The Pursuit of Happiness (2001)

by Douglas Kennedy

  I caught Meg’s glance - imploring me not to let on that I knew about Charlie’s unemployed status. Isn’t it amazing how family life is an ever-widening web of petty confidences and ‘please don’t tell your brother I told you …’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Charlie,’ I said. ‘And I’m sorry I boxed your ears before. It’s a bad day and …’

  Charlie silenced me by leaning forward and giving me a fast buzz on the cheek.

  ‘Let’s keep in touch, eh?’ he said.

  ‘That’s really up to you, Charlie.’

  My brother didn’t respond to that comment. He simply shrugged sadly and headed to the front door. When he got there, he turned back towards me. A look passed between us. It only lasted a nanosecond, but it said it all: please forgive me.

  In that sad nanosecond, I felt a surge of pity for my brother. He appeared so bloated and battered by life; as trapped and cornered as a deer staring straight into the oncoming headlights. Life had not worked out for him - and he now radiated disappointment. I could certainly sympathize with his sense of letdown. Because, with the serendipitous exception of my son, I was not exactly a walking advertisement for personal fulfilment.

  ‘Goodbye, Katie,’ Charlie said. He opened the front door. I turned away from my brother and disappeared into the bathroom. When I came out two minutes later, I was relieved to see that he’d left.

  Just as I was also relieved that the rest of the assembled mourners began to make their goodbyes. There were a couple of people from the building, and some old friends of Mom - increasingly frail women in their seventies, trying to make pleasant chit-chat, and appear reasonably spirited, and not think too much about the fact that, one by one, their contemporaries were vanishing.

  By three, everyone had gone - except for Meg and Rozella, the large, cheerful, middle-aged Dominican woman I had hired, two years ago, to clean Mom’s apartment twice a week. She ended up being a full-time nurse after Mom checked herself out of Sloan-Kettering.

  ‘I’m not dying in some beige room with fluorescent lighting,’ she told me the morning her oncologist informed her the cancer was terminal.

  I heard myself saying, ‘You’re not dying, Mom.’

  She reached out from the bed and took my hand.

  ‘You can’t fight City Hall, dear.’

  ‘The doctor said it could be months …’

  Her voice remained calm, strangely serene.

  ‘At the very outset. From where I’m sitting, I would say three weeks maximum. Which, quite frankly, is better than I expected …’

  ‘Must you always, always look on the bright side, Mom?’ Oh Christ, what am I saying here? I grasped her hand tighter. ‘I didn’t mean that. It’s just …’

  She stared at me critically.

  ‘You’ve never really figured me out, have you?’ she said.

  Before I had a chance to offer up some weak refutation, she reached out and hit the call button by her hospital bed.

  ‘I’m going to ask the nurse to get me dressed and help me pack up my things. So if you wouldn’t mind giving me fifteen minutes

  ‘I’ll get you dressed, Mom.’

  ‘No need, dear.’

  ‘But I want to.’

  ‘Go get yourself a cup of coffee, dear. The nurse will take care of everything.’

  ‘Why won’t you let me … ?’ I suddenly sounded like a whiny fourteen-year-old. My mom simply smiled, knowing she’d checkmated me.

  ‘You run along now, dear. But don’t be longer than fifteen minutes - because if I’m not gone by noon, they charge another full day for the room.’

  ‘So what?’ I felt like yelling. ‘Blue Cross is picking up the tab.’ But I knew what her response would be.

  It’s still not fair to take advantage of a good, dependable company like Blue Cross.

  And I would then wonder (for around the zillionth time) why I could never win an argument with her.

  You’ve never really figured me out, have you?

  Damn her for knowing me too well. As usual, she was right on the money. I never understood her. Never understood how she could be so equanimous in the face of so many disappointments, so many adversities. From the few hints that she had dropped (and from what Charlie told me when we used to talk), I sensed that her marriage hadn’t exactly been happy. Her husband had died young. He’d left her no money. Her only son had estranged himself from the family. And her only daughter was Ms Discontented who couldn’t understand why her mom refused to scream and shout about life’s many letdowns. Or why, now, at the end of her life, she was so damn accepting, and would think it bad manners to rage against the dying of the light. But that was always her fortitudinous style. She never showed her hand, never articulated the inherent sadness which so clearly lurked behind her stoical veneer.

  But she was certainly right about the timetable of her illness. She didn’t last months. She lasted less than two weeks. I hired Rozella on a twenty-four-hour care basis - and felt guilty about not being with Mom full time. But I was under insane pressure at work with a big new account, and I had Ethan to look after (being pigheaded, I also didn’t want to ask Matt for any favors). So I could only squeeze in three hours a day with her.

  The end was fast. Rozella woke me at four a.m. last Tuesday, and simply said, ‘You must come now.’

  Fortunately I had already worked out an emergency plan for this exact moment with a new-found friend named Christine - who lived two floors above me in my building, and was a fellow member of the Divorced Moms Club. Though Ethan loudly objected, I managed to get him out of bed and delivered him to Christine, who immediately put him back to bed on her sofa, relieved me of his school clothes, and promised to deliver him to Allan-Stevenson that morning.

  Then I raced downstairs, got the doorman to find me a cab, and told the driver that I’d tip him five bucks if he could make it across town to 84th and West End in fifteen minutes.

  He did it in ten. Which was a good thing - as Mom went just five minutes after I walked through the door.

  I found Rozella standing at the foot of her bed, sobbing quietly. She put her arms around me, and whispered, ‘She’s here, but not here.’

  That was a nice way of saying she had slipped into a coma. Which, honestly, was something of a relief to me - because I was secretly terrified of this deathbed scene. Of saying the right, final thing. Because there is no right or final thing to say. Anyway she couldn’t hear me now - so any melodramatic ‘I love you, Mom!’ proclamations would have been for my benefit alone. At a momentous moment like this one, words are less-than-cheap. And they couldn’t assuage the guilt I was feeling.

  So I simply sat on the bed, and took Mom’s still-warm hand, and gripped it tightly, and tried to remember my first recollection of her, and suddenly saw her as an animated, pretty young woman holding my four-year-old hand as we walked to the playground in Riverside Park, and thought how this wasn’t a significant or crucial memory, just something ordinary, and how back then she was fifteen years younger than I am now, and how we forget all those walks to the park, and the emergency trips to the pediatrician with tonsillitis, and getting picked up after school, and being schlepped around town for shoes or clothes or Girl Scout meetings, and all the other scheduling minutiae that comes with being a parent, and how my mom always tried so hard with me, and how I could never really see that, and how I hated my neediness towards her, and wished that I could have somehow made her happier, and how, back when I was four, she would always go on the slide with me, always sit in the adjoining swing, rocking back and forth, and how, suddenly, there we were, mother and daughter swinging higher into the sky, an autumn day in ‘59, the sun shining, my world cozy, secure, loving, my mother laughing, and …

  She took three sharp intakes of breath. Then there was silence. I must have sat there for another fifteen minutes, still holding her hand, feeling a gradual chill drift into her fingers. Eventually, Rozella gently took me by the shoulders and stood me upright. There were tears in her eyes
, but none in mine. Perhaps because I was just too paralyzed to cry.

  Rozella leaned over and shut Mom’s eyes. Then she crossed herself and said a Hail Mary. I engaged in a different sort of ritual: I went into the living room, poured myself a large Scotch, threw it back, then picked up the phone and dialed 911.

  ‘What kind of emergency do you want to report?’ asked the operator.

  ‘It’s not an emergency,’ I said. ‘Just a death.’

  ‘What sort of death?’

  ‘Natural.’ But I could have added: ‘A very quiet death. Dignified. Stoic. Borne without complaint’

  My mother died the way she lived.

  I stood by the bed, listening to Rozella wash up the dishes from the wake. Just three days ago Mom lay here. Out of nowhere I suddenly remembered something that a guy named Dave Schroeder recently told me. He was a freelance magazine writer: smart as hell, well-traveled, but still trying to make a name for himself at forty. I’d gone out with him twice. He dropped me when I wouldn’t sleep with him after the second date. Had he waited until the third date, he might have gotten lucky. But anyway … he did tell me one great story: about being in Berlin on the night the Wall was breached, then coming back a year later to find that that monstrous structure - the defining, bloodstained rampart of the Cold War - had simply vanished from view. Even the famous Customs Shed at Checkpoint Charlie had been dismantled, and the old Bulgarian Trade Mission on the eastern side of the Checkpoint had been replaced by an outlet of Benetton.

  ‘It was like this terrible thing, this crucial cornerstone of twentieth-century history, never existed,’ Dave told me. ‘And it got me thinking: the moment we end an argument is the moment we obliterate any history of that argument. It’s a basic human trait: to sanitize the past, in order to move on.’

  I looked down again at my mother’s bed. And remembered the soiled sheets, the sodden pillows, the way she would almost claw the mattress before the morphine kicked in. Now it was neatly remade, with laundered sheets and a bedspread that had just come back from the dry cleaner’s. The idea that she died right here already seemed surreal, impossible. A week from now - after Rozella and I packed up the apartment, and the Goodwill Industries people hauled off all the furniture I planned to give away - what tangible evidence would be left of my mom’s time on the planet? A few material possessions (her engagement ring, a brooch or two), a few photographs, and …

  Nothing else - except, of course, the space she would permanently occupy inside my head. A space she now shared with the dad I never knew.

  And when Charlie and I both died … ping. That would be it for Dorothy and Jack Malone. Their impact on human life rubbed right out. Just as my lasting imprint will be Ethan. For as long as he’s here …

  I shuddered, and suddenly felt very cold, and in need of another Scotch. I walked into the kitchen. Rozella was at the sink, dealing with the final dishes. Meg was at the little formica kitchen table, a cigarette smouldering in a saucer (my mom had no ashtrays in the house), a bottle of Scotch next to a half-filled glass.

  ‘Don’t look so disapproving,’ Meg said. ‘I did offer to help Rozella.’

  ‘I was thinking more about the cigarette,’ I said.

  ‘It doesn’t bother me,’ Rozella said.

  ‘My mom hated smoking,’ I said. Pulling back a chair, I sat down, then reached for Meg’s packet of Merits, fished one out, and lit up. Meg looked stunned.

  ‘Should I alert Reuters?’ she said. ‘Or maybe CNN?’

  As I laughed, I exhaled a lung full of smoke.

  ‘I treat myself to one or two a year. On special occasions. Like when Matt announced he was leaving. Or when Mom rang me up in April to say that she had to go into hospital for tests, but she was sure it was nothing …’

  Meg poured me a large slug of whiskey, and pushed the glass towards me.

  ‘Down the hatch, honey.’

  I did as ordered.

  ‘Why don’t you go off with your aunt,’ Rozella said. ‘I’ll finish up here.’

  ‘I’m staying,’ I said.

  ‘That’s dumb,’ Meg said. ‘Anyway, my Social Security check just cleared yesterday, so I’m feeling flush, and in the mood for something high in cholesterol … like a steak. So how about I book us a table at Smith and Wollensky’s? Have you ever seen the martinis they serve there? They’re the size of a goldfish bowl.’

  ‘Save your money. I’m staying here tonight.’

  Meg and Rozella exchanged a worried look.

  ‘What do you mean, tonight?‘ Meg asked.

  ‘I mean - I’m planning to sleep here tonight.’

  ‘You really shouldn’t do that,’ Rozella said.

  ‘Understatement of the goddamn year,’ Meg added.

  ‘My mind’s made up. I’m sleeping here.’

  ‘Well, if you’re staying, I’m staying,’ Meg said.

  ‘No, you’re not. I want to be here by myself.’

  ‘Now, that’s nuts,’ Meg said.

  ‘Please listen to your aunt,’ Rozella said. ‘Being by yourself here tonight … it is not a good idea.’

  ‘I can handle it.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure about that,’ Meg said.

  But I wasn’t going to be talked out of this. After paying off Rozella (she didn’t want to accept any additional money from me, but I shoved a hundred dollars into her hand and refused to take it back), I finally managed to dislodge Aunt Meg from the kitchen table around five. We were both just a little bit tipsy, as I had matched Meg Scotch for Scotch … and lost track somewhere after the fourth shot.

  ‘You know, Katie,’ she said as I helped her into her coat, ‘I really do think you are a glutton for punishment.’

  ‘Thank you for such a frank assessment of my shortcomings.’

  ‘You know what I’m talking about here. The last thing you should do tonight is be alone in your dead mother’s apartment. But that’s exactly what you’re doing. And it baffles the hell out of me.’

  ‘I just want some time by myself. Here. Before I clear the place out. Can’t you understand that?’

  ‘Sure I can. Just like I can understand self-flagellation.’

  ‘You sound like Matt. He always said I had a real talent for unhappiness.’

  ‘Well, fuck that social-climbing bozo. Especially as he has a proven talent for creating unhappiness.’

  ‘Maybe he has a point. Sometimes I think …’

  I trailed off, not really wanting to finish the sentence. But Meg said, ‘Go on, spill it.’

  ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I think I get things really wrong.’

  Meg threw her eyes heavenward.

  ‘Welcome to the human race, sweetheart.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘No - actually I don’t. You’re successful at what you do, you’ve got a great kid …’

  ‘The best kid.’

  Meg pursed her lips - and a momentary flicker of sadness crossed her face. Though she rarely spoke about it, I knew that her childlessness had always been a quiet source of regret for her. And I remembered what she said after I announced I was pregnant: ‘Take it from me. I mightn’t have tied the knot, but I’ve never been short of guys. And the vast majority of them are useless, weak-kneed assholes who run a mile when they work out you’re an independent broad. In fact, the only good thing a guy can ever give you is a kid.’