‘How wonderful,’ I said.
‘Yes, it is. The ceremony is scheduled for noon.’
‘And he’s going to swear undying love to you?’
‘Undying . . . because he now knows that leaving was the worst mistake he ever made. He told me that on the telephone, nearly breaking down, cursing himself for listening to you all those years ago and—’
That’s when I got up and charged out of the ward and into the nearest restroom, locking myself in a stall and fighting back the need to scream and shout and pound the walls and get that woman’s voice out of my head. But this desire was subsumed by the sobs that grabbed my throat and wouldn’t let it go.
My mom is about to leave this life and all she can talk about is
. . .
Before the sobs could escalate into something more primal and extreme, a certain corner of my brain (the part that always argued in favor of self-preservation) said: ‘Enough . . .’ I let myself out of the stall and negotiated my way through the maze of corridors that was this wing of the hospital. Within five minutes I was back in my car and tearing north on Interstate 95, putting as much distance as I could between myself and Mom. I drove non-stop, arriving back in Cambridge just before midnight. Christy was awake, sitting in the living room with a glass of wine, but not surprised to see me.
‘I’ve been trying to ring your cellphone for the past couple of hours. But I figured—’
‘I had it turned off.’
‘The hospital called.’
‘Has she . . . ?’ I asked.
‘Around two hours ago. The doctors were wondering where you were.’
‘I was . . . running away.’
Christy stood up and put her arms around me. But I didn’t break down or convulse with sorrow or shake my fist at the heavens and demand to know why my mother had been such a sad angry woman who had to take it all out on the daughter who simply craved her love. No, I didn’t have that purgatorial moment of grief which should accompany a parent’s death.
All I felt was . . . exhaustion.
‘Go to bed,’ Christy said, seeing just how wrecked I was. ‘Get nine, ten hours – and let me worry about bringing Emily to school tomorrow.’
‘You’re too nice.’
‘Shut up,’ she said with a smile.
I did as ordered – and actually slept ten straight hours without interruption. When I woke, there was a note from Christy:
By the time you read this, Emily will be happily ensconced at her crèche. I hope you are a little more rested – and as OK as you can be under the circumstances. And you might want to call your beloved Theo on his cellphone. He rang here while you were sleeping and wanted you to know that they have just done an American deal for the movie . . . for three million dollars
.
Congrats, I guess. You’re rich.
Eight
T
HE NEWS OF
Theo’s windfall was subsumed by a far more pressing concern: arranging my mother’s funeral.
Upon waking up and finding the note from Christy that Theo was in the money, I immediately phoned the hospital and began to make arrangements. Within an hour not only had I organized the collection of the body by a funeral home, but I had also rung the local Episcopal priest in Old Greenwich and sorted out the service in two days’ time. Then I called the library and informed her colleagues that she had died. I also asked one of them to contact any friends she might have in the community to pass on the news and tell them of the service Friday morning.
Once that was all completed, Christy was back in the apartment and making coffee. I accepted the mug that she placed in front of me, drew in a deep breath and phoned Theo. He answered on the first ring – and immediately sounded like a man who had just broken the bank at Monte Carlo.
‘Well, hello there,’ he said, all expansive and friendly. ‘Listen, real sorry about your mom. That’s tough . . .’
‘Might you like to explain to me where you’ve been for the past three weeks?’
‘London, Paris, Hamburg and Cannes – and do I have news for you . . .’
‘Your news is less important to me than the fact that you have vanished from our lives for nearly a month.’
‘I was off making us money. Big money. Like one million dollars to Fantastic Filmworks . . .’
‘Congratulations, well done. The thing is, all that money is actually secondary to the fact that—’
‘
Secondary?
You would think that. Because it’s so you, so
Jane
. Piss on my parade and tell me how little value I have in your life.’
‘You dare say that after telling me, if you had to choose between me and that psychotic freak you adore, you’d choose the freak in a New York minute.’
‘Well, she doesn’t belittle me.’
‘I am not belittling you. I am angry – justifiably angry – because you abandoned us.’
‘Jane, I’m sorry that your mother is dead, even though you understandably couldn’t stand the bitch.’
‘Thank you for that sensitive observation.’
‘What do want from me? Lies?’
‘You’re sleeping with her, aren’t you?’
‘Do you have proof of that?
Documented
proof?’
That’s when I threw the phone across the room.
There was a moment’s shocked silence, during which Emily looked up from her coloring book and said: ‘Mommy threw a phone.’
‘Mommy probably had very good reason to throw the phone,’ Christy commented.
‘Mommy needs a drink,’ I said.
But I didn’t take the vodka that Christy proffered because I had to drive all the way back south to Stamford. Christy called the head of her English Department at the University of Oregon and spun some story about a family emergency and said she wouldn’t be back for seventy-two hours.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ I said after she hung up the phone.
‘Yes, I do. And please don’t tell me that you don’t want to put me to any trouble. You’ve got more than enough on your mind right now. And if you want a piece of cheap advice, here it is: get your money back from Theo
now
. . . and with interest. Once you’ve been refunded your investment, inform him that he no longer has a part to play in your lives. Not that he’ll want to be a participant in Emily’s upbringing. I hate to say it but the guy is a case of arrested development.’
‘But you liked him when you first met him . . .’
‘Sure I did. Because he’s eclectic and original. And yeah, I encouraged you to keep the kid . . . not because Theo was destined to be named Father of the Year, but because I knew you would never live with yourself if you had—’
I put my finger to my lips.
‘Oh, please . . .’ Christy said. ‘Anyway, look at Emily and tell me that my advice – which was simply a reflection of your own instincts – wasn’t the right call.’
‘You knew what I wanted, I guess.’
‘No –
you
knew what
you
wanted – and you got it. And she is magnificent. Even if I still can never see myself crossing that frontier, I have to admit that whenever I lay eyes on Emily, I am very envious.’
As if on cue, my daughter looked up from her coloring book and said: ‘Christy talks funny.’
A half-hour later they saw me off. I hugged Emily after loading my bag – packed with a black suit – into the truck of the car.
‘Why Mommy goes?’ she asked.
It was the one moment I almost broke down. Emily saw this.
‘You’re sad!’ she said.
I shook my head and blinked back tears.
‘Your mom is just very tired,’ Christy said. ‘Tired of other people making her sad.’
‘I don’t make Mommy sad,’ Emily said.
Now I almost completely lost it. But I somehow managed to keep myself in check and held Emily close to me and whispered to her: ‘You are the best thing that ever happened to me.’
Then, with great reluctance, I handed her back to Christy.
‘You sure you’ll be all right driving?’ she asked.
‘I’ll be just fine,’ I lied and promised to call as soon as I reached Stamford.
As it turned out I got through the drive without the requisite moments of guilt-sodden grief. Perhaps I was just too numb. Or perhaps the one-two punch of Mom and Theo had rendered me strangely defiant – as I told myself that there was no way I’d allow myself to fall apart at their expense. And yet . . . at extreme moments like this one, the regret nonetheless manages to swamp everything. Especially if it is rooted in the very simple realization that it didn’t have to be this way. Even though you also know that when it’s wrong, it remains wrong – and no amount of dialogue will ever make it right.
When I reached the hospital I was directed to the morgue. I had told the funeral director that I would be arriving around three p.m. – and sure enough he was waiting for me in the lobby of the hospital mortuary. I had expected some Dickensian stick figure in a cut-away frock coat and tall hat. But having been recommended by the hospital the firm of Sabatini Brothers, I should have realized that the funeral director awaiting me would be an Italian-American.
As it turned out, Anthony Sabatini was a short, bulky man in his early forties and dressed in the requisite black suit. He was so solicitous and decent, without being in any way oleaginous, that I took to him immediately. I sensed that, courtesy of his chosen profession, he was something of an expert when it came to sizing people up in extreme circumstances. Though I said nothing to him, he grasped right away that I was on my own here with no one to support me through the next few days.
‘You can see your mom now if you like,’ he said after introducing himself and insisting that I drink a cup of mediocre hospital coffee with him. ‘But, to be honest, the last phase of cancer really robs the person of much of their original looks. It would be better if you let us do some restorative work first.’
‘I saw her yesterday – I know how she was at the end. As it’s going to be a closed coffin followed by a cremation—’
‘If that’s the way you want to go, Miss Howard, no problem. I’m not trying to shill for more business here. You tell me what you want, I’ll make sure you have it. And I’ll be here from now right until the end of the cremation to make certain that everything happens as smoothly as possible.’
Once we had agreed some basic things he approached the woman at the mortuary reception desk and informed her that we were ready for the viewing. She dialed a number. After a few minutes, she received a call back and then said: ‘You can go in now.’
Anthony guided me through double doors, down a series of long, chilly corridors to a frosted-glass portal marked ‘Viewing Room’. As he knocked on this door, he put a steadying hand on my shoulder.
‘You ready, Miss Howard?’
I nodded. An attendant opened the door – and we followed him inside.
I had been preparing for this moment all the way down from Cambridge. As I had mentioned to Anthony, having seen her in the last throes of the cancer had indeed prepared me for the ravages that she had suffered. But once I was brought inside this plain unadorned room and looked down at the tiny shrunken figure on the hospital gurney – a blue sheet brought right up to her chin, her features so emaciated, her lips half-eaten away by the cancer, her eyes closed tight, never to open again – all I could think was: here is the woman who gave me life, who brought me up, who sacrificed so much for me . . . and who could never tell me that she actually loved me, if indeed she ever did. And I, in turn, could not tell her that I loved her . . . perhaps because . . .
Well . . . I always wanted her love. But when that love wasn’t reciprocated, when it became clear to me that she saw me as the agent of her unhappiness . . .
Anthony Sabatini saw me lower my head and stifle a sob. It was the only moment that I came close to crying during the next few days. I didn’t cry when, later that afternoon, I let myself into her house and sat on the narrow single bed in what had been my room and remembered how many times I had shut myself away here during my childhood and adolescence, thinking about a way to escape all this. I didn’t cry when I saw her local lawyer and was informed that Mom had remortgaged the house twice over during the past few years as her hours in the library had been severely cut back. With no savings to act as a safety net, she had to keep borrowing against home equity in order to simply survive.
‘
She knew I had money
,’ I felt like telling the lawyer. ‘
And I had, against her will, helped her out in the past. Why couldn’t she have asked me
. . . ?’
But I knew the answer to that question.
I could have cried when the Episcopal priest who conducted her sparsely attended funeral (were there really only twelve people who cared about her?) referred to me as ‘her much-loved daughter, Jane’. I could have cried when the tacky curtains opened in the tacky chapel of the crematorium and the coffin moved through ceremonial flames towards the furnace. I could have cried when a box was delivered the next day to her house and I drove out to Todd’s Point Beach and scattered her ashes onto the angry waters of the Atlantic. I could have cried when I packed up two boxes of personal memorabilia – what little jewelry she possessed, some family photos, some of her prized Mel Tormé albums (she always went on about his voice being akin to a ‘Velvet Fog’) – and informed the lawyer that he should hire someone to pack everything else up and give it all to charity, then put the place on the market. I could have cried when the lawyer told me he doubted the house sale would actually cover all the mortgages, let alone the $23,000 in legal fees he had let ride with her over the past few years. And I could have cried when – on the way back to Cambridge – a public radio station played Mel Tormé singing ‘What Is This Thing Called Love’ . . .
Yes, there were ample opportunities to break down during the four days I ended up spending in Old Greenwich (Christy insisting that she could hold the fort until late Sunday morning). Though I could feel immense sadness for that which had been absent from our relationship, I found it very difficult to cry for someone who held on to a self-deception so skewed and sad that it corrupted everything to do with her one and only child. But if life teaches you anything it’s this: you can never dispel another person’s illusions. No matter how much empirical proof you have to the contrary, they will hang on to their false beliefs with a vehemence that might baffle and infuriate you, but which (you realize much later on) is their only defense against a truth that would undermine everything they hold dear. Once they have embraced the lie, nothing you can say, do or
prove
will shift them away from it. The lie becomes the truth – and it can never be challenged.