The Mistress's Daughter

by A M Homes

  The house has been ransacked—there are candles but no candlesticks, plates but no silverware, and the copper pots and pans I saw through the kitchen window are gone. The lawyer tells me that he and his wife have been organizing things, getting ready for a tag sale. Cleared of anything of material value, the house is still filled with stuff. There is the crocheted afghan that covered the sofa where she was found, lots of ugly candy dishes, weird plastic dolls with music-box bases, supplies from the failed beauty shop she opened a few years before, Christmas decorations. And there is a small blue vanity case—the kind of thing you’d see in a movie, Audrey Hepburn or Barbra Streisand carrying it through the airport, a bellhop following with all the other, larger bags. The case has a built-in combination lock and the latch was open—clearly someone had already looked through it. It is filled with the debris, crumbs of a life lived—encrusted with old makeup, bobby pins, a hair roller, a long-expired ring of birth control pills, loose coins. Either she or someone she knew was king of the silver dollar, because they’re everywhere, in every drawer of the dresser. The suitcase sums her up—it wouldn’t have surprised me to find pieces of Lego in there or parts of a broken toy. It was, on the one hand, a sophisticated piece of luggage, and yet its condition gave the appearance of having been used by a child, a girl playing an adult. I leave it behind—it’s too much, too intimate, like taking her toothbrush from its cup.

  I go through the house, randomly putting things in boxes, my two friends trailing—asking what I want to keep, what I’m looking for. I am wandering, opening and closing closet doors, having no idea how to add it all up. Devastating, depressing—this was the sum of her life. On the inside the house feels impermanent, occupied by a transient, someone not living in the house but on it, like a squatter. It’s messy, as though a hurricane has blown through, and there’s no way of knowing if that was her or if someone had gone through it like a pirate, looting. There is nothing of substance—and I don’t mean value but solidity. Everything feels like it is made of paper, like it could crumble and blow away. The lawyer lets us into the house—and then about twenty minutes later he finds me and asks, “Will you be done in fifteen minutes?”

  My friend takes him aside and says, “Look, this is her mother, this is as close as she’s ever been to her mother, so just give her a moment—if you have things to do, come back in an hour or so.”

  I shoot photographs of everything, knowing this is it, the one time, the only time, the last time, and I have to try and capture what I can. I have to find a way to save it for later because I can’t deal with it in the moment. I photograph her bedroom and the things in her bedroom—closet, headboard (brass but unattached and leaning sharply forward). I photograph the top of her dresser—Excedrin, Johnson’s Baby Powder, perfume, candy, a China geisha, a bowl of loose change, and a stack of baseball cards! I photograph the insides of her dresser drawers—each stuffed with unfolded clothing—a lifetime supply of lingerie. I take pictures of her bathroom—thirty-two Chanel lipsticks and dozens of the strange little dolls that are all over the house, six-inches tall and dressed like colonial ladies, in wide skirts, with ruffles and, on their heads, lace hats, orange hair, and weirdly red, clown noses and circus makeup. I photograph the back of the bathroom door—her bathrobe and multiple shower caps. I photograph the other two empty bedrooms, filled with boxes, with stuff she’d clearly brought from the last place, cartons and shopping bags, wrapping paper, shoes still in their boxes. In a corner of the kitchen there is a menorah and then, just behind it, a crucifix, and in front a framed photograph of a dog. I use a half dozen disposable cameras, and when they are done I put the cameras in the boxes.

  In the front closet, I find a fur: a stole, with her initials sewn into the underside in pink script. I imagine it was among her prized possessions, that Norman gave it to her. A luxury. It must have seemed glamorous when she got it. Now it looks old, mangy. I leave it hanging.

  I take pieces of paper; boxes of paper, among them a receipt for a diamond ring from 1963; an old packet of what look like birth control pills, an arrest warrant, a package from Saks that must have arrived recently, two pairs of rubbery “slimming” underwear with the tags still on, one in black, one in flesh color. What size was she? A brown cashmere sweater exactly like the cream one Norman sent me for Christmas the first year we were in touch—the infamous cashmere sweater. In her bedroom her pants are hung over a chair, black jeans, not unlike the black jeans I often wear. They still hold the creases of her body. I put my hand in the pocket; there is a wad of money, loose bills, a pack of gum. This is exactly the way I keep my money. It’s the one thing my mother is always on me about: How can you keep your money like that? No one keeps their money like that—don’t you want to keep it in a purse? The wad is thick, jammed down into the bottom of the pocket—how many women in their early sixties keep money in a wad in their pocket? It creeps me out, this indescribable subtlety of biology. In her pockets I find the same things I find in mine.

  I am reading a pile of clothes, a messy house, looking for information, clues.

  I remember the writer James Ellroy talking to me about his mother’s clothing—getting his murdered mother’s clothing out of the police evidence room—years after the fact. He talked about taking the clothing out of the sealed plastic bags and wanting to smell it, wanting to rub his face with it.

  There is a tendency to romanticize the missing person—to think about her is to allow her in. I hear her voice in my head—unreliable though she was, she is the only one who could explain to me what happened.

  When I leave, I put four boxes of assorted paper into the rented car. I have no idea what I’ve taken, what it might add up to. I drive my two friends into downtown Atlantic City and take them out for dinner at one of the casinos. I feel indebted—I couldn’t have gotten through the day without them. The setting is surreal, a faux underwater ice palace. We sit staring at the slowly melting sea-creature ice sculptures surrounding us. The lighting constantly shifts, green and purple and blue—like Jacques Cousteau on acid. The three of us order the same thing—steak and baked potatoes; it’s as though we need a good meal to ground us. We are silent, stunned—it’s hard to know what to say after a day like this. In the end Ellen pays for the meal. I use the wad of money from her black pants, and whatever is left I leave as a tip.

  That night in New York, I clean my apartment. Frantically, hysterically, I go through everything, throwing things out—I have shower caps from every hotel I ever stayed in, soaps, shampoo. I have everything that she had. I throw it all away. I cannot be like Ellen—it can’t all happen again the same way.

  I think of the flowers she had turned into a plant, the plant I saw through the kitchen window, the plant with the Christmas tree lights turned on, and me, a Christmas baby, the thing that couldn’t be forgotten—did she leave the lights on for me?

  I struggle with how to narrate the confusion, the profound loss of a piece of myself that I never knew, a piece that I pushed away because it was so frightening.

  The autobiography of the unknown.

  A couple of months later, I call Norman—he says, “Let me call you right back.” It’s the first time we’ve spoken since Ellen’s death. He tells me that he saw Ellen in Washington not long before she died. I have no idea if this was the first time they’d seen each other in almost forty years or if they’d been seeing each other repeatedly since their independent reunions with me. He tells me that he knew she was sick. The doctor had told her that she needed a kidney, and according to Norman, Ellen wanted him to ask me for one. He becomes adamant; she asked him and he said no. He told her that they couldn’t ask me for any favors, on account of how neither of them had ever done anything for me. He tells me he offered his own kidney—that he called his doctor and asked about it. I believe he asked his doctor something about it but beyond that it seems unlikely. We’re talking on his car phone because he’s afraid to talk to me from his home phone, but he expects me to believe that he could give Ell
en a kidney—would he tell his wife, his children? I believe that when Ellen asked Norman, he said no at first and then agreed to ask me and told Ellen that I’d turned her down. That would explain a lot. It would explain why I didn’t hear from her before she died.

  When I speak to Norman, I get emotional and think, Oh no, I’m reminding him of her. I tell Norman that I’ve had enough, that I can’t do this again, that I don’t want one day to get a phone call summoning me to another church, where I’ll stand in the back, unwelcome, and witness friends and family mourning the passing of a man I never really knew but was somehow a part of.

  “I understand,” he says. “Call me. Call me in the car. My wife isn’t in the car very often—we can talk.”

  “I’m not your mistress. I’m your daughter. And I’m not calling you in your car,” I say.

  “Fine thing,” he replies.

  Book Two

  Unpacking My Mother

  Ellen Ballman

  It is seven years before I can open the boxes I took from Ellen’s house. It is 2005, and I am still on the same page, I am still wondering exactly what happened.

  “Moribund on the sofa”—what did that mean? Half dead, already dead, well on the way to being dead? Was she in a coma? Did she know someone had come for her? Did she hope to be saved? How does someone live to be sixty and end up so alone? I go through the few papers I have—her death certificate says she died at 3 A.M. in the emergency room of the hospital. Who called the ambulance? How long was she in the emergency room? She must have been a little bit alive when she got there, otherwise the DOA box would have been checked. I think of calling Atlantic City 911 and asking for a transcription. And why am I remembering someone saying something about her being discovered by a Chinese deliveryman?

  Seven years after the fact and it is as fresh as when it happened. It seems that this is the nature of trauma—it doesn’t change, soften, go dim, mutate into something less sharp, less dangerous.

  Even now I want to call Ellen and ask what it was all about. Did she kill herself? Sort of. She chose to check herself out of the hospital against medical advice and went home to die alone on her sofa. Her fear of fear, her dislike of doctors, her underlying anxiety were certainly contributing factors.

  I remember the birthday card—“This card is being sent early as I am not sure I will still be here on the 18th of December. I go to Jefferson Hospital on December 4 for a kidney procedure. What the outcome will be I do not know.”

  I remember calling Ellen, half annoyed, half concerned.

  “I canceled the procedure,” she said.

  I never understood what the procedure was for; the closest thing I got to an answer was something about blood flow to a kidney and that she’d seen a lot of doctors—including one in Atlantic City who sent her to someone in Philadelphia—but she was scared to have anything done down there, to be alone in the hospital, and I knew I was supposed to say, I’ll come and take care of you.

  Part of me thinks that if she’d asked in the “right way,” I would have helped her, and I am annoyed with myself. What does it matter how she tried to ask? She was afraid and she’d probably never gotten good results with asking—probably in part because she didn’t know how. So instead of getting what she wanted, she continually got what she didn’t—she pushed people away.

  And I cannot escape the nearly biblical connection of the kidney—I was adopted into my family on account of my mother’s son Bruce dying of kidney failure. Is it my fault that she died? Was I expected to give her a kidney? Just after her death, I called her doctor in Atlantic City; in death I was to her what I couldn’t be in life. “This is Ellen Ballman’s daughter, I’m looking for some information.” I paused, waiting for him to say, “Ellen Ballman was unmarried and had no children. I have no idea who you are.”

  “A transplant would have saved her,” he said, without prejudice. There was nothing in his voice implying that it should have come from me. Without prompting he went on to say that the kidney she needed would not necessarily have to have been my kidney. Had they talked about it—did he know who I was? Had he asked her, Do you have a family?

  “I don’t know why she checked herself out of the hospital. I don’t know what she was thinking. Her condition was treatable—she could have been saved.”

  After she died I wrote letters—to the brief list of friends her lawyer gave me, to the friend who called to say she was dead, to her niece in California, and so on. I wrote to them, telling them who I was and that I would very much like to hear more about Ellen, their memories, experiences, anything they wanted to share. I dropped the letters in the mail and nothing happened. The only person I heard from was Ellen’s Polish cleaning lady—who didn’t speak English. The woman she worked for on Tuesdays called me and together they left a message on my answering machine. It was a message left in translation as relayed by her Tuesday employer—the cleaning lady is heartbroken, she loved Ellen, she had no idea she was so sick. The cleaning lady had gone to Poland to visit her family; “she was away but now she is back.” I should call her anytime. I should come visit. She loves me very much. The Tuesday employer also left her name and phone number—“Call anytime,” she said. I couldn’t bring myself to call.

  It is human nature to run from danger—but why did I have to be so human? Why could I not have been more capable, a better biological daughter? Why did I not have the strength and perspective to both protect myself and give? I failed her—I was so busy protecting myself from her that I didn’t do a good enough job recognizing the trouble she was in. I expected her to ask for what she needed in the way that I thought was appropriate. I could not see her selfishness with perspective, could not see that this was a woman in enormous pain, could not escape myself, my own needs, my own trapped desire. What does it matter how she asked? I should have given. I should have given despite not wanting to give. And what self was I protecting—does bracing oneself against something offer any protection?

  People tell me how to feel. “You must be relieved,” they say. “You must be confused.” “You must be ambivalent.”

  I failed her. I didn’t pay enough attention to the last letters, to the last time we spoke. She had called telling me to “hurry up and call your father, he may not last long.”

  The idea that she was calling about him, that she and he had a relationship that extended beyond me, was galling. And that he was my father and had made me prove it, only to then not talk to me, and now I should hurry and call because he may not last—that these people who had so suddenly arrived might now so suddenly disappear was all too much.

  My mother is dead. My mother called to tell me my mother is dead? This is the dissonance, the split, the impossibility of living two lives at once.

  Yom Kippur, autumn, 1998. I am in Saratoga Springs, New York, at Yaddo, an artists’ colony. It is just a few weeks after the funeral. I go to services hosted by the local temple. I am alone among strangers, in a place safe for grief, and for me this is the memorial—“May he remember.” There is a part of the Yom Kippur service called the Yizkor—during which they read the names of all those related to the congregation who have died that year. I add her name to that list. The names are read aloud. There are other names before and after hers. Her name is called out, it is heard—equal to the others, it is not alone. Her name is said aloud, it is offered to everyone. I see other people crying and feel that I have done something, I have given her one thing she wanted, to be recognized, to be noticed. This is her Jewish funeral. I am holding a memorial service for a mother I never knew in a room full of strangers. We are embracing history and grief and all that has come and gone, and it makes more sense than anything has.

  I am thinking about Atlantic City and walking out on the pier and how the clouds cracked open and rays of late-afternoon rainbow-colored light came streaming down. I am thinking about the time I sent her rose petals from the Yaddo garden. I am thinking of how she wanted everything and anything and how insatiable she was. I am glad I
am there, alone, among strangers. I cry throughout the service. I am crying not just for her, but for myself, for every accident that has been a part of this, for every failing on everyone’s part, for the damned fragility of being human, for being afraid, ashamed. This is my atonement; I am confessing my sins, beating my chest, asking for forgiveness for what I have said and for what I have not said, for what I have done and for what I have not done, for those I have hurt or offended knowingly or unknowingly, for my errors of omission—this confession is known in Judaism as the Viduy. I am crying for how isolated I am, how alone, and how I have to go through life like this.

  Did I ever say how precariously positioned I feel—on the edge of the earth, as though my permit could be revoked at any second?

  The boxes. I come home from Yaddo and the boxes are in my apartment waiting for me, greeting me, nudging me to remember what I can’t forget. I cannot open the boxes. I am afraid of them, as though they contain something that might hurt me. Peeling the tape off them might unleash a virulent bacteria, just touching them might somehow infect me with her. I live with them like furniture, taking care to steer around them, to not let anything I care about come in contact with them, and then finally, more than nine months later, I put them in storage. I banish the boxes to the netherland of ministorage—before they go I mark them carefully in Sharpie marker on all sides, Dead Ellen 1–4. She put me up for adoption—I’m sending her to ministorage. She will join my tax records, my vinyl record collection, my dot matrix printer, my old typewriter, becoming a piece of my life I am unwilling to entirely unload but that is best kept off-site.

  What is the half-life of a toxic box? When will I be ready to look inside—does the potential to rattle and shake lessen over time?