The truth is I have not bought gifts for many years. It was one of the themes in my mother’s frequent harangues during the short time between Eliot’s death and her own: “You need to quit thinking about yourself! Lots of other women have lost their husbands! You need to snap out of your depression! Go out and do something for somebody else! Buy somebody a present and write them a nice note of appreciation!”
The somebody to whom she was referring was herself. After Mother’s Day, Christmas, or her birthday, she would say to me, “Well, I heard from Regina and Virginia both—right on time, too.” The weighty pause that followed completed the meaning: “But you, my ungrateful self-absorbed middle daughter, couldn’t spare the little bit of time it would take to buy me a gift and write a few words on a card.”
She continued such speeches even after coming to live with me during her last few months of life. “Regina called me twice yesterday,” she might say, or “Look at all these cards Virginia has sent me.” Evidently the fact that I was caring for her—feeding her with a spoon, dressing her, washing her soiled underwear—escaped her. I was the dutiful daughter. In her way of thinking, phone calls and cards were acts of love; bathing her and changing her sheets did not qualify.
And my mother was right. After Eliot’s death I had become self-absorbed. I couldn’t spare the time for anyone else. It took all of my emotional and rational resources merely to make it through a day. I began doing whatever seemed necessary for survival, dispensing with the niceties of social interaction. Whereas I had once been friendly and courteous, I was now glum, even gruff. Don’t tell me such a change cannot happen overnight. It can and it did. I know the kinds of things others must have been saying behind my back: “She just walked away right in the middle of something I was saying! She didn’t even answer when I called to her, just kept walking!”
But people love sentimental explanations for bad behavior. I was thought to be emotionally prostrate over the loss of my husband. I was an object of pity. I was excused by virtue of my great love and of the great empty hole in my heart. I let the assumption stand. I learned that silence is the best refuge from responsibility. No need to tell lies. Say nothing and let the merciful and the ignorant think what they will.
The act of teaching, which in earlier years had been my purpose for living, was now only a framework to hold my days together. Though I taught for almost ten more years after Eliot’s death, my students were like walk-ons in a play—necessary for the illusion of reality but not memorable. I could have been a cardboard cutout standing at the front of the classroom for all the warmth that passed between us.
I think of how many worthy institutions become nothing more than props for mankind: education, art, religion, law, marriage. “So strong a prop to support so weak a burden.” These words from the dedication of Shakespeare’s poem Venus and Adonis come to mind. The prop in this case was the Earl of Southampton, to whom the poem was dedicated, and the burden was the poem itself. A self-deprecating declaration by the bard. But again, my logic fails. The Earl of Southampton would still have existed without the poem. Without humans, however, the institutions of man could not exist. It is men, weak though they are, who create the props on which they lean. In their ideal form, institutions may possess a strength that is almost holy. Ideal forms are an extinct breed, however, if indeed they ever existed at all.
The television describes the “holiday atmosphere” that surrounded Oliver and his owner during the three weeks of their Japanese tour in 1976. I am reminded that the word holiday was originally “holy day.” Pictures are shown of Oliver wearing a tuxedo at a banquet, drinking beer, smoking a cigar, dressed for bed in a kimono. I am reminded of the many ways man corrupts the institutions that support him, that give his life meaning.
I tell Patrick that I have no Christmas gifts to buy, that holidays are nothing more than props. He is momentarily silenced. I hear him scraping his plate with his fork.
Oliver displays extraordinary behavior for a chimpanzee, the television reports. Though he is now old by chimp standards—in his midforties—he once distinguished himself by walking on two legs all the time, by doing simple house chores for his trainer, by pouring himself a drink and watching television at night. Shunned by other chimps, he has always preferred the company of humans, especially women.
Patrick gets up from the table. He takes a few steps toward my recliner, then clears his throat. “Well, Aunt Sophie, I guess I’ll go now,” he says, and I nod but don’t look at him. If I had the energy, I might remind him that I never invited him to stay in the first place. But I say nothing. Rudeness often requires energy. On the television screen Oliver is hugging people and shaking hands. He is in a large crowd. In another shot he is eating a jelly sandwich and drinking a cup of coffee.
“I see the book there beside you,” Patrick says, taking another sip of his own coffee. “Do you ever look at it?”
I nod again. I have never thanked him for the bird book, but neither has he ever thanked me for the wealth that is to be his upon my death. Nor is he likely to. When it is his, I will be beyond thanking. Thanking is another of man’s conventions worn out from overuse. I recall reading in my book about certain birds that show no gratitude, that fall upon their food cruelly, sometimes impaling it on a spike until they feel like eating it.
Patrick takes another slurp of coffee, then moves toward the door, stopping first to stack his dessert saucer on top of mine. He drops one of the forks on his way out and bends to retrieve it. He then returns to get my glass and the used napkins from the table. When he finally closes the door, he has not thought to wipe off the round table. I want to call after him, to tell him to check on Rachel and bring me a report, but I say nothing. His checking would include too much talking, first to Rachel and then to me.
I wonder what Patrick’s Christmas gift to Rachel will be. I wonder if he buys her things that he wants. One of the English teachers at South Wesleyan used to tell us about the gifts her husband bought for her: fishing rods, circular saws, hunting knives. She started playing his game by buying him pearl necklaces, leather purses, and silk lingerie. The arrangement worked quite well, she said. Once opened, the gift was simply handed over to the buyer. Each looked forward to the other one’s birthday more than his own. On anniversaries and at Christmas, they were always assured of receiving gifts they knew they would like and use.
I wonder what Rachel would request from Patrick if asked for a gift list. Would she ask for clothing? I can’t imagine that she spends time wishing for a new pair of denim jeans or a new flannel shirt. She wears a dress only on Sunday. One dress worn once a week would last a long time. Her only jewelry is a wedding band and an engagement ring with a diamond not much bigger than a sesame seed.
Perhaps Rachel would put books and bath powder on her gift list. While staying in the back bedroom during the rewiring project, I went into Patrick and Rachel’s bedroom one day while Rachel was out grocery shopping. I saw two books on the table beside their bed: a Bible and a book titled Old-Fashioned Grace for Modern Times. In their bathroom I saw a pair of men’s pajamas on a hook. Something told me they were Rachel’s, not Patrick’s. I saw bath powder in a round pink box beside the sink and another book, titled Looking to Heaven, on top of the commode.
Folded inside my book of Easy to Read Stories is an old letter written in my own hand in the year 1936. I was ten years old and still believed in Santa Claus, to whom the letter was addressed. “Dear Santa Claus,” the letter reads, “I am going to write you and tell you what I want. I want a blackboard that has a seat to it, and it has a felt eraser. One side is black and the other side is white. You can use it as a desk. There are three pieces of chalk for the black side and four colored pieces for the white side. I want a yo-yo in my stocking. I want a house set. I want six Shirley Temple books. I want a watch that costs $1.98. It is in the Sears Roebuck book. And ten pounds of hard candy and all kind of nuts and fruit. The candy is not stick candy. Your friend, Sophia Langham.”
&
nbsp; I am quite certain that I didn’t receive any of these items that Christmas, except perhaps the candy and fruit. I keep the letter, however, as a relic of hope and innocence, as well as a reminder of broken promises. My mother had told me she would mail my letter to Santa Claus. I found it in her drawer, folded inside her box of handkerchiefs, the next summer.
And what would I request today if asked for a Christmas list? The things an old woman wants can’t be purchased with money. My list would be blank.
A picture of Oliver, taken a year ago, fills the television screen. He is hunched in the corner of what appears to be a wooden cage, wearing his age with no trace of dignity—shaggy fur, pot belly, leathery hands, milky eyes. No celebrity now. No grinning poses in tuxedo or kimono. No cigar or jelly sandwich. No holiday atmosphere.
Chapter 12
Men Must Endure Their Going Hence
Carolina wrens are stay-at-home birds, weathering all kinds of winters to increase their population in a region until a severe cold spell kills them off in large numbers. But the process of repopulating begins again, and new nesting sites soon appear in mailboxes, baskets, even pockets of old coats.
Before she died, my mother said to me numbers of times, “Getting old is no fun, Sophie. Just wait. Your turn is coming.” I was almost fifty-eight when she came to live out her last few months at my house in Carlton, Kentucky. I drove to Mississippi to get her in May, and she timed her death conveniently so that I was free again by the end of September. I speak amiss. There was nothing convenient about the last five months of my mother’s life. Instead of five months, it seemed like five decades. After she died, I had three months, from October through December, to try to rid my house of the smell of death before returning to the classroom in January.
The business one must see to when undertaking the care of a deathbed patient is enormous. It fell to me to clear out my mother’s apartment, where she had lived after selling the boardinghouse in Methuselah, Mississippi, and to sort through her papers and personal effects. She was unable to help in any way, and my sisters, both of whom lived in Vicksburg, less than two hundred miles away, claimed to have family conflicts or health issues that prevented them from driving to Methuselah to lend a hand.
The small towns of Mississippi, like those of any state, have colorful names. Methuselah was only one of many. Hard Cash, Whynot, Increase, Picayune, Errata, Pentecost, and Soso—these are a few others I recall. But every state has its share. In Kentucky you will find Rabbit Hash, Dwarf, Monkeys Eyebrow, Top Most, and Hell for Sure. Arkansas has Need More, Blue Eye, and Ink, and on your way through Louisiana you might pass through Jigger, Plain Dealing, and Many. Georgia has a Lax, Tax, and Wax, as well as a Social Circle, Newborn, Between, and Poetry. Unusual names of towns used to give me pleasure for reasons I no longer remember.
My mother’s apartment was a shambles. She shouldn’t have been living alone. Since Eliot’s death I had not been to see her, and my phone calls had been distracted and infrequent. In my widowhood I hadn’t realized she had become an old woman. Three years before Eliot died, when she was eighty, she had ridden a bus to Bean Station, Tennessee—a state that also boasts the towns of Belt Buckle, Difficult, and Frog Jump—to visit her youngest brother, had found him sick in bed with pneumonia, and had stayed two months to see him back on his feet.
This was before my world changed, when I still thought life was a good and simple proposition, when the idea of nursing a relative to health seemed a decent and reasonable thing to do. I am now the same age my mother was when she spent those two months in Bean Station, Tennessee, emptying bedpans, preparing meals, and keeping nighttime vigils. The thought of my doing such a thing now, possessing either the ability or the impulse to do so, is beyond my powers of imagination.
Sometime during the five years following my mother’s trip to see Uncle Abe, both her mind and body began to break down. My sisters detected it before I did, both of them having more stamina than I for telephone conversations and both of them driving over together for short visits twice a year. When I entered my time of trouble, beginning with the firing of the gun in Alonso’s hand, I had no room in my heart and mind for my mother’s well-being. This sounds hard, but it is true. I suffered her phone calls, her admonitions to “get over” my grief, her accusations about my selfishness in the absence of birthday and Christmas gifts, hearing it all as from a great distance, muffled and garbled.
I soon discovered that her words were indeed muffled and garbled, not because of distance but because she was a sick woman. For three years following Eliot’s death, I knew I had a mother, yes, and that she was living in an apartment in Methuselah, Mississippi. If asked her age, I would have known she was in her eighties, could have figured it to the exact year if necessary. I would not have known, however, that she was inventing and diagnosing illnesses for herself, ingesting large quantities of medications, some of it outdated leftover prescriptions of my father’s and a great deal of it taken off drugstore shelves and slipped into her pocketbook.
And suddenly, it seemed, everyone was alarmed. Within the space of two days, I received four phone calls—one each from Regina and Virginia, one from Uncle Abe, and one from my mother’s landlady, all apprising me that my mother’s condition was extremely precarious. I received the first one on a Saturday morning in early May as I was grading the last of a set of freshman research papers on a topic of my choosing: “The Death of John F. Kennedy—Lone Assassin or Conspiracy?” By Sunday evening I knew that there was a conspiracy against me, to relieve everyone of the burden caused by my mother’s physical and mental deterioration.
I was unattached, with no husband or children. In spite of my weight I was in moderately good health. I had money, one of my primary qualifications. I had a house with an extra bedroom. I had time, at least imminently, with the summer ahead of me, and if need be, a rich single woman could take as much time as she needed to attend to the urgent task of nursing her mother. This was the thinking of my sisters and uncle. And there was no loophole in the argument. I fell victim to the lone assassin of logic.
It could be asserted that my life suddenly had purpose. It was a purpose I was not eager to embrace, yet one I could not escape. I knew Regina and Virginia felt, as my mother had, that it was time for me to become involved with life again, specifically with my mother’s life. The word involved is a frightening thing, encompassing such extremes as minimal, polite contact at the one end and absolute immersion at the other. I knew toward which end I was headed. I had the sense of one about to be tortured, who sees his persecutor standing over him, the glint of a blade in one hand, a black hood in the other. This is a grim metaphor for the care of a loved one, yet I speak the truth. I could feel the sensation of too little air to breathe.
And so I gave myself to duty. I finished grading my papers, arranged for a colleague to cover my remaining classes and proctor my exams, received permission to take an early leave, and drove to Methuselah. Never having had children of my own to tend, I felt ill-equipped in a physical sense. Though I had performed basic first-aid skills in my years of teaching elementary school, I knew my mother’s illness would require more than the application of Band-Aids, Mercurochrome, and ice packs.
There was no talk of nursing homes or other facilities. My mother had always said she wouldn’t submit to a “dumping place,” as she put it, and not one of us was willing to test her. My mother had developed a formidable temper in her old age. My sisters and I had heard her say many times since our father’s death, “I will not die in a hospital or a nursing home. I will kill myself, or someone else, if you ever take me to one. If you try it, my spirit will haunt you for the rest of your lives.” I have no doubt that she would have kept her word.
She had not been to a doctor for a checkup in over thirty years, ever since a certain Dr. Halliday, a new doctor in Methuselah, had recommended a hysterectomy, which she considered “mighty presumptuous of a young doctor.” She ignored his recommendation and began ordering herbal medici
nes to treat her symptoms.
During my father’s illness several years later, she had become further convinced that the medical profession as a whole was not only untrustworthy but also aggressively venal, seeking opportunities to defraud patients of their money by what she called their “hobby of waving their knives around,” by which she meant unnecessary surgeries. When Daddy died, she claimed grounds for numerous potential malpractice lawsuits against various doctors who had overlooked obvious red flags, misprescribed medications, botched simple office procedures, and in general failed to cure him, as if a heart aneurysm was something you could fix with the right pill.
“Step foot inside a doctor’s office,” she would say, “and you’ll never be well again.” She delivered the speech regularly: First you have the checkup, she said, at which time the problem is first brought to light, then another checkup to verify the first one, then a pre-operation visit, then the surgery, then the post-surgery checkup, then the post-post-surgery checkup, by which time “They’ve gone and found something else wrong with you that starts the whole cycle over again.” It was her belief that they “had their hand inside your pocketbook from day one” and “weren’t about to take it out.” They knew where their fancy cars and expensive vacations came from. Further, she suspected many male doctors of having gone into the business simply so they could see naked women.
This was the woman I took home with me to Carlton, Kentucky. I did not know the exact nature or extent of her ailments, except for a few general self-diagnoses she offered from articles she had read in medical magazines, one of which was irritable bowel syndrome. “I’ve had it for years,” she said, “but it’s gotten worse. Lots worse. And this is bad, too,” she said, showing me her stomach. “That’s where it’s growing.” This was no mere irritability. It was a raging distemper.
Winter Birds Page 12
