That day on the telephone in the Charlotte airport, I listened as my father described Hurricane Floyd, at that moment racing toward Miami. Floyd was expected to make landfall with greater force than 1992’s Andrew, which had ripped apart entire districts of the city. My father was preparing his house for Floyd. He and his wife had, at that time, two old, sick cats. My father doted on the cats. He told me that he and my stepmother planned to wait out the storm with their pets in a barricaded bedroom closet.
“What?”
My father and his wife were professors at a Miami university. Surely the campus would offer better protection than their house. True, my father told me. Unfortunately, the shelters would not admit animals. I thought about what he was telling me, and then shouted, “Dad, if you want to use your body to shield your cats from a force-five hurricane, I can’t help you! My mother is dying! She’s dying!”
I slammed down the phone, showed my boarding pass at the gate, and marched onto the plane to Asheville. I was breathing heavily, and perspiring. My father’s love for his animals had undone me — and what had I done but angrily show my own powerlessness?
One way that I have for years maintained a relative powerlessness is by neglecting to keep a valid driver’s license. I let my Florida license, the one I’d had throughout college, expire after several years in New York, and learned to rely on public and commercial transportation, like a European. My sister would be joining me in two days; she could rent a car. During the flight, I stared from the airplane window at the Smokies below. It was a clear, hot day in September. The plane, bouncing on wind currents, was headed into the sun. After landing, all alone with the driver in an enormous van I’d hired to take me from the airport to the hospital, I watched the day’s light fading behind a western ridge of the same green mountains I’d seen from the air.
At Mission — St. Joseph’s Hospital, it took me a while to find my mother’s room. I lost my sense of direction and rode up and down in elevators. The old people I came across in the halls looked neither beautiful nor youthful. Quite a few were gasping for air in the rooms on the hall that led to my mother’s, which, thanks to her lung infection, was stickered with brightly colored quarantine notices.
I knocked lightly, opened the door, and peeked in. She was propped up in bed. “Mom?”
“Don?”
I put down my suitcase, walked across the room, leaned over, and, cautious of the tubes and hoses connecting her to pieces of equipment, hugged her.
“How’re you feeling?”
“Not great.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry, Don. Was your trip all right? I’m glad you’re here. Thank you for coming,” she said. After that we made an effort, for a while, to talk as if nothing out of the ordinary were taking place — the way people in crises will, I suppose — and suddenly she asked, “Don, are you going to dedicate your next book to me?”
My first had been dedicated to her parents, the second to my father and his brother, my uncle Eldridge, who’d died in 1992. The third, about some misbehaving psychoanalysts in a nameless city, was scheduled to appear in early 2000.
I was trapped. Obviously, she was next in line. But I didn’t particularly want to dedicate — certainly not on demand, as it seemed to me in that moment — a book to my mother. I stood in her hospital room and said:
“Well …”
“No?”
“What I mean to say is that the new book isn’t — it isn’t appropriate for dedicating. I’ve decided not to dedicate it.” What?
“Oh. Will you dedicate one to me sometime?”
“Of course,” I promised, and, desperately, went on, “It has to be the right book. Do you know what I mean? Mom?”
“I don’t. I don’t know, Don. I’m going to die.”
“Oh, Mom.”
A nurse entered the room and tried to talk to my mother about home care. My mother thought this pointless, because she had determined on her own that the cancer had spread to her brain. She hoped to move directly from the hospital to one of the Hospice facilities known as Solace houses, meant for people in the last stages of illness. I remember that my mother’s silver-haired GP stopped by on his evening rounds, but stayed only briefly. I’d booked a night at Asheville’s most expensive hotel, far on the other side of town. I had thought that I might, in some unaffordable place far removed from the circumstances defining reality, feel — what? Protected? I told my mother that I’d see her early the next day, called a taxi (which took a long time coming), and, when I arrived at the resort, found the dining rooms closed. I trekked past empty ballrooms and conference halls, and, after several wrong turns, located my room, where I stayed awake until dawn picking at room-service food, watching television, and wishing that I could open the sealed-shut windows.
The windows faced a construction project. The hotel was building a new wing. All of a sudden, the sun was up and the day’s work with heavy equipment had begun. I got out of bed and drank coffee, cup after cup. I’d arranged to meet a lawyer my mother had retained for a lawsuit she’d brought against the previous owner of her house, the real estate agent who’d handled the sale, and a Black Mountain oil-company owner. Shortly after moving in, in 1997, she’d smelled fumes. The heating-oil tank in her basement had been leaking into the topsoil. Without a clean bill of health from the EPA, her house — paid for in cash — would be worthless. A suit for damages had dragged on for more than a year, and my mother had made enemies in Black Mountain. I ran downstairs to meet the lawyer, already behind in his day’s schedule. He offered to take me to the hospital, and talk along the way. Driving through Asheville, he told me not to worry about the oil underneath the house. He told me that he admired my mother, whom he saw as a courageous person. He asked me if I’d ever married.
“I haven’t.”
“No? Why not? You ought to try it,” he said, and went on to describe his happiness in his second marriage, which had gathered the children from his and his wife’s first marriages together in one family.
At the hospital, my mother complained that her GP had not visited that day. One of the nurses thought he might be in the emergency room. I went downstairs and entered the maze of corridors leading to the ER. When I got there, I saw, through the doors to the ward, my mother’s doctor. I pushed open the swinging doors, marched past nurses, and asked him if I might speak with him. He put down his clipboard and we chatted — as if getting to know each other — and he told me, “There’s nothing we can do about your mother’s cancer in the long run, but we can give her time, and she needn’t suffer.”