“I understand.”
“Talk to her about radiation. She’s a good lady.”
“I’ll do what I can,” I promised. On my way to see her, though, I had the thought that I might prefer her gone sooner rather than later. When my grandmother died, my mother had proclaimed that, unburdened of lifelong parental constraints, she would be free at last to move to the San Juan Islands, a place she’d never visited, but which she understood to be a secret garden for women artists. Now I was having my own fantasy about the freedom to pursue happiness. All I had to do, I thought, was respect her rejection of medical interventions, and she would die by Christmas from fevers that would make her delirious.
When I got to her room, though, I told her that her doctors were not conspiring to harm her. “They’re doctors, Mom. They took an oath.” And I begged, “Try radiation?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Will you? Please?”
“I said I’d think about it.”
A Hospice worker appeared, and my mother said, “It’s in my brain! I feel the cancer in my brain!”
The woman said, “You can’t usually feel it like that,” and turned to me and said that someone would need to be at my mother’s house the next morning. A hospital bed, an air compressor and hoses, and portable tanks were scheduled for early delivery.
I could get a lift to Black Mountain, it turned out, from a friend of my mother’s who worked near the hospital.
“I have to go get things ready, Mom. They’re kicking you out of here in a few days.”
She squeezed my hand, laughed, and coughed. “Go ahead, Don.”
On the drive, my mother’s friend told me about her grown son, whom she had not seen for many years because he refused to visit her. I nodded my head sympathetically and stared out the window at the kudzu strangling the life out of trees and plants beside the highway.
“I don’t know whether your mother has told you her theories about your family. I guess she hasn’t,” the friend said.
“What does she believe?”
“Your mother thinks her father wasn’t her father. There was another man in your grandmother’s life.”
“Jesus.”
“Why would your mother say that?”
“I don’t know. What do you guess? As her friend.”
“We’re not close anymore,” the friend said, and commented on my mother’s flair for working people against each other. “It’s hard to be close to someone who gets people mad at each other.”
We were nearing the Monte Vista Hotel, on Main Street. I had to check in, watch the television for reports on Hurricane Floyd, call R. in New York and rant into the telephone, try later to sleep, wake up at a reasonable hour, and meet the oxygen truck at my mother’s house a few blocks away. If time remained before my sister arrived, I might, in the early afternoon, visit the estate lawyer (who was not, I should say, the lawyer working on the oil-spill suit) handling my grandmother’s — and, soon, my mother’s — last will and testament. In the event, I did what I needed to do (including standing on the Monte Vista lawn sometime after midnight, praying to my grandfather’s spirit for any kind of guidance he — it? — could give), and, at the lawyer’s office, in a brick house on a quiet street, I was handed a pair of sweetheart wills signed by my grandfather and grandmother in the early eighties, the second of which — my grandmother’s, already in probate — left all their worldly goods to my mother.
My grandfather did not leave behind great wealth. Like many in his generation, he had been distrustful of the stock market. Yet he’d been frugal, and had saved enough to help his family when needs arose. Before he died, he told us his intention to draw up a will that would disperse whatever remained, after his and my grandmother’s deaths, among my sister, me, and our mother. He told us he wanted to do this out of consideration that his grandchildren were now, like his daughter, adults.
“That’s not the will. That’s not the will,” I said over and over to the confused lawyer.
And later that day, when my sister arrived in the car she’d rented at the Charlotte, North Carolina, airport, I said, practically as she was opening the car door and stepping out, “Mom fucked us.”
“What?”
“She took in a 1983 will! She grabbed an old will out of the file! Leaving everything to her!”
We set up a labor routine that followed old-fashioned gender lines. My sister occupied our mother’s house, phoning nursing agencies and scheduling interviews. I commandeered the hotel bar as a base from which to contact doctors, lawyers, and the woman in charge of the money-market accounts. I saw my mother as a suicide and a cheat who would steal her children’s birthright, and I hated her, with her brain-cancer dreams and her banishment of her father, without whom she must have felt orphaned and alone, as did I — a fact that I savagely demonstrated the evening my sister and I drove west on Interstate 40 to the hospital, where we packed our mother’s suitcase, put her shoes on her feet, and rolled her in her wheelchair past the nurses’ station, into and out of the elevator, across the hospital’s expansive lobby, and into the Appalachian night.
We helped her into the rental car’s front passenger seat. I recall that I tilted back the seat for her comfort. I loaded the oxygen and her suitcase into the back, then climbed into the car. I was sitting, as I remember, behind my mother, and could see, passing through the space separating the front seats, the clear tubing connecting her nostrils to the squat green tank propped beside me like some strange new addition to the family.
“How are you doing, Mom?” my sister and I asked. “How are you feeling?”
“Okay, kids.”
Terry started the car. We began the drive. I couldn’t resist. Addressing the back of my mother’s head, I said, “Mom, do you remember what Granddaddy told us about his will? Right before he died?”
“What are you asking me? I just got out of the hospital! I’m sick, Don! I’m sick! Can’t you let me have some peace?”
“Don! Stop!” This from my sister.
I leaned back in my seat. I’d made our mother cry. We rode home to the sounds of her sobbing and coughing. Later, at the house, she got in her bed and announced that she wanted Terry to keep her company for the night. I had to go to the hotel.
The next day and the day after that, I manned the hotel bar phone. No one I spoke with had heard of another will. I opened the yellow pages and read the names of Asheville attorneys. I was determined to catch my mother in what I was certain was a deliberate deceit. How could she? How dare she? I told myself that I wanted to get to the bottom of the matter. I was curious. That was all. Had there been another will? Where was it? Had my grandfather mentioned another lawyer?
Hurricane Floyd had by this time changed course and spun away from the Florida coast. The danger to my father and his wife had passed. At least there was that. But what about the toxic spill beneath my mother’s house? What about the Environmental Protection Agency? What about radiation therapy? Would my mother accept radiation? Would she consider a nursing home? Which nursing home?
In the afternoons, I cleared my papers from the bar and walked down the hill to the house. Had you been a resident of one of the homes in that part of town — one of the stone bungalows whose porches, in my memory of them, were painted durable green or brown shades that echoed the colors of the forested mountains in the near distance; or one of the bigger houses whose more spacious porches were decorated with comfortable chairs positioned to give a view of the lawn — and had you been sitting out front or standing at a window, you might have seen a man stalking past, wearing lace-up moccasins without socks, khaki shorts held up by a narrow belt, and a white dress shirt, tucked in. He probably would have had his hands shoved into his pockets, and his head might have been lowered, eyes glaring at the road ahead. Would you have imagined that this anxious man was plotting to bring down shame and maybe even the law on his own mother, who, at that moment, was lying on her back in huge discomfort, possibly imagining dying, or imagining smoking and drinking, or trying, with help from her pills, to lose consciousness and sleep for an hour or two, while in the kitchen her daughter made a few last phone calls of her own, penciled check marks beside things-to-do notes on a yellow pad, and boiled water for tea?