Bettyville (5 page)

This is what I see in her face: the wandering one, the one who is letting go, and the anguished one, the one who remains, but who knows she is losing, barely holding on. They coexist, alternating, the one gradually ceding to the other. As the surrender progresses, she becomes more and more anxious, sometimes even terrified.

“Betty's okay,” I whisper. “Betty's fine. Betty's home. Betty's okay. Betty's fine. Betty's home.” When I finally get her in the car, she looks at me as if she has lost the only person in the world she trusts. I get her to church, hold open the car door, help her in and down the basement stairs, a flight of concrete steps that terrify her always. Reluctantly, she grabs my arm and holds on tight. In the meeting room, gathered around the table, the other members of the committee are waiting and not everyone looks like they have maintained their patience. As she starts into the room, she rallies; she straightens her shoulders. She heads into the fray, reaching for my arm as I leave to say that she is sorry. When my mother walks into the meeting, I think of all the people quietly doing so many things that are hard.

. . .

There was a day once, a few years back, before I realized how bad her eyes had gotten, when I had left her at the church to practice. Detained at the lawyer's office, I was late to pick her up. When I returned, I saw no other cars in the parking lot and glimpsed Betty, walking close by the side of the church, keeping both hands on the wall of the building, moving tentatively toward the side yard to wait by the steps for me. There was no sun; it was a cloudy day. She moved very slowly, as if just ahead there might be something waiting, something that might take an old woman down forever.

My mother speaks of the night when Mammy fell and broke her hip as the moment when her mother stopped being herself. Betty is petrified of falling. It is what she fears above all. Already she has gone down twice, once bruising her tailbone. She will not admit—even to herself—that this ever occurred. Yet in the hall at night, I hear her: “I can't fall. Don't fall. Don't fall. Don't fall.”

My parents were at a party the night my grandmother's accident occurred. After they left the house, after I was forced to watch Lawrence Welk, after I was asleep, my grandmother tumbled down some steps and broke her hip. I slept on, not hearing her cries. My parents found her when they returned and I woke to the voices of the ambulance men. For the rest of her life—and she lived to be a very old woman—my grandmother used a cane, and then later a walker, which she called her horse, to get around.

I woke up, very late, to find my mother sitting on the edge of my bed, gently patting my back.

“Ssshhh,” she said. “Sssshhhh.” Maybe she was crying; I couldn't tell for sure. We hadn't said our prayers together as we always did. It seemed now especially that we should not miss. “Do you want to say our prayers?” I asked.

My mother said nothing, just kept patting my back. I do not know if Betty's sorrow stemmed from her mother's loss of independence or her own. Mammy would need care. There would be another person depending on my mother, a situation to make a woman like her feel more hemmed in. That wouldn't be easy for anyone. Mammy felt terrible for falling.

. . .

After we return from church and Betty calms down, I shower and nervously attempt a shave. I realize my face is bleeding from razor cuts, which I attempt to stop with the application of tiny shreds of toilet paper. They cling to my face. Of course, this would be the moment I decide to go out. I don't think I can bear to sit in the house one more night. After freshening my toilet paper, I clean my glasses—butter sucks on bifocals—then mix pineapple with cottage cheese, bake a piece of salmon, and give Betty an early supper. I hesitate to leave her, but when I say I am going, she nods.

In the Columbia paper, I have read about a program at the synagogue called “Coming to America,” featuring elderly Jews telling the stories of where they are from and how they came to this country. I decide, as I have time, to take the route through the country past a little store run by the Amish where I take Betty to buy pies. By the time I reach the area where the Amish reside, the sun is setting. I watch the men and women in their heavy dark clothes, in which they must be baking, gathered on porches or walking in from the fields. By the side of the road, a group of little girls in aprons marches together toward the store, carrying dishes covered in white cloths. One girl lags behind. Her bonnet is untied and the strings hang down her chest. Her cheeks are dirty and her boots appear to be unlaced. She stomps angrily down the path, oblivious to the rest. She looks angry; I sense rebellion. I can almost hear her screaming: “Enough with the churning!” This one may just be heading off the reservation. I imagine Betty as a girl like this, inclined toward irritable moments and headstrong, determined to go her own way. I like a girl like that.

A
lways open—late nights and early mornings—Rexall Drugs was run by Lennos Bryant, a pharmacist and longtime mayor of Madison known for his annual ascension of the water tower to put up Christmas lights visible for miles. Also in attendance at the store was his wife, Nadine, a registered nurse with an eye for fashion. From her closet came turbans, stoles, aged fur pieces with heads and wandering eyes, sarongs, dresses draped with huge cloth flowers or glittering jewel-like objects. She attracted praise for her attentiveness to the sick for whom she served as doctor, as the town had none. But she specialized as well in unpredictable acts—leaving poison out for dogs that congregated in the business district—that made her less popular. On certain Sundays, her Chevrolet could be seen on the highway, swerving back and forth across the lanes as she supervised the driving instruction of her four-year-old grandson.

The Rexall was adorned with a black cat clock whose swinging tail marked the hours. My father parked us at the counter as Nadine—her wet hair shaded slightly blue—gave herself shampoos in the soda fountain. My father loved her, egged her on to further feats of eccentricity. On this particular day, however, he finished his cherry Coke before I did and looked shocked when Nadine picked up his drained glass and began crunching on the ice.

“Nadine!” exclaimed Lennos.

“He doesn't have any germs,” replied Nadine. “Look at him.”

My father laughed until he remembered why we were there. Then he looked at me gravely and said, “I gotta tell you. Your mother has a plan.”

. . .

Every few years, when the rains come right, it is impossible not to notice that the place where we live is blessed with picture-book beauty. Maybe it was the pastoral greenery or the glory of nature that led Betty—a woman petrified of the water and not inclined to feast on its products—to wake one morning and imagine her husband and son standing at the edge of a sludgy current, fishing poles in hand, joined in appreciation of each other and the wonder of it all.

It was 1969 or so, and not long after my father sat me down at Rexall, the two of us found ourselves preparing to go. Fishing.

“Good lord,” said Big George, “I guess tomorrow is the day.” We were watching the movie on Channel 7, as we did Friday nights. My father was drinking beer. Betty was gone, and as he was inclined to ignore her preferences when the two of us were on our own we had let our dog, Toto, whom Betty detested, into the house. Both of us were sneezing as I powdered our irascible animal.

“Sonuvabitch,” my father yelled out as Toto scratched himself lewdly. “We gotta do something about that damn dog.” Our breathing became even more difficult.

“Sonuvabitch,” I screamed in imitation. I loved a cussword uttered with abandon.

“Don't talk like that,” he said.

“I like that word,” I answered.

“I know,” he agreed. “It is a good one.”

Sometimes on nights like this, my father went on about World War II, when he was stationed in Saipan at an oxygen plant. Some people associate war with death and suffering, but Big George spoke of his years in the South Pacific as if they were the most golden days he could remember, which made me feel a little bit hurt. He often told me about the day when his base was bombed and he almost died. The planes flew so close that he was able to spot a Japanese pilot's long yellow scarf blowing in the wind. He never spoke of the thousands of American boys who died on Saipan. My parents never mentioned bad things at all.

Once a year, he went off to St. Louis for a reunion of his army buddies on the Hill, the Italian section of the city on the South Side. He didn't have that many male friends in Madison. I don't think I could have named one. I didn't have that many either. It was fairly difficult to gather a band of boys to stage a re-creation of the Academy Awards with me as the favored nominee for everything.

“Good lord,” my father said, anticipating the fishing expedition. “Of all the damn things . . .”

“Of all the damn things . . .” I repeated. “Of all the damn things . . .”

“I guess I'm supposed to get a damn pole,” my father said. “I guess we'll have to buy some damn worms.”

“Where,” I asked, “do you buy the damn worms?” I was no Huck Finn, though I thought the hat was interesting.

“Hell if I know,” he said, “but someone will know. I don't think we'll have to put an ad in the paper.”

I continued to powder Toto—a loyal but randy terrier who pursued every bitch in Monroe County. Domestic life did not come as second nature to him. Asked to perform even the most rudimentary trick, he yawned and sauntered off to lick his well-used private parts. He seemed to like my father, who had found him on the street and took care of him mostly. Me, he had reservations about. Each day when Big George arrived home, Toto swaggered over to his station wagon, looking aggrieved and obligated to report that the boy-dog bonding thing just wasn't working out.

. . .

Until 1972, when I was thirteen and we packed up to head a dozen miles down Highway 24 to Paris, my parents and I lived in Madison, a town of 528 people, where Betty grew up and her father built the family's first lumberyard. Big George ran the place. When we pass through Madison now, I see my father standing in front, crying out something a little shocking at passersby, or raising his hand as my mother and I drove by.

“What is he up to?” Betty would ask. “No good.”

Rolling down the car window, she would yell at my dad, “Get to work.

“What am I going to do with him?” my mother always asked.

“Hit the road, Betty,” he cried back.

Big George fancied himself a little bohemian. In the late 1960s, when the hippie signs proclaimed
FLOWER
POWER
, he painted the refrigerator in the family room completely black with one big blooming white flower. He could draw anything, and, wishing I could too, I sat watching him for hours as he sketched a caribou from the
World Book Encyclopedia,
the profile of John F. Kennedy, a sleeping dog, my mother's face from a photo taken when she was in college. In the picture she looked shy and innocent; in the sketch, through my father's eyes, even more so. He worked on that portrait night after night, but she didn't like it. It was the same old problem; in person or on paper, she never thought she looked right, even when captured by loving hands.

My father's big hands were rough from work, but gentle too. When laboring in the yard, he touched the leaves and shrubbery with kindness. Standing behind my mother, latching a necklace or strand of pearls, he brushed the hair away with delicacy, always kissing her neck when he finished his task. I came to see my mother through my father's eyes, which took in what few others recognized, her sweetness, vulnerability, and the sadness that sometimes came over her silently.

Betty and I were nervous characters, and when we were on the downswing, the house was still except for the sound of my father making jokes, trying to wash our cares away. When we would return to the world, we would find him, sitting in a chair on the patio with a beer, stroking the ears of Toto, who had grown accustomed to my capricious affections and my mother's tendency to send things into a bit of a whirlspin.

There seemed to be some kind of rule that my father could never have anything he wanted. He lived for us.

. . .

On the morning of the fishing trip, I located a glass jar with a top and dragged the snow shovel out of the garage. Digging tentatively into the earth, I left a fairly shallow impression and collapsed on the ground as Toto eyed me skeptically. Already I found life exhausting, and it seemed to have the same opinion of me, but eventually I did find a couple of worms and managed, with a kitchen fork, to get them into a jar. “Two will be plenty,” I said to Toto. “We won't be staying long.” I had a plan.

Big George looked woebegone when he arrived home with a pole and more nasty worms in a small box. Work, hard work; this was the Baker family religion, but my father was the good-time sinner man who never quite got the faith. My uncle Harry, who supervised the running of all four of the family's lumberyards, had a way of suggesting, as he peered over his accountant's half-glasses, that no one else could ever do quite right. My father tended to ignore him when it was possible; he was as easygoing and personable as Harry was shrewd and financially adept.

We headed to Moberly, to Rothwell Park where there was a pond or lake or something. Daddy took along a six-pack of Budweiser. I was determined that whatever happened, I would not touch a fish. I left the jar with the worms I had found, dead by this point, on the kitchen table for my mother to find with a sign that said,
ENJOY
YOUR
LUNCH
!

My father did what he always did when we traveled together alone. “I want you to have a happy childhood,” he told me before asking about school, my life, my friends. Sliding as far as possible toward the car door, I never knew quite what to say to please him. I wanted him to believe that all was well, but could not really make the case.

“I'm not right,” I blurted out to him once.

“No one is,” he answered. “They just think they are. Too many people think they've got it all figured out. But they don't.”

This idea was going to come as quite a shock to many people I knew.

“No one?”

“Look inside a person and everyone has problems. I work in a damn lumberyard. My father was a lawyer. He was number one in his class.”

All the way to Moberly, my father sang, as he always did in the car. From his old single man's life as a salesman, he kept, in a rarely opened cabinet in the family room, the records of Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Paul Whiteman, Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra, Lionel Hampton, the Mills Brothers, Woody Herman, and Nat King Cole.

“Mona Lisa, men have named you,”
he sang as he dried off after a shower, always folding his towel carefully and hitting every inch of flesh. I thought the method was something he had picked up in the army.

At Rothwell Park, after my father finally succeeded in assembling the pole and baiting it, he retired to the grassy bank to drink beer. There I stood for fifteen minutes or so, holding the pole, hoping that the fish were elsewhere, preferably in some far-off bay. My father checked the sky for rain with some frequency and chugged on a Bud.

About every five minutes, I shot him a look that said, “Isn't this enough?”

“Fish, dammit,” he said. “Fish.” In return, I made a face, turned back around, and threw the fishing pole into the lake. Already I was a believer in the power of the grand gesture.

“Damn, George,” my father yelled as I plopped down beside him.

“Daddy,” I said, “you know and I know that this is just a shit waste of time.”

“Don't talk like that,” he said. “Your mother is going to blame me for this. I am never going to hear the end of it. Some boys would be damn grateful for a fishing pole like that.”

Then he gave me a sip of beer.

. . .

After the fishing ordeal, my father and I wound up eating hamburgers at the country club bar where my father's cronies wandered through the bar in their golf shoes. “I guess you wouldn't want to learn golf,” my father began. But I was reluctant. I did not care for the shoes.

“Am I a brat?” I asked.

“Borderline,” he responded.

Soon, another thought occurred.
Funny Girl
was playing in Columbia. I did not know Barbra Streisand, but anyone who tripped on her pants leg at the Oscars was my kind of woman. I had read the reviews of the movie, knew the songs from the record, and had memorized the number to call for showtimes. My father shrugged, threw down the last of his drink, gave in. We saw the movie. When Barbra declared, “I'm a bagel on a plateful of onion rolls,” I wanted to cheer.

When it was over, my father remarked, “That Jewish girl can sing.” Afterward, we dined at Rice Bowl Shan-grila restaurant, which I considered the height of sophistication. All the way home, I talked about Barbra until my father turned from the wheel and said, “Please, George, hush. You've got to straighten out and fly right.”

For days, I spoke in Brooklynese 24/7. I narrowly escaped injury when, standing on a bar stool in my bathrobe, lip-synching to “Don't Rain on My Parade,” I fell to the floor after what I considered a particularly devastating climax. Betty came rushing, kneeling down to check for fractures as I rubbed my head, thinking, “Oy!”

. . .

A city kid who grew up in St. Louis as the son of a successful attorney, my father—who snoozed over the stacks of sale tickets he brought home nights—was from a family of huggers, eaters, drinkers, people who dragged us, way past my bedtime, to suppers at fancy restaurants with waiters in tuxes, appetizers, tanks of lobsters with snapping claws.

Granny was one of five sisters, all with waves of platinum hair, whose parents, or grandparents, or someone, had come to a town near St. Louis called Pacific from Vienna, for reasons I cannot say. Maybe they thought things worked out for the Gabors.

Granny wore black dresses, strands of pearls, loved to entertain, stuffed bills into the hands of ragged men on the streets. “God love him,” she always said when she passed those without. Her sister Sade Sizer was smoky-voiced, with the tendency to scatter burning ash. She turned the air around her blue with curses. When she descended on St. Louis from Chicago with her husband—an ice magnate—my father watched his aunt, face circled by cigarette fumes, holding court like a bawdy empress while Granny trailed her, checking the carpet for anything smoldering. He savored a character, loved things a little wild and crazy.

Sade, though, frightened my mother. Granny's sister was the sort discomfited by a younger woman whose beauty bested the kind she herself acquired at the Marshall Field cosmetics counter.