Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (25 page)

Mom was looking more fragile than ever. More than a year had passed since Adelle’s wedding, and during that time she had confronted the boundaries of her stamina. All the chemotherapy—at least three times as much of it as doctors had ever expected she could withstand—had so battered her immune system and weakened her blood that she was receiving regular transfusions and was diagnosed with leukemia, a new cancer to keep company with the old one. She slept so fitfully that she spent most nights curled up on the family room couch, where she could turn on and off the lights or TV without bothering Dad. She was happiest whenever she found a
Law and Order
episode she’d already seen; that way, she didn’t have to worry about dozing off before the verdict. As for her serial-killer books, which she was going through at a faster pace than ever, I noticed that she’d taken to reading the last twenty pages first. She told me she’d simply lost her appetite for surprises. I wondered if she’d lost her confidence that she’d get to the end.

She was shockingly, frighteningly moody, pivoting from laughter to tears without any explanation or provocation. And she was, for the first time, pessimistic. Shortly before Thanksgiving she asked me for an unsettling favor. Would I take the two cats, Sable and Boo, to the vet to be put to sleep?

For decades our family had alternated between cats and dogs, occasionally having one of each at the same time. But after the English setter was hit by a car, we gave up on dogs. Mom liked cats better, anyway. Sable and Boo were the last in a line of more than a half dozen of them since I’d been born.

Mom attributed to them personalities much more complicated and fascinating than they had, and claimed to be able to read into their squeaks and peeps and full-throated meows whole sentences and paragraphs of meaning. Dad just rolled his eyes. They were her cats, not his; he tolerated them solely for her sake. And now they were getting old and addled, often going to the bathroom near, instead of in, their litter box in the laundry room. At this stage of their lives, no one was going to adopt them, and Mom didn’t want Dad to be saddled with them when she was gone. No, there was only one sensible course of action. She should say good-bye to them now.

But she wanted someone with them, holding and stroking them, when they were put down, and she couldn’t bear to be the one. She elected me. Although I was the son who listened to the weepiest music and blubbered most copiously during
Terms of Endearment
, I was also the one she trusted to be the most hardheaded and strong- stomached about certain things. That was why I was the one she always reminded about her adamant opposition to any extraordinary life-prolonging measures.

As I walked through the Scarsdale house to round up the cats for their ride to the vet, I tried to make light of it, telling her, “I feel like I should be carrying a scythe or something.”

“My grim reaper,” she said with a smile and a tiny, forced laugh, then hugged me. On my neck I could feel that her eyes were wet.

Two days before Thanksgiving, Lisa gave birth to a boy and named him Frank, after Dad. Mom wanted to see him right away and Dad was tied up, so she packed up some pots, pans, spices and such to supplement whatever Mark and Lisa had in their house. She hauled them into a car. Then she drove the three and a half hours to Boston by herself. That evening, in Lisa’s hospital room, she cradled her first grandson and delighted in his coloring: he had the pale skin, pale eyes and red hair of her Irish lineage. In her own dark-eyed, dark-haired children and in the Italian values and habits and appetites she had developed, Dad’s blood trumped hers. But here was a seven-pound, ten-ounce reminder that she was in the mosaic, too, and that she would stay there.

Lisa’s parents, Betty and Mike, arrived on a plane from Dallas the next day, but Mom nonetheless insisted on taking charge of Thanksgiving dinner, though it would be slightly more modest than usual, given that she was feeding a smaller group and doing so with limited energy.

She debriefed Lisa on the best food stores in the area and went out the day before Thanksgiving to do the shopping. Back at Mark and Lisa’s house she started chopping what could be chopped in advance and cooking what could be cooked ahead of time, including a turkey breast that didn’t need to be served warm, since it was designated for extra meat for the evening sandwiches that traditionally followed the midday meal. She educated Betty on the importance of the extra breast.

“Without it you just never have enough white meat,” explained Mom, still an evangelist for excess. She moved through the kitchen sluggishly, becoming palpably winded at times. She waved off suggestions from Betty and Mike that she let them take over. She had no choice, though, but to accept their offers of help.

On Thanksgiving morning she woke up at four a.m. so she could put the whole turkey in the oven and start making the rest of the meal. For several hours she had the kitchen to herself. That was precisely how she wanted it.

Mark and Lisa returned home from the hospital with their son at about noon, in time for shrimp and quiche, because Mom had of course made quiche. She had also peeled scores of clementines and stacked them high in the shape of a pyramid. They were just a little something to be put on the table right after the dishes for the main meal were cleared and before the real dessert arrived.

We had that meal at two p.m. As soon as it was over, Mom excused herself and apologized: she needed to take a nap. She negotiated the stairs up to the second-floor bedrooms one slow, careful step at a time. She didn’t come back down until three and a half hours later.

At the end of the Thanksgiving weekend she and Dad drove together back to Scarsdale, and at about five thirty a.m. Monday the phone in my apartment in Manhattan rang. Dad was with her at the hospital, where he had taken her in the middle of the night because she was having trouble breathing.

Adelle and Tom drove into the city from their apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey, to pick me up. By eight a.m. the three of us were with Mom and Dad in her room at White Plains Hospital. Soon Harry and Sylvia showed up, bringing little Leslie with them, and soon after that Mark arrived, too, having driven three and a half hours straight from Boston, where Lisa remained only because she had a five-day-old infant to care for.

Dad and all four of his and Mom’s children were around her, encircling her, as her breathing became increasingly labored and her eyes darted this way and that, wild with confusion or maybe fury. We couldn’t tell, and she wasn’t able to tell us.

As she struggled ever harder for breath, her body began to thrash.

“You’ve got to help her,” I told a nurse, who upped the amount of morphine going into Mom through an intravenous drip.

I told the nurse the same thing ten minutes later, when Mom’s thrashing hadn’t ceased. And the same thing again five minutes after that.

Dad balled his fists tighter and tighter, walked in circles, asked me if I was sure. I said yes. I had to say yes. Those were my orders.

Whenever I stepped back from the side of Mom’s bed, I found myself plucking little Leslie, eight months old and unaware of what was happening, from Harry’s or Sylvia’s arms. I pressed my lips against her forehead, her nose, her cheeks. Over and over again. I couldn’t let go of her.

Years later, when her personality came into sharper focus and it was the personality of a competitive, stubborn and sometimes bossy spitfire, we all joked that it wasn’t death that took place in that hospital room.

It was just the transfer of an indomitable spirit from an older vessel to a newer one.

 

 

 

 

The days, weeks and months that followed Mom’s death were, in the truest sense possible, a blur. I couldn’t concentrate the way I usually did, and I often couldn’t clearly remember what had happened one day by the time the next arrived.

Did friends of the family drop off platters of food, casseroles and cakes at the Scarsdale house, the way people often do after someone dies? It’s possible. Probable. I can’t say.

Was there any sort of ceremonial meal to go along with the moment when Dad, Mark, Harry, Adelle and I carried Mom’s ashes to the pond across the street from the Scarsdale house and scattered them there, in a setting that always delighted her and gave her a sense of peace? There might have been. There
must
have been. But it’s lost to me.

I remember walking to a lectern in the same Scarsdale church where Adelle had been married to give the eulogy at Mom’s funeral, and I remember walking away from that lectern. But if Mark hadn’t saved a text of that eulogy—written with his, Harry’s and Adelle’s help—it would be lost to me, too.

I talked to the hundreds of people who’d come to pay their respects about Mom’s cooking, and about the lasagna for Mark’s college teammates, a tradition that lasted all four of his years at Amherst. “It’s an amazing thing,” I said, “when you think about it: that a college-age kid would actively encourage dozens and dozens of his friends to meet his mother, and that those friends would like her—and, I’ll admit, her cooking—so much that year after year, they would forgo getting back to campus in time for the Saturday-evening parties just to pay her and her home another visit.”

I also put into words something I’d always believed, deep down, even when Mom had signaled disappointment in me over a swimming practice missed, a race lost, a nearly straight-A report card marred by a B-plus or ten pesky pounds I couldn’t lose. I said that I’d had the luxury of going through life knowing there was someone who would love and support me no matter what. “For me, at least, she was the safety net that made every risk manageable, every uncertainty endurable,” I told the gathered mourners. “Now, for the first time, I guess I’ll find out if I have any courage of my own. I didn’t need it before, because I had my mother.”

After nearly a week in Scarsdale with Dad and my siblings, I went back to my apartment and back to work. I wrote an article on something—on nothing—and realized that it was probably the first piece of mine in the
Times
that Mom wouldn’t read. She had been faithful that way.

As I made coffee one morning I caught sight of a book above the stove that I hadn’t noticed in a long time. It wasn’t exactly a book, but a binder filled with sewing tips and cleaning tips and many blank ruled pages onto which whoever bought it was supposed to paste, scribble or staple favorite recipes for whoever was receiving it. Mom had pasted, scribbled and stapled dozens. The book’s title:
Where’s Mom Now That I Need Her?

There were thousands of scenes I could have flashed back on, many of them more colorful or eventful than the one that kept popping up in my mind. It was from four years earlier, when Elli and I had been working on our book about the Catholic Church. At that time Elli lived in Miami and I lived in Detroit, but we wanted to be in the same place for at least six weeks of the writing, so we moved in with Mom and Dad in Scarsdale, each of us taking one of the spare bedrooms in their empty nest. In their finished basement, which they seldom used, we set up Command Central: two large card tables with our files and our laptops on them.

Mom, then winning her battle against cancer, had decided that her contribution to the book would be caloric. She kept us fed. And when, early in our stay, she noted how quickly and happily we ate some fresh turkey sandwiches she had made for us, she decided that fresh turkey sandwiches would always be available. Every few days she bought a new selection of breads and a new turkey or turkey breast, which she roasted and stuck in the refrigerator, where we could get at it and pick at it if and when she wasn’t home to make us something different, something else.

And if she was indeed home and turkey sandwiches were what we wanted, she’d make them for us. Not because she was some meek, doting servant: Mom drew too much attention to her exertions and was too transparent in her bid for plaudits to be taken for meek, doting or servile. She made the sandwiches for us because she knew we wouldn’t slice the turkey as strategically as she did, in narrow but meaty slivers. We wouldn’t arrange those strategically sliced slivers on the bread so that each bite of the sandwich pulled out some but not all of the meat. We might not take the time to clean and dry a leaf of lettuce for the sandwich, and we might not remember to spread the mayonnaise on the meat, not the bread, because bread too readily sponged it up, lessening its rich, fatty say.

She made the sandwiches, in short, because she was better at it. But she also made them because doing that, and presenting them to us, was her shorthand for telling us that she was rooting for, and watching over, us. That she was rooting for, and watching over, me.

In the scene that kept popping into my head after her death, I heard her footsteps coming down the basement stairs. I smelled freshly roasted meat. I turned to see her walking toward me and Elli, a plate in each of her hands. And I fielded a question as rhetorical as any ever uttered.

“So,” Mom asked, “can I interest anybody in a turkey sandwich?”

What brings you here today?” asked the avuncular internist in whose office I was sitting. After nearly two years in Manhattan, I’d finally gotten around to selecting and paying a visit to a doctor. I’d neglected it before because I always avoided doctors, whose poking and prodding and above all weighing of me amounted to a judgment I didn’t want rendered. Doctors made you stand naked or half naked in front of them. In the sadism sweepstakes, they had dentists easily beat.

I rearranged myself in my chair, willing a nonchalant posture and nonchalant voice.

“Just routine stuff,” I said. “Since I moved here from Detroit, I’ve been using refills for existing prescriptions, and some have run out.” I told him I thought it was time to connect with a new, local doctor. I made it all sound very matter-of-fact.

“What medications do you take?” he asked.