by Julia Pandl
MY MOTHER HAS pneumonia again.
My mother danced. She danced the grandma dance, twirling her small hands while sitting in a chair.
She made wildly funny faces.
She left a half banana on the kitchen counter every day.
My mother quit smoking for Lent and took up knitting.
She did the crossword every morning. She pulled words out of the sky.
My mother was lonely.
SHE PRAYED TO St. Thérèse. Little Flower, show your power. Let fall from heaven a shower of roses. George doubted.
My mother let me skip school today and took me shopping and out to lunch.
My mother drank her coffee black. She gave up sugar for Lent one year and creamer the next year.
She had shoes, tons of shoes.
She was lonely.
SHE PRAYED. HE doubted.
She loved Buick station wagons. She said they were safe.
My mother paced and prayed the Memorare. Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary . . .
She had small hands, soft, hands made to be held.
She asked a lot of questions during movies. Holy shit, did she ask questions.
She was lonely.
MY MOTHER CRIED forty-three-year-old tears when she found out she was pregnant with me. She was in labor for four days.
My mother peed in a pot last night.
She left a half banana on the counter.
My mother told me she’d watch over me from up above. Then I brushed her hair.
MY MOTHER DIED this morning. It’s Johnny’s fiftieth birthday, November 14, 2002. She had a look in her eyes I didn’t recognize, vacant and mechanical. She was already gone. We held her hands and prayed, Katie, George, and I. I mumbled the Memorare, asking the Blessed Mother to take her hand. She disappeared in the night. Her soul floated, and she kissed us while we slept.
SHE SMELLED PRETTY, like Shalimar.
12
The Promise
We made a deathbed promise, Katie and Peggy and I. Our mother wasn’t actually dying at the time, but you know that promise when you make it, deathbed or not.
We were at St. Mary’s Hospital in Ozaukee. The room smelled of soap, sweet and antiseptic.
She said, “Keep an eye on Daddy,” and the air got sucked out of the room. I tried to sneak a little breath before it happened, but it was like someone sucker punched me right in the gut and stuck a wool sock in my throat.
“Okay,” we said, immediately, emphatically. I mean, really, what were we going to say?
You’ll know it when you hear it—it changes everything—and you won’t say no either.
“KEEP AN EYE on Daddy.”
An ambiguous request, open to interpretation, followed by a promise. A request that left us a little wiggle room.
Ours was a loose working definition. “Keep an eye on Daddy,” we thought, was code for “Make sure he doesn’t leave the house looking like a hobo.” She knew better, though; she knew more.
We stretch the boundaries, or maybe they stretch on their own.
The line between her words and our actions is wobbly, not what it used to be.
We do shoddy work, but he listens.
He leaves the house looking like a hobo, daily. Dressed in kelly green shorts, a white T-shirt, red suspenders, black socks pulled up to his knees, and tan shoes. He runs to the hardware store, to Bayside Garden Center, Schwartz Bookstore, and Walgreens.
He’s seventy-seven now. He married my mother fifty years ago, nearly fifty-one. He proposed with a rosary and she said yes.
HE DRINKS TWO martinis, not three.
He grieves.
He wears white vinyl exam gloves wherever he goes, an effort to kick his habit of picking his hangnails. He walks into the bank like he always has, through the mahogany entryway and past the velvety nubuck leather furniture, up to the dark marble counter of the teller windows, looking not only like a hobo but also kind of creepy, like he has a chopped-up body stashed in the trunk.
He’s back, working at the restaurant, has been for quite a while.
He chef pants are rolled up around his chins.
“Keep an eye on Daddy.”
HE DRINKS TWO martinis, not three.
He actually does know how to dress, feigning ignorance all these years just to push Terry’s buttons. Just like a husband.
He’s faithful to the core, although he doesn’t admit it. He champions all religions.
He made each of us a collage; a picture of us with Terry in the middle, high school graduation, vacationing in Door County, sitting on her lap. He got the babies all mixed up. Mine has a picture of Katie; hers has a picture of me. Jimmy’s has a picture of Stevie and Stevie’s has Jeremiah. These pictures made when we were babies had a sameness. We are harder to define without her.
He grieves.
HE TAKES LONG walks. He climbs the lookout tower at the Audubon Center.
He has Jean Feraca’s birthday on his calendar. Who the hell is that? And why does he need to remember her birthday?
He eats bowls of bleu cheese with a cocktail fork.
He crushes boxes at the restaurant.
He showed up the other day with half of his front tooth missing.
“Keep an eye on Daddy.”
HE PICKS HIS hangnails until they bleed. He’s afraid he can’t be a good guest without her.
We, Katie and Peggy and I, told him never to show up empty-handed.
Loneliness bears gifts.
He brings pretty soaps from Caswell-Massey to parties as a gift for the hostess, and the host.
He stopped murdering squirrels.
HE USES MASKING tape and a Sharpie to mark foil-wrapped items in the freezer—ham, chicken livers, tenderloin tips—with the day and the year.
He reads.
He uses Pink Pearl body shampoo on everything: his dishes, his floors, his body, his hair.
He wraps books from his library in newspaper and gives them to us for Christmas.
He wraps junk from his garage in newspaper and gives it to us for Christmas. We all got an orange plastic pasta fork.
He stopped going to Mass.
“Keep an eye on Daddy.”
HE CRUSHES BOXES at the restaurant.
He cuts out tiny pictures of roses and tapes them to the front of envelopes containing birthday cards.
He eats spearmint leaves and drinks sherry in bed.
He drinks two martinis, not three.
He grieves.
HE WASHES THE car for the first time ever, gets a haircut, and goes out on a “date.”
He puts the milk jug right on the kitchen table.
He takes us to Spring Green, to the American Players Theatre, the House on the Rock, and the National Mustard Museum, all of us—the boys, the girls, and the grandchildren. He gives us all embroidered old-lady change purses with walkin’-around money inside.
He reads.
HE BUYS CASWELL-MASSEY soap by the gross.
Loneliness bears gifts.
He drives the car, with its TERRY P license plates and PRAY THE ROSARY bumper sticker.
He stops going to Mass.
“Keep an eye on Daddy.”
He’s a boxer-brief man now, Calvin Klein; they have to be Calvin Klein.
He changes his sheets with the seasons.
HE DRINKS TWO martinis, not three.
He spends the entire summer walking around the house wearing only his Calvin Kleins.
He picks his hangnails until they bleed.
He grieves.
He stops going to Mass. He’s faithful to the core.
He’s creating change, exacting meaning.
The promise came with a big hole; still, there’s no room for sameness anymore.
13
Hocus-Pocus
Our parents are planted everywhere in us—their smiles, their gait, their stomachs, their habits. The older we get, the stronger the roots. Our resistance is worn down with wisdom, and in time we begin to do thing
s, like replace the empty toilet paper roll with a new one. We buy pants with elastic waistbands; we turn the lights off and the heat down; we change the sheets and set out fresh towels for our guests. In time we become what we said we never would—we become them—and we smile in spite of ourselves.
My mother planted the seeds of faith in our family and did the lion’s share of the watering. Hers was a simple two-step process, both gentle and fierce, strangely naive and knowledgeable. She began by bringing the church to us. The Holy Family and the Communion of Saints were ever present in our house, in our cars, and on our person. Tiny icons traveled with and among us, watching us eat, sleep, fight, pray, and live. Gladly handing over her Rolodex of short prayers, rosaries, and novenas, she taught us who to call, and how, when intercession was beyond our control. The Crucified Christ hung around our necks and over our beds, St. Christopher and the Sacred Heart of Jesus dangled together from safety pins pressed into vinyl car visors, the Infant of Prague looked faithfully out the window on the eve of every outdoor party, bringing good weather; the concrete St. Anne stood sentry, facing east, beckoning sailors safely to shore; and St. Joseph was buried upside down in the backyard of every home being prepared for sale.
They were all respected and welcome additions to our family, with one exception. I was eight or nine, I guess, when Jimmy came home from a trip out west, bearing a life-size portrait of Jesus with the Crown of Thorns, inked in thick, midnight blue velvet. Even I could see that using velvet as a canvas to depict the Lord was a practice that needed restriction under canon law. It was novelty-shop tacky in a way that at once insulted both God and novelty shops. A gift from her prodigal son, my mother hung it nonetheless, in the front foyer, just inside the door we never used, and Jesus laughed.
She wouldn’t admit it, but she had two favorites: the Blessed Mother and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. She had an extraordinary bond with these two women; theirs was a closeness found only in faith. Identifying with Mary in motherhood and with St. Thérèse in name, she referred to them as her “buds.” Mary accompanied my mother as she paced around the dining room table, hundreds of thousands of times, wearing her cotton nightgown and mumbling the Memorare, waiting for someone to give birth to a baby, get through surgery, or more often than not, complete a long drive home from college in a snowstorm.
And St. Thérèse, the Little Flower, brought roses without fail on the heels of every novena. She comforted my mother when earthly comforts were exhausted, when we were exhausted. Her hand-painted six-inch replica, sealed in a Ziploc freezer bag along with my mother’s rosary and hairbrush, made dozens of trips into and out of the hospital. We all witnessed the call, “Little Flower, show your power,” that brought my mother over the hurdle of amputation. St. Thérèse stood by when it was time for the rest of us to go home, watching my mother from her place on the adjustable bedside tray table. She held my mother’s trust, her heart, and her hand. These friendships, born of faith, set us on the path of believing without seeing.
Step two in Terry’s catechism brought us to church. Regular attendance at Sunday Mass was nonnegotiable in the same way that breathing is nonnegotiable. My mother knew the secret that formed the unshakable bond of faith: practice. It was that simple. We went to Mass and we received the sacraments. We did not question, argue, or even discern. There was nothing touchy-feely, nothing “up to us” about it. We just went. If we did not go, and were not behind bars or in a full body cast, bleeding out our eyes, we swung by St. Robert’s and picked up a weekly bulletin. If we did not get a chance to pick up a bulletin, we lied—at least I did, and I’m fairly certain the rest of my siblings did too. I was thirty before I could look my mother in the eye and confess that I missed the occasional Sunday Mass. And even as I explained that her work was done—that I was a practicing, albeit somewhat erratically, Catholic—I felt the sting of offending her and Jesus.
George was wired differently when it came to religion. He was on board in the Mass department, of course. He sat in the driveway and honked the horn on Sunday mornings, and even corralled us into the front pew at St. Robert’s, all the while reading books like The Secret Archives of the Vatican, The Church That Forgot Christ, The Daily Dilemma of the Christian, In Defense of Secular Humanism, and How the Pope Became Infallible. He searched for faith, waiting for it to come together in a neat little sentence and jump off the page, hoping to solve the mystery by contradicting its essence. He believed in God and prayed often. He also believed in, and even cherished, Holy Communion. He accepted the presence of Jesus Christ in the simple fellowship of breaking bread. It spoke to him on a familial level. The wheels came off, though, when it came to the hierarchy of the church. He did not, he could not, believe in an institution run solely by men, with no system of checks and balances. The pope went against George’s grain. He called the church the only absolute monarchy, and he constantly questioned its authority and wealth. Yet he practiced.
Conflicted, and offended to the core by the political and religious apathy that spawned the Holocaust, he owned—more than most Catholics, I think—our Jewish roots, and taught us to do the same. Judaism has no pope; it also has female rabbis. Therefore, Judaism appealed to his skeptical nature and his feminine side. He embraced the traditions, verbal and edible, with gusto—attempting Hebrew, gobbling up gefilte fish, and preparing beef brisket on Christmas Day when my mother insisted on ham. How they ever managed to present a united front and raise an ever-expanding army of practicing Catholics is a mystery the Holy See might want to look into.
SIX MONTHS BEFORE my mother died, Memorial Day weekend of 2002, Chrissy’s brother-in-law, Dan Griffith, was ordained into the priesthood in St. Paul, Minnesota. Holy Orders happened often enough, but it was rare to actually know someone joining the team. When the invitation came, my mother was pensively excited. Like most Catholic mothers, she had always wanted one of her sons to become a priest, but none of them had the calling. So she quickly claimed Dan as one of her own. She pulled down the family portrait—the one of the nine of us huddled together on a frigid fall day at Hubbard Park—from its prominent place in the center of the refrigerator, cast it aside with a flick of her wrist, and slipped Dan’s invitation into its place. She smoothed it down with her puffy, prednisone-swollen hand and told George, “We’re going, come hell or high water.” He rolled his eyes.
My parents never traveled light, especially when we were kids. Because there were eleven of us, we didn’t fly many places, so they had the luxury of packing the car as if they had been commissioned to map a newly discovered, uninhabited continent. My father packed books, sometimes as many as ten or twenty, in empty wine boxes from the restaurant. He also packed booze, wine, and sherry—always sherry—in the same boxes. Without the sherry, their nighttime sleep routine was disrupted in a way that tended to ruin the following day. Terry packed everything else: clothes, shoes, hats, scarves, mittens, jackets, snow pants, boots, skis, bathing suits, beach towels, and sunscreen, depending on the destination and the time of year.
The trip to St. Paul was different only insofar as we were old enough to take separate cars, caravanning west and then north on I-94, plus my mother had been flirting with the angel of death for some months. He had taken her for a spin around the dance floor on several occasions but had retreated each time, leaving behind a new medical apparatus for her to contend with: an oxygen tank, a wheelchair, a commode, a titanium leg, or what have you. We knew, and perhaps she did too, it was only a matter of time before he left the deathbed, so the pilgrimage to the Catholic Super Bowl became charged, ironically, with life.
Peggy and I followed behind as their Blessed Virgin blue Buick dragged along the asphalt, weighted down with the oxygen tank, the wheelchair, the commode, the titanium leg, the books, and the sherry. The car was a pharmacy on wheels, equipped for anything from diarrhea to diabetic shock, and all aches, pains, and respiratory distresses in between. I remember watching the PRAY THE ROSARY bumper sticker bounce in time with the bumps in the road, laug
hing at what a shamelessly obvious metaphor my mother had created for my father to drive.
We arrived at the Holiday Inn in downtown St. Paul at about six o’clock on Friday. It was a sunny afternoon, with a temperature that anywhere else in the world would be considered a little chilly for the end of May, but it was warmly welcome by Twin Cities standards. Winter had finally stopped haunting spring, and the crooked branches of the cottonwoods were shrouded in bright yellowy green. My father pulled the car up to the curb in front of the revolving glass door, and we pulled up behind them. I stepped out of the car into a sea of cousins. The sidewalk hummed with the excited chatter of togetherness. Our families combined into a strangely twisted vine of relatives and friends. When Chrissy married Bill, Dan’s brother, who was also the first cousin of our sister-in-law Treasie, things got complicated in a way that isn’t worth unwinding here. Suffice it to say that, over the years generations of Griffiths and Pandls have shared everything from high school hallways and college dorm rooms to cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents.
Wrapped up in hug after hug, I made my way over to my parents’ car and commenced the unloading. George pulled the wheelchair out of the backseat and unfolded it on the curb while Terry handed me her portable oxygen tank and Peggy hauled suitcases and wine boxes from the trunk. My mother pivoted herself over to the wheelchair and plopped down with a frustrated wince. “Ouch, ouch, ouch! This damn back.” I winced too. Presumably a side effect from a hip replacement the previous February, her severe and chronic back pain was a recent development.
“Here, Mom, lemme get your feet in the things,” I said, squatting down and turning the footrests flat. She had on a spring jacket, pastel plaid, and a pair of slacks that were roomy around the ankles. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, yes. Hand me my purse, will you, please?”
“Hang on a sec, Mom, let me just . . . get these right.”
She wiggled, anxious to join the flurry of hellos. I straightened her pants legs, leaned into the car, and grabbed her purse off the floor of the front seat. By the time I turned around, purse in hand, she had circled her wheelchair into a flock of cousins, aunts, and uncles. I stood watching her. Her profile showed a soft, cheeky smile as she planted a hand and a kiss on the face of an old friend. My mother was a great guest at a party, easy, one of those people whose worries melted away in a crowd. On her sickest day, I’d take a conversation with her, in a corner over a glass of chardonnay, before most people. Chaos softened her. She forgot herself, sidled up with a drink and a cigarette, patted you on the knee, and became a gentle confidante. People loosened their caps around her, and she around them.
