“Max? It’s Pop. I’ve got bad news, son. Mom had a stroke last night. She’s in the hospital in a coma. You think you can come here and be with us?”
I was on an airplane heading east three hours later. By late evening I was holding my father’s hand in a hospital room very similar to the one I’d so recently left. Lying still and pale in bed, my mother already looked dead. The stroke had done something to her mouth and it gaped open oddly to one side.
It was the third time my father had told me the story of what had happened. I knew it was necessary for him to talk it out as much as he could, so I said nothing.
“We were watching TV. She said, ‘Do you want a little snack, honey?’ You know her, always wanting to feed you. Then she makes sure you eat every bit. I said no, I’m fine. Then she stuck her hand out like this, like she was pointing at something on TV. I even looked that way, but a second later she fell forward, right off the couch.
“Oh, man. Oh, Max. What am I going to do? If Mama doesn’t get better, I don’t know… I don’t function… I can’t do things right when she’s not around. You know how I am, son.” He looked at me desperately, as if waiting for me to explain him to himself: explain a way out of the final dilemma that was here now in the form of his too still wife.
“I think she’s resting, Pop. She’s in there sorting things out and seeing what she needs to do to come back to us. Mom wouldn’t leave us in the lurch like this. Hey, listen, you know her—always sets lunch out for us before she’d go anywhere. She’s not going to leave now without making sure we’re taken care of!”
I meant it as a gentle reassuring joke, but the light in his eyes was suddenly bright and surer. “That’s right! Ida never left things undone. She is in there, resting up for the next act. That’s right. She’ll wake up any minute now, yelling for us to take off our shoes.”
Inescapable. At some point, life orders us to our parents’ seat at the head of the table and suddenly we’re responsible for “feeding” them after a lifetime of vice versa. It is a moving and genuinely disconcerting moment, one you can’t fully bring into focus until later.
When the doctors spoke to us about Mother’s condition and treatment, my father constantly watched my brother or me, as if only we understood and could translate what was being said. In the days we spent there, he never stopped asking, “What do you think, guys?” But what did we know that he hadn’t already taught us? He was the one who had gone through the Depression and war, the loss of his parents, and nine thousand more days of life. Nevertheless, when Saul or I made a decision, he accepted it instantly. We never knew if he agreed, but I got the feeling the loss of his wife had entirely sapped his strength. Like someone who stumbles and starts to fall, any steadying arm is welcome. The fact it was his sons’ made it easier to grab and hold on. Plus any decision made quickly and with a degree of certainty appeared to reassure him there was still some order and balance in his now teetering world.
He told us many things, both about Mother and about their relationship I’d never heard before. Some of these stories were intensely personal, others boring. What was disconcerting was that all three of us continually referred to her in the past tense. Even the tone of our nostalgia, or the way anecdotes were told, made it sound like the woman wasn’t really there anymore; she was half ghost, or ectoplasm, rather than a living Ida Dax Fischer.
“Okay, so enough about your mother and me. What about you, Maxie? Have you got a nice girlfriend these days?”
“I think so, Pop. We only met recently, but so far I like her very much. You have to hear a story, though. She has a ten-year-old son and he had a birthday party the other day…” I went on to tell him about the party/snakes/Tackhead because he likes a good story and I thought this would make him laugh. To my disappointed surprise, he only half smiled and asked what had happened to the Aarons when I was done. I said they’d come to the hospital and appeared to have forgiven me, but who knew? Maybe I’d go home and never hear from them again.
“Do you think you’ll get married one day?”
“I hope so, Pop. I like the idea of marriage but’ve never met a woman—”
“Listen to me. I wouldn’t say this if your brother was in the room, but you know how I feel about the dragon he’s married to. I got hitched young and was lucky. Saul got married young and Denise was the biggest mistake of his life. But now Mom’s like she is and I feel like my head’s cut off. So what does either get you? Know what I mean? If you’re lucky, you end up feeling headless. If you’re unlucky you got to get into bed for forty years with a monster from hell. I don’t know if you can win, Max. Maybe you should stay single and play the field.”
“I want to have children, Pop. I’d love to know what it’s like to see kids in a sandbox and know they’re yours. That must be a hell of a feeling.”
“It ends up the same—kids grow up and leave, and you feel like your head’s been cut off.”
To our amazement and delight, Mother came out of the coma four days later and immediately asked for a screwpound. When asked what a “screwpound” was, she said a vodka and orange juice. With the exception of many of these eerie, funny “offnesses,” she returned to full consciousness in decent shape. Her mouth remained crooked, as did many of the things she said, but nothing else was damaged and she was in good spirits.
“How much is the hospital costing?”
“I don’t know, Ma, but don’t worry about it. Saul and I will pay.”
“Then get your father in here to take the other bed. It would be the first vacation we ever had.”
My father walked on air. He had always treated her well and with the fullest respect and appreciation, but the return and recovery made her even more special in his eyes. He spoke of her in glowing, reverential terms. He spoke to her in almost a whisper, as if afraid any loud noise might scare her away, back to where she’d been or worse.
She chided him for his obsequiousness, but there was much love in her expression and she insisted on holding his hand whenever he was in the room.
Sitting there, I sketched them again and again. We talked, they held hands, Saul told stories about life in London and the company he worked for there. Although the four of us got together for family reunions once or twice a year, this was totally different. We were all breathing relief, love, and apprehension as one. It warmed the emotional temperature of that room fifty degrees. Mom had almost left us forever, I’d had kidney stones, my father had turned over familial power to us and spoken of marriage, family, and lifetime love as things that killed a person in the end. Perhaps he was right to whisper. Perhaps we all should have.
In my mother’s room one afternoon while she slept, I remembered the drawing Lincoln had sent of the man with the flower in his neck. A rose in the throat. Wasn’t that what was happening here? Choking on life’s good things if they went down the wrong tube, the wrong way? Roses are meant to be seen and smelled, not swallowed. My father’s love for Mother turned instantly lethal when he thought she was dying. This way, not that. It made such sense. But what did the Aarons mean in saying it? It was ten in the morning in L.A. There was a telephone in the room but I chose to use the public one out in the hall.
“Hello?”
“Lily? This is Max Fischer.”
“Max! I’ve been waiting for you to call! How are you? How’s your mom?”
“Okay. She was in a coma but she’s out now and they think she’ll be all right. Listen, apropos of nothing, I wanted to ask you something. Remember that drawing Lincoln sent me? The one of the man with the flower in his throat?”
“The rose. Sure I remember—I told him to draw it! Exactly to my specifications.”
“Okay, but what does it mean?”