Within Arm's Reach

by Ann Napolitano

  When I can think again, I think, My God, I must be dead.

  My mother speaks. No, Catharine, you’re not.

  My mother is smiling, and it is a smile I had seen many times before, during my childhood. It is the smile I’d always dreaded because it meant lies and craziness. I had hated to see my mother turn her eyes away from me to look at people she only imagined were there. But now she was pointing that loony smile straight at me. And she had said that I was alive. And somehow I knew my mother had engineered this moment. She had brought me my family.

  I scan their faces. Patrick is bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet, trying to quiet the baby boy. The infant and his father look so similar I feel a catch in my throat. Each has a frustrated, balled-up expression on his face. The three-year-old girl, my daughter, tugs on Patrick’s suit jacket, wanting his attention. Patrick’s face pinkens. I can tell he wants a drink. I can tell he is about to explode. I have seen that look before. I want to warn the children, to get them out of the way, but I can’t move.

  I told your father you would be able to see us, my mother says.

  Please help the babies, I say.

  My parents are not listening to me. They are sharing a look. They have forgotten me and mine. Patrick now has our little girl by the arm and he is shaking her, trying to make her quiet. At first she fights him and then she stops fighting and she moves like a rag doll under his touch. The twins, both crushed against Patrick’s chest, are shrieking at the top of their lungs. I feel my own breath leave me. Their screams are deafening. Their tiny faces turn purple.

  I think, Oh Jesus, it is happening all over again.

  And then everything gets louder, worse. The nasal roar of car horns and tires screeching overwhelms the cries of my babies, and then my car door flies open. I think, Oh thank goodness, I can go to them now. I can save them.

  But the road in front of me has emptied. My family has disappeared and Kelly’s husband, Louis, of all people, is leaning over me, unbuckling my seat belt, taking me by the elbow, half-lifting me out of the car into the clear white light of midday. He is talking to me. His words dance over my head like stars. My son-in-law tells me that I must hold myself together, that my children need me, that my influence is greater than I know, and that before I even think about disappearing—in any way—I need to make things right with them.

  LOUIS DRIVES me to the hospital against my will. I want to go home. I want to sit calmly in my room, among my things. I want to be alone, so I can figure out what is happening.

  But instead I am put in a wheelchair when I am perfectly capable of walking on my own, and wheeled into an exam room, where a young doctor with a bushy mustache and hair growing out of his ears pokes and prods me and sticks a needle into my forehead and asks stupid questions. When he leaves without even saying It was nice to meet you, or Good-bye , the nurse tells us to wait and then we are left alone.

  I give Louis a good glare now and ask, “What are we waiting for?”

  “They didn’t say,” he replies.

  This non-answer doesn’t surprise me. I have always liked my son-in-law, but he tends to be weak.

  There is a clatter out in the hall, and then Lila is standing in the doorway of the exam room. She is wearing a white coat like everyone else in this godforsaken place, but she has the clipped stride and stressed face of my second oldest grandchild. She is in her third year of medical school and she is a natural worrier. It’s clear that finding me here in her hospital as a patient has upset her hard-won sense of balance. I blame her father for this, too.

  She looks to him first. “Daddy, what’s going on?”

  “Sweetheart, hi. There was a little accident across the street from my meeting. I just happened to be there.”

  “I’m fine, Lila, don’t worry,” I say. “I had a fender bender, that’s all. I wouldn’t have even come here, but your father insisted. This is an obvious waste of time and money.”

  Louis clears his throat. “I told you I would cover any costs, Catharine.”

  “But the waste of time,” I say, and am surprised by how upset I sound.

  Lila moves to the side of the bed and takes my hand. She is checking my temperature, and to see if my skin is clammy or dry. Lila is my own personal health watch team. Every time I see her she takes my pulse and asks a few specific questions about how I’m feeling. Anger and fright struggle across her round face as she presses her fingers into mine. “How many stitches did they give you?” she asks. “What happened?”

  I wave my free hand toward her father. “Louis, why don’t you go and track down that woman who said she would check me out. Lila will keep me company.”

  Louis seems relieved to be freed into motion. “Right,” he says. “I’ll see if I can’t speed things up a little.”

  We are not a touchy-feely family, and I can tell Lila is as aware as I am that my hand is still in hers. I pull away slowly. I say, “Don’t you look professional, in your white coat.”

  Lila puffs up with pride. “My coat is shorter than the doctor’s,” she says. “That’s how people distinguish the students from the real thing. But I did get to put in stitches yesterday morning. It was kind of an honor, being allowed to do that.”

  I nod, but I am only half-listening. It has occurred to me that I should take advantage of this time with Lila. If I am going crazy I should make something positive come out of it. I need to talk about my family to my family.

  “Gram,” Lila says. She still looks shaken. “Do you think it’s possible for people to change?”

  I am already on my own track; I don’t know what she means, and I can’t stop to think about it. I say, “I want to get the entire family together for Easter.”

  Lila squints. “Easter is in a few weeks. Everyone? Even Uncle Pat?”

  “Everyone. And I want to have the party at your and Gracie’s house.”

  Lila takes a step away. She has her doctor-in-training expression back on. She thinks I’ve become disoriented, that I don’t know what I’m saying. “You mean Gracie’s house, don’t you, Gram? I’m just staying there for a few days while I sort out my medical school housing. You know that.”

  “I don’t want you to leave her. I want you to live with her for good.”

  Lila gives a short laugh that doesn’t sound at all amused. “What are you talking about? Gracie and I haven’t lived together since we were kids, and there are good reasons for that. Besides, you know that I need to live alone.”

  “Nobody needs to live alone. You’re just more comfortable that way. A little discomfort might do you good.”

  Lila is squinting so hard her brown eyes have almost disappeared.

  “Look, dear.” I try to make my voice softer, more charming. I know how stubborn my granddaughter is. By pushing her I am just pushing her away. “Your sister needs your level head. You’ve always had more common sense. Besides,” I say, “it must be financially difficult for you to afford your own apartment. Living with your sister makes sense on so many levels.”

  “I need my own space, Gram, whether you believe it or not. It’s not that easy around here and I need a place to go where I can lock the door and be alone.”

  I lean forward. I want my grandchildren, and everyone I love, to be strong and tough. Sometimes that requires my giving them a little shove. “Who ever said becoming a doctor was going to be easy? Life is not supposed to be easy, Lila. Easy is a cop-out.”

  Lila has darker hair and more freckles than her sister. Gracie is pale of skin, hair, and eyes. Gracie often looks washed out, but when she’s happy, she is lit by an inner light. Lila always looks strong and vibrant and, at the moment, angry. She is a spotlight to her sister’s candle.

  I don’t look away from her gaze. If Lila wants a staring contest, I will win. She should know that much by now. I say, “So we’ll all gather at your house then, for Easter. I can’t fit everyone into my room at the home, and your mother gets too stressed out when she has to host these kinds of gatherings. You and yo
ur sister will help me, won’t you?”

  Lila opens her mouth to speak, but the nurse comes in then, a clipboard in her arms, announcing in a bullhorn voice that she is here to check me out. Louis is one step behind her. I’m not concerned that our conversation is cut short. If Lila has something else to say, I’m sure she’ll track me down and let me hear it.

  WHEN I lay my hand on the doorknob of my room at the Christian Home for the Elderly, I am suddenly so weak I have a hard time turning it. I didn’t realize how shaken the accident had left me until then. But I feel better with each step inside. My room reminds me of the hotel suites where I grew up. I am safe in this place, which reduces my whole life to one room. In old-age homes, as in hotels, personal taste and unique touches are necessary to distinguish your space from that of your neighbor next door. It is your possessions—your favorite chair, your grandfather clock, your large black-and-white photograph of every single one of your children smiling at the same moment—that make it home, not a mortgage or a backyard or a husband or a view. This is how my parents lived their entire lives, and this is how I am able to feel close to them now. I prefer feeling their presence in this room to confronting their dead selves in the middle of the road in the middle of the town that I have lived in for most of my adult life.

  We lived in three different hotel suites while I was growing up, in three different cities. One in Atlantic City, one in New York City, and the last in St. Louis. It was in that hotel suite that Patrick courted me, and it was in that hotel suite that I left my parents behind when I headed east as a new wife.

  I met my husband when I was twenty-three years old, and already an old maid. My two sisters had long since married. I lived with my mother and father in the hotel my father ran. I had graduated from college the year before, and upon my return, the few friends I had left from the area called me a snob within my hearing and ignored me when I spoke to them directly. I didn’t care. I was proud of my degree, a Bachelor of the Arts in Nutrition. I was content to live a life that consisted of going to church each morning with Mother and eating dinner with her and my father each night. I was never one who needed much company.

  My parents were both from Ireland, but my father seemed to have become American the minute his feet hit Massachusetts soil. He was tall and he stood up straight. He always wore a three-piece suit, rarely drank, and had a firm handshake. He was a successful man who managed four-star hotels in major cities. He had met Franklin Delano Roosevelt and played golf with Babe Ruth. He was a wonderful father.

  My mother, on the other hand, had only seemed to grow more Irish, and more eccentric, with each year in the States. Her brogue became so strong that only our family could understand her. During thunderstorms, she hid in the coat closet and prayed at the top of her lungs. She carried a rosary in every pocket; most days she had two or three on her at a time. She would nervously touch the front pocket of her dress, and then her handbag, and then her closed right palm, checking on, reaching for, the ever-present beads. Seated at the breakfast table in our hotel suite, she would often address the empty chair by the window as if it were filled by whomever she was missing most from Ireland just then. Her mother, or her sister Nancy, or her girlhood friend Diandra. “Look, girls,” she would say, “see the smile your aunt Nancy has on her face? She always did love my tea best. Say good morning to her, girls. Mind your manners, won’t you.”

  My father would play along. If he’d just walked into the room, he would act pleased to have the chance to chat with Nancy. He behaved as though my mother had done him a favor by delivering her to our hotel suite. “How’s the weather in old potato land?” he would say to the empty chair by the window. “Can’t say that I miss the gray skies, but I do miss your lovely face, Nancy lass. And I can’t tell you how much Lorna longs for your company.”

  I knew my father did not really believe that my aunt was sitting there under the ray of sunlight, the way my mother did. And as much as I loved him, I could never understand why he pretended to share her delusions. Why did he appear to love my mother more for providing him with her silly games and fantasies? Why did he encourage her? It made no sense. When my mother insisted that I address Aunt Nancy, or Diandra, or some other person I had never even laid eyes on, much less spoken to, all I could do was smile stiffly at the empty chair. I was never rude, but I refused to play along.

  On my thirteenth birthday, when my father had taken me out alone for an ice cream, I asked him why he didn’t lay down the law with Mother and tell her she was acting crazy.

  “You’re not doing her any favors, Papa.” I sat up straight on the counter stool, so pleased that I was finally an adult, and could finally have this discussion with my father. We could speak openly, as one grown-up who had put up with my mother for many years to another. “She thinks it’s acceptable to act the way she does because you don’t tell her otherwise. If you told her to stop it, she would. Then we could be a normal family. We could talk about normal things. We wouldn’t be forced to offer tea and dinner rolls to her, to her”—I struggled for the right word—“her ghosts.”

  My father put his elbows on the counter, then folded his hands under his chin. His movements were measured and calm. “Another root beer when you have a moment please, ma’am,” he said to the waitress. “Catharine, your mother simply brings more life to the room. She is not crazy. She’s Irish in a way you and I are not. You must treat her with respect.”

  I gasped. I was never reprimanded. I never did anything wrong. I couldn’t bear for him to think I did. “I love Mother,” I said. “I do respect her.”

  But the second part was a lie, and I never got over feeling badly about that. I tried to make up for the lack of respect by loving her even more. I concentrated on how to love her better. I showed her my love every day by running errands, by buying a single yellow daisy to sit in a cup on the windowsill. I gave orders to and fielded complaints from the hotel maids, because I knew Mother hated to look at or talk to black people. I kept her company while my father was downstairs in the offices. I stayed home long after my sisters had married and left. It seemed clear that I would have to give up my entire life in order to prove I respected my mother. And I was prepared to do that.

  But then Patrick appeared, and he offered me a way out.

  I met Patrick McLaughlin in the dining room of the hotel. I knew my father had engineered the meeting. Patrick was a young lawyer from New Jersey, in town on business. He met my father’s qualifications for a son-in-law: He was Irish and he could support me. His parents were poor immigrants who ran a grocery store in Paterson and had sacrificed everything to put their sons through school. But there was no Paterson and no grocery store in Patrick McLaughlin’s walk. He was cocky. He carried himself like he thought he was the President, the cat’s meow, and the next in line for the throne all rolled into one. I didn’t think much of him, until I saw him with my mother.

  The first evening he visited our hotel suite, my mother told a story about her home (a story she started reciting before I was born, and which seemed to go on for as long as she was alive, without end) and in the middle Patrick joined in. He spoke about Ireland, too, even though he had never been there. He said his mother was from County Wicklow, and my mother beamed. She leaned forward, her hands folded over her heart, and told him she had spoken to her old next-door neighbor Diandra that morning over tea. Diandra had sat right there—and my mother pointed at that damned empty chair I wished every day someone would take a match to. Patrick nodded; his eyes lit up. I gave him a sharp look and saw that he understood that Diandra had not really been here. Like my father, he was playing along, not missing a beat. Patrick told me later that at that moment he had felt like he was home.

  I never saw Patrick drink during his stay in St. Louis, so it was only in his interaction with my mother that I noticed his Irishness. I thought of what my father had told me ten years earlier, and knew that Patrick was crazy Irish in the same way my mother was. Yet he was smart, too, a lawyer, and sensibl
e. He had a down payment on a house in a town called Ridgewood in New Jersey. He was thirty years old. He was ready to marry. I couldn’t get over the fact that he was equally comfortable talking money with Father and leprechauns with Mother. He presented a package in which I could accept the traits he shared with my mother. I realized, the first evening he sat in our suite, his hat on his knee, that the answer I had never even imagined existed lay in Patrick McLaughlin. I would be able to love, and, most importantly, respect my mother through him.

  We married three months later, in front of thirteen guests, at St. Paul’s Church, two blocks from the hotel. Patrick wore white gloves and a morning suit. I wore a floor-length dress with tiny buttons running from the nape of my neck down to the hem. We left for New Jersey the next morning in the middle of a thunderstorm. My father drove us to the train station, and as we pulled away from the hotel I waved out the back window of the car in the direction of the suite’s windows, even though I knew my mother would be nowhere near the window in this kind of weather. She would be deep in the closet with the door shut, her face buried in my father’s overcoat, her rosary beads clutched to her chest. My mother’s prayers and violent claps of thunder swept me out of St. Louis.

  I planned to go back for a visit that Christmas, but by then I was too far along with the baby to travel. And then came Kelly and Patrick Jr. and life became so that I was rarely able to leave the house for a few hours, much less cross the country for a few days. Father came to visit when my first child died, but Mother didn’t make the trip. I never saw her again.

  LOUIS

  I have just walked out of a pointless meeting with the mayor, Vince Carrelli, and the town council when the accident happens. I am standing on the steps of the Municipal Building, trying to decide if it’s worth going back in to have another word with Vince, who is acting like an idiot because I caught him drinking again last week, when I recognize Catharine’s gray Lincoln heading down the street.