by Mary F. Pols
We said, “We love you” a hundred times over. Wib, trying so hard, as she always does, to give comfort, walked over to his apartment and brought back his poetry manuscript. One of his newer poems, “The Winter Hexagon,” was about death, the way he used to imagine it, under the winter constellations, as a young man, and the way he imagined it as an old man. We ringed the bed, Alison on his left, then Katy, then Wib, then me to his right; I read his words to him, trying not to choke over them as they warred with the tears in my throat, in my heart.
When I was young and full of careless vigor,
I often thought the end of life should be embraced
in some old pagan way one’s heard of; go forth
to meet with dignity what must in any event come.
The Winter Hexagon then seemed a refuge: walk
out under it as though it were a canopy:
Walk till you can walk no more, or perhaps go striding
along on your battered old skis till you can
stride no more. Choose some great hard-frozen lake
somewhere in Maine; or perhaps those blueberry barrens
on the great ridge out Camden way
either way you’d pass without knowing that you passed.
How was I to know that such pagan resolve
requires strength and vigor—the same qualities
that make life persist? I have seen loved ones wane
till no purpose was left, even as I now fade:
no trace of any pagan resolve at all.
Nonetheless, immortal hexagon, I revere you still,
For you are there in glory whenever at the proper season
I look towards heaven—shall be there in glory
When, weak or strong, my time shall have come.
He closed his eyes and a single tear rolled from each eye. Alison reached out and put her hand over his heart, then grabbed mine and brought it there as well. She collected hands, Katy’s and Wib’s, until they were all stacked on his heart, beating slower and slower. Then he was gone.
We dressed him in a white shirt and chinos. Alison combed his hair. We picked up his possessions and put them in a box. Reluctantly, we went home. There was nothing else to do.
MY MOTHER HAD DIED without any of us there. She too went in the middle of the night. It was the thirteenth day after her stroke. Wib saw her last, a few hours before the end. She’d worn us down. A nurse had walked by her room and noticed that she had stopped breathing. They called us, to come say good-bye to her body. I woke to Benet’s touch on my arm and had risen in the dark, throwing on my clothes quietly so as to not wake Dolan. Wib was waiting downstairs for us and we’d driven over together. I had dug out a pair of old pajamas for Mum to be cremated in, pale blue polar bears on flannel. I’d bought them for her a few years before, at Nordstrom, in the era when gifts had started to seem pointless but I hadn’t been able to give up the idea of trying to reach her with some small pleasure. Bowdoin’s mascot was a polar bear, and my mother had loved her college. I could still see her in my mind’s eye, standing next to my childhood self, passionately chanting, “Go U Bears” at hockey games.
In death, the beauty of her high cheekbones and her elegant nose was more obvious. I stroked a long shin and remembered those slim legs, kicking up through the water at Lookout Point, the tips of those sneakers sticking out of the water. Her swimming costume always included the sneakers, a modest suit, and often a cap. I’d snuck peeks at those legs then. They were covered with varicose veins, the fascinating but horrifying evidence of her motherhood.
“Do you want to help me wash her?” the nurse’s aide had asked. She was sweet. They were all sweet.
I’d hesitated for a second. So private, my mumma, would she want this? Then I remembered how she’d talked fondly about the way of Irish wakes, how loved ones prepared the body for viewing. “Yes,” I’d said, and taken the warm cloth from the nurse. We moved around her body, tenderly taking off the institutional gown, slipping the pajamas up over her hips and around her arms. I straightened her top, then slid my hand onto her belly. I laid my hand on a surface once soft, now practically concave after weeks without food. Her skin had felt dry and cool already, papery and wrinkled. I put my other hand under my shirt and felt my own belly. I stood for a minute, touching the twin sources of my being and Dolan’s.
THE MORNING AFTER my mother died, we had had something to do. We had to go tell my father. We drove over to his apartment and waited for Alison, then all went upstairs together. Benet had a key. He went in first and shook Dad’s shoulder gently to wake him. He blinked, looking from face to face, knowing without asking. We waited in the living room for him to get dressed. When he came out, wearing a navy blue blazer, a pressed shirt, and chinos, I had ached for him. He had just been diagnosed with leukemia, he was so sick, so tired, yet he dressed like a gentleman to say good-bye to his wife.
I had walked behind him on the pathway between the apartment complex and the nursing home. He’d lost his strong gait, his purposeful stride we’d always called it, and shuffled now, listing to one side. I thought of him in his fifties, coming into the room while my mother and I were watching The Carol Burnett Show, focusing on the screen for a few minutes, then leaving the room in an imitation of Tim Conway’s old man shuffle. The space from joke to reality seemed outrageously short.
More than sixty years they’d spent together, had known each other, had loved and tolerated and, I was sure, sometimes hated each other. He stood looking down at her body and began to recite part of the Requiem Mass in Latin, words from their Catholic childhoods, words learned in Newark, words from long before any of us. He clutched a napkin in his hand, spoke softly, in his solemn teacher’s voice, and as I watched, again from behind, his thin shoulders shook inside the wool and he began to cry. And we all cried again, with him, in the quiet room that smelled nothing like my mother, or anything alive.
He had touched the hands of the nurses on the way down the hallway afterward, let them hug him, big women embracing a frail old man. We were walking away from my mother, leaving her to be taken away by strangers, a lonely journey to the crematorium. She would soon be gone in every sense. No part of her left, just scattered reproductions. The dimple in Dolan’s chin, the set of Katy’s eyes, the high curve of Alison’s cheekbones, Wib’s mouth. I stopped at the nurses’ station and asked for a pair of scissors.
Her hair was like fine steel and curled, as it always had, at just the right place. Variations on white and gray, wrapped around my finger. “I hope this is okay, Mumma,” I said, as I snipped a curl. Your corporal self, soon to be gone, I had thought. I must have something of you to look at. I must have something beyond photographs and memories. I must hold on to something.
WITH DAD GONE, there was just a vast emptiness. There were no ceremonial good-byes needed. I took nothing from his body, no lock of hair. My mother had been absent in so many ways for so long that her death had somehow seemed more acceptable. But he had just been there. He had just been talking to us. He had just been our father.
We set out to clean his apartment, to banish all the remnants of his illness. It was Alison’s idea. “If I don’t do it now,” she said, “I am never going to be able to do it.” I took my cue from her. My own choice would have been to wallow, but I was grateful to be given direction.
There were so many bottles of medicines that didn’t help at all, or helped just a little, or never even got tried. Cases of Ensure. A fridge full of ice cream for smoothies never made. Under the bed, crumpled Vanity Fair napkins, left by a man too fragile to find a waste can. On the desk, the first few lines of a new poem, in black ink, in his chicken scratch, slanting across unlined white paper.
Alison moved with her usual efficiency, sweeping things into plastic bags, piling up food and toiletries that could go to Benet’s house or her place. I went slower, looking at things as I went, trying not to cry over the family mementos he’d chosen to put on the shelves in his bedroom.
“We migh
t as well do the closets,” she said when she finished with the kitchen. “Matthew might like some of his jackets. And his sweaters. Maybe even some pants, although I suppose they’ll be too short.”
You realize, when you’re packing up the life of someone you loved, that much as you’d like to devour it whole, preserving it forever as it was, a museum to that person, it just isn’t feasible. No one has the room for the museum. Moreover, the meaning dissipates. His selection of narrow-tipped felt pens in a cup means something only in the context of his being alive, because he might return to them, use them to write you a note. With him gone they’d become just a motley collection of pens with and without caps, mixed in with some paper clips that will never be used, and a grimy plastic pencil sharpener that came out of a set you got for school back in 1975.
I got a suitcase out of the closet and opened it up on the bed.
“You should take this,” Alison said, coming out of the closet with the Pendleton wool robe we bought for his birthday a few years ago. “You masterminded this purchase.”
“I did,” I said. My mother had bought him a Pendleton robe long ago, sometime in the seventies, and he’d worn it until it was in shreds. I’d gotten the idea to get him a new one a few years before while I was in the Pendleton store in Park City, Utah, killing time between movies at the Sundance Film Festival. I’d made a quick round of calls to my siblings, assessing interest in a group gift. Now I took the robe from Alison. I’d wear it. I’d write reviews in it, sitting at my kitchen table.
Then I went into the closet myself and stood in there, looking at the neat piles of sweaters on the shelf. There it was.
“IF YOU LOSE THIS ONE,” I said, lecturing as I stitched away at the last seam, “I’ll have your head.” The wool was a deep berry red, the color of the raspberry in the basket that makes every other berry look less ripe, less enticing. “Two of these in one lifetime would be too much.”
“I’ll guard it with my life,” he said, amiably. He nibbled on a cookie and drank watery tea. We were in Venice, in a rented apartment with high ceilings and what seemed to be bearskin blankets on the beds. The balcony looked out over a canal in Cannaregio. It was March of 2000 and Dad had finally been coaxed away from my mother’s side. Benet was taking care of her in his absence. We had been trying to persuade him to enjoy life a bit more, to get away from his responsibilities here and there.
“Now this one isn’t going to be enormous, is it?” he asked.
I shot a glare his way. The last sweater he watched me finish was for Benet. I had less control over my gauge back then, and as I had laid it out on the kitchen table to piece it together, it did seem to cover the distance from one side of the table to the other. My father had sat next to Wib, both of them silently watching like jurors. His hands were crossed in his lap. Mirth played around his mouth as he watched me realize how huge the thing was. Then finally he couldn’t contain himself and he’d said, “I hope Pavarotti likes his sweater.” He and Wib had dissolved in laughter.
“If anything, it might be a tad small,” I said, making the very last knot at the armpit. I held it up. It was the nicest sweater I’d ever made. I had been knitting frantically, all the way from California, through Paris, racing to finish before I saw him in Venice. Instead I’d had to settle for finishing it halfway through our stay.
The trip to Venice had its complications. For the first few days, Dad was ready to go early in the morning, happy to be visiting old haunts, making delighted noises over the Bellinis at the Frari. But he had not come with a warm enough coat, and he complained of the damp air. He got a canker sore. He wanted to stay in the apartment instead of going sightseeing. On our evening constitutionals, Wib and I walked along the Fondamente, speculating that he felt guilty, coming without Mum. Not that he could have brought her. Not that she would have even known this place that she had loved.
One day as he was gazing out over the canal, looking wistful, I asked him if he was homesick.
“No,” he said.
“You seem sad,” I persisted.
“I’m sad because I don’t want to go home,” he said gravely.
Who could blame him? Going back to dirty diapers, my mother’s occasional tantrums, and her incessant repetitions? Meals he prepared himself, for the two of them to eat at a table once filled with children, now so empty? His energy sapped at the end of the day, when what he wanted to do was write poetry?
“Okay,” I said, holding the sweater out to him. “Let’s give this a try.”
“Ah,” he said. “So warm.” He went to look at himself in the giant gilt-rimmed mirror, threw his shoulders back, and struck a pose. “I shall be the grandest tiger in the jungle.”
THIS RED SWEATER was not lost on an island’s ledges. This red sweater was not forgotten on a day that started out chilly enough to beg for wool and ended in the kind of warmth that made a plunge into the northern waters palatable. This sweater, made with heathered wool from Maine sheep, saw only four winters with its rightful owner. On an overcast August day, it came back to its maker. She shed tears on it, folded it into a suitcase, and thanked whatever twist of fate it was that brought her a son who might someday run across a Maine beach, wearing his grandfather’s sweater.
CHAPTER 14
Orphan Girl
IT WAS MY JOB to call Adrian in Virginia to tell him how Dad had left us. He listened to all the details of that last night without interrupting. We both knew there would be no more fresh stories about our father.
“I can’t believe I never get to talk to him again,” Adrian said. “Not for the rest of my life.”
The enormity of it, the end of a conversation that had gone on for forty years for me, almost sixty for Adrian, rose up in front of me like a rogue wave and slapped me down. If I was lucky, I was about halfway through my life now. Half my life without the people who made me.
“We’re orphans now,” Adrian said.
Orphans were not adults; they were children in books. They were despairing and alone, ragamuffins in the street clinging to a single penny, or Sara Crewe huddled in her unheated attic, trying to be optimistic. But I couldn’t shake the label Adrian had given us. I said it to Benet later, in the kitchen as I was putting on the kettle for afternoon tea. I could hear Dolan chattering away with his cousins in the front room.
“Adrian says we’re orphans,” I told him.
He had been standing over the table, reading something in the Times Record. He glanced up at me. He looked weary.
“We’re not orphans,” he said dismissively, dropping the newspaper and moving to the window. No one scoffs quite as effectively as Benet. “We can’t be.” He put his elbow on the sill and looked out toward the poplar tree in the neighbor’s yard. There had been a beautiful elm next to that poplar tree when we were kids, two tall, elegant trees, growing companionably together, but long ago it had been felled by Dutch elm disease. I’d never be able to look at that poplar without remembering the elm.
The kettle came to a boil. Benet was still looking out the window.
“I suppose he’s right,” he said quietly.
I WAS FORTY-ONE YEARS OLD, and as far as I was concerned, the three most important events in my life had happened in the past two years. I’d had a child in circumstances I never would have predicted. I’d lost my mother. Then I’d spent a year watching my father die. Geographically, I’d lived in California during that time, but mentally, I’d been in Maine, following every twist and turn in his health saga. I had my siblings, but now there was no one left on earth who remembered my beginning. No one there from those first moments. No one there in the secret time when I was made. If the beginning and end of life are the bookends, one was now vanished and the other loomed larger. Any book on such a shelf would be about to fall over.
I’m not sure there is anything new to be said about loss. But when it is new to you, you form the words because you have to. You feel yourself delivering dialogue from a bad movie, saying things that sound as though you must
be reading off a Hallmark card, because they are just that trite—but feeling as though at least these words might help you start bailing the boatful of your own tears, because no matter how bad it feels, it is worse than you thought. I had always been an imaginer of the darkest sort. In my childhood I would sometimes kill off Benet in my head and then try to picture life without him. When I’d seen enough to believe I did not think my own survival would be possible without him, I’d turn off this stream of thought and return, somewhat guiltily, to real life. Back then, I had never done this with my parents, perhaps because they were such a given. Now I knew their absence. It was a loneliness of the sort that must happen when you’ve been lost in deep woods for days.
Yet even when I was most mired in sadness, I looked at Dolan and thought, Yes. But. Had I been looking backward at my life with my parents and forward at nothing but myself, I would have been crushed. That was the self I felt truly sorry for, that alternate Mary, the one who stayed home that June night and drank more wine with John and Liza and fell asleep on the couch and then went on with the life she’d been living. Not the Mary who had blundered into a productive one-night stand and had, unwittingly, provided a sort of salvation for herself.
Dolan was so essential. There had been so many times when I had watched death circling my loved ones and put my face down into his hair and smelled life and had known that time had somehow been on my side just as much as it had been against me. I had spent so long obsessing over the biological clock, aware, yet at the same time ignorant on some level, of the power of the bigger clock, the one ticking away on my parents’ lives. That I’d had Dolan when I did now seemed like a miraculous stroke of luck.
