Face (42 page)

“They seem to be in order, Mum.”

“Let me see those.” Her voice is clammy. She takes the documents and steadily rips them to shreds.

“It’s all right, miss,” the guard says to me as I scramble, hissing, to retrieve the pieces.

My mother kicks me in the ribs. I push her foot back firmly on the floor, and she doesn’t strike again.

“These are only copies. I’ve another set in the back. The originals are in a vault in London. But I think you’d better take
her away, ’fore she does any more damage to herself.”

“At least let me get my personal belongings.”

I half expect her to wink at me, she must have a plan. Doesn’t she always? But she’s sagging. She won’t look at either of
us.

“I can let you into the office, but I have to escort you and make a note of everything you take.”

So we march, ahead of him. I wonder if this is how prisoners felt on the way to the guillotine. There’s nothing she wants
or needs in the office.

She sits in Foucault’s chair at Foucault’s desk and pulls the top drawer.

“My cosmetic bag, with my initials on it.” She holds it for him to see. “My address book, also with my initials.”

“I don’t know about that, mum.”

“This is mine. Here’s the Rolodex. I wouldn’t dream of taking that. But these are my personal friends.” She rolls her eyes
up at him, the expression of a silent-movie queen in distress. “My husband is in the hospital dying of cancer. I would like
to be able to notify my friends when he passes on.”

“That’s true,” I say. He shrugs and flutters his giant paw.

Some bills, still in their envelopes, addressed to Mum at home.

“Maybe you’d like to take care of these for me?”

“Go on with you. Finish up.”

From the next drawer a box of diet bars, Kleenex, a silver pen also engraved with her initials that my father bought for her
on sale at Tiffany’s, and from the bottom drawer a framed photograph of Henry and Anna and me, must have been that last year
at the farm. I recognize us, smiling together, but I have no recollection of the picture being taken. Mum’s kept it here for
fifteen years.

The guard looms over the desk, making notes. “Nice-lookin’ family.”

“Yeah. Well, I guess they’re all I’ve got left, aren’t they?”

I pick up as many of the belongings as I can hold. We don’t have a bag. We would never have gotten out with what we really
came for.

I draw a bead on the back of my mother’s blue velvet collar, still marginally askew but straightening rapidly, and follow
her out and away from the gallery. For the final time.

* * *

Later, standing in the kitchen with a tumbler of Scotch, she tells me the salient details. He drowned in the South of France
while swimming in a mineral pool reputed to prolong life. Coralie was with him.

We stare at each other while the words sink in. I start to laugh. Mum watches, wide-eyed with surprise or anger, I can’t tell
which, but it doesn’t stop me and soon she, too, is bubbling over, helpless chortles branching into raucous guffaws. We wipe
our noses on paper towels. The laughter fills the cold white room like helium in a dental office. We refill our glasses with
the Dewar’s we’ve been drinking for over an hour. It almost feels as if we’re having fun. We keep it up until our faces are
slick with tears, and stop abruptly.

The Bauhaus clock reads six. Outside, the sky is ashen, city lights reflecting intermittently off of low clouds.

She has her arms twisted around each other tight against her chest. Suddenly she whirls to the sink, grabs a scrub brush,
and attacks the tile grout.

“You could fight in probate,” I say. “You could get your customers and artists to testify that Foucault only succeeded in
New York because of you. There must be some precedent for this, like commercial palimony? Mum, that gallery was your life,
you can’t just let it go without fighting.”

Her body slowly stops working. She lets go of the brush. When she turns back to me, she is biting her lip. The rims of her
eyes are red and glossy, and I expect her to say something about the hidden pictures, the part of the gallery that is most
hers, which she can never claim.

Instead she says, “That’s really what you think?”

I stare at her shoes. Black round-toed Ferragamos with small pleated bows. She’s had them for years, but they look brand-new.
“Well, Art was, anyway.”

She tears a Kleenex from the heap of retrieved goods piled on the counter and blows her nose. Hard. “Your father was my life,
Maibelle. Everything I’ve ever done has been for him. That’s the only thing I regret about the gallery. The only thing.”

She gasps. Her eyes roll wide, thick with tears that have no part of laughter. She gulps air. “I don’t know what I’m going
to do. What am I going to do now?”

I come toward her. She stands sobbing, pulling tissues. She won’t look at me. Her hair falls loose, dull and wispy as an old
feather. I want to hold her, to hug her, be small in her arms again. To feel warmth and the certain squeeze of her love. But
her body is closed and smaller than mine now.

“It was my fault, don’t you see? Coming back. Settling in. Babies. None of it—”

I picture her clawing at a locked door. A pink satin pillow. Sobbing. My father leading her to safety.

“He never would have quit if it hadn’t been for me.”

“That’s not true, Mum.”

“It is.” She takes my head between her hands and squeezes until I can feel the contours of my own skull. Her eyes dig into
mine. “You don’t know. None of you. The way he just disintegrated.”

Suddenly she straightens as if someone’s put a prod up her back. She releases me and shakes her head, smooths a final tissue
below her eyes.

“Look at me. Who has time for this! It’s all right, Maibelle. As soon as the word is out, as soon as Joe’s better and I can
put my mind to this again, people will call.”

“Delong. And Scott?”

“Absolutely.”

After that one brief lapse, Foucault’s death seemed to engineer my mother’s grief over Dad, gave it the sharp, crisp edges
of an executive career. The day we brought him home from the hospital she filled the apartment with balloons and loaded his
bedside with the best of his gadgets for invalids. Rotating cup holders, folding trays, side bags containing magazines, newspapers,
cards, and notepaper within easy reach. Considering the disdain with which she’s treated most of his inventions, this was
a sweet and meaningful gesture.

Sweet and meaningful does not describe her dealings with me and Henry. The contrast, after the first days at the hospital
when every word between us throbbed like a stab wound, was both a relief and a serious annoyance.

After the shock of Foucault’s betrayal subsided, she didn’t mention the gallery or her future plans again. Instead, Dad became
her consuming passion—and a macabre Pollyanna passion it was. In complete and unilateral command, she reported every development
as if Henry and I had just dropped in from Outer Mongolia. Told us over and over how marvelously sensitive the radiologist
was, how humane the treatment (which, because of the extent of the cancer, consists of little more than painkillers), and
how open-minded the oncologist (because he gave Mum the number of an “alternative” medicine man whose coffee enemas and herbal
infusions Dad won’t touch). She studied homeopathic textbooks, restorative cookbooks, became an overnight expert on resuscitation
techniques. The kitchen became a laboratory for Dad’s new whole-grain, raw-vegetable immuno-boost diet. Once again, her entire
existence served a master plan.

When I suggested that the best treatment might be simply to cherish the short time Dad had left, Mum repeated a phrase I’d
heard so often. “You don’t really believe that,” she said, then more softly, “We can’t quit.”

While I told myself she was more than entitled to whatever defenses she could muster, at that moment I began to fantasize
about scrawling “Death Kills!” in blood red across her living room chevrons.

Henry finally bailed out. He’d visit Dad every day like a dutiful son, but he just couldn’t handle round-the-clock exposure
to Mum’s Florence Nightingale routine. So we’ve traded places, in effect, with me helping Mum uptown, he braving Harriet and
the other white witches of Eleventh Street.

And then the weekend after Dad came home, Anna arrived.

From the living room I could see the foyer as my mother went to unlock the elevator door. I watched it roll back, saw the
duffel bag and
backpack and, beyond, a thin figure with cropped brown hair. She was wearing blue jeans, a turquoise-green pullover, dark
glasses. She gave us all hugs, no cheek pecks. She smelled like a Big Mac and handed Mum a bottle of Oregon wine for a homecoming
present.

As Anna hurried down the hall to see Dad, Henry voiced what we were all thinking. “Ding dong, the guru’s dead!”

Later in my father’s room, Anna (she was, again, Anna even unto herself) told us the story. The Dhawon, it seems, had objected
to her leaving the ashram. He told her she had taken a vow to serve him as daughter and wife, that her spiritual family consisted
solely of other devotees. The outside realm was of no consequence. Not even if her “biological” father was terminally ill.
By leaving without permission she would forfeit her place of favor in the Inner Circle.

“In other words, I’d go from being his mistress to his janitor. Somehow, I felt I had a right to my own father. Besides, I
always hated the way I look in red, and I had a terrible craving for beef.”

Dad smiled. “Me, too,” he whispered.

Anna kissed his forehead. “Which part? The red or the beef?”

“Whopper.”

My mother started to shake her head. The nutritionally correct diet she’d been feeding my father made the Dhawon’s menus seem
positively sybaritic. But the rest of us were united on this one.

“If he can’t smoke, he can at least have a good greasy hunk of meat.”

Without any further discussion Henry and Anna were gone, my mother pounding after them.

“Lock the door.” My father propped himself up, wheezing with the effort of speech.

I did as instructed and tried to plump up his pillows, move away some of the books that cluttered his bed, but he waved a
sheaf of handwritten papers in my face to make me quit.

“Sit. Read this.”

“Maibelle? Are you in there?” She called but didn’t try the door.

“Yes. We’re fine. Take a rest, Mum.”

“You’ll let me know if he needs anything?”

“He doesn’t need anything, Mother. Relax.”

But I could hear her pacing the hall a few times before her footsteps finally retreated to the kitchen, where they were soon
replaced by the roar of the Cuisinart. There was going to be a showdown when the Fast Food Kids returned.

My father was watching, taking one labored breath after another as he waited for me to attend to my reading. There were pages
of his cramped chicken scratch. I dropped into a chair beside the television, which was tuned to a rerun of
The Avengers
with the sound off.

“This will take a while. Want me to turn up the volume?”

He signaled for me to just read.

“Dear Maibelle—Mei-bi,” I read. “Mei Mei.”

He had his mouth pursed around an imaginary cigarette and his eyes were aimed toward the television but moved in quick, side-to-side
jerks as if he were dreaming awake.

You were always fond of stories. I’m not sure if you yet realize, the best photographs tell stories better than words. So
that they rise beyond the tale, reveal history. I made a few pictures that qualified in my day. Maybe Mum has some of them
in that secret cache you told me about. Maybe you’ve seen them. I hope so. But most of my work fell short because I refused
to put
myself
in the story. (I don’t mean physically being in the photograph, you understand. I’m talking about more of a spiritual presence,
as Anna would say.) I always knew that one day you would insist on the truth. Henry and Anna would go their own ways, but
you… from the very beginning you wanted to know what I was incapable of telling you. It seems that by telling me about Diana’s
secret—by offering to show me what you’ve done with the Leica—you are again asking the unanswerable.