Habit

by Susan Morse

Ring. Ring.

  —Hello?

  —Susie?

  It was Father Nicholas from the monastery in Seattle. He sounded cute as a button and told me all about his son who is an actor. Small world: my mother’s monk’s son is on TV, too.

  Of course, it’s all up to Ma, but if it were Father Nicholas, he said, he’d just give his Abbot Superior a copy of his living will, move up to the attic of the monastery, and let nature take its course. And there’s always tonsure.

  I keep hearing Ma mention tonsure as something that somehow factors into the equation, but she’s vague about it. I know she and the holy guys have been contemplating this for her, and it is a big change of some sort. What I got from Father Nicholas is that tonsure is a ceremony where you become a monastic. Younger nuns and monks live in communities together, share the household duties, and pray. That’s their job. In Ma’s case, being female and elderly, she’d be a House Nun. Her job would be to stay in her home and pray there, which is pretty much what she does already.

  Ma’s favorite Orthodox prayer is familiar to me, but I’d always thought J. D. Salinger made it up. She has a slightly wordier version of this prayer Salinger’s character Franny obsessively mutters while having a nervous breakdown in Franny and Zooey:

  Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.

  I like Salinger. I’m pretty sure he was born half Jewish/half Catholic, and later practiced Buddhism and Hinduism as an adult. I feel it’s best not to point this out to Ma.

  According to Father Nicholas, there’s a bonus with tonsure. The Church has noticed that when Orthodox people with dire illnesses receive it, Things have been known to Happen, and they’ve happened often enough to get everyone’s attention. The tonsured person is sometimes miraculously cured, or else dies suddenly without any painful messy ordeals.

  So that’s what she’s up to.

  Weissman tells us he also wants to operate but, contrary to surgeon number one, he recommends the full course of chemo and radiation first. We realize we’re going to need a third opinion, and things are getting complex. Ma’s been sort of quiet, and after I walk her up to her apartment, I figure it’s time to let her know where I stand. At the door, I tell her I’m with her no matter what she wants to do. Treatment, partial treatment, no treatment at all, I’ll see if I can figure out a way to support her.

  —Thank you, she says.

  —I can imagine this is pretty scary, I say, and I don’t want you to worry about me.

  We look at each other.

  —But, I say, I know what I would do. It’s pretty clear that if you don’t do something medical, and things progress, you might not like what you’ll be going through.

  —Yes, Ma says, I’m praying about it.

  —And, I say, this might not be a good time to hold out for a miracle.

  —I’m praying, she says.

  —Right, I say. I really hope your priests and monks and things aren’t getting your hopes up too much because—

  —I’m aware of the situation, she says, and I haven’t made up my mind yet. I’m gathering all the information and I know God will take care of me.

  This, I think, is really hard. I don’t want to beat her up about it, but this is really a big thing. It’s one thing to say that with prayer someday your checkbook will balance itself or your illegally parked car won’t get impounded. When those kinds of prayers aren’t answered, you can still carry on somehow and Susie will get over it after she’s had a minor conniption and recovered from cleaning up the mess. Now the stakes are raised.

  —I hear you, I say. I’m with you if you decide to go the prayer route. I’m against it, but I’m with you. And if you do manage to be cured or even if you simply have a comfortable peaceful death without doing anything medical about this cancer, you just might convert me after all.

  As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I am profoundly uneasy. There is an unmistakable gleam in Ma’s eye, and her absolute composure both appalls me and rips my heart from its root. I burst into tears. The gauntlet is thrown.

  4.

  The Night of the Fork

  WE ARE DOING THIS lying-on-the-foam thing today. The radiation department needs about two hours to get a mold of Ma, facedown in position. This mold will become her bed during treatment, to keep her perfectly still. They will also do a CT scan, and make tiny tattoos on her backside so they can point the beam as accurately as possible.

  We have settled on an outfit called the Huntingdon Cancer Center. We like Huntingdon because it’s not in Center City, and it has its own parking lot, which takes you right to the door. Also because Pete Johnson is a hotshot surgical oncologist there, and he used to be married to my cousin. When we sent Pete all the test results, he took charge in a very reassuring way, and we found ourselves saying yes to the full protocol: six weeks of chemo and radiation, followed by surgery.

  At least, I think that’s what we’ll be doing. Ma has required a little coaxing, but she admits she has a thing or two to accomplish before she exits this world. So the plan is to try the treatment one day at a time with the option to quit immediately if she doesn’t take to it.

  The radiation subsection we’re dealing with this morning is made up of a bunch of nurse types with shrill voices who are awfully wrapped up in the pleasures of their workday, hanging out in the halls and gossiping with one another. The patients seem to be expected to hop to it when they’re told, and otherwise not to call too much attention to themselves.

  This is sort of not really the way Ma likes to operate. I can tell they are pushing all her buttons; she’s tired as it is. I wonder gloomily if we will be seeing a lot of these ladies over the next six weeks.

  She emerges from the last segment of business, the CT scan, while I’m in the hall talking schedules with dreamy radiation resident Doctor Morris. She has two or three of the ladies in tow, and they’re squawking cheery, patronizing last-minute salutations in high nasal voices.

  Ma has a familiar demonic grin on her face, which calls to mind the famous Night of the Fork, around 1969 or so, when she decided she didn’t like our dinner conversation.

  —You’re all done now!! says a nurse.

  I wince. Ma hates it when people say they are done because technically it means they are dead. You are supposed to say I have finished.

  —Oh, you’re all DONE NOW!!!!! says Ma, mimicking the nurse in this really high voice with an exaggerated South Philly accent.

  —You can get changed!! says the nurse.

  Get changed is also bad grammar of some sort—I forget what. I brace myself.

  —OH, GOODY!!!! You can get CHANGED, squeals Ma and she sniggers evilly at me and Doctor Morris, whose jaw has dropped. He looks to me for a cue.

  When we were little, my siblings and I used to joke about the Men in the White Coats. These were the guys who had to come and cart you away from home if you were locked-up-type crazy. We thought it was a funny image, but under the surface was the possibility we didn’t really talk about: that the White Coats might really have to come and collect our mother some day. Ma was mostly functional, but there were these outbursts when her frustrations got the better of her and she would lose it publicly in ways that were hard to overlook. Colette remembers a particularly turbulent summer when she was only nine or ten. More than a couple of people yanked her aside at the Penllyn Club to vent: Our mother must see a psychiatrist. This was the 1960s, when nobody said things like that unless the situation appeared to be desperate.

  A few years before the Night of the Fork, when I was five, Daddy had his first heart attack. Quitting drinking was not discussed with the doctor, but apparently leaving his unsatisfying job as a corporate lawyer was. There was a modest income from a small family trust, and Daddy decided to look for a new country to live where the dollar could really be stretched. The criteria: golf for Daddy. There had to be Montessori, ponies, and dogs for us three girls, and Ma needed Catholics, a garden, and a decent social life. All of this boiled down to Ireland. There was added entic
ement: something about a baron Ma was related to, who was friends with racy people like the Guinnesses.

  Felix had just graduated from college and was left behind to fend for himself. We girls spent a week on a Dutch ocean liner and landed in two worlds at once, the first being Old Fort: a farmhouse near the sea, named after the ruined sixteenth-century fortified castle that was crumbling picturesquely in the adjoining field, nestled in the lowland area of the magical, mystical Wicklow Hills. There were lambs frolicking, a few ponies and barn cats, a devoted yellow lab who produced baskets of puppies hand over fist, and new friends with names like Seamus and Grainne who had lyrical accents we quickly assumed as our own.

  The second world was our parents’ rapidly deteriorating marriage. Ma soon copped to the reality that her talented young Philadelphia lawyer had no intention of supporting the family in the conventional way, and instead had plunked her down in the middle of a dirty damp nowhere with three small children and untrained help. That’s when she began to squawk. Plus she hadn’t really thought out the whole social thing: We were serious Catholics then, and the Anglo-Irish crowd was allergic to Catholics—this was Ireland, duh.

  Daddy could have made do indefinitely between the golf and the pubs and his weekly columns for newspapers back home and in Dublin (Mike O’Shisker amid the charming natives of the Emerald Isle—fables for our times). But Ma wasn’t cooperating, and our household became a place where parents screamed at each other and slammed doors in the night.

  As for us girls, we had to do a lot of coping on our own. We learned quickly not to make life more complicated by objecting when Things Happened. Like when Colette, the eldest, was ordered to put some excess newborn puppies in a burlap bag and drown them in a barrel because that’s what you did on a farm, and I, at age seven, went into the ancient, cavernous kitchen for a snack and was fiddled with by the toothless old gardener.

  There are some riveting memoirs out these days by people whose early years were incredibly intense. You keep checking the author’s picture on the back cover for facial disfigurement and missing ears, or just to confirm the miracle that they survived. I enjoy these stories as much as the next person, but they kind of make it tough to justify my own need for therapy. My childhood, while it left a lot of scars, had subtler traumas that never really seemed to explain my personal level of angst. I keep thinking I must be a little boring:

  —Um, it was really really loud when they slammed the doors, and one time she threatened to leave, even. That really scared me.

  —Of course, because she couldn’t bear to see you all suffer. So she tried to drown you in the bathtub—

  —No. She just put on her coat for a minute. But Colette had to drown—

  —Okay, but she knocked you all unconscious that night and poured gasoline all over you and then—

  —No.

  —No? Are you sure you just don’t remember? Do you have blackouts, multiple personalities?

  —No, no blackouts. But—okay, the gardener groped me.

  —How terrible! He violated you!

  —No. He, you know, felt me up and sort of kissed me.

  —You mean he repeatedly raped you over a period of years and told you not to tell anyone or he would kill your parents?

  —Well, no. It was just the one time. But he didn’t have any teeth . . .

  For me, it took a Meisner acting teacher to convince me to try therapy. She pointed out I was dodging conflict unnaturally in scenes and improvisations. My partner could be flipping out all over the place, yelling horrible things at me or whatever and instead of yelling right back, or at least admitting how I felt about what he was doing, I’d try to calm him down, or worse, I’d just giggle inanely. It’s good not to get in an argument at the drop of a hat in real life, but my teacher wanted me to be able to go for it in the imaginary world, and I was clearly blocked. So I sucked it up and let myself unload on a series of therapists. I even took Ma’s advice and tried Adult Children of Alcoholics.

  It was exhilarating when the results started showing and I “came to life” in acting class. I could cry real tears and holler bloody murder all day long—in fact, I did, because expressing my true feelings felt so cathartic and pure, I couldn’t bring myself to leave such liberating behavior behind in the classroom. If a bunch of construction workers tried to embarrass me with loud appreciative comments as I passed on the way home from class in Times Square, instead of ducking my head as usual and increasing my pace, I’d stop in the middle of an intersection and give them what for at the top of my lungs, complete with enough graphic hand gestures to make them all blush. I collared my landlord in a stairwell about our yearlong unresolved water temperature problem and informed him with gusto that he was a flaming asshole. My mother couldn’t get away with anything anymore. I think David sort of regrets introducing me to the Meisner Technique.

  What I had come to understand in therapy was that there were too many things we didn’t talk about in our family. In the 1960s, people didn’t realize that when a little girl tells her sister that the disgusting gardener defiled her one afternoon in the kitchen, it’s not enough for her parents to fire the monster and pretend nothing happened. The little girl shouldn’t have to wait till she’s twenty-three years old to begin to face how utterly terrifying and life-changing that experience was.

  Instead I was left to draw my own conclusions from the gardener episode and its aftermath. It’s been a lifelong process. In Ireland, at the impressionable age of seven, I contemplated the elements that made up my small, dangerous world: the recent shocking introduction to horrors lurking in the kitchen, my basic lack of popularity with my older siblings (who had their own traumas to work through and weren’t particularly thrilled by my Special status), my father’s general emotional unavailability, and the strong possibility that my only ally was becoming more mentally unhinged by the day and might just leave if she didn’t get what she needed. I figured I had to come up with my own strategy for coping.

  It was pretty logical. If the world wasn’t safe and Ma was the one person in the family who took a real interest in my welfare, and she was about to fall apart, then my personal survival depended completely on keeping her together so she’d stick around. Even though the role of the Special one was beginning to stink, I had to milk it for all it was worth. I had to take care of my scary, fragile mother any way I could think of. This solution would do nothing for my reputation with my siblings, but I saw no other choice at age seven. I became my mother’s caretaker, because without her, I’d REALLY be left in the clutches of the next foul-smelling groundskeeper who blundered into our home in search of a place to stick his nasty old tongue.

  Wicklow, 1966

  So I became a habitual watchdog. When Ma ran to her room to cry, it was my job to follow her there and try to comfort her. And from that moment onward, I wasn’t just reluctant to go out for a sleepover because I’d be homesick: I was afraid to leave her for too long in case she needed me to settle her down when she began to freak. This is partly why I switched schools so often—for a solid two-year period I pretended I was sick, so I could stay home all day and keep an eye on her.

  Even Daddy came to regret the move to Ireland. He’d dreamed about Philadelphia every single night we were there. So it was not too hard for him when he finally faced facts and took Ma back to civilization.

  By then, she was in the throes of a thyroid condition, complicated by undiagnosed perimenopause. It was too late. The marriage was still a disaster and no amount of country clubs, modern dishwashers, and wall-to-wall carpeting was going to help stop the battles that started when Daddy came home from the mishmash of jobs he’d cobbled together trying to make his life interesting. Still no lawyering and not enough money for Ma, which meant continued conflict.

  We girls did our best to not be around for the fights, but we sure heard them down the hall at homework time. Nothing was ever said about their nightly hollering and stomping at dinner, when we all shifted seamlessly into Perfect Table m
ode. We had to set the table exactly right with this kind of napkin placed exactly like this with the fork just like that beside, not on top of the napkin, and aligned on a diagonal with the glass—no, not that kind of glass, the one in the pantry on the third shelf and now we need the candles lit—no not just the little ones, the tall ones. Susie go get the tall candlesticks in the sideboard and then refold this napkin, its border needs to be showing in the upper left hand corner. “Please pass the salt” wasn’t quite right. It had to be please pass the salt, Colette. The topic of conversation had to be soothing, stimulating, and above all something Ma liked to talk about.

  The Night of the Fork, everything was arranged just so and Daddy lurched in as usual to take his seat at the head of the table, wait for the blessing, and dig in.

  Our father was as complex as Ma in his own way. It was really too bad he had such a problem with drinking, because when Daddy was in good form, he was absolutely delightful. He had a wonderful beaming smile and that special kind of manner that makes everyone feel appreciated. Going into the city with Daddy was a thrill because of all the different kinds of people who knew him and seemed so glad to see him—train conductors, waitresses, businessmen on the street. They all called him Mike, and he’d stop to talk to each of them. He was fantastic at names, so he’d make it seem as if it was his own particular pleasure to introduce us to everyone.

  We loved Daddy a lot, but one of the things we’d all like to have changed was his appalling table manners. He was a huge, grunting, freckled redheaded ogre at the table, with chicken grease and melted artichoke butter all over himself.

  So we were meant to keep eating despite the stomach-turning spectacle at Daddy’s end, and help make pleasant conversation with Ma at her end, which was basically only anything Ma was interested in. We were, for the most part, unstimulated by Ma’s topics, so the goal was always to try to engage Daddy, partly because he was more fun to talk to, but also just to get him to stop looking and sounding like a Neanderthal for a second.