Granta 125: After the War

by John Freeman

  Kurt and I have lunch on the days we visit her in assisted living. These are the times we just give in to reminiscence, memories that are often funny, at least to us. In the seventh grade, Mother took all of our friends to the opera, La Bohème, in her disgraceful old Pontiac, five of us in the back seat chanting ‘Puccini, Puccini, Puccini’. She was worried as she herded us into our seats under the eyes of frowning opera fans. We stuck our fingers in our ears during the arias. One little girl, Lydia Rademacher, was trying to enjoy the show but Joey Bizeau kept feeling her up in the dark. Mother would’ve liked to have enjoyed herself but she had her hands full keeping order and succeeded almost to the end. When Mimi dies and Rodolfo runs to her side, we shrieked with laughter. The lights came up and Mother herded us out under the angry eyes of the opera patrons, tears streaming down her face. It was a riot.

  The Parkway was a nice but short-lived restaurant that didn’t make it through the second winter. Before that we just had the so-called ‘rathskeller’ and its recurrent bratwurst, but it had turned back into a basement tanning parlour with palm-tree and flamingo decals on its small windows. While we still had the Parkway, Kurt was picking at his soufflé as the waiter hovered nearby. Kurt shook his head slightly and sent him away. Kurt has natural authority and he looks the part with his broad hands and military haircut. He rarely smiles, even when he’s joking: he makes people feel terrible for laughing. I’m more of a weasel. I don’t think I was always a weasel but I’ve spent my life at a bank; so, I may be forgiven. ‘Remember when she got us paints and easels?’ We laughed so hard.

  Several diners turned our way in surprise. Kurt didn’t care. He has a big reputation around town as the guy who can get your kid to quit looking like Bugs Bunny; no one is going to cross him. It was a tough call selling our crappy childhood home but it helped pay for assisted living. Mother would’ve liked to have had in-home care – that is, when she was making sense – but the day was fast arriving when she wouldn’t know where the hell she was, unless it was the chair she was in. Anyway, we’ve got her down there at Cloisters. We just hauled her over there. It’s OK. Kurt calls it ‘Cloaca’.

  Mother’s days are up and down. Sometimes she recognizes us, sometimes not, but less and less all the time. Or that’s what Kurt thinks. I think she recognizes us but isn’t always glad about what she sees. When she is a little lucid, I sometimes feel she is disgusted at the sight of us. I mean, that’s the look on her face. Or that we’re hopeless. Or that I am: she never could find much wrong with Kurt. This used to come up from time to time, a kind of despair. She once screamed that we were ‘awful’ but only once and she seemed guilty and apologetic for days, kept making us pies, cookies, whatever. She felt bad. If she’d had any courage, she’d have stuck to it. We were, and are, awful. We will always be awful.

  We were in Mother’s room at the centre. I won’t describe it: they all have little to do with the occupant. Me and Kurt in chairs facing Mother in hers. Her face is pretty much blank. Someone has done her hair and make-up. She still looks like a queen, keeps her chin raised in that way of hers. But she just stares ahead. Kurt bangs on about a Board of Supervisors’ meeting; then I do a little number about small-business loans, naming some places she might recognize. Mother raises her hand to say something.

  She says, ‘I gotta take a leak.’

  Kurt and I turn to each other. His eyebrows are halfway to his scalp. We don’t know what to do. Kurt says to Mother, ‘I’ll get the nurse.’ I stole around in front of Mother to get the call button without alerting her. I couldn’t find it at first and found myself crawling down the cord to locate it. I gave the button a quick press and shortly heard the squeak of the approaching nurse’s shoes. Kurt and I were surprised at how hot she was, young with eye-popping bazongas. Kurt explained that Mother needed the Little Girls’ Room. Ms Lowler winced at the phrase. Kurt saw it too. He’s quicker to take offence than anyone I know, which is surprising in someone who so enjoys making others feel lousy. When Mother came back from the bathroom, she was refreshed and a little communicative. She knew us, I think, and talked a bit about Dad but in a way we hadn’t heard before. She talked of him in the present tense, as though Dad was still with us. ‘I knew right away he wasn’t going anywhere,’ she said. We were thunderstruck. Mother yawned and said, ‘Doozy’s tired now. Doozy needs to rest.’

  Outside, Kurt splayed both hands and leaned against the roof of his car. ‘Doozy? Who the fuck is Doozy?’

  ‘She is. She’s Doozy.’

  ‘Did you ever hear that before?’

  The door was open to Ms Lowler’s office, which was small and efficient and clean, and refreshingly free of filing cabinets. Little uplifting thoughts had been attached to the printer and computer. Have-a-nice-day level. I took the initiative and asked if we could come in. ‘Of course you can!’ she said with a smile and hurried around to find us chairs. Kurt introduced himself, booming out ‘Doctor’ and I made a small show of modesty by just saying, ‘I’m Earl.’

  ‘Your mom has good and bad days in terms of her cognition generally but she never seems anxious or unhappy.’

  ‘She got any friends?’ said Kurt.

  ‘I think that’s still a bit beyond her. Her friends are in the past and she mostly lives there.’

  Kurt was on it. ‘Who’s this Doozy? That name mean anything to you?’

  ‘Why, yes. Doozy is your mother. That’s her nickname.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘We’ve never heard it.’

  ‘Doozy is the nickname Wowser gave her.’

  ‘Wowser? Who’s Wowser?’

  ‘I thought it might be your dad.’

  I just held my head in my hands. Kurt asked if this had gotten out. Ms Lowler didn’t know, or didn’t want to know, what he was talking about.

  Kurt and I love to talk about Mother because we have different memories of her before she lost her marbles and we enjoy filling out our impressions. For example, Kurt had completely forgotten what a balls-to-the-wall backyard birder Mother was. We went through a lot of birdseed we really couldn’t afford. Dad shot the squirrels when Mother was out of the house. By holding them by the end of the tail he could throw them like a bolo all the way to the vacant lot on the corner. Naturally, Mother thought the squirrels had decided the birds needed the food more and had moved on.

  Kurt remembered her gathering the cotton from milkweed pods to make stuffing for cushions. He was ambivalent about this because we both loved those soft cushions but it seemed to be a habit of the poor. Dad was the one who made us feel poor but through her special magic Mother made us understand that we had to bow our heads to no one. By being the queen she transformed Kurt and me into princes. It stuck in Kurt’s case. Wowser and Doozy put all this at risk.

  Two weeks later we were summoned back to the home by Ms Lowler who this time wore an all-concealing cardigan. She’d had enough. It seems Mother had been loudly free-associating about her amorous adventures in such a way that it wasn’t always best that she occupy the common room during visiting hours. She had a nice room of her own with a view of some trees from her window and Bible-themed Kincaid on the opposite wall and where she couldn’t ask other old ladies about whisker burn or whatever. That’s where we sat as before, except this time I located the call button. Kurt and I were in coats and ties, having come from work, Kurt shuffling the teeth of the living, me weaselling goobers across my desk. She smiled faintly at each of us and we helped her into her chair. Kurt started right in. I kind of heard him while I marvelled over the passage of time that separated us from when Mother ruled taste and behaviour with a light but firm hand and left us, Kurt especially, with a legacy of rectitude that we hated to lose. Kurt was summarizing the best of those days, leaning forward in his chair so that his tie hung like a plumb bob, his crew cut so short that it glowed at its centre from the overhead light. Mother’s eyes were wide. Perhaps she was experiencing amazement. As Kurt moved toward what we believed to be Mother’s secret life, her eyes suddenly droppe
d and I first thought that this was some acknowledgement that such a thing existed. Kurt asked her if she’d had a special friend she’d like to tell us about. She was silent for a long time before she spoke. She said, ‘Are those your new shoes?’

  I followed Kurt into Ms Lowler’s office. ‘I would like to speak to you, Ms Lowler, about our Mother’s quality of life.’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘She’s no longer here at all, Ms Lowler.’

  ‘Really? I think she’s quite happy.’

  ‘Ms Lowler, I’m going to be candid with you: there comes a time.’

  ‘Does there? A time for what?’

  ‘Ms Lowler, have you had the opportunity to familiarize yourself with the principles of the Hemlock Society?’

  ‘I think it’s quite marvellous for pets, don’t you?’

  Later, when Mother started thinking Kurt was Wowser, he really got onto the quality-of-life stuff. I waited before asking him the question that was burning inside of me. ‘Have you ever done it?’

  ‘I’ve never done it but I’ve seen it done.’

  There were times when Mother seemed so rational apart from the fact that what she told us fitted poorly with the Mother we used to know. She said, for example, that Wowser always wore Mister B collars with his zoot suit.

  Kurt told me that he never knew what would happen when he visited Mother. Lately she’s shown an occasionally peevish side. Today she suggested that he ‘get a life’. This was about a week after Mother had started confusing Kurt with Wowser, and a few days after Kurt had started addressing Mother as Doozy in the hopes of finding Wowser before he could add his own stain to our family reputation. ‘You’re in a different world when your own mother doesn’t recognize you, or thinks you’re the stranger who gave her a hickey.’

  This brought up the Hemlock Society all over again. I told Kurt to forget about it. ‘Why?’ said Kurt. ‘That’s the only way we get our real mother back. The human spirit is imperishable and Mother would live on through eternity in her original form and not, frankly, as “Doozy”. They really should weigh the spirit just to convince sceptics like you. I see the expression on your face. You could weigh the person just before and just after they die. Then you’d see that the spirit is something real. Scientists have learned how to weigh gravity, haven’t they? It’s time to weigh the spirit.’

  I’d give a million dollars to know why Kurt is in such a lather about our ‘standing’ in town. Does anyone actually have ‘standing’ in a shithole? Well, Kurt thinks so. He thinks we have standing because of Mother’s regal presence over the decades which, I will admit, was widely admired but which seems to be under attack via these revelations about Wowser and Doozy. I shudder to think what would happen if Kurt found out who Wowser is. Sadly, we know who Doozy is. Doozy is our mother.

  I said to the shining young couple across my desk, ‘If you take this loan, at this bank’s rates, at this point in your lives, you could find yourselves in a hole you’d never dig out of.’ Was this me speaking? This was an out-of-body experience. I didn’t tell them that if I went down this road I’d be in the same mess I was recommending they avoid. Feeling my heart swell at the prospects of this couple was more than a little disquieting. From their point of view – and it wasn’t hard to see it in their eyes – I was just turning them down. They would have liked me better if I’d hung this albatross around their necks and let them slide until we glommed the house. After they were gone, I slumped in my chair – a butterfly turning back into a caterpillar. I hadn’t felt quite like this since I repeated ninth grade with Mrs Novacek busting my balls up at the blackboard doing long division.

  Kurt has this habit of picking up his napkin between thumb and forefinger as though letting cooties out. It’s his way of showing the restaurant staff that nobody is above suspicion. He was on his third highball when I said, ‘There were times when Mother could be pretty hard.’

  ‘Where do you come up with this shit?’

  I felt heat in my face. ‘Like when she was den mother.’

  ‘Of course she was hard on you. You were still a Bobcat after two years. What merit badges did you earn?’

  ‘I don’t remember …’

  ‘I do. You earned one. Handyman. You earned a Handyman merit badge. I never ever knew anyone who even wanted one. I had Athlete, Fitness, Engineer, Forester and Outdoorsman in year one. And Webelos. I didn’t find Mother hard, ever. Unless you mean she had standards. Where are you going? You haven’t even ordered!’

  After the lunch I missed, Edwin, our bank president, came to my desk for the first time since spring before last and asked when I would start moving product like I used to. The young couple must have complained.

  Visiting Mother with Kurt was getting to be too hard. The last time we tried, Mother got a mellow, dewy look on her face and at first Kurt thought it was her pleasure at seeing us. Then he seemed to panic: ‘She calls me Wowser, I jump out the window.’

  Mother said, ‘Wowser.’

  Kurt was blinking, his nose making a tiny figure-eight, but he didn’t jump out the window. So, I started seeing Mother on my own. I didn’t try to make anything happen when I was with her and we mostly just sat in silence. She would look at me for a long time with a watery unregistering look and then, once in a while, I’d see her eyes darken and focus on me with a kind of intensity that lasted for a good long while. I think I knew what was going on but I was darned if I would start yammering at her like Kurt does to get her to put into words what couldn’t be put into words and only produced some crazy non sequitur from her deepest past. Of course if it featured Wowser, Kurt was on the warpath. If she just chattered about this, that and the other without naming names, then Kurt would announce she was talking about Dad. But mostly he couldn’t handle her obvious mental absence.

  ‘Mother, I just heard the sprinklers go off. Now that’s summertime to me. Mother! Are you listening to the sprinklers? It’s summertime!’

  ‘Kurt,’ I said. ‘It’s not registering.’

  ‘Mom! The sprinklers! Summertime!’

  Kurt had a brainstorm and it turned out very badly. I say this not knowing how it went down but I know it wasn’t good. He decided that since Mother was mistaking him for Wowser, he would just go ahead and be Wowser – ‘Wowser for a day’. He came home shattered. I really don’t know what happened unless it was Mother’s golden boy turning into some vanished adulterer, a role in some ways similar to the one he’d been playing around town and in his safe houses for years. Finally, and without telling me anything, he calmed down. He said, ‘I think I have a headache. Do I? Do you think I have a headache?’ It was getting to him.

  When we were young I was always a little stand-offish. That is, I was a social coward. But not Kurt. By the time he was twelve he’d be sticking out his big paw and telling grown-ups, ‘Put ’er there.’ They liked it and it kind of made me sick. Now he revealed an uncertainty I hadn’t seen before; but it didn’t last. He was soon on the muscle again. Kurt: ‘I see literally – literally – not one thing wrong with my taking on the identity of Wowser in pursuit of truth.’

  Mother’s love of excellence was not something I always embraced. It certainly raised Kurt to the pedestal to which he had become accustomed, but it unfairly cast my father in a negative light. Truth be told, I was far more comfortable with Dad than with our exalted mother. What you saw was what you got. He was a sweet man, and a sweet old man later, who was not at war with time. He noticed many things about life, about dogs and cats and birds and weather, which were just so many impediments to Mother. Kurt was right: left to Dad we would have probably not gone very far, nor been nearly so discontented.

  I’m on the hot seat looking into the piercing eyes of my boss: ‘Earl, how long have you been with the bank?’

  ‘Twenty-two years.’

  ‘Like to see twenty-three? Not much coming over your desk except your pay cheque. Desks like yours are financial portals. You know that.’

  ‘My, what
big teeth you have.’ I was fired that day.

  Where had I been all my life? I had grown up under so many shadows they were spread over me like the leaves of a book. Only Dad and I were equals, just looking at life without being at war with it. There was no earthly reason I should have been a banker beyond serving the shadows. By all that’s reasonable, I should have been at the post office like Dad, taking packages, affixing stamps. Reciting harmless rules, greeting people. I loved greeting people! In my occupation, you had to screw someone every day, even if it was your own family.

  I went to see Mother on my own on a beautiful day with a breeze coming up through the old cottonwoods along the river and cooling the side street where the rest home sat in front of its broad lawn and well-marked parking spaces. The American and Montana flags lifted and fell lazily. It was hard to go indoors. A few patients rested in wheelchairs on the lawn, the morning sun on their faces. I recognized old District Court Judge Russell Collins. He had no idea where he was but his still-full head of hair danced in the breeze, the only part of Judge Collins moving. The others, two women who seemed to have plenty to talk about, barely glanced at me.

  I sat with Mother in her room. It seemed stuffy and I got up to let in the air. A glance at the spruces crowding the side lawn made me want to run out into the sun as though these were my last days on earth. I was unable to discern if Mother knew I was in the room. She rested her teeth on her lower lip and each breath caused her cheeks to inflate. It was very hard to look at, which doesn’t say great things about me.

  I’d had enough of these visits to feel quite relaxed as I studied her and tried to remember her animation of other days. Why had she married Dad? Well, Dad was handsome and for thirty-one years held the Montana state record for the 440-yard dash. He looked like a sprinter until he died. His luck and happiness as a successful boy lasted all his life. Even Mother’s provocations bounced off his good humour when she attempted to elevate his general cultivation with highbrow events at the Alberta Bair Theater in Billings. Dad liked Spike Jones, ‘the way he murders the classics’. I remember when he played ‘Cocktails for Two’ on the phonograph when Mother was at a school board meeting. I loved the hiccups, sneezes, gunshots, whistles and cowbells, but Kurt walked out of the house. I thought Dad held his own with Mother. Kurt thought she made him look like a bum.