“You okay, Charlie?” I asked quietly.
He lifted up his head. His face was tomato red, his eyes awash in tears. Suddenly he lurched toward me, his head collapsing against my shoulder, his arms clutching me as if I was a life preserver in high seas. His sobbing was now fierce, uninhibited. For a moment I stood there, arms at my side, not knowing what to do. But his grief was so profound, so total, so loud that, eventually, I simply had to put my arms around him.
It took him a good minute before his cries subsided. I stared ahead into the distance, watching Ethan (having just returned from the toilet) being gently restrained by Matt from running toward me. I winked at my son, and he repaid me with one of those hundred-watt smiles that instantly compensates for all the exhausting, endless stress that is an essential component of parenthood. Then I looked to the left of Ethan, and saw that woman again. She was standing discreetly in an adjoining plot, watching me comfort Charlie. Before she turned away (again!), I momentarily saw the intensity of her gaze. An intensity which made me wonder: how the hell does she know us?
I turned back to look at Ethan. He pulled open his mouth with two fingers and stuck out his tongue—one of the repertoire of funny faces he pulls whenever he senses I am getting far too serious for his liking. I had to stifle a laugh. Then I glanced back to where the woman was standing. But she was no longer there—and was instead walking alone down the empty graveled path that led to the front gates of the cemetery.
Charlie gulped hard as he tried to control his sobbing. I decided it was time to end the embrace, so I gently disentangled myself from his grip.
“Are you okay now?” I asked.
He kept his head bowed.
“No,” he whispered, then added: “I should’ve, I should’ve . . .”
The crying started again. I should’ve. The most agonizing, self-punitive expression in the English language. And one we all utter constantly throughout this farce called life. But Charlie was right. He should’ve. Now there was nothing he could do about it.
“Come back to the city,” I said. “We’re having some drinks and food at Mom’s apartment. You remember where it is, don’t you?”
I immediately regretted that comment, as Charlie began to sob again.
“That was dumb,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
“Not as sorry as me,” he said between sobs. “Not as . . .”
He lost control again, his crying now ballistic. This time, I didn’t offer him solace. Instead, I turned away and saw that Meg was now hovering nearby, looking dispassionate, yet waiting to be of assistance. When I turned toward her, she nodded in the direction of Charlie and arched her eyebrows, as if to ask, “Want me to take over here?” You bet. She approached her nephew, and said, “Come on, Charlie-Boy,” linking her arm through his, “let’s you and I take a little walk.”
Matt now relaxed his grip on Ethan, who ran toward me. I crouched down to scoop him up in my arms.
“You feeling better?” I asked.
“The toilet was yucky,” he said.
I turned toward my mother’s grave. The minister was still standing by the coffin. Behind him were the cemetery’s groundskeepers. They were keeping a discreet distance from the proceedings, but I could still tell they were waiting for us to leave so they could lower her into subterranean Queens, bring out the earthmovers, plug the hole, then head off to lunch . . . or maybe the nearest bowling alley. Life really does go on—whether you’re here or not.
The minister gave me a small telling nod, the subtext of which was: it’s time to say goodbye. Okay, Rev., have it your way. Let’s all join hands and sing.
Now it’s time to say goodbye to all our company . . .
M-I-C . . . See you real soon . . .
K-E-Y . . . Why? Because we like you . . .
M-O-U-S-E . . .
For a nanosecond, I was back in the old family apartment on 84th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam. Six years old, home from first grade at Brearley, watching Annette, Frankie, and all the Mouseketeers on our crappy Zenith black-and-white set, with the round picture tube and rabbit-ears antenna, and the imitation mahogany cabinet, and my mom staggering toward me with two Welch’s grape jelly glasses in her hand: Strawberry Kool-Aid for me, a Canadian Club highball for her.
“How’s Mickey and his pals?” she asked, the words slurring.
“They’re my friends,” I said.
She sank down next to me on the couch.
“Are you my friend, Katie?”
I ignored the question. “Where’s Charlie?”
She suddenly looked hurt.
“Mr. Barclay’s,” she said, mentioning a dancing school to which adolescent prep school boys like Charlie were dispatched, once a week, screaming.
“Charlie hates dancing,” I said.
“You don’t know that,” Mom said, throwing back half of her drink.
“I heard him tell you,” I said. “I hate dancing school. I hate you.”
“He didn’t say he hated me.”
“He did,” I said, and turned my attention back to the Mouseketeers.
Mom threw back the rest of her drink.
“He didn’t say that.”
I think it’s a game.
“Oh yes he did.”
“You never heard him . . .”
I cut her off. “Why is my daddy in heaven?”
She went ashen. Though we’d been down this road before, I hadn’t asked about my dead father for nearly a year. But this afternoon, I had arrived home with an invitation to a Father/Daughter evening at my school.
“Why did he have to go to heaven?” I demanded.
“Darling, as I told you before, he didn’t want to go to heaven. But he got sick . . .”
“When can I meet him?”
Her face now betrayed despair.
“Katie . . . you are my friend, aren’t you?”
“You let me meet my daddy.”
I heard her stifle a sob. “I wish I could . . .”
“I want him to come to school with me . . .”
“Tell me, Katie, that you’re my friend.”
“You get my daddy back from heaven.”
Her voice was weak, tiny, diminished.
“I can’t, Katie. I . . .”
Then she began to cry. Pulling me close to her. Burying her head in my small shoulder. Scaring the hell out of me. And making me run out of the room, terrified.
It was the only time I ever saw her drunk. It was the only time she ever cried in front of me. It was the last time I asked her to get my father back from the celestial beyond.
“Are you my friend, Katie?”
I never answered her question. Because, truth be told, I never really knew the answer.
“Mommy!”
Ethan was squeezing my hand. “Mommy! I want to go home!”
I snapped back to Queens. And the sight of my mother’s coffin. I said, “Let’s first say goodbye to Grandma.”
I led Ethan forward, sensing that all eyes were on us. We approached the shiny teak coffin. Ethan knocked on it with his small fist.
“Hello, Grandma. Goodbye, Grandma.”
I bit hard on my lip. My eyes filled up. I glanced at my father’s grave. This is it. This is it. An orphan at last.
I felt a steadying hand on my shoulder. I turned around. It was Matt. I shrugged him off. And suddenly knew: it’s me and Ethan, and no one else.
The minister gave me another of his telling glances. All right, all right, I’ll move it along.
I put my hand on the coffin. It felt cold, like a refrigerator. I pulled my hand away. So much for grand final gestures. I bit my lip yet again, and forced myself to stay controlled. I reached for my son. I led him toward the waiting car.
Matt was waiting by the door. He spoke quietly.
“Katie, I just wanted to . . .”
“I don’t want to know.”
“All I was going to say . . .”
“Do you speak English?”
&nbs
p; “Would you please listen . . .”
I started grabbing the car door. “No, I will not listen to you . . .”
Ethan tugged my sleeve. “Daddy said he’d take me to the IMAX movie. Can I go, Mommy?”
It was then that I realized just how shipwrecked I was.
“We have a party . . . ,” I heard myself saying.
“Ethan will have a better time at the movies, don’t you think?” Matt said.
Yeah, he would. I put my face in my hands. And felt more tired than I had ever felt in my life.
“Please can I go, Mommy?”
I looked up at Matt. “What time will you have him home?”
“I was thinking he might like to spend the night with us.”
I could see that he instantly regretted the use of that last pronoun. Matt continued talking.
“I’ll get him to school in the morning. And he can stay the next couple of nights if you need . . .”
“Fine,” I said, cutting him off. Then I crouched down and hugged my son. And heard myself saying, “Are you my friend, Ethan?”
He looked at me shyly, then gave me a fast kiss on the cheek. I wanted to take that as an affirmative answer, but knew I’d be brooding about his lack of a definite response for the rest of the day . . . and night. And simultaneously wondering why the hell I’d asked that dumb question in the first place.
Matt was about to touch my arm, but then thought better of it.
“Take care,” he said, leading Ethan off.
Then I felt another hand on my shoulder. I brushed it off, as if it was a fly, saying to whoever was behind me, “I really can’t take any more sympathy.”
“Then don’t take it.”
I covered my face with my hand. “Sorry, Meg.”
“Say three Hail Marys, and get into the car.”
I did as ordered. Meg climbed in after me.
“Where’s Ethan?” she asked.
“Spending the rest of the day with his dad.”
“Good,” she said. “I can smoke.”
While reaching into her pocketbook for her Merits, she knocked on the glass partition with one hand. The driver hit a button and it slowly lowered.
“We’re outta here, fella,” Meg said, lighting up. She heaved a huge sigh of gratification as she inhaled.
“Must you?” I asked.
“Yeah, I must.”
“It’ll kill you.”
“I never knew that.”
The limo pulled out on to the main cemetery drive. Meg took my hand, locking her thin, varicose fingers with mine.
“You hanging in there, sweetheart?” she asked.
“I have been better, Meg.”
“A couple more hours, this entire fucking business’ll be over. And then . . .”
“I can fall apart.”
Meg shrugged. And held my hand tighter.
“Where’s Charlie?” I asked.
“Taking the subway back into town.”
“Why the hell is he doing that?”
“It’s his idea of penance.”
“Watching him break down like that, I actually felt sorry for him. If he’d just picked up the phone toward the end, he could have straightened out so much with Mom.”
“No,” Meg said. “He wouldn’t have straightened anything out.”
As the limo approached the gates, I caught sight of that woman again. She was walking steadily toward the cemetery entrance, moving with fluent ease for someone her age. Meg saw her as well.
“Do you know her?” I asked.
Her answer was a couldn’t-care-less shrug.
“She was at Mom’s grave,” I said. “And hung around during most of the prayers.”
Another shrug from Meg.
I said, “Probably some kook who gets her giggles loitering in cemeteries.”
She looked up as we drove by, then lowered her eyes quickly.
The limo pulled out into the main road, and turned left in the direction of Manhattan. I fell back into the seat, spent. For a moment there was silence. Then Meg poked me with her elbow.
“So,” she said, “where’s my twenty bucks?”
TWO
AFTER THE CEMETERY, fifteen of the twenty graveside mourners returned to my mother’s place. It was quite a squeeze—as Mom had spent the last twenty-six years of her life in a small one-bedroom apartment on 84th Street and West End Avenue (and even on those truly rare occasions when she entertained, I can’t remember more than four people in her home at any given time).
I had never liked the apartment. It was cramped. It was badly laid out. Its southwest position on the fourth floor meant that it overlooked a back alleyway, and was rarely in contact with the sun. The living room was eleven feet by eleven, there was a bedroom of equal size, there was a small en suite bathroom, there was a ten-by-eight kitchen with elderly appliances and scuffed linoleum. Everything about the apartment seemed old, tired, in desperate need of updating. Three years ago, I’d managed to convince Mom to get the place repainted—but, like so many old West Side apartments, this new coat of emulsion and gloss simply added another cheap veneer to plasterwork and moldings that were already an inch thick with decades-worth of bad paint. The carpets were getting threadbare. The furniture was in need of recovering. What few so-called luxury items she owned (a television, an air conditioner, an all-in-one stereo unit of indeterminate Korean origin) were all technologically backward. Over the past few years, whenever I had a bit of spare cash (which, it has to be said, wasn’t very often), I’d offer to update her TV or buy her a microwave. But she always refused.
“You have better things to be spending your money on,” she’d always say.
“You’re my mom,” I’d retort.
“Spend it on Ethan, spend it on yourself. I’m fine with what I’ve got.”
“That air conditioner is asthmatic. You’re going to boil in July.”
“I have an electric fan.”
“Mom, I’m just trying to help.”
“I know that, dear. But I am just fine.” She’d give the last two words such pointed, tetchy emphasis that I knew it was useless to pursue the issue. This topic of conversation was closed.
She was always denying herself everything. She hated the idea of turning into a burden. And—being a genteel, yet fiercely self-respecting WASP—she loathed the notion of being a suitable case for charity. Because, to her, it implied personal failure; a collapse of character.
I turned around from where I was standing in the living room, and caught sight of a cluster of framed family photos on an end table next to the sofa. I walked over and picked up a snapshot I knew all too well. It was of my father in his Army uniform. It was taken by my mother at the base in England where they met in 1945. It had been her one overseas adventure—the only time in her life that she ever left America. Having volunteered for the Red Cross after college, she’d ended up as a typist, working at an outpost of Allied Command HQ in suburban London. That’s where she encountered the dashing Jack Malone, cooling his Brooklyn heels after covering the Allied liberation of Germany for Stars and Stripes—the U.S. Army newspaper. They had a fling—of which Charlie was the by-product. And they suddenly found their destiny spliced together.
Charlie approached me. He looked down at the photograph I was holding.
“Do you want to bring this back with you?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I’ve got a copy at home,” he said. “It’s my favorite photo of Dad.”
“I think I’ll take it then. I don’t have too many pictures of him.”
We stood there for a moment, wondering what to say next. Charlie chewed nervously on his lower lip.
“You feeling better?” I asked.
“Fine, yeah,” he said, averting his eyes as usual. “You bearing up?”
“Me? Sure,” I said, trying to sound unfazed by having just buried our mom.
“Your son’s a great-looking kid. Was that your ex?”
“Yeah—that’s the charmer. You’ve n
ever met him before?”
Charlie shook his head.
“Oh yes, I forgot—you missed my wedding. And Matt was out of town during your last trip here. Nineteen ninety-four, wasn’t it?”
Charlie ignored that question, and instead posed another:
“He’s still something in television news, isn’t he?”
“He’s now something very big. Like his new wife.”
“Yeah, Mom did tell me about the divorce.”
“Really?” I said, sounding surprised. “When did she tell you? During your annual phone call in nineteen ninety-five?”
“We spoke a little more than that.”
“Sorry, you’re right. You also called her every Christmas. So, it was during one of your biannual phone calls that you discovered Matt had left me.”
“I was really sad to hear about that.”
“Hey, it’s ancient history now. I’m over it.”
Another awkward silence.
“The place doesn’t look very different,” he said, glancing around the apartment.
“Mom was never going to make it into the pages of House & Garden,” I said. “Mind you, even if she’d wanted to do up the apartment—which she didn’t—money was always rather tight. Thank God the place was rent-stabilized—otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to stay on.”
“What’s it now a month?”
“Eighteen hundred—which isn’t bad for the neighborhood. But it was always a scramble for her to meet.”
“Didn’t she inherit anything from Uncle Ray?”
Ray was Mom’s well-heeled brother—a big-deal Boston-based lawyer who maintained a starchy distance from his sister. From what I could gather, Mom was never particularly close to him when they were growing up—and they grew even further apart after Ray and his wife, Edith, voiced their disapproval of the Brooklyn mick she had married. But Ray did live according to the WASP code of Doing the Proper Thing. So after my dad’s premature death, he came to the financial aid of his sister by offering to pay for the education of her two children. The fact that Ray and Edith had no kids of their own (and that Mom was Ray’s only sibling) probably made it easier for them to foot this hefty bill over the years—even though, when we were younger, it was pretty clear to Charlie and me that our uncle didn’t really want anything to do with us. We never saw him. Mom never saw him. We each received a twenty-dollar savings bond from him every Christmas. When Charlie was at Boston College, Ray never once invited him over to his Beacon Hill town house. I also got the cold shoulder while I was at Smith and dropping into Boston once a month. Mom explained his aloofness away by telling us, “Families can be odd.” Still, fair credit to the guy: thanks to him, Charlie and I were able to attend private schools and private colleges. But as soon as I graduated from Smith in ’76, Mom saw no more money from her brother—and she was always short of cash for the rest of her life. When Ray died in ’98, I expected Mom to come into a little money (especially as Edith had predeceased her husband by three years). But she received nothing from his estate.
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