Everything was somehow always okay. She was a good teacher and a good mother really. At home the small house overflowed with projects, books, arguments, laughter. Everyone met their obligations.
In the evenings, after dishes and laundry, correcting papers, there was TV or Scrabble, problems, cards, or silly conversations. Good night, guys! A silence then that she celebrated by doubling her drinks, no manic ice cubes now.
If they awakened, her sons would stumble upon her madness which, then, only occasionally spilled over into morning. But for as far back as she could remember, late at night, she would hear Keith checking ashtrays, the fireplace. Turning out lights, locking doors.
This had been her first experience with the police, even though she didn’t remember it. She had never driven drunk before, never missed more than a day at work, never … She had no idea of what was yet to come.
Flour. Milk. Ajax. She only had wine vinegar at home, which, with Antabuse, could throw her into convulsions. She wrote cider vinegar on the list.
Phantom Pain
I was five then, at the Deuces Wild mine in Montana. Every few months, before it snowed, my father and I would climb into the mountains, following blazes old Hancock had made back in the 1890s. My father carried a duffel bag filled with coffee, cornmeal, jerky, things like that. I carried a stack of Saturday Evening Posts, most of the way, anyway. Hancock’s cabin was at the edge of a crater-shaped meadow on the very top of the mountain. Blue sky over it, all around it. His dog was named Blue. Grass grew on the roof, down in a rakish fringe over the porch where they drank coffee and talked, passing chunks of ore, squinting through cigarette smoke. I played with Blue and the goats or pasted pages of the Post on cabin walls already thickly layered with past issues. Evenly in neat rectangles one on top of another all around the small room. Snowed-in in the long winter Hancock would read his walls, page by page. If he found the end of a story he’d try to make up what came before, or piece it together with other pages around the cabin. When he had read the whole room he’d paste for days and days and then start all over. I hadn’t gone up with my father the first trip that spring, when he found the old man dead. The goats and the dog too, all in his bed. “When I get cold I just pull me up another goat,” he used to say.
“Come on, Lu, just take me up there and leave me.” That’s what my father kept begging me to do when I first put him in the nursing home. That’s all he talked about then, different mines, different mountains. Idaho, Arizona, Colorado, Bolivia, Chile. His mind was starting to go then. He wouldn’t just remember those places, but would actually think he was there, in that time. He would think I was a child, would talk to me as if I were the age I had been in different places. He’d tell the nurses things like, “Little Lu can read all of Our Friendly Helpers and she’s only four years old.” Or, “Help the lady take out the dishes. That’s a good girl.”
I’d bring him café con leche every morning. I’d shave him and comb him, walk him up and down, up and down the rank-smelling halls. Most of the other patients were still in bed, calling, rattling their bars, ringing their bells. Senile old ladies play with themselves. After walking with him I’d tie him in his wheelchair, so he wouldn’t try to run away and fall down. And I’d do it too. I mean I wouldn’t pretend or just humor him — I’d actually go with him someplace. To the Trench mine in the mountains above Patagonia, Arizona: I was eight years old, purple with gentian violet for ringworm. In the evening we would all go out to the cliff to dump cans and burn the garbage. Deer and antelope, the puma, sometimes, would come close, not afraid of our dogs. Nighthawks darted against the sheer rock face of the cliffs beyond us, deeper red in the sunset.
The only time my father said he loved me was just before I came back to the States for college. We were on the beach in Tierra del Fuego. Antarctic cold. “We’ve tramped through this whole continent together … the same mountains, the same ocean, from top to bottom.” I was born in Alaska, but I don’t remember it. He kept thinking I should, in the nursing home, so finally I did pretend to know Gabe Carter, to remember Nome, the bear in the camp.
In the beginning he kept asking about my mother, where was she, when was she coming. Or he would think she was there, would talk to her, make me feed her a bite for every bite he took. I stalled him. She was packing, she was coming. When he was better we would all live together in a big house in Berkeley. He would nod, reassured, except for one day when he said, “You’re lying through your teeth.” And then went on talking about something else.
One day he just killed her off. When I arrived he was lying in bed, weeping, curled up like a baby. He told the story as if in shock, with irrelevant details, like someone who has witnessed a horrible accident. They were on a Mississippi steamboat; my mother was gambling belowdecks. Colored people were allowed on now and Florida (his nurse) had won every cent of their money. My mother had bet the whole thing, their life savings, in one last hand of five-card draw. One-eyed jacks wild. “I should have known,” he said, “when I saw that hussy laughing away with her gold teeth, counting all that money. She gave John here at least four thousand.”
“Dry up, you snob,” John said from the bed next to my father’s. He took a Hershey bar from the back of his Bible. He wasn’t allowed sweets, it was the one I’d brought my father the day before. My father’s reading glasses showed from under John’s pillow. I got them. John began to moan and cry: “My legs! My legs hurt!” He didn’t have any legs. He was a diabetic and they had been amputated above the knees.
On the steamboat my father had been in the bar with Bruce Sasse (a diamond driller from Bisbee). They had heard the shot and then a long time later the splash. “I didn’t have change for a tip but I didn’t want to leave a dollar.” “Cheap snob! Typical! Typical!” John said from his bed. My father and Bruce Sasse rushed around to the starboard side just as my mother was floating away. Blood in the wake of the boat.
He grieved for her only that one day, but for weeks he talked about her funeral. Thousands of people had been there. None of my sons had worn a suit, but I looked lovely and was gracious. Ed Titman came, the ambassador to Peru, Domingo the butler, even Charlie Bloom the old Swede from Mullan, Idaho. Charlie once told me he always put sugar on his oatmeal. What if you don’t have any? I asked, smart aleck. I puts it on yust the same.
The day my father killed off my mother was the day he stopped knowing me. After that he ordered me around like a secretary or a servant. One day I finally asked him where I was. I had run off. Bad blood, a Moynihan just like my mother and Uncle John. I had just taken off one afternoon, right outside the nursing home, up Ashby Avenue with a good-for-nothing greaser in a four-holed Buick. The man he described was, in fact, a dark sleazy type I find attractive.
He began hallucinating most of the time then. Wastebaskets turned into dogs that talked, leaf shadows on the walls became marching soldiers, the hefty nurses were now transvestite spies. He talked incessantly about Eddie and Little Joe; neither seemed to be anyone he might have known. Every night they had some wild free-wheeling adventure on an ammunition ship outside Nagasaki, in helicopters above Bolivia. My father would laugh, loose and easy as I had never known him.
It got so I would pray for him to be this way, but more and more he was becoming rational, “oriented as to time and place.” He talked about money. Money he had made, money he had lost, money he would make. He saw me then as a broker, maybe, would drone on and on about options and percentages, scrawling figures all over the Kleenex box. Margins and options, T-notes and stocks and bonds and mergers. He would bitterly denounce his daughter (me) for murdering his wife and locking him up, just to get his money. Florida was the only black nurse in the hospital who would work with him. He accused them all of stealing, called them pickaninnies or whores. He’d use the urinal to call the police. Florida and John had stolen all his money. John would ignore him, reading his Bible or just lying in his bed, writhing, screaming, “My legs! Lord Jesus stop the pain in my legs!”