Dead End Gene Pool (39 page)

Then I come along, and I am just about the ugliest thing anyone ever pinned a diaper around, but I’m a girl, so they dress me up in frills and start taking a zillion pictures of me and my brother doing cute things together, and my mother’s in there, orchestrating things. Her hair is getting blonder, and she’s thinner, and starting to wear dresses with wide, brass-buckled, cinched-in belts. Her glasses are gone, traded in for those revolutionary new contact lenses. There are birthday parties, with the candles—three, and then four, and then five of them, being blown out on cakes crowded with so many cowboys and Indians and fairies and ponies that you can’t see the icing. There are fewer friends in the photos. Then, within a couple of pages, there are none of them.

Somewhere between the second potty chair and the Christmas in New York where Will gets the four-lane slot car racetrack, the bookish young wife and mother has transformed into a full-fledged man-eater. In snapshots taken by the sea in Maine, she now lazes, legs apart, in a strapless one-piece. Her hair is lemon blond and her sunglasses dark and slanted, like those of a movie star. And she just gets hotter and hotter; one summer and a couple of pages later, she is on the bow of my grandparents’ boat, and the one-piece has been replaced by a bikini. Her hair is swept back by the wind, and her deep tan is the stuff Bain de Soleil executives dream of. If a camera can pay grimly wistful homage, my father’s Leica was doing just that.

The third photo album contains our one and only family trip to Disneyland, and the focus is decidedly on my mother. There she is—carefree in the twirling teacups, circling the air on Dumbo, and giggling in a hovercraft bumper car as she tries to catch up with my brother and me. She is breathtakingly beautiful in a man’s untucked white shirt, black capri pants, and pointy black flats, her hair down and loose. Next to her, Will and I look like prairie children from the Dust Bowl.

And that’s it. The remaining soft black pages are empty.

The following afternoon I sat across from my mother at the kitchen table. I was prepared for anything. Kitchens are meant to be the heart of a house, and the beating one at that, but I couldn’t help thinking that this one was a reflection of my mother’s: the cupboards were a nondescript prefab wood, and the floor was a brick linoleum that could only be described as inventive, but the counters were beautifully fitted, custom maple and cherry butcher-block. The stove was Kenmore green and obsessively clean, and the textured fridge door had diet notes stuck all over it with animal magnets, only now they were intended for my mother’s husband instead of her. Superstition about the year she was going to die, along with breast cancer, had enabled her to finally let herself go.

She was poring over a dog-eared, fan-shaped diagram of hand-lettered names: a genealogical map of five generations of Hamiltons. My mother had discovered genealogy, not religion, in her waning years. There were enough ancestral registers and charts—dozens of them, all recorded in tight cursive by her own bored, sickly mother—to keep her busy throughout the several courses of chemotherapy she would endure. The comings and goings of people with names like Sarah and Fanny, and Ephraim and Nathaniel and Phineas, had become the object of her academic curiosity—men who were born in log cabins but went to Harvard, if only to become shoemakers and bricklayers before eventually getting murdered by Indians. (It was something of a family tradition—excellent education, unambitious choice of career, and untimely death.)

Anyway, there we were. I was going over in my head how I was going to get her to come clean about the death of my father, when she beat me to it—only it wasn’t exactly the information I’d been after. It was about how my sister had died in the toilet.

The fact that I’d had a sister at all was a revelation to me. All I’d ever wanted was a sister. Someone to haggle over the Balenciagas and the Schlumberger with. Ally, co-conspirator, or worthy opponent, we would have been tighter than ticks. I would have been able to call her, page her, text her, e-mail her—and say,
You get this?
And she would have gotten it.

My sister had been born at seven months, when my mother thought she was evacuating her bowels, not the contents of her uterus.

“All of a sudden, there was a tiny arm hanging out of me,” my mother said, weaving her head at the memory. She reached to gather a few of the ever present Greek coins that lived on the table, and her fingers clicked nervously over them as she spoke of the botched delivery and subsequent trip to the hospital.

“But I don’t understand! Why couldn’t they save her?” I cried. “They save preemies at four months!”

“They didn’t back then, Toots.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said flatly. “Somebody must have screwed up at the hospital or something.” I persisted, as if this were happening in real time.

“Nothing could be done. They did all they could. End of story.”

I folded up my arms and glared at her. I hated myself for thinking she hadn’t tried hard enough, but I just
knew
she hadn’t.

“The worst part,” my mother said, and then she paused. “The worst part was leaving the maternity ward with empty arms.”

I looked at her, sitting there in her hideous caftan, all bloated and cancer-riddled, with her Greek coins and her Diet 7UP and rum—and my heart broke in pieces. My poor, pathetic mother. Once again, I couldn’t imagine that kind of sorrow. We sat there on opposite ends of the table, and like the enigma she was, my mother wept as she said that all she had ever wanted was a houseful of babies.

“A house full of babies. Go fucking figure,” I repeated in the car driving home.

 

 

 

EDWARD MANAGED TO miss out on his grandmother’s demise, as well. Even though he had set up a vigil, Will was the one who was with her when she died at home, and the inebriated chauffeur was the one who got to call everyone.

Edward was beside himself. In the months, and the years that followed, he developed a New Age theory involving a parrallel spiritual world to help him make sense of the one in which he had been doled such wildly uneven shares. He became more convinced that our father had come back as him. He even took to calling people up and apologizing for killing himself. He tried to unravel the mysteries of his muddled life with knowledge gleaned from his fledgling faith. And from instructional Web sites like
Healpastlives.com
. . .

When I allowed myself to consider Edward’s theology, I found the similarity to my other brother’s chosen Eastern path oddly reassuring.

When our mother’s breast cancer eventually meandered its way down to her liver (which, aside from the tumors, was surprisingly intact), she summoned Will, Edward, and me to her final Christmas. In Nantucket.

Nantucket?
we all marveled. There’s got to be a mistake. She must have told the booking agent the wrong island. She meant Nassau. Or Nevis.
Nantucket?
Who the hell would rent a house in the North Atlantic for Christmas? An alcoholic Yankee on chemo, that’s who.

My brothers and I agreed to stagger our visits, so that no one would have to suffer unduly. A couple of days before Christmas I drove from Manhattan to the Woods Hole terminal in a whiteout blizzard, and spent the three-hour ferry trip cowering belowdecks in my car as we pitched across the stormy sound. It was after midnight when I rang what I hoped was the right doorbell. (Locating one out of a thousand historically correct clapboard houses is challenging when, out of mortal fear, you’ve been imbibing the special edition Stolichnaya originally intended to go under the tree.) In a flash, like she’d been waiting there all night, my mother threw open the door. She glared at me under the light of the reproduction gas lamp.

“Wha took you sho long?” she snarled.

“And merry Christmas to you too!” I said. The vodka coerced me into kissing her chemo-orange cheek.

At the end of the dim hallway, I could see her husband. He was seated at a table in a scrimshaw-decorated kitchen, his grizzled head in his carpenter hands. The girth of his waist had enabled the frogs on his belt to stretch back into tadpoles. Edward was sitting quietly beside him, and he gave me a brotherly
Thank the Universe you’re here!
look. My mother remained where she was in the entry, searching my face. I thought she was going to embrace me—I mean God knows she should have after the crossing I’d endured to get there—and I dropped my bags in order to receive her, but instead, she spat out, “Wrinkulsh
and
acne at your age?” and marched into the kitchen to refill her drink.

Two dirgelike days later, I crept up the narrow staircase to say good-bye. My mother was asleep with her two Rhodesian ridgebacks curled up like parentheses on either side of her. She looked like her tribesmen had already laid her out for burial; her flat, brutally scarred chest was ablaze with amulets of gold and silver, and ceramic and rock, and bead and bone. Bracelets and bangles lined her dehydrated arms, and a bit of bluish scalp peeped from under her embroidered emerald green skullcap. I didn’t wake her; I just stared at her for a long time. I wasn’t crying or anything, but I’m sure my face was an obliging flush of red.

The inevitable predawn phone call came in February. No way was Edward going to miss this one; he had stuck by our mother’s side (helping himself to her morphine patches) until one night the hospice nurse had cranked up the drip and she’d slept so well that she’d died.

According to my brother, the nurse was in hysterics. It had been her first death.

Out of curiosity, I recently Googled Charles Thomas, the glorified daddy figure of yesteryear. I’d seen his full name in my grandfather’s deposition, so it wasn’t hard to find him. There wasn’t a lot of info; turns out all along he’d been a CIA spook. The last entry I could find on him was a stint posing as a foreign service officer in Lisbon in the late 1970s.

There was no death date on any of the entries.

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