Saturday's Child (58 page)

Kenneth tried to be comforting. But his own pain and his own demons preoccupied him during this time; he would alternate between expressing sympathy for Faith and inveighing against her as the bitch who deserved to suffer because she'd caused all my, and thus his, problems to begin with. Blake was exquisitely tender, but there was little he could do juggling, as he already had to, school and problems at home. As it was, I died a little every time I saw how rapidly the whole situation was maturing him. It was Lois who mostly housed me. It was Suzanne who first went through Faith's apartment with me. It was Gloria who lent me the money to carry on. It was Karen who kept
Sisterhood Is Global
moving on schedule. And it was Iliana who seemed to be always there, like a rock emanating security and a cornucopia lavishing love.

What an irony
that
discovery, to be exploring another woman's body in love while the body of the woman who gave me life was moving daily, inexorably into decay. Or was that in fact the reason? However many the dimensions, Iliana was friend as well as lover, mother as well as sister. She was the person who toured nursing homes with me, who argued with doctors when I couldn't bear to one more time, who scrubbed apartment items before appraisal, who kept me (relatively) sane after meetings with lawyers, who reminded me to eat something or sleep a few hours; the person who held me when I couldn't stop crying and shaking.

All through that summer, I saw my mother almost every day, usually twice a day. When I had to be briefly out of town, I was consumed with getting back. I was possessed by her; haunted by her past while going through her papers, albums, and books; submerged in her present as I sat hour after hour at her bedside editing
SIG
articles while she dozed or murmured half sentences or railed against her mother, or her doctors, or me. Some days she called me Friend and whispered that the doctors were pimps and the nurses madams and the place was a brothel at night. No reassurances to the contrary worked, so I entered into her delusion and together we clung and huddled and plotted her imaginary escape, which made her laugh with delight. Some days she knew who I was, but thought I was four years old again. Some days, she implored me to tell Robin she was sorry, sorry, so
sorry
, and
please
to come visit her.

The medical personnel scuttled about, cheerily exuding what de Beauvoir termed “ritual facetiousness” in the account of her own mother's dying, A
Very Easy Death
, which became my bible. Summer surrendered to autumn and autumn to winter while Faith lay in her bed staring or mumbling and I came and went from the magazine or the meetings or the
SIG
office, to sit at her side watching the light dim and shrink across the floor. She seemed improved enough for me to go on the November book tour—but I broke it on three occasions to fly back for overnights in order to visit her. She was stabilized enough that I went with Blake and Iliana for three days over Christmas to the Levines' country home in upstate New York, while Rafi spent the holidays with Kenneth at our home. The moment we returned to the city, I went directly to see her.

She was sleeping, her jaw slack, her mouth open with labored breathing, the lines in her forehead a tortured knot of tension. I dropped my coat and sank into the familiar chair, waiting. Maybe she'd wake up and take a little spoon-fed food. Maybe she'd want Friend to sing to her. Maybe she'd tell Friend that the Baby had given a good performance, like a real little trouper. But she slept on, and the night nurse looked in to warn me that visiting hours were almost over. Then, as I gathered up my things, my mother opened her eyes.

They were brilliant and clear, black stars in the bone-colored pottery skull that was left of her face. They focused on me. They
focused
. I watched through tears how those dark novas glowed toward recollection, how the forehead knot slowly released its lines, how they radiated like a rose window until the entire sunken, twisted constellation of her features caught and blazed into recognition and love, the dry lips leaking spittle but cracking into a luminous smile.

“
Robin!
” she cried. “It's
you!
You're all grown up but you still came home to me!”

I dropped whatever was in my arms to gather her up instead, crying, “Yes, Mommie, it's me. All grown up and still here. Never really been anyplace else. Oh yes, little Mommie, it's me.”

We stayed that way a long time, as I rocked and whispered to her while she drifted back to sleep. Then the nurse came, insisting I leave. I could now, because I knew that for the rest of my days, this would be the face of my mother I would choose to remember. This was a woman whose passion
knew no middle way, saw no distinction between love and hunger, lies and truth—but this was a woman who had managed to surface from the depths where she now semi-lived swimming through the wreckage of her life, to grant her daughter one moment of grace.

The next day, she was suddenly worse, and had to be rushed from the nursing home back to the hospital. Her heart was strong, but she had pneumonia—“the friend of the dying,” her doctor called it. I asked for no extreme measures, canceled as much of my own life as I could, and began the vigil. When I couldn't be there, Lois or Iliana managed to be.

They say that of all the senses in a dying person, hearing is the last to go. I murmured and sang and told her stories through those last weeks, read to her from the books she'd once loved—Blake, Kafka, Lao Tzu. I talked about the Orozco murals in Mexico City that she'd seen when she was seventeen, laughing into the wind and daring her future to be as beautiful as herself. She never regained comprehension. When she lapsed into unconsciousness, I kept on whispering into wherever she might be lingering to listen.

No matter how expected, death is always the ultimate surprise.

She died in the month and hour she'd borne me, a chill January dawn.

In certain parts of the Amazon rainforest, bromeliads—partly parasitical plants that attach themselves to trees and live on air and water—can grow as large as three feet across. Since they are deep-centered, they contain small pools of rainwater, up to several gallons, in which entire miniature ecosystems flourish. Among the life-forms found there, high in the treetop lagoons, is a tiny frog, which is born, grows, lives, mates, spawns, and dies in the same pond, believing those few cupfuls of water are the world.

By Jewish law, the deceased should be buried before sundown the next day or, at maximum, within forty-eight hours. I knew that my mother had wanted a plot in the Conservative Jewish cemetery where the Thurman family graves were, and that she would have wanted a Jewish ceremony,
though I would have opted for cremation and a secular memorial service. Well, politics teaches even its radicals the art of compromise, so—with the help of those indefatigable women friends—I was able to devise a middle way, one that bestowed its own comic tenderness even in the midst of grief. If it was going to be a religious ceremony, then at least it would have a womanly style.

Joanne Edgar, a friend and
Ms
. colleague, helped make the necessary phone calls. Letty Cottin Pogrebin found me a woman rabbi (in 1983 they were rarer than today) and even a woman cantor, who at the time was one of two in all of New York State. The rabbi told me we'd need a minyan for the burial—the minimum ten people required by Jewish law for ritual prayers—but that a minyan was traditionally male, at least among Conservative Jews; she herself was Reform. Never mind, our minyan would be different. Lois, meanwhile, flew into action, remembering and locating an old acquaintance, Angie, then one of three female funeral directors in the whole country.

Angie had inherited the business from her father and was bent on showing that a woman could act, dress, and undertake as solemnly as any man. She was an old hand at this, and she would deal with everything, although, she warned me, she was used to organizing funerals in the tradition of her own background—which was Italian and Roman Catholic. Never mind, she could adjust. She did, managing to find the homespun white shroud and plain pine coffin with a Star of David on top required by Conservative Jews, instead of the elaborate caskets, clothing, and cosmetics to which she was accustomed. But that was nothing compared with her alarm when she realized that a special washing of the body had to take place, not by her own employees, but by Jewish women recommended by the cemetery, whose job it is to perform this washing as a religious act. The additional catch was that no Conservative Jewish cemetery would receive a body that had been “desecrated” in any way. With the ritual washers waiting suspiciously in her outer office, Angie phoned me in a panic, hissing into the phone, “The eyes! Holy Mary Mother of God, what am I supposed to do about the
eyes?
”

In the hours before my mother's dying, I'd asked to sign the requisite papers at the hospital, to donate her corneas for transplant after death. Now, Angie was afraid the washers would regard this as desecration. I
didn't know what to tell her. I recall stammering how sorry I was but that I carried a universal organ donor card myself and so I'd thought Faith's beautiful brown eyes at least should be used to help someone see and—

Angie, ever practical, cut off my meanderings with a curt, “I got it. Marbles. I'll deal with it. G'bye.”

Whatever she did, it worked. The ritual washing took place. No desecration was found. My friend Lesley Gore—herself a child-singing-star survivor—rose to her assignment and managed to find, in midwinter, a massive armload of white lilacs. The next day three cars bore Faith and the nine-tenths-female minyan to the cemetery—where we were promptly barred at the gate for not being all men, and for having a female rabbi, wearing slacks, yet. But a rabbi she was, using her powers of moral persuasion, and they finally permitted us to proceed to the gravesite. Blake, the minyan's sole male, never let go of my hand. Iliana hovered protectively. And there was Lois. And Lesley. And Joanne, Suzanne, Gloria, Letty, and my friend and literary agent Edite Kroll. With me, ten.

The rabbi and cantor had never experienced what they called a “full feminist funeral” before (neither had any of the rest of us). They said later they'd found it profoundly moving. Still, both of them—and most of the minyan—almost lost all composure when, to oversee the moving of the coffin to the site, Angie emerged from the hearse: a tall woman with cropped black hair and a crisp but compassionate manner, impeccably attired in a full cutaway tuxedo.

We gathered round in the cold grey morning, and the rabbi and cantor led us in reading the Kaddish. In women's voices the prayer for the dead seemed to take on a keening quality sharper with grief than in men's, the traditional words of mourning flayed raw again by the unexpected treble. We each threw a handful of earth on the coffin as it was being lowered. Last, I lifted the sheaf of lilacs, stepped to the edge of the open grave, and flung my arms wide so the flowers descended, wingspread like a great pearl bird, into the earth.

Two days later, my twenty-two-year-old marriage ended forever. Two days after that, Faith's memorial service was held. Although I'd made calls and posted notices in the newspapers, those few people who attended were my friends, because my mother had so alienated her own. In her honor, I read the closing lines from Elizabeth Cady Stanton's final speech,
“The Solitude of Self.” At the end, after almost everyone had gone and I was waiting to thank the rabbi, two women came slowly up the aisle from where they'd been sitting by themselves at the very back. They offered their condolences and said they'd keep me in their prayers. We embraced. Nothing more was said, and they retraced their steps out of the temple. One had a southern accent. The other spoke with a Jamaican lilt.

It was over.

The following day, Karen and the
Sisterhood Is Global
team insisted I pause work for an hour to celebrate my forty-second birthday with a lovably lopsided carrot cake Toni had baked. And Blake appeared, to give me something I'd never been allowed as a child, and had always longed for: a dollhouse.

“To tide you over, Rob,” he smiled.

It was now the only dwelling I had.

¹
Susan would later become the first woman president of the Ford Foundation.

²
Donna, whose life has been spent trying to heave the ideas of social-justice movements into the circles of political power, was at the time president of Hunter College. She is, at this writing, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.

³
Gen Vaughan—now out of the closet as a feminist philanthropist—still is a good friend; having given away most of her wealth to women's groups around the globe, she's devised yet another way to contribute, by writing serious political theory:
For-Giving
: A
Feminist Criticism of Exchange
(Plain View Press, 1997).

⁴
For details about the methodology of research, the staff, contributors, funders, and in general “the making of
Sisterhood Is Global
,” see the book itself, preferably with the updated preface I wrote for the edition reissued by The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1996.

⁵
Claire would write the anthology's critique of the UN itself, a witty article titled “Good Grief, There Are
Women
Here!”

⁶
Nawal and her husband, Sherif Hetata, the two Austrian co-contributors Edit Schlaffer and Cheryl Benard, Iliana, and Claire de Hedervary, who was visiting at the time. Some of them brought more people at the last minute, until, with Kenneth and Blake, we were up to twenty—in a pricey restaurant, with champagne. In the circumstances, I saw no way to disinvite the extra guests or ask people to chip in. I distinctly recall seeing the bill with hundreds of thousands of zeros in Austrian schillings, blithely handing over my credit card, and then waiting with a fixed, dazzling smile while internally dreading that the waiter would return to whisper that I'd maxed out. That time I was lucky.