A Mother's Love

by Mary Morris

  She smiled but said nothing.

  “So,” I said, deciding to change the subject, “what’s the crime this week?”

  Patricia hesitated. “Well, it isn’t exactly a crime. It’s a tragedy, really. It came over the wires this morning. At first the police thought there might be foul play. In California a woman’s car stalled on the railroad tracks. Her three children were in the car. They were very small and a train was coming. So the woman leaped out of the car and tried to flag the train down. But it couldn’t stop in time.”

  “My God!” I said. “That’s terrible!”

  “It’s so sad, isn’t it? I can’t imagine how that poor woman must feel.”

  I shook my head and looked at Bobby, who was awake, smiling. It wasn’t a crime, that was true, but somehow the story didn’t sound right. I felt as if Patricia were telling me a riddle, and I’ve never been good at solving riddles. “I don’t know,” I said. “Something’s not right about it.”

  “How can you say that?”

  I shrugged. “I just know that something’s wrong.”

  Patricia looked at me, her face set hard, as if she were blaming me for something I didn’t do. “The woman was distraught,” she said. “It couldn’t be helped. That’s what the police decided.”

  Unsettled by the story, puzzled by what felt like a missing piece, and not wanting to get into an argument with Patricia, I took Bobby into the living room to change him. The news was over, and Scott had a basketball game on. He was also playing a video game in his lap. Bugs Bunny scrambled to eat a carrot. Five carrots and he won. Scott pecked away at it until dinner was served, gleeful whenever he won.

  We ate steamed vegetables, brown rice, fish, while listening to a CD of Brahms. Scott kept one eye on the basketball game—Lakers versus the Celtics—he had not turned off, though there was no sound. Patricia had a rule about television. He could watch it, but she didn’t want to hear it. “So,” Scott said, his eyes wincing at a bad play, “have you been getting back to work?” Then he grimaced; another play had gone awry.

  “A little. I’m going to have to do something soon. Money’s getting tight.”

  “Well, what about Matthew? Can’t you hit him up for some?”

  “Scott,” Patricia said angrily, “we’ve discussed this. You know what the situation is.”

  “Pretty rotten, if you ask me.”

  “It was my choice,” I muttered.

  “Still pretty rotten.” Scott hit his fist against the table. A jump shot had succeeded.

  “Big game, huh?”

  “Big game, little game,” Patricia said. “He watches them all.”

  Suddenly, after dinner, I realized how tired I was. I had walked a great deal that day and been out for hours. And besides, I could think of nothing to talk about. If I went to bed, I’d feel better in the morning. Reluctantly, Scott turned off the television and went into their room. Patricia opened the sofa bed. There was something official about her movements, as if I were a renter in a boarding house. She brought in some sheets and towels.

  “Will he cry?” she asked, putting a pillow case on the pillow.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Will he cry in the night?”

  “Do you mean will he wake you up?”

  Patricia looked chagrined. “It’s Scott. He has trouble if he’s awakened in the night. He has trouble going back to sleep.”

  “So do I.”

  Patricia smiled weakly.

  “But no,” I said, “I don’t think he’ll cry, or if he does, I’ll nurse him quickly so he won’t disturb you or Scott.”

  Rage welled up within me as I watched Patricia turn to go into her room. “Anyway, I’ll be leaving in the morning. You don’t have to worry about me. I’ll be out early.”

  “Ivy, that isn’t necessary …”

  “I’m sorry I came here,” I said, voice cracking. “I really didn’t know where else to go.”

  EIGHTEEN

  THE FIRST WINTER after my mother and Sam disappeared, a toddler who lived not far from us wandered outside while his father, who perhaps had been drinking, slept. The night the boy wandered off, we had a cold snap. Most people don’t think of the desert as being cold, but a fierce wind can come from the north, the kind that cracks your skin. When the man’s wife came home (she worked the night shift at a coffee shop in one of the casinos), she found the door open. She had no idea how her husband had slept through that cold. They searched for hours for the boy and found him, frozen, a mile from his home. That’s how far he’d wandered. When my father heard this, he said, “Don’t ever go out if I’m not here.” He shook his finger at me. “Don’t ever go out alone.”

  Yet my father still went off on his own. I begged him to stay with me, but he’d say, “I can’t. I can’t sit here and do nothing.” He never spoke of what had happened with my mother and Sam. He just got restless; he moved around like a hyperactive child. A gambler has what they call “tells.” The way he pulls at his chains, turns his ring. Runs a finger through his hair. With my father, it was the pacing.

  He tried to sit in front of the television, but soon his leg bounced into the air, his hand tapped the desk. Then he’d be up and pacing, and soon he’d say, “I’m sorry, honey, but I’ve got to go somewhere. I’ll be back soon. You know I will.” And he went out. I’d stand on the steps of the trailer, watching his red hair. I got my red hair from my father, only his covered his whole body. After my mother and Sam left, he began to slouch. On the nights when he walked away, my father looked like an orangutan, and this thought sometimes made me laugh.

  He’d pause at the street and wave. “Whatever I win tonight, it goes to you.” I’d smile and shake my head. He was going down to Glitter Gulch, the skid row of Vegas, where he’d play poker with the tourists—the polyester crowd in their powder-blue doubleknits and pompadours, the women in tangerine and lime pants suits. Here he’d mostly win. And then he’d go on to the high-stakes card games, the ones behind closed doors, and here he’d lose.

  Then I was just a child alone in a trailer park. Sometimes Dottie came over. She’d bring me a pot of stew. But mostly, on the nights my father left, I’d do housework, dusting or ironing his shirts, though he asked me to stop after a while because of the yellow marks I left.

  When I was done with the housework, I’d sit in front of the television, watching shows like “Leave It to Beaver” or “Life With Father.” I’d fall asleep in the chair and stay there until my father wrapped his arms around my legs and carried me, fireman’s style, into my room. On those nights, when I was alone and my father came home late, all his winnings went to me. I’d wake in a daze as he dropped coins into my hand. “For your college fund,” he’d say. I kept the coins in a box. I had three hundred dollars when it was time for me to go to college.

  One night when he came home at dawn and found me in the chair, I put my arms around his neck and pulled him down to me in a breathless embrace, as if I could not let go. “What do I do if you don’t come home?” I whispered into his ear. “What happens to me?”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to either of us,” he said, but his voice sounded shaky, as if he weren’t quite sure.

  There was a woodpile around the side of the trailer, and I used to play there when my father was gone on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. I stacked the wood and made small forts. I piled it for hours, warding off imaginary assaults. One afternoon when my father came home, he found me at the woodpile and asked, “Are you having fun? Are you having a good time?” He saw a small black speck on my arm and went to flick it away, but his finger sank into my flesh as if it were made of custard. We both stood, staring into the gaping hole, like a sink hole, growing larger and larger, though I felt no pain at all. At first he thought I’d poured acid on my skin. Then he began to cry and he picked me up and raced to the car. I gripped the door handle as he sped through red lights.

  My father carried me into the emergency room, though I felt well enough to walk. He kicked the
door open with his foot. The doctor took my arm. The nurse hurried to bring him the syringe he’d asked for. They are tiny things, those spiders, only a quarter of an inch long. But their bite can kill a child. My father sat, sobbing, holding my hand. The white-coated doctor patted his back. “She’ll be all right,” he said as he gave me the injection. “She’ll be fine.” But still my father sobbed.

  When the spider bite was still raw on my arm, we left Vegas because of a gambling debt my father could not pay. It was summer and there was no school, so I wasn’t missing anything yet. We were regrouping, my father said. He did odd jobs to pay off the debt. When he went out during the day, he took me with him. We’d get into the pickup and go to a small shop or someone’s garage, where my father moved wires around. He fiddled with the insides of things until he made them work. There was almost nothing he could not make right.

  We hardly discussed my mother and Sam’s leaving, but often we talked about them as if they were still there. My father believed that someday they’d be back, that they hadn’t left for good. I think he was so accustomed to my mother’s little excursions into the desert—a day here, two days there—that he thought they’d gone on an extended one. He’d say things like “Your mother would love this shop” or “Sam would think this is the greatest grilled cheese.” But we never talked about what mattered. About the things that might have enabled me to get on with my life.

  My father never liked to talk about the past—his own especially. “What’s done is done,” he said if anyone asked him where he’d been. But on the road as we traveled that summer and the tedium of driving took over, he told me bits and pieces of his life. He was just a boy, the youngest of seven, when he emigrated from Poland with his older brother, Max. In London they slept on park benches until one night someone hit them on the head with a bottle. My father still hears a ringing in his ear. Eventually they made it to New York, and tried to bring the rest of the family over. But Hitler had already marched into Poland. By 1940 the letters from home stopped.

  About my mother he remained silent, and I suppose I never asked. Then one night we checked into a motel and after dinner he put a bottle of bourbon down, which he didn’t do often. He had aged since we’d found them gone a little over a year before. His thick head of coppery hair had thinned and he looked tired and worn. Deep lines furrowed his brow, the corners of his eyes. As the bourbon got lower and lower, he began to talk about my mother, and I listened as if I were being told a fairy tale. It was as if in explaining her to me he was explaining her to himself as well. “When I met your mother,” he told me, “she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. But more than that, there was something about her. Something that looked”—he searched for the right word—“terrified.” She had intrigued him. “Jessica told me many things,” he went on. He’d never before referred to her by name, and it made me feel that somehow, definitely, she was gone. “I’m still not sure what is true.”

  My mother, he said, came from a mining town in Pennsylvania, though she claimed for years to have come from wealthy Philadelphia stock. In one version her father was the scion of a rich blueblood family and had married the Italian maid. In another her mother had been a flamenco dancer. Once she’d made a convincing case for her mother’s having been a fine painter of portraits. He had tried to track her family down—and I tried myself years later—but he found nothing. “I feel pretty certain,” my father told me that night, “that Jessica invented her life.” But she was beautiful, he said, and exotic, and he hadn’t really cared. One thing in all of her stories was consistent, though. Her father had been an abusive man, capable of cruelty, and her mother drank to forget, and no one paid Jessica much heed. “You know what I think,” my father said. “I think they were simply mean-spirited people and Jessica’s beauty went to her head. It was her way out.”

  When she turned seventeen, she saved for a train ticket to Hollywood and she never returned. She worked as an extra in films. That was where she met my father before she was twenty years old. It seemed only right that these two people whose pasts had been obliterated—my father’s by history, my mother’s by her own will—should come together in the late 1940s, adrift, without families, working in the motion picture industry. One night when I was grown, I went to see an old film in which my mother was an extra—an Indian squaw, dancing wildly around a campfire.

  That fall when I started school outside Reno, I told people that my father was a cartographer, which was why we moved around so much. They were always interested in what I said my father did. I said he was assigned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to make maps across the Southwest. His specialties were mountains, desolate terrain, the kind of places most mapmakers hate to tackle. No people, no roads, no significant landmarks. Endless vistas, pure topographical complexities.

  In those dried-up desert towns, I learned to become a fairly accomplished teller of tales, not unlike my mother, I suppose, and people believed me. They envisioned him out there, surveying the land, determining distances, and I found it also interested me. My stories about him grew quite elaborate. He became a man who loved borders, having done both the Mexican and Canadian. He had done Alaska and Texas, two difficult states. I described for students in my new school what it was like living in the Alaskan wilderness—the freezing mornings, the pristine skies, the ambling polar bears. I made up elaborate nonsense about living on seal fat, and no one doubted a word I said.

  The teacher, Miss Willenford, finally asked if my father could come and talk to the class about his mapmaking career. Tell how he got into the business, what he looks for when he studies a landscape, how he knows where to begin. How does a mapmaker learn when a previous mapmaker has made mistakes? That kind of thing. I was startled by this request. My father was, I will always say, a loving man—a good father to me and fun to be with, despite the flaws. But he was a man with a bad habit, an illness, that I did not think would go over well in the classroom.

  On the day I said my father would appear, I showed up loaded down with maps and charts, and explained that he was a busy man and, like a traveling salesman, was on the road much of the time. I had enjoyed the research I had done at the public library for this project, and I pinned to the wall an ancient map of California, showing it separated from the landmass, an island floating out to sea. I unrolled another map of people sailing off the edge of the world. I explained to the class how early cartographers made errors based on mistaken impressions of the world. I said that sometimes what we want to believe affects the way we see the world. Who knows, I told them, how our own maps today will be read centuries from now?

  The students laughed at my maps, but the teacher was clearly impressed. She wrote a letter to my father. “Ivy is very proud of what you do. She made an excellent presentation today. She made it seem as if being a mapmaker was the most exciting thing in the world. A fine future awaits her, I’m sure.” That letter, undelivered, has lain in a box I keep in a drawer. I read it from time to time, for somehow it is the only true reminder of the life I have led.

  NINETEEN

  THE SUBWAY was packed with morning travelers as I scrambled for a seat on the uptown local. I had left Patricia’s early, saying an awkward, unpleasant good-bye. She had asked me not to leave, but I couldn’t stay. We both knew it would be some time before we saw one another again. We had tried to apologize, but we had moved into different phases of our lives. There was little left to say.

  The subway went two stops before it stalled between stations. An announcement told of signal trouble ahead. The advertisements overhead preoccupied me as I sat holding Bobby in my lap, the folded stroller in front of me. Pregnant, embarrassado, habla con nosotros. When I found out I was HIV positive, for me it was the end of the world. Call us when you’re tired of living the high life [a man slouches, needle piercing his arm]. Do you think you might hurt your child? Call us. Anal warts, fissure, hemorrhoids. Call 1-800 MD-TUSCH.

  The train lurched. A homeless man in a filthy business suit stag
gered into our car, Styrofoam cup in hand, singing, in a falsetto, “Somewhere over the rainbow, blue birds fly. There’s a land that I heard of once in a lullaby.” He stumbled toward me—bloodshot eyes, an unbearable stench—and I feared he’d fall on us. I dug into my purse and dropped change into his cup as he shuffled by.

  The train stopped again. “Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to inform you …” Then all I could hear was static, and a groan went up from the car. “What did he say?” I asked the man beside me. He shrugged. I pulled Bobby closer, wondering where we’d end up that night. I had called Jake to see if we could sleep at his place, but he was on the Island. I called another friend, who offered us their maid’s room in the basement of her building.

  The conductor came through the car, swearing. Passengers settled in for what would likely be a long delay. With Bobby resting now on my chest (I prayed he would not wake and have to be nursed or changed), I scanned an old copy of The New York Review of Books. I started an essay, “Rethinking the Middle East,” but found myself quickly distracted, my concentration having been cut to a fraction of what it used to be, and I moved on to a shorter essay on modern American utopian thinkers.

  After a paragraph or two I flipped to the personals, where the reading length and required concentration seemed more suited to my frame of mind. BGM seeks man of similar persuasion for extracurricular whatever. WASP lesbian who won’t kiss and tell seeks other women from Greenwich. There were the usual support groups. The adult child of adult whatevers. Twelve steps. The head injury support group. Single parents support group. (Once I had thought of phoning, but realized I had no time to join, and besides, who would watch Bobby?) Older married man seeks pleasant time with younger woman, no promises but lots of fun. Then one caught my eye. Hey, Valentine, are you looking for someone special? I’m handsome, well-built, Brooklyn, SJM in my 30s, seeking ONE cute, slim, Brooklyn nonprofessional SWJF, 27–42, WITHOUT CHILDREN.