Authors: Rafael Yglesias
“Of course,” she said with ardor, hysteria drained. “Of course I want this to be easy for her. I’m her mother. I love her. My heart is breaking,” she said, and tears welled. “Of course we’ll do what she wants.” Embarrassed by showing her grief, she tried to raise her hands to cover her face, and he let them go. She fished in her purse for a tissue. That activity stopped her tears. She needed the appearance of strength to feel strong, he concluded, and let her be, turning to Leonard. The old man’s eyes were awash, but he made no move to dry them. He said in the solemn tone of an oath: “We’ll do what Margaret wants. Do you need any help with the arrangements?” Enrique shook his head. “You’re sure?” the patriarch demanded.
“I’m sure,” Enrique said and sighed, breathing easy. For a moment he felt a surge of excited happiness, until he remembered just how sad was his accomplishment.
Margaret’s brothers and their wives appeared en masse about eleven, staying until late afternoon. At Margaret’s request, lunch was brought in from the Second Avenue Deli, a landmark kosher restaurant. She had two hot dogs with mustard and sauerkraut, and a square potato knish. They ate at the dining room table, but afterward Margaret, feeling tired, asked Enrique to carry the IV pole upstairs, and she invited them to follow. She hosted them from her bed, the family’s usual formality discarded as to location but retained as to clothing. They were all neatly attired, the men in slacks, button-down shirts, and jackets, Dorothy and the sisters-in-law in dresses, as if this were Thanksgiving or Passover. But holiday small talk was unbuttoned in favor of heartfelt reminiscences of childhood, and praise for Margaret as a mother. Dorothy did not
compliment Margaret directly. Instead she reported flattering remarks made about Margaret by her friends. Those encomiums were inherently unconvincing. Since contact with Margaret was limited to a quick hello in passing at the country club, the true source was Dorothy.
This indirect way of praising Margaret on her deathbed disappointed and irritated Enrique all over again. He knew Dorothy didn’t mean to be stingy. He understood, at long last, that Dorothy and Leonard were emotionally shy, not cold; their reserve didn’t mean they loved less. Still, there was a time for bravery in all things. Enrique wanted more from them than their chronic diffidence. His resentment grew as the day of reminiscences wore on. He focused his disappointment on the fact that Dorothy had said nothing about her daughter’s artwork. Finally, after hours of sitting in front of the large painting of Greg and Max hanging over Margaret’s bed, Dorothy said, “I never saw that one before.”
Enrique waited for her to add that it was beautiful, or at least that her grandchildren looked beautiful. Instead, she repeated, “No, I never saw that one.”
“You haven’t seen a lot of her paintings,” Enrique replied churlishly.
“She never invited me!” Dorothy squealed as if he had stuck her with a pin and, in a sense, he had. “You never invited me.” She turned to accuse Margaret. “I wanted to come. Remember? I said I wanted to see your work and then we could have lunch. There are so many galleries over there, where your studio is, isn’t that right, Margs? Do you remember? I said I wanted to come and see your paintings and have lunch and you could show me these new galleries. But you never invited me,” Dorothy repeated, as if she were a neglected little girl and Margaret a withholding parent. Dorothy stood on the balls of her feet, erect and alert as a bird on a perch. One hand rested on the wing chair in which her husband
was slumped, gazing mournfully at his frail daughter. Dorothy’s male progeny were in folding chairs at the foot of Margaret’s bed. Both sons were at the top of their professions, wealthy and eminent middle-aged men. They lowered their chins penitently, as if they too were indicted in Margaret’s failure to welcome her mother into her world. Margaret stared back in wonderment at Dorothy, puzzled by her complaint. Her eyes looked bigger in a face starved by her disease, and her body was smaller than ever, pale skin rivaling the translucence of the plastic lines running into the ports on her chest. For a long moment no one spoke.
It was then that the full strangeness of this mother-daughter relationship struck Enrique. Dorothy waited for Margaret’s explanation in what everyone knew to be one of the final conversations mother and daughter would have. Dorothy was a private person, and this was a profoundly private matter, and yet she asked in a roomful of people, albeit members of her family. Was she afraid that, without an audience, Margaret would say something wounding? Margaret had certainly kept her mother at arm’s length during her illness, but everyone in the family, including Dorothy herself, Enrique suspected, had been grateful for that. Her mother’s distress at being helpless to stop what was happening to her child only worsened matters for all concerned. Margaret understood this dominating fact of her mother’s nature: she needed to be in control in order to feel secure, and yet no one could control illness.
But why had Margaret kept Dorothy at a distance when she was well? That was the question Enrique believed her mother wanted answered. She had complained bitterly ten years ago that Margaret and she weren’t as close as Dorothy’s friends were with their daughters, and went so far as to accuse Margaret of having “no family feeling.” Margaret, a dutiful daughter compared to her women friends, was hurt and angered by the accusation. “My mother doesn’t know how to be my friend,” she complained to
Enrique. That seemed accurate to Enrique. But he didn’t agree that Dorothy wanted friendship from her daughter. He believed she was hurt because Margaret no longer asked for her advice.
Margaret had welcomed her mother’s advice once. During the days of mothering the infants Gregory and Max, she had sought Dorothy’s counsel about all sorts of child-rearing topics. And ten years into their marriage, she had asked for her mother’s help during its greatest economic crisis, shortly after Margaret quit her job to concentrate on raising the boys. Simultaneously Enrique’s career, barely keeping them in the black anyway, had collapsed, his income dropping to nothing for over a year. Dorothy had supplied more than money then. She had helped Margaret find a new nanny when the one they had was injured in a car accident. She had encouraged Margaret not to return to work, contrary to the advice of all of their friends, who thought Margaret should, in order to relieve the pressure on Enrique’s career. Dorothy insisted that Enrique, along with their financial help, would survive this “problem” as Dorothy described his inability to make enough money from his novels to support them. “He’s a creative person,” she had said. “Income goes up and down for creative people. And they don’t know about money,” she added, which incensed Enrique but was beside the point. Dorothy could see that he was trying to earn a living. She didn’t blame him for struggling. Her daughter had chosen to love him, and so the Cohens were along for the ride, for better or for worse. Dorothy, with her time and Leonard’s money, shored up all the stress fractures that cracked Margaret and Enrique’s hopeless attempt to re-create the traditional nuclear family model of the 1950s until Margaret could have what she desired—the freedom to nurture her children while retaining the luxury of nine-to-five help.
Once the young mother Margaret had admitted they needed help, Dorothy had helped all right, rescuing them from having to
double up the boys in a small bedroom, from sending the boys to public school, and from a thousand other calamities for young, well-to-do New Yorkers. But Dorothy didn’t stop at those successes. She wanted to change the way Margaret managed everything, from determining how much of their laundry was done by their cleaning woman to insisting that Greg, a remarkably unmusical child, be taken to Suzuki violin lessons—then the rage among the daughters of Dorothy’s Great Neck friends. She complained that she didn’t understand why they were summering in Maine, where there weren’t “people like them.” She didn’t approve when Margaret decided to work at a small start-up magazine for no money, and then later couldn’t understand why she rented a studio to paint without also taking a class in drawing. After all, that was what Dorothy’s friend who decided to paint had done.
Dorothy nosed her way into every cranny of every decision her daughter made, in the same affectionate and annoying manner Dorothy did with her own friends. Dorothy didn’t know that even Enrique was not permitted to shine a light into the recesses of Margaret’s mind where she chose to take up or abandon various interests. As a teenager, Margaret had had to push her mother away to find room to grow. Dorothy didn’t understand this dominating fact of her daughter’s nature: Margaret needed to be in control, and she couldn’t control her mother. Neither when Margaret was a teenager, nor later when she was a maturing wife and mother, did Dorothy comprehend her daughter’s need to push her away, nor did she feel any less hurt the second time. Enrique also understood that wasn’t how Margaret had experienced those two phases of their relationship. Margaret believed that she had been an obedient and dutiful daughter, and that when she tried to be her mother’s chum, their different natures collided with too much force for either of them to feel friendly.
After Margaret’s diagnosis, for this third and final phase of
their relationship, Dorothy and Margaret vowed to be closer. But they hit a bump during the early months of Margaret’s treatment, at a particularly inopportune time. Margaret called Dorothy to tell her that she had scheduled the nine-hour surgery during which, among other extraordinary manipulations, her bladder would be removed and replaced by one rebuilt out of a portion of her small intestine. Enrique overheard his wife’s side of what turned into an argument about an inept medical suggestion her mother made based on a friend’s remark. Dorothy had, and probably needed to have, a poor understanding of the gravity of Margaret’s illness in those days, no matter how clearly things were explained to her. As a result, her friend had misunderstood Dorothy’s assessment of Margaret’s cancer. Dorothy’s friend told her that someone she knew had bladder cancer, presumably superficial bladder cancer, and that she didn’t need to have the organ removed so maybe Margaret didn’t have to, either. “You don’t listen to me, Ma!” He heard a frustrated Margaret raise her voice. “That’s why you don’t understand what’s going on. Because you don’t listen to me! I have stage three bladder cancer. That means I have to have my bladder taken out. If I want to live, I have to. There’s no choice. I don’t want to talk about this anymore! I have to go now.” And she hung up on her mother.
Consistent with the handful of other occasions when Margaret expressed anger at Dorothy, Enrique got a call from Leonard a few hours later saying, “I don’t know if you know what happened. Margaret really blasted her mother this morning. Dorothy’s very very upset. Too upset to talk to Margaret about it. And I’m very upset too. I’m sure you know this is very hard on Dorothy. Of course Margaret isn’t herself these days, I understand that, but she has to take it easy on her mother. Her mother loves her and she means well. She wants to help. That’s all.”
Enrique, furious inside, mounted a timid defense of his wife.
“Margaret’s the one who has cancer, Leonard. Don’t you think she’s the one people should take it easy on?” The awkward phrasing revealed to Enrique how unsure he felt about his role in the very foreign diplomacy of peacekeeping in the Cohen family. This sort of third-party-to-third-party negotiation was unknown among the Sabases. In Margaret’s place, Enrique would have shouted at his mother, and she would have wept and fired a thousand verbal pulses of guilt through the fiber-optic wires. If his father got involved, more likely it would have been to chortle over the whole episode, or comment from a lofty vantage point, rather than to plead on behalf of his wife. But Guillermo and Rose’s marriage had ended in divorce after forty years. That fact, among others, caused Enrique to pause before concluding that Leonard’s loyalty to Dorothy was wrongheaded. He decided to mimic Leonard, to defend his wife just as stoutly. He didn’t do as good a job. Leonard asserted the primacy of his wife’s feelings as though announcing an emergency that all concerned should concentrate on alleviating; Enrique meekly asked whether his wife’s feelings ought to take precedence. The true objective of Leonard’s call—and this was what Enrique found so enraging—was to provoke Enrique to put pressure on Margaret to apologize to her mother.
His head filled with resentful argument. His wife was facing death and a surgery so intimidating that the dry medical terms made Enrique dizzy no matter how many times he read them—and yet Margaret was supposed to apologize. For what? For speaking her mind when her mother was being thoughtless? Of course Dorothy meant well. But in the real world, not in the planetarium of Long Island country clubs and Florida gated communities, not in a social class where women could go almost their entire lives without working, not in that pleasant world of privilege, where your grown sons and daughter carefully manage information to keep their most worrisome facts secret, not in this bourgeois par
adise the Cohens conspired to sustain for Dorothy, but in the real world where Enrique lived, meaning well simply wasn’t enough. One also had to
do
well. If Dorothy was too frightened to learn the details of Margaret’s illness, that was understandable, but then she shouldn’t contradict her daughter’s carefully researched medical decisions.
He told himself that he wanted Margaret to choose whether to call her mother without feeling pressure from her father. The truth was that Enrique wanted Dorothy to apologize to her daughter. As absurd and cruel as it sounded to his own ears, he wanted eighty-year-old Dorothy to grow up and admit that she had been wrong. His head was still deadlocked when Margaret announced, “Oh! And I made up with my mother. I felt bad, so I called her.”
“But you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Yeah, she’s being an idiot and she doesn’t listen to me, ever, it’s incredible how she doesn’t listen to me, but she’s also…you know. Think how she must feel, Puff. I’m her daughter. Imagine if this were happening to Maxy or Greg. And when I apologized, something really sweet happened. She said something kind of wonderful. Hysterical, but wonderful.” Margaret reported that Dorothy announced that from now on it was important to remember to say they loved each other at the end of each conversation, that a new day had dawned in their relationship. They would be open and tell each other how they felt. “She was so sweet,” Margaret said and added with a rueful smile, “I hope it’s true. We’ll see.”