested on a shelf.
What I am trying to say is that, in a way, we were pretty much all present, in one form or another, in my mother’s house that night — all of us except our mother’s father.
But then he got invited, too. My mother invited him. I remember this with clarity, because it was astonishing to hear, astonishing, as well, to wonder, as I have over the years since, about the truth regarding her father’s will, though I realize that I will probably never know the truth, and must only imagine my mother in the days immediately following her own mother’s death, my mother sick and with the incipient awareness, surely, of the severity of her illness. I see her collecting my grandmother’s ashes from the undertaker, bringing the ashes home and placing them on the shelf, maybe only then pulling the old paperwork from a box or a file, and making her way up the hill to the lawyer’s office in town. I wonder, imagining such scenes, what had led me so deliberately to pursue, in my thoughts and in my actions, the idea of my mother as a thief, when, just as likely, she was no thief, merely a woman who was sick and alone and scared and grieving, hoping for a better life, one that was not ever going to come, not in this world.
That evening at the dinner table, my mother said, “I remember. I remember. There was another lawyer. Granddaddy said that there was a lawyer in Asheville.”
I recall that the sun was setting. The light outside the partly curtained window above the kitchen sink, the window facing west, with a view of trees, had been growing dark. I turned and looked at my mother. Maybe I was holding a spatula or the pan of cooking fish.
She went on, “What was his name? What was it?” Then she pronounced the name. It was the name of the man with whom I’d spoken a day or two before, whose phone number I’d got out of the phone book, the man my grandfather had contacted about a trust.
She said, “Kids, I’m going to make things right. I’m going to make things right.”
At that point dinner was ready. I plated up, and we gathered around the table, just the three of us — or the six of us, or however many of us were, in body or in spirit, present in that room — and, as I recall, someone said about the fish, “This is good,” and I said a silent prayer that my mother would get well and not die, not ever die, and the next day my sister and I got in the rental car and fastened our seat belts and headed up the hill toward the highway. We drove east across the mountains. Near Lake Lure, we stopped at a roadside stand, where I bought sourwood honey in a mason jar that I tossed into my suitcase. We continued out of the mountains, up and down the foothills, and through rolling farmland toward Charlotte. At the airport, Terry and I dropped off the car and boarded a courtesy bus that took us to the terminal. I checked my suitcase, and, when the time came, she and I walked off down the long concourses leading to our different gates. My sister went one way and I went another.
That night when I got to my apartment I discovered that the honey jar had been smashed to pieces during the flight. Honey and shattered glass were everywhere.
PART VI
At the time when I began trying to draw my father into literary conversations, we were living in a Miami tract development that featured homes whose exteriors evoked a variety of architectural schools. Most were Modernist; several looked like Modernist churches. Ours had a pale green, Bauhaus-style façade, and was settled into an unpruned hammock of overhanging trees and dense, humid-looking flora that appeared as if it might one day advance across the narrow yard and engulf the house. It didn’t matter that the driveway ended in a busy road, or that neighbors were close. A jungle enclosed us. You couldn’t see in, and you couldn’t see out.
The house itself was a single-story rectangle with bedrooms taking up the eastern half, a thin strip of kitchen in the middle, and, looking toward the end opposite the bedrooms, a dining area and a small sunken living room. Sliding glass doors opened from the dining and living rooms onto a screened-in patio and pool out back. My sister and I spent a lot of time splashing in the water, then running into the air-conditioned house for something cold to drink. It was my job, once a week or so, to skim debris off the pool’s surface, vacuum the bottom, and, using a little plastic test kit, check the chlorine. Caring fo
r the pool was dispiriting. The patio, like the property’s front and sides, was surrounded by hardwoods and tall pines, whose branches, arcing overhead, shed decomposing leaves, brown needles, and powdering bark that filtered through the screen and made a scum on the water. The trees blocked much of the day’s light, leaving the pool shaded during the long subtropical afternoons. These factors may have contributed to the algal buildup around the tiles marking the waterline. Algae showed on the bottom, too, and in faintly discoloring streaks that curled down the deep end’s walls. I periodically went at the algae with brushes and chemicals picked up at the pool-supply store by my father on his way home from teaching. We moved into that house in 1972. During the year of our residency there, the algae crept out of the pool and claimed sections of patio, darkly filling the veins and cracks that gave texture to the concrete. I remember dragging aside porch chairs and our glass-topped table, pouring acid over the contaminated spots, then hosing everything down. Sometimes on weekend mornings I got up early and swam a mile’s worth of laps — one of many things I did in solitude — while my parents and sister slept. On afternoons after school, I could often be found lying facedown in the water, staring through a face mask at the light show of refracting shadows cast across the surface by passing clouds and windblown treetops. In anticipation of one day getting scuba certification, I’d begun collecting gear, a piece at a time. I had a tank and a secondhand regulator, and every now and then I’d buckle these on, fasten a weight belt around my waist, plunge into the pool, and sink to the bottom, where, six feet under, I’d sit, breathing.
Out on dry land, I was coming into consciousness of the books on display on my father’s shelves in the living room. In imitation of him, I’d begun collecting and exhibiting my own paperback collection, works by Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, Arthur Conan Doyle, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe, along with leftovers from earlier eras of childhood, books about boys’ adventures in crime solving, soldiers’ daring escapades during wartime, and heroic athletes’ triumphs on the playing field. Surely my father had his own era’s versions of books like these lying around his bedroom, back in the days in Sarasota, when he’d first encountered my mother.
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