“What happened?” I sometimes asked my grandfather at this point in the story. It was our call and response.
He chewed his toothpick. “If I have it right, he went up to New Haven, and was there a year or two. I believe he might even have had a play produced in New York.”
“Did he carry his pistol?”
“Yes, he must have. He wanted to be ready to get up and go if he needed. He didn’t want to stop and so much as pack his bags. He wanted to catch the first train home. Well, one day he got word that his father had been shot. It was what he’d been waiting for. He folded the telegram and put it in his pocket and walked to the station and was never seen at Yale again.”
“He went to the mountains.”
“Yes. For years he tracked his father’s killer, but he never found the man.”
“Never.”
“Some years ago I was in Kentucky, Don, and I looked him up. He told me that after leaving Yale he dedicated himself to finding the killer. But eventually he realized that he simply would not find him. There was too much territory to cover. Don, you can walk twenty feet into those woods and lose your sense of direction and never come out. So he gave up. He became a teacher. By the time I found him, he was long retired.”
“Did he keep writing?”
“That’s a good question. I don’t know. I don’t believe he did, Don. I don’t think he did. Too much time had passed.”
But getting to the story at hand:
In 1994, my grandparents, too old to maintain their house, moved into a nearby assisted-living community, where they occupied a small apartment with a tiny yard planted with flowers. Several times I visited them there — an insomniac man in his mid-thirties, walking the long corridors of a rural home for the aged. I remember from those trips that the men and women of the place, who seemed ancient to me when I first arrived, began, as the days passed, to appear younger and more beautiful. The women in particular, in their laughter and their smiles, and in the way they might quickly glance away when aware of being looked at, showed evidence of themselves in their youth. I felt charmed by the ladies in my grandparents’ circle, and learned to understand that a woman near the end of her life has not given up her powers of seduction. While stopping after lunch to say hello, I might look into the eyes of a great-grandmother from Richmond or Atlanta and see, or imagine seeing, the girl who did not yet realize that everything and everyone ahead of her — the husband who would pass away, her children, and their children, since moved to distant cities — could come and go so quickly.
One afternoon in 1995, while I was talking to my grandfather about things that had happened before I was born, I saw a startled look pass across his face, as if he had seen something unexpected, and, in that instant, I was sure he’d felt the speed of time. A month later, on an October night, he walked into the bathroom, had a heart attack, and fell to the floor. He was ninety. Four years later, in the late summer of 1999, my grandmother followed him in her sleep. And two weeks after that, my mother, who had moved to North Carolina in the year following her father’s death, collapsed and was taken in an ambulance to an Asheville hospital.
It was not a surprise. At her mother’s funeral, her face looked worn and gray, the color of damp ash, and she was feverish and trembling. She could barely stand. When had my mother become such an old woman? Her cough had grown nightmarish, frightening to listen to. At her mother’s service, listening to her, it was possible to feel the worry and discomfort of the people sitting in the pews behind us, our grandmother’s elderly friends from church and town, and the small handful of relatives who’d driven in a single car across the mountains from eastern Tennessee, my mother’s uncle Orbin and her cousin Annette and aunt Dorothy. After the service, my mother found her way outside the church, where her cough abated long enough for her to light a cigarette and send herself into another fit.
That night, my sister and I stood on the porch at our hotel, and I told her that I thought our mother was a dangerous person. I said that I did not want to be alone with our mother. I said that I did not think our mother would live much longer. “A year? Two years?” I guessed. Then I suggested that Terry and I get ready for bad news ahead, because when the time came it would be up to us alone to handle our dying mom, who, during much of our childhoods, had been a drunk, a woman we had known — and, I think, in our memories, in our consciousnesses of ourselves, and in our bodies, continue to know — as a holy terror.
I remember my phone conversation with my mother, just over a week after my grandmother’s funeral. It was the morning after she’d been rushed to the Asheville hospital. I was back in Brooklyn. I sat perched on a low ottoman — slumped over, as if hiding in my own house. I pressed the telephone receiver against my ear, and my mother whispered that she was ready to die, and that she knew peace awaited her in the Universe. She told me she loved me, and would continue loving me when she was dead.
After hearing that, I had a conversation with her pulmonary specialist, who told me that my mother would not recover, and that invasive or aggressive therapies were out of the question. Radiation might give her ten months to a year. If the malignancy were left to grow unchecked, infections brought about through the blockage of one lung would kill her in half that time.
“Your mother has made it clear that she intends to refuse the radiation,” he told me.
We talked a while longer. He asked me about my own smoking, and I admitted to some; he suggested that it would be better not to do it, and I agreed. I thanked him and hung up the phone, then made my way out of the living room and down the hall, passing the dimly lit bathroom and the little extra room that, before too long, would be packed and spilling over with uncrated marble-top bureaus, rolled and folded-over rugs, and carefully wrapped and boxed smaller items saved from my grandparents’ house out on McCoy Cove Road, and, from my mother’s house, old artworks and an Art Nouveau lamp and a stained-glass vase and an ivory brooch — all the various belongings that I could not part with, yet which I fear I will never learn to live with. I made my way down the hall, as I was saying, to the bedroom, where R., my girlfriend at that time, waited under the sheets. I got in bed beside her, and, after I’d cried a long time, she and I made love, and, at some point in the day, I got out of bed and phoned the airlines and packed a suitcase, and, early the next morning, I was off.
My first stop was the Charlotte airport. I called my father in Miami from a pay phone in the commuter-flight terminal. I told him how things were, and he told me how sorry he was, and then we were silent. I remember waiting for him to say something more. Or was my father waiting for me? He and my mother had, after all, been high school sweethearts. Not long ago, while sorting through a box of family photographs, I found a picture cut from a Sarasota newspaper.
“Panhellenic members lived it up this week, when they had a holiday dance at Tropicana,” the caption begins. My future parents, home on vacation from college, sit across a table from another couple. It’s the mid-fifties, and my mother has on black evening gloves; her hands rest on a table draped with a plain white tablecloth. She wears a sleeveless, backless white dress fastened at the throat with a choker made from darker fabric — it appears in the picture, though it is impossible to tell, for sure, that the choker closes with a brooch. Her hair is pulled out of the way in a hairdo that is difficult to see in detail. She wears costume pearl earrings of a sort that I remember her putting on for parties when I was a boy. Smiling, she gazes down and away from her future husband, who, sitting beside her — from the camera’s point of view, my father is more or less behind her — and wearing a dark jacket, a narrow, tightly knotted tie, and a white pocket square, leans in close with one elbow propped on the table. His open hand rests near her bare arm. But he does not appear to be touching her. Instead, he is staring at her face in profile. Frankly, uninhibitedly, he appraises her. And my mother-to-be, aware of his eyes on her, aware of being seen by him (and by the camera) — is an alluringly beautiful, coy young woman. Unless I am mistaken, she is in love.