All Happy Families

by Jeanne McCulloch

  Our own father would never appear among the fathers on the train. He was at this point in the late afternoon well into his first evening scotch. We would return home those Fridays, dropped off by one or another of the train families, the father instead of the mother now driving the station wagon. Already, the kids in the car would be yelling the week’s news at their father: “Jerry got thrown in the pool!” “Izzie got first in the freestyle meet!” “The boys on the soccer team peed on the raspberry bushes!” “Can we go fishing with you tomorrow pleeze, and can I bait the hooks all by myself?” “There are fireworks on Main Beach Saturday night! Mom said we can go with a picnic dinner, ‘kay, Dad?” The silence of our house as we entered the foyer had a gray, haunting weight to it after the festive clamor of the train station children and the weekly return of their heroic fathers.

  These fathers appeared in the winter too. In New York City blizzards, doormen with snow piled an inch high on the flats of their caps blew their whistles along Park Avenue into the hush of the storm, to hail the few lone cabs out in the weather. The cabs plodded through the thick snow making tracks, the glow of their lights visible from far off in the white mist. They pushed with effort down the wide avenue, wipers clearing the fat fresh flakes off the windshields as they progressed closer in the storm. Along Park Avenue, fathers, the same fathers, now on cross-country skis, parkas over their gray suits, in wool beanies and ski goggles, their briefcases strapped to their backs, glided down Park Avenue toward the gray Pan Am building dividing uptown from downtown. Their skis made long tracks as they followed each other, silent in the newly fallen snow, on their way to gleaming offices in Midtown Manhattan. These same heroic fathers who rode the Cannonball express train out to East Hampton on the Friday afternoons of summer; now in their winter garb braved the elements. Upstairs, in the quiet of our apartment, my father in his pajamas and bathrobe sat with his books in the living room, a cup of tea, a boiled egg, and a can of Budweiser on a folding table by his side.

  “Try one of the dresses on,” my mother said. “One of the feathers. It would look so cute on you.”

  I looked at the dresses in their plastic wrap and imagined the feel. The stiff bodices, too big for my frame, the feathers tickling my nose, getting in my mouth, the smell of mothballs and faint perfume.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think I want to, Ma.”

  “Or a Lilly then. Lillys never go out of style, dearie. Take it from me. You could pull it off. Add a little color to that black you wear all the time. We could get them taken in for you in a snap. Don’t you want a dress of mine for your own? It would be fun for you to have.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I pushed the box aside and pulled out another from behind. It was labeled, “MRS. MCCULLOCH DRESSES, 1950s ON.”

  I pulled out a dress from the box. It was soft silk, cheongsam, royal blue, with a high collar, cap sleeves, small pearl buttons down one side, and a slit up the leg on the other. It felt elegant and graceful as I held it in my hands. “This is what I’d like to try on.”

  She reached out an arm from the beanbag. “Let’s see,” she said. “Give it to me.”

  She held the dress up in both hands, taking off her reading glasses to get a better look, and thought quietly for a moment. Then she smiled and put the dress in her lap. It lay there on top of the legal pad listing wedding presents. “No,” she said. “Dearie, this is mine. Daddy brought it back to me from his travels to the Far East, back when we were just courting.”

  “It’s so lovely, though,” I said. I imagined the silk gently brushing my bare feet as I buttoned it up, my hair swept high up on my head as I wore it out. “I think it would fit me. Or we could maybe just take this one in.”

  With one hand, she pinched the fabric lightly and rubbed it between her fingers. “No, no, I don’t think so.”

  “Ma, you will never wear this dress again. You didn’t even know it was up here. It would never even fit.”

  “Look, you’re getting my emeralds when I go. So don’t push it.” She looked down at the dress pooled in her lap, the soft silk luminous.

  “You’re young yet,” she told me. “Someday, you’ll have a lovely dress like this of your own. Maybe even someday if you’re lucky someone will give you one as a special present, some nice man. As for me,” she went on, “this is all I have left.”

  I think I’m lonely. One letter changed, and I would be lovely. What would that be like?

  “Dearie, your father wasn’t perfect. No man is. But when he came along, he changed my whole life. We had some happy, happy times.”

  My mother had had her portrait painted in that very same silk dress when she was a young bride. In the portrait, she sits by an open window. Beyond her is a small balcony, iron balustrade, and beyond that the cityscape. Rooftops, buildings so far away the windows are but dots of gray in the painter’s palette. Her black hair is cut short in bangs along her brow, flipped in curls just at her chin. This was the look she had in all the photos of her courtship with my father, and in the photos of her life as a young mother. Almond eyes, clear white skin, her face composed. Her mouth was a ruby red in the portrait. It hung in our living room for years. In a black-and-white photo taken years later, she sits in a curved leopard-print loveseat under the portrait. The face is the same, but her gaze is steely, her mouth set firm. It must have been the mid-’70s when the second picture was taken. Her hair is still black, but with a white streak coming up from her hairline, sprayed and brushed back off her face. She wears tartan slacks and a pale turtleneck sweater, patent leather pumps with gold buckles on the toe, as was her style at the time. In the twenty years between those images, the hope and openness of the first gave way to the hardened resolve of the second. On her leopard loveseat, she braced herself.

  “Life was not easy with your father,” she said. “You know that. Marriage never is, or we wouldn’t be sitting here in this mess, with all these boxes of unopened wedding presents and boxes of old clothes and old baby furniture no one has ever used.” On the beanbag chair, she seemed so small. “Yet.”

  Stories of my mother’s young life emerged rarely. When she would tell us about it, she would be angry. “No one loved me,” she would say, or “Everyone liked Sissy best.” Declarations, not anecdotes. When I imagined her young life, I pictured her in a house with strangers, alone. This would be followed with a softer voice: “When your father came along, he changed my whole life.”

  The morning tapered into afternoon as we sat in the attic. “Help your old ma up,” she said when we were done, putting out an arm from the depths of the beanbag chair.

  As we reached the bottom of the attic stairs, a blast of light shone down the hall from the window. “Look,” she said. She tapped a ruby fingernail against the pane.

  “See, what did I tell you? I wasn’t crazy. No more rain.”

  The waves broke in graceful furls of foam, pushing in even lines toward the shore.

  “Look,” she told me then. “A mother can fix a lot of things, but she cannot fix a broken heart. Not even I can do that. But I can tell you this, little one. You’ll never carry a weight too heavy to bear. You’re too strong for that. Okay? The rest of it takes time. Hearts don’t heal overnight. I wish it didn’t take so long, but it does. That’s just the way it goes.”

  Look, china breaks, that doesn’t mean you don’t use it.

  Look, a heart breaks, that doesn’t mean you don’t use it.

  Patch as much as you need; it doesn’t hurt.

  She took my hand in hers and squeezed four times. It was an old game. Do. You. Love. Me.

  I squeezed back three times. Yes. I. Do.

  She squeezed twice. How. Much.

  I gave her one big squeeze, to say, To smithereens and back. Then I squeezed hers four times, she followed with three, then I with two, and finally she took my hand in both of hers and squeezed as hard as she could. We laughed. “Ouch,” I said. I shook my hand. “Ma!”

  Together we stood side by side at the window and w
atched the waves break toward the shore in even curls of foam. The glinting sunlight made crazy diamonds across the water.

  “Look,” she said then. “At the end of the day, that’s what we do. We march on. We don’t dwell. If I’ve done my job right, that’s what I’ve taught you. There’s always tomorrow. Right?”

  For a time, I didn’t answer. She squeezed my hand again and repeated, “Am I right?”

  “Okay, of course. Right.”

  “Right?”

  “Yes, right.”

  “Baby girl, trust your old ma,” she said. “It’s going to be a perfectly glorious day.”

  XIV

  The House

  “The houses are all gone under the sea,” T. S. Eliot wrote in one of the songs in Four Quartets. I thought of that line as we packed up the house on the last summer we owned it, and of another of Eliot’s, from The Waste Land: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

  Beyond the sweet, gentle smell of the tangle of wild honeysuckle in the driveway, the high two-toned trill of the morning bobwhite, the cold watermelon seed shooting down a shirt, gleefully spit by a boy cousin all the girls in town admired, beyond all this inevitably there were the darker memories. Of hearing about my father leaving the house for the last time on an ambulance stretcher. Of my mother, living on for twenty years in a grief that became a rage, her final summers spent in the house by the sea in a wheelchair, accompanied by a nurse, by occasional family and friends she no longer recognized but reflexively cursed. By the endless beat of the waves that just keep coming and coming.

  My mother lived on for twenty years after my father died, and fifteen years after the death of her sister, my aunt Jeanne. Determined not to be one of the army of women, she, soon after my aunt was gone, captured the attention of a handsome widower called Harry (“His poor wife’s deathbed wasn’t even cold yet when your mother swooped in,” her friends all clucked admiringly), and Harry took up residence on my father’s side of the couch. He and my mother smoked and talked together for the years they had left. When she was paralyzed from the waist down with neuropathy and I was remarried and had my first child, Sam, Harry would wheel my mother alongside me as I wheeled Sam in his stroller. Ever flirtatious, she’d wave at Sam and giggle, and he’d coo and gurgle back, and I know that scene made her happier than probably anything else.

  “You girls are so slow to get married and have children, I’ll be in a wheelchair before I have any grandchildren,” she used to say, and about that, like other things, she ended up being right. After Harry died from a rapidly growing form of cancer one year, my mother, paralyzed, on dialysis, and demented, despite her wishes to not ever be without her grace, style, or dignity, nevertheless lived on.

  Often late at night in those years she would call me, demanding I get on a plane to Paris, where our father had “run off with a tootsie,” or that I go to jail and bail Harry out. She called me Sissy, and I knew she was already talking with the dead. It was Sissy, fifteen years gone at this point, who she was entreating to sort out the messes her men had gotten themselves into, these men who even in her dementia she saw as having abandoned her.

  For the living, she had nothing but increasing rage.

  In the end, my mother was in a hospital bed in Mount Sinai in New York City. Her housekeeper, per her instructions, came by every day and did her makeup and put on her earrings and did her hair.

  We’re going to get through this thing with grace and style even if it kills us.

  Her kidneys had failed, and one of her legs had become gangrenous and would have to be amputated if she was to have a shot at surviving. I thought of what she had said to my father all those years before: “You didn’t want us to do anything heroic to save you if you no longer had your dignity. Remember, that was the promise we made. . . ”

  Yet I realized too, as the executor of her living will, that in signing the DNR order I would with a pen be putting an end to her life. That pen in my hand felt weaponized, wrong, too powerful. At the doctor’s urging, I reread the instructions she had left to us, and I realized how truly hard it must have been for her to put an end to my father’s life even when there was no hope of recovery. We’ve given up hope. Where has hope gone? The power to end someone’s life should not be this easy, I thought, a scratch of a pen on paper. Or maybe it should be. Maybe it’s just that simple.

  My sister Darcy and I convened her best friends, Nancy and Mu, to come visit and help us out with the decision. The same two women apparently responsible for our lives, in talking our mother into marrying our father, were now going to be indispensable in deciding her death. At this point, both were widows. Al the lawyer had died, and Nancy’s fifth husband had died as well. Yet Mu was still elegant, wrapped in a purple cloak, and Nancy was still scrappy and no-nonsense.

  “You have to let her go,” Nancy told us. We were standing in the lobby of Mount Sinai Hospital. Above us, our mother lay in the geriatric wing. “Right, Mu?”

  “Honey,” said Mu to me, because Mu always called everyone honey, “it’s time.”

  “We’re not getting any younger,” Nancy added. Nancy’s eyes were going, and she wore thick lenses that made her eyes enormous as she looked at me. “She wouldn’t want this. That’s all you have to keep in mind.” She folded her arms over her chest and shifted her weight to one hip. “None of us would.”

  They were not mournful; instead they were determined and direct. None of us would. The “three little maids from school.” They had seen one another through their adult lives, husbands, children, and now they would see to one another’s deaths.

  Mu put her hand lightly on Nancy’s arm. Mu’s hand was flecked with age spots, her veins bulged, but her fingers were long and graceful, the deep sapphire ring Al gave her still on her hand. “Nance, let me drop you in a cab, honey,” she said. To them, there was no more discussion. They were leaving.

  “You girls know the right thing to do,” Nancy said as they locked arms and walked together across the hospital lobby toward the revolving glass doors. We watched them get into a cab, the hospital doorman lowering first Nancy and then Mu into the back seat, and we watched as they drove off down Fifth Avenue, the taillights of their taxi retreating into the distance as they made their way into the evening.

  Back upstairs, I took the living will out of my pocket, and at the nurse’s desk I signed my name.

  At the time, I had been filling out applications to preschool for my daughter, Charlotte, and under “relationship” on the DNR form I reflexively wrote “mother” on the line below my signature. As I corrected it and wrote “daughter,” I realized that I was writing it for the very last time.

  We waited for my sister Catherine to arrive, and then the plan was to take our mother home to hospice care, though she didn’t make it that long. As soon as Catherine arrived, our mother was gone. And so when my sister Darcy and I arrived at the hospital, she lay there, still with her earrings on and her hair coiffed, Catherine beside her in the chair. At the funeral home, the three of us identified the body and I stood a long time over the casket, a simple pine box, looking at the peace I found in her face. In many years, I had not seen her this peaceful. She was beautiful in her serenity, a beauty that erased the lines from scowls and grimaces. At last she was at peace.

  “Excuse me, may I ask an irrelevant question,” I asked the funeral director. We sat in his office, leafing through pages of his urn catalogue. The large book was bound in leather, splayed out across his desk. Just to his right, above the door frame, an orange “No Exit” sign was posted. “Do people tease you for sitting under a ‘No Exit’ sign?” I asked him. “I mean, isn’t that the idea here, the ultimate ‘No Exit,’ so to speak?”

  He looked up and said, “I see you like the turquoise blue urn. It costs extra because it’s unique, but it’s well worth it.”

  “We really should get the turquoise urn,” Catherine said. “We have to. It’s the color of her favorite muumuu.”

  “Okay, no exit, I
get it,” my sister Darcy said to me. “Huis Clos.” She nodded. “The one time Sartre is funny.”

  “We’re taking her to Switzerland,” Catherine told the man.

  “She will love it there,” he said, somewhat nonsensically. “She’ll be in our crematorium in the Bronx waiting for you whenever you ladies are ready to fly her there.”

  This added a sense of new urgency for Catherine, who said, “She won’t like waiting around in the Bronx. Not for one minute.”

  Of the three of us, Catherine seemed to be able to most closely channel our mother. She had also quite naturally developed her knack for making use of a broad palette of accents. So, with a British one that would have made our mother proud, she said to the undertaker, “Lovely then,” and lightly clapped her hands. “Please would you kindly arrange for everything, and we’ll be on our way.”

  We took our mother to join our father in Lake Lugano in her turquoise urn. It was just the three of us this time, no half siblings, though my sisters brought their husbands. As the motorboat rocked in the middle of Lake Lugano, and the cowbells rang in the distance, one of my brothers-in-law struggled to get the canister of ashes opened. On the boat’s radio, “Spanish Dancer” played at soft volume: