I stayed a week. She remained in bed for much of it. I went to a store and bought food. She sat against the pillows, and I fed her soup, soft-boiled eggs, and canned peas and corn. She refused a trip to the hospital or the doctor. Instead, when she was able, near the end of my trip, after she’d recovered enough strength, she got in her car and took herself back to Alcoholics Anonymous.
During the two decades since then, I have often thought of my mother in terms of diseases and symptoms. Ever since she’d been a girl in Tennessee, her life had been marked by illness. Illness defined her relationship with her own mother, whom she outlived by only a year, and, sadly, illness defined her relationship with me. That she was, throughout my childhood, sick, the nightly victim of a terrifying Jekyll-and-Hyde transmutation, I learned to take for granted, even as her grandest symptoms, having become in the eyes of her family more or less expectable, even normative, seemed almost to vanish inside the stormy routines of her, and our, everyday life.
In recent years I have noted how surviving children can find themselves reappraising their mothers and fathers, who might appear braver, stronger, and more beneficent in death than in life; and maybe it is true that, as time goes on, and we, their children, survive and lament their passing, we nonetheless continue in the hope that we will one day truly know our parents, as they will know us.
Near her life’s close, I lost the fortitude, the ability, the heart to be with my mother. For a time, I referred to her, in thought and in conversation with others, not as my mother but as Louanne. Her parents had sometimes called her by this name, but my father and my parents’ circle of friends always knew her simply as Lou. In thinking of her as Louanne, I pretended to an objectivity of perspective that I did not, nor will ever, possess, and, in doing so, I pretended to myself that the coming loss of her would not hurt, and that in the absence of suffering I would go forward, a free man.
A week after I flew by night to watch her descend, in delirium tremens, the staircase in her Miami duplex, I went into her study, where she kept sewing supplies, files holding papers that she’d accumulated during her years of teaching, and her typewriter. In an hour, she would drive me to the airport, and I would return to New York. I sat at the typewriter and wrote her a note. It was brief. I told her that I loved her, and that others loved her, and that we who loved her wanted her to live. I hoped she’d make it. I left the note scrolled in the typewriter. Many years later, she told me that she’d put it in a safe place and kept it. She never drank again.
Five years have passed since her death. I’m not sure whether I can say, now, what her Christian name means to me. She was my mother. Her ashes have yet to be scattered. They remain, to this day, in a box in a closet at my sister’s house. Maybe before long Terry will fly with them to Charlotte, North Carolina, where, at the airport, I’ll meet her. We’ll join up at the car-rental desk, get a car, put our mother’s ashes in the backseat and our suitcases in the trunk, and head to Bridges, in Shelby, for barbecue, then continue west toward the Smoky Mountains. We’ll drive past Chimney Rock, around Lake Lure, up past Old Fort, and down into Black Mountain, where we’ll stay a night or two at the Monte Vista, the hotel that was our base when our mother was dying. I’d like to sit on the Monte Vista’s porch one more time and gaze out at the mountains known locally as the Seven Sisters, before getting up and continuing on highways bordered with kudzu and corn, gas stations and pecan emporia, horse farms and flood canals, office parks and ocean resorts, straight through South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, all the way to the Keys, to Islamorada, where, on the Atlantic side of the island, there is a beachfront lodge that my mother loved. I hope to go there, take the ashes out of the car, and, with my sister beside me, walk to the water with them.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For their support and encouragement during the writing of this book, the author thanks Jonathan Franzen, Nicholas Dawidoff, Allan Gurganus, Jeffrey Eugenides, David Means, Melora Wolff, Matthew Klam, Christine Hiebert, M. E. Bowles, Janice Deaner, Pamela Leo, Amy Azzarito, Melanie Jackson, and Jane Shapiro. Thanks to Andrew Wylie, Tracy Bohan, Elena Schneider, Katherine Marino, and Amelia Lester of the Wylie Agency; and to Jonathan Galassi, Lorin Stein, Kevin Doughten, Lisa Silverman, and Annie Wedekind of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. My thanks to Deborah Treisman, David Remnick, Bill Buford, Dorothy Wickenden, Field Maloney, and Rhonda Sherman. I thank the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Last, I am grateful to my family for their tolerance and understanding, and I am thankful for the generous and loving support of Fran Dilustro.