30 Pieces of a Novel (59 page)

Knows
, unless she was too weak or tired to. Places like dumps, the kids' music schools, just ordinary chores; driving in neighbor hoods she hadn't been to before, or not for long, and especially shopping with him, and especially grocery shopping when she stayed a week or two in Maine with them each summer, she liked. A week; his wife felt that was long enough for either of their mothers, but he always felt bad sending her back to the hot city and wanted it to be more. She'd be in the front seat. Last time she was in the van was about six weeks ago when he drove her and his family to dinner at his cousin's apartment in New York. No, last time was when he drove her home after dropping off his family at their apartment, since she lived farther downtown. She was in the backseat, because his wife had been in the front seat and there didn't seem to be any reason for his mother to move up for such a short trip. He said something to her, she didn't answer, he turned around: she sat frozen, it seemed, staring straight ahead past the front passenger seat. “Mom, you okay? What are you looking at so hard?” She continued staring, didn't move. “Mom, anything wrong? you all right? why don't you answer or look at me?” Nothing. He thought: Is she dead? Is this it, then? He reached over and touched her shoulder and neck. She seemed to be breathing normally but still stared straight ahead without moving. Should he pull over? he thought. Maybe she needs to be rushed to a hospital or for one of those EMS ambulances to rush to him. But he's near her building and maybe she is asleep and something's wrong with her eyes that's keeping them open and she'll snap out of it before he gets there. He kept looking back at her as he drove; she stayed the same; he parked at the hydrant by her building, put the emergency lights on, ran around the car and slid the side door open, and she suddenly stopped staring, turned to him and smiled, and said, “We're home? So fast? I must have slept,” and he said, “But your eyes were open. You were staring out the windshield, or seemed to, the whole way after we dropped off Sally and the girls,” and she said, “I couldn't have. Nobody sleeps with his eyes open, at least I never have.” He got her into the chair and wheeled her down the areaway steps and into the building—regrets that he didn't tell Angela, or whichever woman was working that night—and also called her doctor the next day about it. He still doesn't know why she froze up like that. Next time he sees his doctor or his wife's—not the kids'; she's strictly pediatrics—or meets one before then at a dinner or something, though the way he feels now he doesn't know when that will ever be, he'll mention it. He'd talk to her now if she were in the car. Last time they spoke she was hallucinating. It was the night before she went into a coma; next day—no, the day after that—she died. Ebonita called him; said his mother had been babbling for three hours straight, she'd never seen anything like it. About her children, husband, work, her family when she was a girl, a jump rope she played with for years; mostly, though, her mother and sister. “I can't get her to stop. Maybe you can.” She put his mother on, and she said, “Party, party, party,” and he said, “Mom, it's me, what do you mean ‘party'? What's doing?” and she said, “Let's go to a party. I want to party, party.” “Mom, it's Gould; you're saying you want to go to a party? What kind?” and she said, “How's business?” and he said, “I'm not in business, Mom; I teach, I write,” and she said, “I'm going to bake a cake. First I should get out of here. I want to bake lots of cakes. I have to get up now and start baking if I'm to have the time to do it.” She was speaking away from the phone, maybe to Ebonita, and Ebonita said, “Talk into the phone, Mrs. B. It's your son, so say something to him.” “Party, party, party,” she said into the phone. “I want to make and bake. Cookies, bread, cake.” “You always made great herb breads, Mom, do you remember? And what you called a zucchini bread, though it was more like a cake. Everyone loved it. Is that the kind of cake you mean you want to make?” “My sister's coming today and she likes chicken the way I bake it and she loves my zucchini cake.” “Which sister? You come from a large family.” “We'll party and party. Lizzie and Ethel, Harris and Rita. Zippie, though that wasn't her real name.” “What was her real name? You and Aunt Zippie and Uncle Pete never wanted to reveal it.” “Party and more party. Are any of my family alive? I think they're all gone and deceased, since I haven't seen any of them in years. Could be they don't want to come see me. Who would want to come see an ugly old mess. Is it fair that I'm the only one of my family left? What happened? Where'd my mother go? What'd I do?” And then more talking to herself, it seemed, where he couldn't cut in, till he yelled out, “Ebonita, it's all right, you can take the phone away, I want to speak to you.” About two months before that his mother said, “Tell me, and I want you to be honest”—he was sitting on her bed, she in her chair, the newspaper she couldn't read anymore because of her cataracts, but still had delivered every day, on her lap—“how old am I?” and he said, “Ninety-one.” “No, am I really that old? How'd I get to live that long? It doesn't run in my family. And I drank and smoked and your father made life hell for me and I lost a child and never ate right because I always wanted to be thin and for the most part neglected myself in all the other things. I don't get it.” He told Ebonita on the phone, his mother babbling in the background: “I'm coming tomorrow to see her. I'll get the eight o'clock train and be there around eleven. She doesn't sound well. But you say she has no fever and is eating and urinating okay?” and she said, “Everything but the talking's normal. And she's eating and drinking her food like she's enjoying it.” His younger daughter woke him around four the next morning and said she couldn't breathe. “You mean you're having trouble breathing?” and she said, “No, I can't get breaths. My throat's stuck.” They later found out she had the croup. He gave her medicine that was for his older daughter's asthma, called Ebonita around ten and said he had to take his daughter to the doctor now, and he'd either see his mother much later in the day than he'd planned or early tomorrow, all depending on how sick his daughter and mother are. “How is she?” and she said, “She babbled endlessly till two this morning and is now sleeping like a baby,” and he said, “She talk about anything different this time? Things or people or events you never heard her speak of before?” and she said, “No, it's mostly her mother and sister and some her father and cake and bake and chicken and such. You a lot too, that you're her only person she can really count on,” and he said, “That's not true at all. There's you and Lottie and Angela and some people from the street. Don't take it personally. In fact, if you want, and you can say this idea came from me, tell her if she can count on me so much, how come I'm almost never there? But it must be very difficult for you, tending to her so many hours straight, and I'm sorry I'm not there to help out. Anyway, it sounds as if she's much better already, but I'll call you later to make sure.” He called later and his mother was still sleeping peacefully, though she had sat up for a few minutes to take some special canned food supplement through a straw. “Good, that means she got some food and you got to rest.” He dumps the stuff he had in the van, goes home, parks, then, while still in the car, he thinks, There's a road near here he's for a few years wanted to take to see what's around it and where it goes, but he's always given himself excuses not to: has no time, it's a silly or childish impulse to carry out, and so on; but do it now, and he drives to it—it's only a mile away and he passes it on the way to the dump and back and almost every weekday when he drives his older daughter to high school—and it winds through an area with homes and woods and hilly lawns like his own and ends up on a familiar road to the main town in this part of the county. He drives home on the familiar road, since it's the shorter route of the two, parks, and walks into the house, and his wife says, “Was that you in the carport before?” and he says, “You mean about ten minutes ago in the van? Yes, but I suddenly forgot something,” and she says, “What?” and he says, “I don't know, something. My mother call?” and she says, “What are you talking about?” and he says, “Just being dopey, that's all, and possibly thinking, ‘Well, you never know.' Anyway, the last few years she hardly ever called. I called her, though, almost every day and sometimes every day for a week. I tried to call more, every single day I was away from her, really I did.” “I know, my darling.” “It would've been nice if she had called—now, I'm talking; I'm not concerned, or ever felt slighted she didn't call me much the last few years.” “Of course you weren't.” “I'm sure she wanted to but didn't think of it. Or she thought of it and then the thought quickly disappeared. She'd never stand on ceremony with me, either—that's a term she liked to use. But you know, that, ‘He's the son so he should call me,' and it for sure wasn't that she was too cheap to call. That was my father. ‘Penurious,' I liked to call him—I mean if I had to put it in words—though some people, including my mother sometimes, called him cheap. Oh, the trouble he gave me as a kid when I wanted to phone a friend. ‘Your father got stock in Bell?' and so on. But my mom? Just the opposite. ‘Call when you like, but better now than when your father's around. You know how it upsets him,' and of course an upset for him would start upsetting her. But do you think she took that tack to sort of get me on her side and a little against him, or just to establish what distinguished them? What am I trying to say here? Help me,” and she says, “She might have been showing you she approved of a number of things you did that your father disapproved of, and certainly that she didn't think your calling your friends was a big deal.” “She was always supporting me and my work. Is that what you meant? Probably not. And I'm not referring to money, though she would've given me some to do what I wanted with it, within reason and her limited budget, and often offered: ‘Do you need any extra cash?' Even now—I mean up until maybe two months ago—and I'd say, ‘No, Mom, I'm working, so I got enough coming in.' But before I met you, to live off of while I did these so-called artistic or creative things, or for grad school or travel, but I never wanted to take it and hardly ever did. I wanted to be Mr. Independent, and I didn't want to be taking money she might have, with a lot of difficulty, extracted from my dad. And, after he died, money that'd make her own life a bit more comfortable and secure. He was a good guy, though, and had a kind heart; I wasn't alluding to anything about that. Everybody thought so, except sometimes my mother. A sense of humor too—both of them—I forget who I was originally talking about there. Though she, for some reason, became even funnier after he died—real witty lines and retorts which I never remember her saying before. Let's see, what would be one? That crack about the Jack Daniels, when I tried diluting it because I thought it was too strong for her and she hadn't had anything to eat yet. I think I told you it. Others. ‘If I get any older …' Something about if she got any older than she was and Stone Age culture, but I forget. And both were affectionate to me most times, my father, earlier on, more than my mother—‘A kiss, before you go to bed every night you must give me a kiss'—and never raised a hand. Well, he raised it to me several times but it never struck. But she? Not a finger, except, and when I probably deserved it, to wag. I really loved them both, though if I had to make a choice—this, by the way, was the one impossible question to answer when I was a boy: ‘Who do you love more, your mom or dad?'—it'd be she. It's true, I'd have to say it, I never said it before, but it was she. Not because I knew her twenty years longer. She was, all in all, just nicer and more dependable and predictable and with a more even disposition, and she made me feel better when I needed to and understood or tried to understand me more. But them both, you know? I've no regrets in what kind of parents I had in them both.” “I know. Try not to be so sad,” and he says, “I can't help it. I feel miserable. This goddamn crying's a pain in the ass sometimes, when it just spurts out in the worst public places and tears my throat, but I suppose it also has its good. I should've got a vaporizer for her room when she started breathing poorly again a few months ago. I didn't want to take her money so she'd be more comfortable and secure in old age? So why, when I had the chance and the income, didn't I give her everything she needed—gone into hock doing it, if I had to? Now I look back and think, What the hell was I saving the money for anyway? I'd only have been spending her money—wouldn't I?—when you think I'll probably end up with a small bundle from her when the estate's settled. Laziness, that's what it was. That I couldn't pick up the phone and call the drugstore nearest her and say, Send over a vaporizer, send her everything she needs or the woman taking care of her says she needs.” “You did that. The women with her could have ordered anything they wanted, and no doubt did. And it was already costing you and your mother a big bundle keeping those women there and feeding them.” “That I just couldn't have picked up the phone every day and even twice a day, morning and night, and not mostly from my office, and spoken to her a few minutes? I had to keep it to once a day and most times not even to that? And laziness that I didn't take the train in to see her more.” “You saw her a lot.” “Not enough. I was bored with the trip, I also found the car ride tedious, but I couldn't have made the sacrifice more? What would it have taken? Bought some good stuff to read on the train. Or saved up, let's say, since to me newspapers are much easier to read on trains than books, two or three days of the
Times
. Or the whole Sunday paper, no matter what day I left, or just the Arts and magazine and week-in-review sections—the book section I would have already read—or made myself tired by not getting much sleep the night before the trip so I'd sleep on the train most of the way.” “Now you're carrying out these things you could have done too far, both for her and yourself, and it's not good for you, it's really not.” “I should have put her up in a nursing home around here—there are plenty that are good and cheerful, people have said. Closed her apartment first and driven her down, or temporarily closed it, in case she didn't like the home, and seen her twice a day at this place, but she wouldn't have gone in one.” “Then don't raise it as a possibility. She was a New Yorker from birth, and even if she didn't have any friends or close relatives there left, except for her niece—” “I should have gone in to see her the day before she died. That kills me the most: the last thing I could have done and I didn't. But Josephine was very sick: I worried about the kid once she came into our room and said she couldn't breathe. And I sort of made a secret decision with myself that day that I had to see to the sickly living before the dying dying. That's an awful thought; cold, crude, awful, and something I didn't even think then, so why'd I say it? Did I use Josephine as an excuse not to see my mother that day before? Again, laziness? No, I wanted to see her, absolutely, truly, and would have, and I thought my cousin was looking after her well or would, plus Ebonita or whoever was on”—“Ebonita was”—“but I—but my mother was ninety-one and I knew she was definitely failing, but I also wanted to make sure Josephine got to the doctor. But she would have seen me before she went into the coma. My mother. But I didn't know she was going into a coma and seeing me wouldn't have stopped her from going into one or dying, though it might have made her feel better for a few moments. I could have shown her pictures—longer than a few; minutes; hours. But pictures of the kids and you, photos I mean, recent ones she hadn't seen, or just old ones of her and the kids and you where everyone looks happy and well. Photos of her parents and brother and sisters. I could have got them out of the breakfront drawers where she always kept them, kept them there when I was a kid. Of herself when she was a beauty. The same drawers. She still was a beauty, a beauty for someone her age and maybe ten years younger; she would have won a contest if there was such a contest for beauty at that age, but not on those final days. I wouldn't have brought out the photos of my brother, no matter how cheerful and healthy-looking he appears in them and beautiful or handsome or whatever a boy is when he's so young. And my father, of course, or maybe not ‘of course,' since their marriage wasn't that great. But photos of them together, just dating and in the latest styles; with friends, all of them arm-in-arm in a park once. One where she's cuddling a dog, though when I was growing up she hated them, and where he has on these long sporty striped socks and what do you call those pants that end just below the knees?” “Knickers? Jodphurs?” “He was a rider too, in Prospect and Central parks: rental horses. And at their wedding reception. She looked gorgeous, holding what she said were a couple dozen long-stemmed roses my father got her, and he so handsome in cutaway and top hat. And one in a bathing suit; she, I'm speaking of—his legs were too thin for him to look good in them—holding an open parasol above her as if imitating a beauty contestant, and with a fashion model-of-today's figure but showgirl's legs. They're all still there. I'm going to get them next time I'm in, and maybe they'll be some of the few things of hers I'll keep before I give or throw everything else away and close the apartment for good.” “She was very beautiful. It was the first thing my parents thought when you introduced them.” “Her skin. Did I tell you about it? Even on that last day, so smooth. Or maybe because of that day, more smooth than ever; I don't know. Relaxed; going into death, if it's not painful or distressing in any other way, might do that. But like someone's—weeks before—thirty or forty years old. Or forty to fifty, better, but on that last day, thirty to forty.” “Even to have the skin of a sixty- or seventy-year-old would be remarkable for a woman her age.” “But it was much better than that. Amazingly, not many lines and none on her forehead and only a few around her chin and mouth and neck where they normally start congregating and growing when you hit fifty. Look at me. So let's say I didn't inherit her skin genes—for the face; her arms and hands were like someone's her age—or my lines relate to other things. And with the plates in her mouth out too.” “I don't follow you.” “That last day. If her dentures had been in, her face would have even been smoother, I think. But I did something that's irreversible, I just know it. Usually the wrong things I do I can patch up, with talk or time or overcompensating later on, but these I can't, especially that I didn't come in that day. The previous one. The day before the last. When Josephine was so sick.” “Don't blame yourself, darling. There wasn't any one incontrovertibly right decision to make.” “I may even have made the right one, for all I know, but it still doesn't help. Josephine was immediately put on antibiotics—right in the doctor's office; they used starters. I remember running out into the hallway to get her one of those paper-cone cups of water. And I left early the next day to see her—my mother—and got there an hour and a half before she died.” “So one of the good things to look at is that you got there in time.” “Or at least before the moment we think she died. There was Ebonita and her daughter. I forget the girl's name. What do I care that she had seen her grandmother die and so was used to it? She shouldn't have been in the room with us. She should have gone into the kitchen during that time or taken a walk outside. But she didn't know better, though she was old enough to, and I don't think Ebonita did either, and there was nothing I was able to say. She was definitely breathing, though, when I got there, my mother. And for the hour and a half or so after. Hard breathing. Meaning it was hard for her to breathe—labored breaths and plenty of phlegm. And for a long time we went on and off thinking she was still breathing after that moment, but so softly we couldn't hear it, and we also thought we saw her body moving a little. But the EMS guy who came hours later—we didn't notify them sooner because we still thought she might be alive—said she'd been dead from about the time we'd originally said and that what we thought were signs of life was just the dead body beginning to break down and settle—I think those were his words—and the gases, or maybe that's the same thing. I told you what he did, right?” “With his two fingers quickly on her neck and saying she's gone?” “After, while we were waiting for the police, I said, ‘Can't he, to make sure, use an instrument or something so we know she won't be carted away alive?' and he shrugged, as if saying, ‘All right, to make you happy,' and monitored her heart with a stethoscope and pinpricked her skin and did something else with another gadget, and then said, ‘Nothing, I'm sorry, my condolences.'” “That part I hadn't heard.” “I held her up, those moments I thought were her last. That's not what I wanted. I mean I didn't plan it that way—come in for it, have any idea it would happen, some dramatic moment like that—but that's how it probably ended and the EMS guy was right. What do you think her babbling meant? She did it for almost half a day straight. I wish I'd been there to hear it.” “I know, you've said.” “It was like she was describing her entire life in that relatively short time, different from what you usually hear about it passing through the dying person's mind. I would have learned—but I told you all this—stuff about her family and my dad and her childhood that she only would have revealed in the unguarded state she was in. It even could have been embarrassing for me to listen to: things about herself and my father and maybe other men before—I doubt there were any after—though Ebonita said, in that hour and a half we had together before she died, there was nothing that made her or her daughter blush or anything she hadn't already heard. Well, she probably had told Angela and Ebonita everything, including things about me that weren't so good—I'm saying, in the years they had looked after her. If only Josephine hadn't got sick, but what can you do.” “It was a freak coincidence. Of course, you were frightened for her, just as I was.” “You don't think Josephine's illness was in any way connected to knowing my mother might be dying? I mean, we were all at dinner when I got that first phone call, and I talked to Ebonita on your portable phone.” “I don't see it. Listen, dearest, try for a while not to think of those last two days. Or think of them all you want; I'm not sure what's right either.” “No, you were right the first time. I'm going to rest, I think. Try to nap, anyway.” “If you need me”—her arms out—“I'm here,” and he says, “Thanks,” and goes into their bedroom, makes sure the phone's off, and lies on the bed. “Party, party, party,” she kept telling him over the phone. Or at least said it while she held the receiver and he was on the phone. Though maybe Ebonita was holding the receiver for her and his mother didn't even know she was talking to him or even talking on a phone. No, she knew she was talking to him, or part of the time, since she asked, “How's business?” something he thinks she said before in relation to his work, the teaching or writing or both. He's sure she said it before, and more than once, and one time as a joke. But what did the “party, party” mean? And she sounded so chipper on the phone, better than she had for months. “My sister's coming and she loves my chicken and I have to bake a cake” and “buy a new dress,” Ebonita told him she'd also said that day several times. Did she mean one of her dead sisters was coming to take her away? That she knew she was dying? That the party was some idea she had of joining up with her favorite dead people in heaven or some afterlife place—her beloved mother, whom Ebonita said she went on about most, and of course her firstborn son—or some notion she had of freedom and fun once she was released from the physical discomfort and misery she'd been in for years? That the cake was what she wanted to make for the party as an offering of sorts? Or just that when you go to a party you always bring something? which is what she thought. The new dress might have meant to her—or did Ebonita say a “fresh” dress?—but anyway, a shroud or just a nice outfit to look good in her coffin in or something presentable to wear to a party. If that's the case, what's the chicken mean? Nothing right now in his storehouse of symbols, but maybe there was one in hers. Or the chicken was a chicken, something she baked with a coating of corn flakes that her sister did like, and that made her sister coming to her more realistic. But if this is how she approached death, then she went fairly resignedly, right? Or not anxious or frightened and maybe even gladly, and that's a good thought for him to have. But what else did she say? Oh, don't start analyzing every word. “First I have to get out of here,” she told him, and she wants to bake “lots” of cakes. Well, the “out of here” is easy enough to explain, not that he'd be right, but “lots of cakes”? Maybe to give everyone she joins up with in this afterlife place. Anything else she say? He wrote most of it down soon after he spoke with her, a little of it even while he was on the phone, but doesn't remember any more of it now or where he put those notes: probably in his top night-table drawer, but he doesn't want to look: what'd be the purpose? Her arm thrashed a lot that last hour and a half and for a few hours before that, Ebonita said, and always the right. So, she was a righty, and what's it mean anyway?—it's all involuntary. His dad's thrashed for two days when he was in his last coma, and maybe in the coma before that, and both arms, back and forth in front of his face and sometimes crossing but never hitting each other. When he tried to hold them down they'd push up, and his dad's face showed pain or intense frustration at that moment, so he let them go, hoping his father wouldn't hurt himself like breaking his nose. He called her doctor the day before he went to New York, and the doctor said that from everything Ebonita told him and the visiting nurse said about her, she's failing. “I'm afraid she'll never leave the hospital this time if we send her there.” “Alive, you mean,” and the doctor said, “To be absolutely frank about it, yes. The decision's ultimately yours, though. But if I were you I'd get to her side quickly and try to make her as comfortable as you can at home. If you need to reach me for any reason, call day or night, though I don't think you'll have to except, perhaps, for a pep talk. I'm sorry, Gould. Your mother was a brave woman, but you have to remember we never thought she'd last this long, and from my conversations with her she didn't think so either.” “Why, what'd she say?” and the doctor said, “I forget, but something, since she was always a pessimist regarding her longevity and health.” After that phone call he remembers thinking, What's the guy talking about? She's not dead yet. That whole last-nail-in-the-coffin business, which they also used on his father, is a bunch of hooey. His