Dear Oliver

by Peter Wells

  MARCH 2016

  Pauline and Nicole were now in Napier, and I had arranged with them to bring you over to my house so you could meet Bess. ‘One end of the family meets the other.’ I knew I needed to get a photograph. This was foremost in my mind as I drove down to PA (Princess Alexandra Retirement Village) to arrange for Bess to be picked up at 12.30 p.m. (This meant arranging for her to finish her midday meal early and be prepared. Any change in routine requires the awkward logistics of a tugboat turning around a liner.) You were arriving at 1 p.m.

  Bess was sitting in her room and I noted she was well dressed for once, and was actually wearing both hearing aids. I gave her lipstick and asked her to put some on. With an expert hand she painted on the shape of her upper lip, then pressed it against her lower. (When I’d asked her to put on lipstick the day before, she had protested: ‘Why? There’s nobody to see it.’ I realised she meant There are no men here to look at me. My mother, the heterosexual. ‘Well,’ I countered, ‘there are still people looking at you.’ And after she put the lipstick on she accepted, grudgingly, ‘It does make you feel better.’)

  As we walked out to the car, I reminded her once more about what was happening. My heart was beating fast. I was aware, again, of how slowly she moved, more a shuffle than a walk — almost a propelling roll forward that her legs struggled to stabilise. Her eyesight was poor, so her movement through space suggested a cognitive greyness, as if she were enclosed in a wall of sensations and vague shapes.

  At my house I took her into the sunroom, where the table was laid. We were having lunch (Bess was having only a cup of tea). I had set the table — wine glasses, soup plates, a crusty sourdough loaf. We sat and waited. Bess asked me again why she was there. Eventually your party arrived, Nicole and Pauline dressed practically, in trousers and puffer jackets. You were being held by Nicole, and both mothers had supplies in a backpack. Introductions were made, Nicole to Bessie. Pauline knew Bess from old — she had last seen her when she was a teenager resentful of the burden of family connections.

  But Pauline had a personal connection to Bess: as a young girl she had gone for a walk on her own and found a stray cat and brought it back and given it to Bess. The much-loved cat had lived with Mum for many years, till it died. Now Pauline was an assured young woman and Bessie had shrunk into almost a mute figure. I had assumed that the sight of a baby would awaken something profound in my mother. I’d seen her in the past expertly crook her arms to cradle a baby, and I had experienced a wire of profound grief that the position of her cradling arms indicated how ready she’d been all her life to receive the grandchildren who never arrived.

  I did a lot of thinking in the night before you arrived, Oliver. You made me think back all over my life. I counted back to the age my mother had been when I was born. I was surprised, adding up the dates, that she was thirty-four. I hadn’t realised she was so mature. I was a lucky boy, Oliver. Like you, I experienced the endless richness that is unconditional love. It is something that will help you all your life; its echo will never die. So it surprised me that when Nicole carried you into the room Bess simply gazed at you unmoved, her face still and almost grim. It was awkward.

  ‘How old is he?’ became her stock question of the afternoon, to be asked again and again.

  It was this which alerted Nicole and Pauline to the state of her mind. Younger people who are not used to being around the very old (and this means nearly all young people these days) don’t understand how to approach and treat and listen to them. It requires tact and patience, even a sense of humour. I was more than a little stressed when I realised I needed to mediate between you, who were of course oblivious to the mise en scène, and my mother, who was being obdurate, separate, not dissolving back into the remembered role of motherhood as I had assumed she would. (Perhaps the truth was that she was deafer than I thought and her eyesight was worse, so she sat isolated, incapable of catching the quick idiom of our sentences, half completed and full of telegraphese. Perhaps she wasn’t feeling well. But she seemed so disconnected from expressing her own feelings that she appeared inert.)

  You were more yourself than I had seen you before. After all, you had serious business to conduct, which was being yourself, attentive to mood, hunger, distraction, attention. Your mothers, on the other side of the table, took turns nursing you — you were passed like a weighty parcel from Nicole, slightly yielding, to Pauline, who seemed entirely in love with you and who could not keep a broad smile from her face. You look like her, which is sweet, considering she is not your birth mother. We talked — that is, Nicole, Pauline and I talked — about gay marriage. They explained they couldn’t get married immediately. Pauline said she would adopt you — and I was surprised, since she is so obviously your adoring second mother. When you got hungry and started grizzling, she picked you up, swung you athletically onto her shoulders, then danced up and down like a bear, so you had the distraction and pleasure of a circus ride. Your tears instantly vanished, you smiled, then the thought of tears returned like a tide and you were clearly trying to decide what mood you were in.

  I asked Nicole how she was coping with meeting so many members of Pauline’s extended family (the Feet, being Catholic, have many more relatives than the sparse, Protestant and picky Northes). She smiled quickly and said how pleasant everyone had been. But even the extended family seemed small to her, since she came from an Irish Catholic family with many siblings and branches and sub-branches.

  Bessie sat silent through all this, uncomprehending, and with a rank, almost obstinate look of bad temper on her face.

  ‘He’ll have bandy legs,’ she announced at one point when you stood up and pulled yourself along the seat of the couch — a feat Pauline, Nicole and I saw as so clever it was little less than a miracle.

  It was not going well. The eternal question of your age was asked again.

  I realised I needed to return Bessie to PA. She had had her cup of tea: ‘A nice cup of tea, Pete’ — her usual comment on tea brewed with tea leaves in a teapot, but here it was delivered like a challenge. Nicole and Pauline were silent a moment and agreed. ‘This table is a mess,’ Bess added. ‘You’ll never clean it up, Pete.’

  You suddenly started crying — a small crisis solved by Nicole getting you a bottle filled with formula and water. You were transferred to the sofa to sit alongside Pauline. You glugged away with that intense concentration, as if in sucking you were pulling the whole world into your insides for your delectation. Somehow Bess came to sit beside you on the sofa.

  Maybe she could see you better. Or maybe it was just your physical proximity spreading an aura. She suddenly became involved. You reached out, or perhaps your hand just projected out and your tiny fingers closed around her ancient hand. This engaged her further. ‘Poor little fellow,’ she murmured, I am not sure why. (Poor because defenceless? Or because so much lies ahead of you, almost certainly pain as well as satisfactions and times of happiness?) There was some further interaction with ancient and soft fingertips, and Pauline said to Nicole quietly, as one murmurs so as not to distract two wild animals grazing by a pool, to get out her iPhone. I did likewise.

  I took enough photographs to ensure that at least one of them would be okay. After this, the occasion was exhausted. The goodbyes were rather hurried. Pauline was very likely never going to see her great-aunt again but in the brouhaha of marshalling a baby out to the car this went unacknowledged. But I felt I would be seeing you again, so there was not a weighted feeling to my farewells. Bess sat through it all with the abstraction of a tired woman waiting for a bus that would never arrive.

  Later, reviewing the photographs, I selected one which caught Bessie’s delight in her contact with the child. Her hand is out and you have one of your fingers interlaced around hers. She is laughing with delight, as is Pauline. I put it on Facebook, explaining the situation and relationships. (‘One end of the family …’). Various friends commented kindly. I wondered to myself later the degree to which I was leading peop
le astray. The Facebook photo was calculated to warm and charm. What did they know of my mother’s cognitive problems? But somehow the juxtaposition of you, the youngest member of the family, meeting her, the oldest member of the family reaching the great age of one hundred, had a neatness to it that surpassed any equivocations. It was an image that said something about continuity, survival, change. You, like all babies, were a signpost to the future just as Bess was an implacable signpost to the distant past. Her being one hundred was a statement with its own gravity. As for your being eight months, this was such a fleeting attainment, it had its own poetry.

  IT WAS THE DAY AFTER Oliver — Ollie — met Bess. The phone had just rung. It was PA. Bess had vomited in the night, had diarrhoea, and was not able to keep down her breakfast. She was not dressing. She was staying in her room, lying on the top of her bed. The nurse described her condition as ‘very fragile’.

  When I went down to see her, Bess awoke, then drifted off to sleep, and I suddenly saw a vision of my father in extremis, when the face becomes stripped of all outerness, seems to look inward at the vast distance over which the soul has yet to travel.

  It’s strange really, Oliver, but I can’t help but feel Bess’s character was formed by her grandmother Betsy Bartlett as much as it was by her survival and endurance of the quake and other horrors. Grandmothers can be a formative influence on a child, a kind of distant beacon emitting a powerful guiding light. Betsy must have been tough as a young woman, as well as hard working. (Think of the young girl who bore a sack of flour on her back and walked for miles.) There’s some of this residual strength in my mother — a tensile quality — so that now that she is sick and lying in bed, her face devoid of make-up and somehow returned to a puritanical mask, every feature registering pain and yet endurance, it is to this woman, Betsy, that I return.

  WHEN THE YOUNG NURSE TALKS to me about the severity of Bess’s condition — she is frail anyway, a tiny bird of a woman, and now she is constantly vomiting as well as suffering diarrhoea — I suddenly think, in a clutch of panic, she may not last. But the nurse, who is kind and can see my concern, shrugs and says, ‘We don’t know what the future holds … but what we do know is she’s a trooper.’ That just about says it, this inheritance of a plain peasant strength. Bess is of the earth. She doesn’t have enough strength left to acknowledge me or play the slightly flirtatious game of being overjoyed to see me. She is almost mute. And when I leave her she is turning over in her narrow bed with the slowness of a sick animal, and she says to me something that I feel is almost symbolic: ‘I hope I can get comfortable. I just want to go off to sleep.’

  Is she lying there … dying? I am loath to use this verb, as she has such powers of recovery and I have rehearsed this moment so often when she seemed to reach the point of just-before-departure, then miraculously pulled back. This keeps me as a perpetual ageing child, a comic figure, an absurd creature, I know.

  But yesterday, I looked at her in her overheated room — it was thirty-two degrees outside, windless, part of a long summer drought which at times seemed as if it was part of the earth itself dying — and she was drifting in and out of sleep, her mouth open, her hair scuffed up behind her small skull. She looked to me like someone dying. When I walked into the room I received a shock. Her nightie was pulled up almost to crotch level and I saw her withered limbs. She barely opened her lids to glance at me, angling her head with difficulty. We exchanged little more than a slight greeting. I offered to plump up her pillows so she could sit more comfortably. She leaned forward so I could do so.

  ‘If this is dying, I wish it was over,’ she said.

  I thought back to my childhood, when I was in bed sick. It was the side bedroom at Point Chevalier, so I must have been very young, possibly five or six. It was when I still shared a bedroom with Russell. That room was always dark in the middle of the day, shaded by the house next door. The doctor was coming to visit. But what I recall is my mother coming into the room. I was lying in the muddle of a bed I had been in ever since I’d got sick, straying endlessly through sleep, in the timeless murk of not feeling well. She asked me to get up and perch on the side of the bed opposite — Russell’s. I did so while she remade my bed. The soft winnow of air as she fluffed out the sheets. Time slid down a slope. And when I got back in the bed there was the most delicious coolness. I lay back and felt a spasm of deep love for this person who looked after me, whose sole focus was me, who had given birth to me and whose love I depended on.

  Now it was me smoothing the pillow of my ancient mother.

  She had recently murmured to me, taking hold of my hand with a surprising strength, her fingers so soft and shiny, ‘I’m just so grateful for all you do for me, Pete.’ I tried to pull my hand away, feeling a rinse of guilt that I had not done more (perhaps I had organised to wash some clothing she had spilled some food down, or I had combed her hair or found her missing hearing aids). I saw that in a situation of drifting aloneness maybe any attention meant a great deal. Perhaps for a moment she surfaced back into her own life, where she was a person again, even a person who meant something, had some value.

  ‘You’re my pride and joy, Pete, you know that.’

  These words were quite genuinely said. But I felt only guilt, or, to be honest, a sense of pleasure lined with guilt, because some impatient part of me wanted her to be dead so I could get on with the rest of my life — in essence, be freed from this state of superannuated adolescence. Here we were, locked together still, both of us getting older and older and older, each one getting nearer the precipice, yet both of us, it seemed, holding onto one another, unwilling to let go.

  This is one version of the bond between a child and his mother, Oliver. Just one. Some people would say it is an example of the unhealthy closeness of a homosexual son to his mother — a staple of homophobic prejudice. Why cannot it just be called what it is — love?

  Lucky you, Oliver, who I saw bathed in the gaze of not only your two mothers but also grandparents, aunts, uncles, even distant cousins like myself, so far away from you genetically as to be an echo of an echo. Of course to be loved too much can be its own curse. If my soul was twisted and perverted and hurt by a father’s lack of love, this also put iron in my soul. It hardened me and gave me strength.

  Where is this taking me? To this moment now when I consider the death of my mother — the cessation of all the murmuring stories, half-truths, distortions, fairy stories of the past. But the fact is the reality of her death terrifies me.

  I could not understand where my mother’s digestive problems had come from. They began the day after she came to my house and met you, Oliver. It was not unusual for her to have what was euphemistically called ‘an upset stomach’ after eating at my place. This was, I worked out, because the food I cooked was so unlike the retirement village’s bland diet. There was probably too much fibre, too much ‘real’ food content. But this time she had eaten only a tiny portion of paleo almond cake. Would that have upset her so badly?

  Then I remembered ‘the stomach upset’ you had brought to New Zealand, one that was so volatile that everyone you came into contact with came down with it. It was two weeks at least since you had arrived. But could a very susceptible and fragile almost-one-hundred-year-old pick up a nascent bug from touch, or even the atmosphere? There was the photo of an intrigued and smiling Bess, her fingers interlaced with your fingers.

  In engineering what was essentially a photo op, had I in fact killed my mother?

  MARCH 2016

  She has been in bed for more than a week now. When I say to her, ‘You must get up. You’ll become bed-bound,’ she just looks at me. She has trouble hearing me, so I have to yell. ‘You’ll lose the use of your legs. They won’t work if you don’t use them.’ Then I make my threat: ‘You won’t be able to stay in your room, Mum. You’ll be shifted to the hospital.’ She reacts to this: her eyes focus on me and she says, ‘I’ve got to get up.’ But she makes no move and lies there, breathing shallowly. She forgets w
hat I’ve just said, and when I say, ‘Mum, you have to get up and get dressed, even if it’s just to sit in the chair,’ she replies, ‘Why? Why do I have to get up? There’s nothing to do,’ and she settles back into her bed. I can’t argue with that.

  Her hair is standing up at the back of her head. Her lids close and she drifts off into a light sleep. I look at her. I can see she’s tired of living but doesn’t have the will to die either. I have to tell her I am going away for a week. I have work to do in Auckland. This will end my attempts at supervision, of trying to persuade the nurses they must dress her, get her out of bed. A tray of entirely unsuitable lunch sits there — it is a meat stew, a large amount of mashed potato, not an invalid meal at all. She has eaten whatever the sweet is.

  I try to do what I can. When I come in I put some mānuka honey on a spoon to give her some energy. As I approach the bed she opens her mouth like a child and I place the spoon there and she sucks the honey off the spoon. Then I make tea. Talk is difficult and I have to fight hard not to look at my iPhone, a battle I often don’t win. I take some photos of her. I’m frightened — no, not frightened, but apprehensive she might slip into some other world while I’m away.

  ‘It’ll feel like a month,’ she says when I explain I’m away a week. I lie and say I will be back the following Sunday rather than Tuesday, knowing she won’t remember the precise day. I keep looking at her face intensely as if to memorise it — and the strangest thing happens. She suddenly changes back into the young mother I knew, the woman in her forties who was always rushing into rooms, or out in the car, hurrying along, full of energy. I can see her clearly. I say to her fondly, ‘You were always so full of get-up-and-go, Mum,’ consciously using her own mother’s highest term of approval. But here she is now, shipwrecked in old age.