Lying with the Dead

by Michael Mewshaw

  The chief didn’t appear to feel any stress. Not bothering to straighten the papers on his desk or lighten the atmosphere with chitchat, he stared at Mom, and she locked her belligerent gaze on him.

  Gil arrived in uniform, carrying a visored cap under one arm as though it were a serving tray. When the chief summarized Mom’s complaints, Gil said, “Gee, I don’t get it. I’ve never seen this boy before in my life. And what she accuses me of doing violates our procedures. We’re trained to treat juveniles with kid gloves.”

  “That’s a lie,” Mom said. “I know damn well what you do to juveniles.”

  Petrified that she’d mention Maury—how would it help to tell them her older son was a convicted killer?—I broke in. “He put me in a room with the girl and pressured her to identify me. He prejudged—he prejudiced me.”

  “What do we have here?” the chief asked. “A Philadelphia lawyer?”

  “He’s smart and he tells the truth,” Mom said.

  “I believe my men are smart and tell the truth, too,” the chief said.

  “There were witnesses,” I said. “Kids at my school. The girl.”

  Ignoring me, the chief asked Mom, “What am I supposed to do, ma’am? It’s your boy’s word against a police veteran of … how many years, Gil?”

  “Eighteen years.”

  “He’s been on the force longer than your son’s been on earth. Under the circumstances, what can I do?”

  “Fire him,” Mom flung back.

  “Afraid I’m not going to do that on the say-so of a kid. Of course, if you care to file a formal complaint—”

  “That’s what I’m doing now. Complaining.”

  “—you’ll need to write a letter and submit it to the review board.”

  “Why should I believe I’ll do better with a letter than talking to you?”

  “That’s your choice, ma’am. Now I’ve got things to tend to.”

  “Me too,” Mom shouted. “I’m missing work. I’m being docked a day’s pay. I’ve spent half my life fighting courts and parole boards. What do you have to do to get justice in this state?”

  The chief signaled that Gil should go. Then he stood up, dismissing us. But Mom wouldn’t leave. And with a fascination that verged on horror, I watched her veer off into self-immolating anger. It came to me then, not for the first time and certainly not the last, that in my childhood calculus of fear this was what I dreaded most—Mom’s meltdowns.

  Nostrils spread, voice lowered to a menacing register, she reared back and lambasted the chief. To crack his smug veneer and leave him with a scar to remember her by, she called him a coward. She accused him of having a backbone as soft as a banana, and she doubted how hard the rest of him was.

  She wasn’t doing this for me, I knew. It answered some deep need of hers. If it all ended in tears, in bloodshed or even a jail sentence, that was a price she was willing to pay. She’d have piled abuse on him for hours had the chief not sauntered from behind his desk and out of the room. The two of us were reduced to silence again. Then there was nothing to do except skulk down the hall to the exit.

  On the ride home, terrified that I’d become her next target, I talked to protect myself. I talked to calm my nerves. I thanked her for defending me. I told her I loved her and was proud of her. But as I gibbered away and watched her hands and prayed they’d stay fastened to the steering wheel, I recognized that for all her brave standing up to authority Mom was … was wrong in the head. That was the politest way of putting it. And it was the hardest thing for me to accept. It’s hard even today to acknowledge that the woman whose love and approval I craved, and who seemed to me, then as now, remarkable in so many respects, is clinically disturbed and dangerous. I didn’t know how to deal with it back then. I don’t know now.

  At 4 p.m., darkness drops over London like a stage curtain. Some people find the early winter nightfall profoundly depressing. I regard it as a good excuse to pour a drink. Back in my conservatory, I measure two inches of Irish whiskey into a coffee mug, postpone the call I promised to make to Mom, and memorize the script of what I’ll say.

  Then I commence punching numbers—twenty for my discounted long-distance service, followed by the U.S. code, the Maryland area code, and finally the digits of her home phone. After a single ring, I hang up and redial. Since it’s the signal she insists on, you’d expect her to snatch up the receiver the instant the second ring crosses the Atlantic. But no, I have time for a leisurely sip of whiskey. Because of her poor hearing, I suppose, the rings—four, five, six—have to wash over her in vibrating waves before she notices.

  “Hello,” Mom warbles as if from the bottom of a dank well.

  “It’s Quinn.”

  “Where are you? You sound like you’re right in the next room.”

  “I’m in London.”

  “Is it cold there? It’s cold here,” she says.

  “It’s nice and invigorating.” Another sip of whiskey warms my innards. “Candy told me you wanted to talk.”

  “What I want to do is talk in person, not over the phone.”

  “Good. It’s been too long since we’ve seen each other. I should be in the States sometime this spring. I’ll stop in Maryland.”

  “I need to talk to you sooner.” Her voice strengthens in her old habit of command.

  “I don’t think that’s possible, Mom. Not with the schedule I have.”

  “What are you doing that’s more important than your mother?”

  If I were her director, I’d discourage this tonal shift. In one line she’s sad Ophelia drowning; in the next she’s the tyrannical mother ruling with an iron fist over the House of Bernarda Alba. Like the weak tubercular son in Long Day’s Journey into Night, I grope for an alibi. “I’ve agreed to write my memoirs. The publisher has me on a tight deadline.”

  “That’s wonderful, Quinn.” The truculence evaporates from her voice. “Tell me about it.”

  “Not much to tell yet. I’m just starting.”

  “I’ll pray for a best seller. Do you need pictures? Candy and I were going through photographs yesterday.”

  “It’s not that sort of book.”

  “Readers would love to see you as a baby. I hope you don’t dwell on the bad parts. Be positive and write about all your blessings. And don’t be too hard on me. I’m hard enough on myself these days and don’t know how much longer I’ll last.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. What seems to be the problem?” With this question I’m uncorking a bottle that could be bottomless. To fortify myself, I pour a second Irish whiskey.

  “I remember and I regret …” Mom’s words trail off in what may be a fault in the connection or a bit of internal editing. “I remember, but I don’t regret. I’m afraid I won’t go to heaven unless I clear the decks with you kids.”

  “Please, don’t feel you need to do that with me. I’m fine.”

  “You may be fine. I’m a wreck. Half of the time I don’t know who I am. I look in the mirror and can’t figure it out.”

  “We all have those days.”

  “The doctor calls them panic attacks. I don’t see what I have to be panicked about. Just life, I guess. These spells last for days unless I pop one of my pills.”

  “What pills?”

  “I have a whole bunch. Xanax is the best.”

  “You take Xanax?” Pictures of druggie old stars in decline or young ones plagued by stage fright come to mind. “Did a doctor prescribe it?”

  “What do you think? I bought it on the street?”

  “What else do you take?”

  She recites a list—Atenolol, Senequan, Celexa, Synthroid, Restoril—as if reading labels off the vials on her end table.

  “Sounds like you might be overmedicated.”

  “That’s what Candy says. But without medicine, I can’t sleep and I can’t wake up. I have terrible dreams.”

  Much as I empathize, I have no desire to compare nightmares with Mom.

  “And every day I have to get up and
dress and hurry downstairs,” she says, “because if I stay in bed, Candy blames it on my being depressed. That gives her another excuse to bring up assisted living. She claims I’ll be happier there. But she just wants me out of the way.”

  “No, she loves you and has your best interests at heart.”

  “She loves somebody else now. Bet you didn’t know that. He wants her to move to North Carolina.”

  “Good for Candy. She deserves some happiness.”

  “How much happiness do you suppose this Leonard Lawrence or Lawrence Leonard gives her? He’s a dentist, almost retirement age.”

  “I’m glad she has someone who loves her.”

  “I tell her, I say, do you know the definition of a sixty-five-year-old man that’s good in bed? It’s one that stays on his side and doesn’t snore.”

  With my fist wrapped around the whiskey, I believe I catch sight of fox eyes in the garden.

  “Candy, all kids,” Mom goes on, “think their parents have no clue about sex. They don’t accept that their mother’s made of flesh and blood, and that at a certain age the flesh was weak and the blood was hot. Dad and I, we fought a lot. Mostly my fault. I had a filthy temper and I’d smack him around to get a rise out of him and remind him I was alive. But after the worst fights, we had the best loving.”

  Alternately an Irish Catholic prude and an outspoken bawd, Mom has always had this cringe-making habit of sharing more information than anybody, especially her children, care to hear.

  “Want to know something funny?” she says. “I’ve started thinking about Jack. For a long time I didn’t, but now I do. I remember he was the one that locked the doors at night before he switched off the lights and came to bed. I haven’t felt safe since he died.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I say for want of something better.

  “There’s lots you don’t know.”

  “Well, one thing I don’t know—and it worries me—are you eating? Candy says you canceled Meals on Wheels.”

  “I drink Ensure every day.”

  “What about meat and vegetables? What about a hot meal?”

  “To hell with cooking! Men retire. Why not women? I can’t be bothered fixing food.”

  “You don’t have to. Let me pay somebody to do it for you.”

  She draws a weary breath. “Eating bores me. The doctor says I have that disease where you lose interest in everything.”

  “What disease is that?”

  “He wrote the name down on a slip of paper, but I lost it. It’s one word.”

  “Anhedonia,” I suggest.

  “That sounds like more than one word.”

  “If you’d let somebody clean and cook and keep you company, you’d feel better.”

  “How good am I supposed to feel at eighty? I don’t want strangers nosing around, ordering me to do this, do that in my own house. The women in that line of work, they can’t even carry on a conversation. Most of them—now don’t accuse me of being a racist. I’ve lived on the same street with them for decades—most of them are black and they have a chip on their shoulder. They grump and gripe and do as they damn well please. ‘Don’t you like your job?’ I ask them. ‘You deserve a better one, like singing or dancing. Something to cheer you up.’ I say, ‘I’m sorry about slavery and segregation and all that. But I didn’t have anything to do with it. My people sailed over on a boat from County Cork and worked for a living.’”

  “Please, promise me you don’t say that, Mom.”

  “Why not? They don’t care what they say to me. Last summer when Candy went to the shore with Leonard, she hired a nurse to babysit me. First thing she said, this nurse, she says, ‘Lemme see you sit on the toilet and get up off it. We don’t want any dribble accidents.’ I told her, ‘Damned if I will. You go directly to hell. I may be old, but I haven’t lost my dignity.’”

  Hoping Hollywood wisdom will soothe her, I observe, “Bette Davis said getting old ain’t for sissies.”

  “That’s for damn sure. I’m not scared of dying. I’m scared of living on and on, wasting Candy’s time, wasting your money and winding up in a hospital with tubes stuck in every hole of my body. Promise me that won’t happen, Quinn.”

  “Be sure you write a living will.”

  “I don’t need to put it down on paper for you to know what to do.”

  I resist a third glass of whiskey. My vision is already shaky. The fluorescent fox eyes I thought I saw in the garden turn out to be my eyes mirrored in the conservatory door.

  “I’d pull the plug on myself,” she says. “But then they wouldn’t pay off my insurance policy, and I’d go to hell.”

  “Don’t say that. Don’t even think it.”

  “That’s what Candy tells me. But she’s got her lover boy, and I’m all alone. Yesterday, I found a snapshot of you as a little kid and I felt … I don’t know. Like I told Candy, ‘Who are you? Where did you come from?’”

  “You told Candy you didn’t know where she came from?”

  “No, I was saying where’d you come from?”

  “Well, if you don’t know, Mom …” I laugh uncomfortably. “… who does? Did you find me under a rock?”

  “I mean, you’ve gone so far and done so much, it’s hard to believe you belong to me. After we looked at the pictures,” she says, “Candy went off to meet Leonard, and I stayed there and finished my cigarette.”

  “You still smoke?”

  “Why not? You afraid it’s bad for my health?”

  “You could fall asleep and burn the house down.”

  “So what? Maybe if I burn here, I won’t burn in the other place.” She dredges in a ragged breath. “Anyway, Candy left, and I rested my eyes. Don’t worry, I stubbed out the cigarette first. Next thing I knew, it was night and I couldn’t figure out where I was. Then I couldn’t stand up.”

  “Oh God,” I groan.

  “That’s what I said. ‘Oh God, don’t let me be paralyzed.’ I shimmied around on my butt to stir my circulation. Then I grabbed onto the cedar chest, but I didn’t have the strength to pry myself off the floor. I felt legless.”

  “Why didn’t you call Candy or the rescue squad? You should keep a phone in every room.”

  “I don’t like having one near my bedroom, ruining the little sleep I get. I decided to sleep right there on the floor beside the cedar chest. I was warm enough in my housecoat, and by daybreak I counted on the blood coming back to my feet.

  “I laid my face against the carpet, and it was like bedding down on fur. Which reminded me of all the cats and dogs I’ve owned in my life. Every last one dead now. I miss them, but I wouldn’t buy another pet. It’d just be underfoot, tripping me, and I couldn’t bear having it die before I do. Or worse, live on with nobody to look after it. Normally I pray myself to sleep. But last night I kept remembering animals and fur until I had to pee.”

  Willpower weakening, I pour a third whiskey. But it doesn’t dull my senses. I remain preternaturally alert as Mom plugs into my brainstem, like one computer uploading its files onto another. This unbroken flow between us calls to mind nights in my childhood when she perched on my bed—pace Dr. Rokoko, sometimes she stretched out beside me—and released a stream of consciousness that rivaled Molly Bloom’s riverine soliloquy. I listened then, and do now, with a combination of curiosity and skin-crawling qualms.

  “I headed for the bathroom on my hands and knees,” she says. “Then I got tired and slithered along on my belly. In the dark I didn’t have any idea where I was going. I bumped into a wall. Then I hit the door frame. Then this awful burning started and I thought I’d wet myself and was afraid Candy would find me in a puddle, like a sick cat. That’d be the last straw. Straight into assisted living!

  “Then I saw crabs in my mind, and pictured how I used to boil them, and they’d scrape and scratch to climb out of the pot. They never made it. Not a one of them. They pulled each other down, like drowning people do, until they turned bright red and died. That’s how I felt, like I was boiling alive.�
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  “Jesus Christ, Mom!”

  “Lying there on fire, it hit me that I was having a foretaste of hell and this is what I’ll suffer for eternity unless you fly home and forgive me.”

  “Of course I’ll fly home. You know I will. Just tell me how you are now.”

  “Not even a blister,” she says. “Turns out I collapsed on a heating grate. The furnace kicked off before it did me any damage. I keep the thermostat on sixty to save money. In the morning my feet were fine. Now when can I count on your coming here?”

  The next day I wake to dismal light. The damp roof tiles of Hampstead are as slickly layered as the scales of a snake. I think of Mom on the heating grate, and rather than pity, I feel I’ve been had again; she’s conned me into flying to the States. Still, I book a ticket on BA and cancel the cleaning lady and my appointment with Dr. Rokoko. I leave a message on Tamzin’s cell phone that I’m making an emergency visit to my mother. The entire time I have the impression that I’ve seen this film before. It has the formulaic shape of a trite made-for-TV movie. Failing parent urgently summons children. Together they revisit ancient history, heal old wounds, and achieve the contemporary equivalent of catharsis—closure! Soft music. Slow fade.

  But the script for my family has never been that saccharine and our past can’t be so tidily summed up. We’re more like brooding, brawling characters invented by Euripides. My last call from Heathrow reaches Mal, who maintains he has BBC on another line. “We’re close,” he swears. “Very close.”

  “I’m not sure I’m still interested,” I lie through my teeth.

  “Don’t throw in the towel,” he says, and leaps from boxing to sex. “Before we get into bed on this deal, we just need to find out who’s screwing who.”

  Maury

  Mom promised me a plane ticket to Maryland. It comes in the mail in an envelope with Candy’s return address and a letter from her saying Quinn paid for it and I should be thankful to him. I am thankful and I look forward to flying. But then Nicky tells me to fork over the ticket. She cashes it in and buys me a seat on a bus. The money left over, she says, barely covers what I owe her.