Missing Mom

by Joyce Carol Oates

  He said, “I pray for her soul, dear. I will continue.”

  Pray for your own soul, Father. Mom’s soul is fine.

  “Well, thank you, Father! I’m sure that’s generous of you.”

  Brendan Dorsey thanked me again for the cheerleader photo, which he’d placed in an inside pocket of his black cleric’s coat. He thanked me even more effusively for the coffee and cinnamon rolls. I said, “Let me wrap up a few to take with you, Father,” and he said, quickly, “No, no! But thank you,” and I said, “But Mom would be so pleased, Father. It’s her recipe,” and he gave in with a guilty sigh, “Well. If it isn’t…”

  “No trouble at all, Father. It was very kind of you to visit.”

  In the vestibule, we had a struggle with Brendan Dorsey’s heavy cashmere coat, as I held the sleeves for him to shove his thick arms into, awkwardly. There was the matter of his “damned arthritic” knee, which had stiffened while he’d been sitting. And—where was his cane? (In my hand. I handed it to him.) Even as Brendan Dorsey was set to leave he hesitated, as if he’d only just thought of this: “In sorting through your mother’s things, Nicole, I wonder if…You might have come upon some old letters of mine…” A hot flush rose in his face, his pale-blue eyes became evasive. “I was very young at the time. I was emotional, undisciplined. I can’t imagine what I wrote, that Gwen would have wished to keep.”

  “I don’t think so, Father. I don’t think that I have.”

  I didn’t want to admit that I’d avoided going through my mother’s oldest things in the attic. I’d postponed the task for months. Each time I climbed the steps to the attic and stooped to enter that crowded, airless space, I’d been overcome by a sensation of dizziness and dread and had to run downstairs where I could breathe.

  “…asked her please to return them, as I was returning her letters to me. Oh, Gwen was so emotional! She thought nothing of writing down her quickest, airiest thoughts, like little flames of feeling they were, on scraps of paper she tied into tiny bundles with ribbons…and these I mailed back to her, every one of them, as I thought we’d agreed.” Brendan Dorsey paused, settling the soft black fedora on his head. He frowned, but then he smiled. “…such silly things! Gwen made miniature valentines to leave in my pockets, and in my car, for me to discover, she made little birds and animals out of aluminum foil, there were birthday cards, half-birthday cards, un-birthday cards, once she melted dozens of jelly beans to spell out I LUV Y…” He laughed, swiping at his eyes. “That was Gwen’s way, to make a fuss over trifles.”

  “Maybe they weren’t trifles, Father. To her.”

  I watched Brendan Dorsey navigate the icy front walk, leaning heavily on his cane. I was feeling sorry for him now, even a kind of sympathy. I did not blame or dislike him. I saw him as Mom had seen him, a boy-man, his soul unformed, like a bud that will wither without opening. Thinking What do I owe him, I owe him everything.

  Hoping he wouldn’t slip and fall and injure himself before he made it to his Lincoln Town Car, and somehow become my responsibility.

  girlfriend

  I could hear the sharp intake of breath.

  “Him! I don’t believe it, Nikki!”

  “Yes. ‘Father Brendan Dorsey.’ He was here, in Mom’s house.”

  “Did he…remember me?”

  “Yes. He did.”

  “He didn’t! He…did?”

  “When I told him ‘Alyce Proxmire’ he described you perfectly, Alyce: ‘Gwen’s closest friend, a very nice girl with beautiful dark eyes.’”

  At the other end of the line there was rapturous silence. Quickly I hung up the receiver to preserve it.

  “time for you to know”

  “Nikki. It’s time for you to know.”

  There was Mom’s cousin Lucille Kovach peering at me with small brightly glittering eyes. A square-built woman in her late fifties with a face blunt as a shovel, no taller than five feet two inches but weighing at least two hundred pounds. Yet Lucille wasn’t fat so much as solid, compacted, in the durable way that scrap cars and garbage are compacted.

  Lucille Kovach, my “second-cousin” whom I had not seen since the day of Mom’s funeral. In XXX-sized jeans with a man’s fly front, the steely zipper of which glinted between her hefty thighs. In a greenish lizard-skin jacket over a tight Metallica T-shirt. On Lucille’s feet, wedge-shaped work boots with reinforced toes.

  Half in dread and half eagerly I asked what Lucille meant?—what was “time” for me to know?

  “About Gwen. When we were girls, on Spalding Street. When”—Lucille hesitated, gnawing her fleshy lower lip—“something happened.”

  I thought it must involve Brendan Dorsey. Certainly, Lucille would have known about my mother’s involvement with Brendan Dorsey. They’d lived together in the same household, for a while. After Mom’s mother died and her father, who worked for the New York Central Railroad, gave up a permanent home to board with relatives.

  Unless what Lucille had to tell me predated Brendan Dorsey. Before Gwen had been taken in by relatives.

  Mom had always been vague about those years. From Alyce, I now knew more. Yet there’d been a “shifting-around” time before Alyce knew my mother. “Shifting-around” was Mom’s word for that time when she no longer had a permanent home but moved from one household to another, until she graduated from high school, met and married my father. Light as a feather she’d wished to be and so her memory of that time had become feathery, imprecise.

  I’d never wanted to think that Mom just wasn’t telling me the truth. It was better to think she’d long forgotten what truth there might have been to tell.

  That afternoon in February, a week after Father Dorsey, I was visiting Hedwig House, an “assisted living facility” in an older section of Mt. Ephraim. Following Mom’s example, I’d been visiting my elderly aunt Renate Kovach once a week. I hadn’t known that, at Hedwig House, Mom had regularly visited several other residents as well. From the nursing staff I’d learned that Mom had brought everyone baked things, sweet pastries. She’d been the most popular visitor at Hedwig House and after several visits they were still telling me so.

  Visiting one elderly relative was enough, for me. I hoped to emulate my mother but maybe not just yet.

  “Aunt Renate! Hello.”

  When I entered my aunt’s melancholy room crammed with remnants of her lost life, often the elderly woman would mistake me for Mom, smiling happily at me, clutching at my hands and pulling me down to kiss her papery-thin cheek. Aunt Renate Kovach had become a frail bent-back spidery-limbed old woman, who’d once been nearly as stout as her daughter Lucille.

  “Ohhh! Is this for me?”

  “Cherry-bran muffins, Aunt Renate. I hope you like them.”

  “Thank you, dear! Nobody ever comes to see me but you.”

  This couldn’t be so. Often I’d seen Lucille just departing in her Dodge pickup when I pulled into the parking lot behind the bleak sandstone building, and if she saw me she’d wave vigorously through her windshield. Or, when I was leaving, I’d encounter Lucille lumbering up the front steps. (“Hey Nikki! How’s my mom, still kickin’?”)

  I never contradicted Aunt Renate, though. Just smiled, and listened. And listened. It made me uneasy to be confused with Mom, but when I’d tried to correct my aunt her immediate question was Then where is Gwen? and words failed me, how to explain.

  “Aunt Renate, I think Lucille explained to you? My Mom is…isn’t here right now.”

  “Isn’t here where? Then where is she?”

  “I think Lucille must have…”

  “Lucille never visits! Lucille has her own ‘life’! Ask her, she’ll tell you: ‘I have my own life, Momma.’ But where is Gwen?”

  Aunt Renate was becoming anxious, suspicious. Clutching at me with talon fingers. Dad used to say of Renate Kovach that the woman had a “carp” mouth. There were family tales of her scolding and humiliating her grown daughters including Lucille. When I tried to reason with her, she began to speak angri
ly.

  “Who are you, then?”

  “Nikki.”

  “Who?”

  “Nikki Eaton. Gwen’s daughter.”

  “‘Nik-ki.’” In my aunt’s pursy mouth, the name did sound improbable.

  “Aunt Renate, I was here last Friday. Remember, I brought you some cinnamon rolls…”

  The watery eyes fastened on me doubtfully. The first time I’d visited, Aunt Renate confused me with Clare; once, waking groggily from a nap, upright in an easy chair, she’d stared at me blinking rapidly and began to whimper: “Lu-cille. Where you been. Leaving me alone in this place like garbage. That’s what you think I am, garbage. God damn your soul Lu-cille. Take me out of here Lu-cille don’t go away again and leave me in this place like garbage.”

  It took several minutes to calm Aunt Renate. I knew, I’d been warned by the nursing staff and of course it was common sense, you don’t want to upset an elderly resident, that’s the last thing you want to do. Yet it required some coaxing, to convince my aunt that no, really I was not her daughter Lucille, I was her niece Nicole Eaton. “Lucille and I don’t look much alike, Aunt Renate. At least, I’ve never heard that we do.”

  “Two-Ton Lucy” and “Tank” were code names for Lucille Kovach generated at 43 Deer Creek Drive. Dad made Clare and me laugh referring to his Kovach in-laws as “The Mt. Ephraim Hillbillies” and Lucille especially discomforted him. (None of the Kovachs dropped by the house when Jonathan Eaton was likely to be home.) Growing up, Clare was most critical of Lucille Kovach for Clare’s standards of grooming, deportment, and respectability were very demanding. Oh! what a horror Lucille was! What an embarrassment! Not just that Lucille was a barrel-sized woman with a broad, blunt face who often wore men’s clothes, but Lucille was lacking in modesty: you’d expect anyone who looked like her to skulk away in shame, but no. You’d expect that, lacking a recognizable female figure, she’d refrain from tank-tops and polyester stretch pants in the summer, but no. You’d expect that she would refrain from making a display of herself with a bugle voice and gut-ripping laughter loud as any man’s, but no. What especially scandalized Clare was that Lucille made no secret of her craving for male companionship even into middle age, and continued to “hang out” in bars though she’d been married and divorced three times, most recently to an ex-Marine who’d served in the Gulf War but was now incarcerated at Follette Maximum Security Facility for Men, serving a lengthy sentence for aggravated assault, creating a public disturbance, and spousal abuse.

  “‘Spousal abuse’!” Clare was mystified. “How could even a Marine abuse that woman!”

  Clare’s scorn was contagious, to a younger sister especially. I was inclined to share it out of a fear of provoking it against me. Yet I’d always liked my Kovach relatives, on those rare occasions when I’d spent a little time with them. Like most people I’d been intimidated by Lucille but her attachment to Mom, and Mom’s to her, had to mean something.

  Returning home from school, sometimes I’d see Lucille’s rust-bucket Dodge backing out of the drive. Inside, Mom would be bustling about the kitchen trying to air it out: stove fan turned on high, windows open, folded newspaper fluttered to dissipate Lucille’s pungent, unmistakable smell which Dad’s sharp nostrils would detect: Camel cigarette smoke, fattish-female perspiration, axle grease. (Intermittently for years, Lucille had worked as an auto mechanic in a Kovach relative’s garage where she was said to be “damned good.”)

  Mom would plead, “Oh, help me, Nikki! If your father knows that Lucy was here he’ll tease so! And don’t tell him, honey, please?”

  This afternoon at Hedwig House, there was Lucille visiting with her mother, her bulk cozily propped against the windowsill as Aunt Renate fretted and fussed, upright in her chintz easy chair. The honey-colored afghan was wrapped about the elderly woman’s frail body like a shroud. Lucille was looking stouter than ever, even her head appeared larger, capped by a springy mass of grizzled-gray curls. The XXX-sized jeans and funky lizard-skin jacket and a smear of lipstick on her fleshy lips made her quite a striking sight in that cramped space.

  “Hey Nikki: great to see you. Thanks for coming to see Momma.”

  I was smiling bravely. Wishing I’d noticed Lucille’s pickup in the parking lot, I might have waited until she left.

  Lucille extended a hand to me, blunt stubby fingers and dirt-edged nails. Like all the Kovachs she was loudly friendly, liking to touch and to laugh. It was possible she’d been drinking, a few beers at lunch. Her eyes were moist and glittering and her mouth kept slip-sliding into a lopsided smile.

  “Momma, see who’s here? You got a visitor, see? Gwen’s daughter Nikki, you remember her, eh? The skinny one, ‘Nikki’? Not the other one, that’s Clare the high school principal, this is Nik-ki the high school sex-pot.” Lucille laughed, this was an old joke of hers. “See, Nikki’s bringing you something, Momma? Mmmm smells good. For you.”

  Aunt Renate roused herself to wakefulness, blinking and smiling in my direction. She seemed to recognize me today. She smiled at me, and thanked me for the aluminum-wrapped muffins, which Lucille had taken from me to settle on her mother’s lap.

  “Well! This is nice. This is real nice. I heard you’ve been visiting Momma, Nikki. Like Gwen did.”

  Gwen. I wondered if it was a good idea to speak my mother’s name in Aunt Renate’s hearing. But Aunt Renate had begun to nibble at one of the cherry-bran muffins and was distracted.

  Aunt Renate brushed crumbs from her lips. “This is delicious, dear. You were always such a good…”

  Lucille said impatiently, “That’s Gwen, Momma. This is Gwen’s daughter Nikki. Get them straight, Momma. You can if you try.” Lucille was ruthless in the way of a gym coach blowing her whistle. Damned if she was going to let her mother, eighty-seven years old, lapse into anything like premature senility. Telling me in a tone meant to tease Aunt Renate, “Momma’s memory is still sharp when she makes the effort. Sharper than mine, lots of times. Oh man, Momma can remember the damndest things. Except she gets lazy in this place. See, they keep it too hot here. Like a hothouse and you can’t breathe, unless, this happened last week, the damn furnace breaks down, and it’s damn cold. Momma, look up here. What kind of mess are you making, those crumbs! You never used to be so messy with your food…”

  This went on for a while. Lucille oversaw her mother’s every move like a doting/exasperated mother. Amid her other smells, and the pervading odor of Hedwig House which I preferred not to analyze, Lucille did smell just slightly of beer.

  She teased me about writing “some newspaper piece” about Hedwig House, was that why I’d been visiting?

  Quickly I told her no. Of course not.

  She teased me about this “married-man-friend of yours what’s-his-name ‘Zall-la’”?

  Blushing like a girl I told her it wasn’t like that, exactly.

  “What’s it like, then? ‘Exactly’?”

  I shook my head. I wasn’t going to be interrogated. The rare times we spoke on the phone, when I called her, Clare always got around to quizzing me about Wally Szalla, too.

  Finally I’d told her I wouldn’t ask about her sex life, if she refrained from asking about mine. This shut up my bossy older sister, fast.

  Lucille’s eyes glittered with a kind of mirthful well-intentioned malice. She had the physical authority of a large dog that might lunge at you to bite or to lick your face out of sheer exuberance. She was eating cherry-bran muffins in three sizable bites.

  I’d had the impression that Lucille had always liked me, much more than she’d liked Clare, and I wondered what Mom had told her about me; what they’d talked about in private, all those years. The secret lives our mothers live.

  Suddenly Lucille asked what I’d been hearing about the trial? That “s.o.b. murderer Lynch?”

  I was shocked, that Lucille would bring up such a subject. In her mother’s presence, and in mine.

  “This latest he’s saying, he didn’t do it? He didn’t? Some other guy,
some buddy of his from prison, the two of them, and the other guy, he’s the one who…”

  “Lucille, please. I can’t talk about this now.”

  “Yeah, O.K. I s’pose not. But, Jesus! The things they let them say! ‘Defense strategy.’ I was reading in the damn paper.”

  My heart was pounding rapidly. I felt that I might faint. It was a solace to me, that my elderly aunt appeared oblivious to the subject Lucille had brought up, contented with a muffin.

  Second childhood it used to be called. There might be solace in that!

  Lucille said, incensed, “Lawyers should be arrested, they spread lies. You’d think there would be a law, wouldn’t you! ‘Perjury’ is something you hear, it should be applied to lawyers. Like this lawyer who represented Harvey, when I brought charges against him, damn liars the things they concocted trying to blame me. Like, I ‘threw the first punch’ kind of thing, and Harvey threw the last. And this s.o.b. Lynch, if the cops’d been thinking straight they’d have shot him dead when they found him, where was it, down in Erie. I’d have, for sure. Give me a gun, any day. Everybody is saying, it’s a damn shame there has to be a trial, not just living through all that again, poor Gwen, I was broke up at the time and it ain’t much better now, but not just that, it’s damn expensive, it comes out of our taxes. And that guy’s lawyer, you can’t say it isn’t ‘perjury.’ He should be arrested.”

  “I think that, to commit perjury, you have to have sworn to tell the truth, in court. Lawyers aren’t sworn in.”

  “Well, hell! They’re the ones who should be.”

  I was managing to remain calm. Lucille was referring to a new “defense” fabricated by Ward Lynch. He had long ago recanted his original confession and was insisting upon a plea of “not guilty.” Initially, one of his lawyers had entered a plea of “not guilty by reason of temporary insanity” but more recently, as the trial was approaching, he’d come up with a new idea, that another man, not Ward Lynch, had actually committed the crimes for which he’d been arrested. The assistant prosecutor who would be trying the case had explained some of this to me but I’d told him please, I didn’t want to hear it. Rob Chisholm had called several times wanting to talk about this and other matters relating to the trial but I explained to him I could not talk about it, I could not think about it. Please.