Screening Room (23 page)

They sat there until late in the afternoon, with the winter sun coming low and cool through the front glass window, staying hours after they’d finished their food, as if time and fate could be suspended as long as they didn’t go home. It was January. People walked into the restaurant wearing thick jackets and hung them on the coatrack by the counter. Every time the door opened, a cold slice of air angled in and mingled with the stuffy heat. My parents had not spoken a word to each other. Around them, at other tables, people talked about good places to eat barbecue, business, movies, the coming season for the illustrious
University of Memphis basketball team. Mother had just turned seventy-one. She hadn’t told anyone the day’s news. Later, she would call Audrey, who was also dying of cancer, Lennie, Lila, Rosalie, Lenore, Nancy. That evening she would call her four sons, one by one.

In the chasm that had suddenly opened up before her, she was thinking beyond her circle of friends. She was thinking especially of her grandmother Oma, who had sewn hats for British royalty and made many trips between Philadelphia and London. Oma was the mother she never had. Oma would visit her in New Orleans for two months at a time, staying up late at night and listening to her childhood dreams. She was thinking about her New Orleans friends, Dot and Sally, and her glory days as a cheerleader, when the Tulane boys would fight for the privilege of walking her to her next class. And she was thinking of some of the young men who had proposed to her, wondering what her life might have been with this one or that one.

At five o’clock, my parents called Blanche to say that they would not be coming home for dinner. Then they drove around Memphis, something they rarely did, through the winding streets of Chickasaw Gardens with the elliptical pond and the Japanese bridge and the ivy-covered houses; past the salmon-colored arches and green-tiled roof of the Pink Palace; past the display of the B-17
Memphis Belle;
past the sweeping grounds of Overton Park and the statue of Crump; past the neon sign of the old Parkview Hotel, which had opened during the presidency of William McKinley and flown a Confederate flag until the late 1950s. “Dick, we should come here when the weather turns warm,” she said and wiped her breath off the window. “We should walk, only walk.”

Driving by the Parkview in the dusk, she thought: I wish we could just stop here for the night, cross the carpeted lobby into
the blue colonnade room with its smell of crushed lilacs, ride one of the brass-fixtured elevators up to our room. I wish I could take a long, hot bath and put on a white robe, have Diet Coca-Colas and ice delivered to the room, call friends from the hotel telephone just to chat about nothing. We would not go to sleep, and the night might go on.

Several months into Mother’s illness, I took my wife and two daughters, Kara and Elyse, to see her. Although Mother still had much of her strength, she spent the majority of each day lying in her bedroom with the window shades down and the drapes drawn, day and night, making her room a cocoon. She had rearranged photographs on her bureau, removing some that she’d had for years out of obligation and replacing them with pictures that spoke to her heart, a photo of Oma, a photo of herself as a young girl. Visitors would sit in the chair next to her bed. At this time, my older daughter, Elyse, was fifteen. When we arrived, Mother set her mind on giving Elyse a driving lesson. As Elyse had never before been behind the wheel of an automobile, my wife and I were not in favor of the idea. But Mother insisted, and she dragged herself out of bed, got herself dressed, and took her eldest granddaughter off in the car. She would not see Elyse’s graduation from high school, she would not see Elyse’s entrance to college, she would not see Elyse’s marriage. But she could offer this driving lesson.

As Mother declined, Blanche’s respiratory problems got worse and worse until she could hardly breathe. One afternoon, wheezing and sweating, Blanche whispered that she was too weak to work for us anymore. A friend from church drove her home, where a cousin took care of her. Eventually, Blanche went into the hospital, from which she never returned.

I began flying to Memphis once a month, to visit Blanche in the hospital and Mother at home. Sometimes, Mother went with me to see Blanche. The two of them talked of times past, Blanche addressing Mother as “Mizz Lightman,” embarrassed to be flat on her back, Mother embarrassed by the odd-looking hat to cover her bald head.

I convinced Mother to get out of bed and go on short walks with me. Moving slowly through the quiet, shady streets of our neighborhood, we talked. I imagined her as the little girl in the black-and-white photograph I have from the early 1930s. I imagined her putting on makeup with girlfriends in her house on Octavia Street in New Orleans. I memorized everything she said.

Then I would fly back to Boston and dream that she was already gone.

While Mother rested fitfully in her bed, Dad sat beside her, reading. He acted as if she had a minor illness, like a cold, and never departed from his daily routines. Sometimes, she would ask him to lie down beside her, and he silently did so.

In the last few months, hospice nurses visited Mother twice a week. In preparation for each visit, she would have a manicure, brush what little hair she had left, and put on makeup.

Mother worried about what would happen to Dad. Her worry tormented her and may have kept her alive several months beyond the predictions of her doctors. “We’ll take care of Dad,” I said. “You should just let go when you’re ready.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” she replied, a grim smile on her face. Until her last few days, when she developed a dazed look and stopped speaking, she kept her sense of humor. “I’m going to miss you when I’m gone,” she said to me.

She rummaged around in her box of old photographs until she found a certain glamorous picture of herself at age sixteen, and she asked me to tape that picture to the refrigerator.

From my journal:

Mother and Blanche died within three days of each other.

Most of the family has come to the Fifteen-and-Under Memphis Tennis Open, where Nancy’s son Scott is seeded second. Sweating profusely, we sit in the bleachers at the University Club. This is a club that once forbade anyone to set foot on the premises after six p.m. without a tie. But traditions have slipped. Aunt Lila and Uncle Harry are here, Aunt Rosalie in one of her first public outings since Uncle Ed’s death, Stephen and Michael and their children, Nancy and Jimmy, John and Ronnie. Even Lennie and Nate, who despise tennis, are here. Just at this moment, Nate is helping Lennie get settled on her cushion. “I can manage,” says Lennie, scowling at Nate. “You treat me like I’m an old woman.”

“Of course you’re not an old woman,” says Nate. “You’re my Memphis cotton bud.” Nate leans over and gives Lennie a kiss, and, for a brief moment, her hand rises and caresses his cheek.

Even under the awning, the heat is fierce. To cool off, we hold ice cubes against our faces.

Down below, on center court, Scott and his opponent, a pimpled young man with a frightening serve, are pounding the ball back and forth. At each shot, a cloudburst of sweat flies from their faces. Scott has quickly discovered the Achilles’ heel of his opponent, a tentative backhand, and keeps pummeling that sore spot but cannot quite make the kill. It is a clay court. As they dash for corner shots, both of the boys slide on the sandy clay,
then, suddenly stopping, produce a rain of sweat. It is astonishing that they can move in this heat, much less run. The older spectators surrender and begin slowly walking back toward their air-conditioned cars. The younger ones—that is, those sixty-five and under—are determined to see this thing through. But despite the ice, our faces are red; the heat makes us dizzy and torporous. Light thickens and dims. Scott. All of it already determined. Scott, the tip of the spear. Uncle Edward’s side of the family, exceptional at sports. My cousin Stephen, an outstanding golf player. My cousin Michael, a tennis star; there I can see him slyly place the ball down the line. Scott learned to play tennis from his mother, Nancy, who learned from her father, Uncle Ed, who followed M.A., also a star athlete. Although M.A. never taught sports to his sons. Not home enough. Half of each week, M.A. was absent, visiting one of his out-of-state theaters or doing a theater purchase assessment or flying off to a bridge tournament in Chicago or Los Angeles. Then, home for a couple of days, long days in his office, level with the balcony seats, the warren of connected rooms, the old creaky fan whirling above him, the sound of Fannie Slepian typing in the next office, the smell of fresh ink from the drafts of movie advertisements. And finally home, he would drop his satchel of sales figures to the floor, lie on the sofa in the sun room with a newspaper over his head for a quick nap before dinner, wake up and call Hattie Mae to fetch him a glass of lemonade. All of it created by him. Children and grandchildren and their children and
their
children, land, houses. Even my forty years gone he must have orchestrated in some invisible way. The privileges and struggles of four generations, marriages, divorces, the bone and the flesh, shadows and light, all of it fashioned by him. And I imagine the smell of the air that day long ago, when he stood on the balcony of his hotel in Sheffield, Alabama, a couple months shy of his twenty-fourth
birthday, handsome as Errol Flynn, and looked across the street at people lining up at a storefront cinema. It was late afternoon. He could smell the fried chicken from the kitchen below. He would have been tired from his meetings with civil engineers and taken off his jacket, loosened his tie, rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. Drawings of the new dam lay on his bed. Even with the revolving fan overhead, his room would have been hot, and he went to the balcony for air. Looking out over the shops and the little hotels on the street, the carriages and parked Model Ts, the side alleys with trash cans and empty milk bottles, his eyes came to rest on the line of people waiting at the storefront. What thoughts then turned in his mind? Did he feel the earth shift on its axis? Did he feel the long waiting generations to come? Did he know that at that moment he gave birth to the
phasma
, which, once created, could slide back in time and create his own birth, then forward in time to build and destroy? He inhaled a deep breath of the future. Then, elated and disturbed by what he had dreamed, he went back into his sweltering room, closed the white slatted doors of the balcony, fell in a swoon on his bed.

I am upstairs in my old bedroom, where I have slept for the last month. One hour more. Downstairs, my father sits at the dining table waiting to tell me goodbye.

These past weeks, my
I
s have begun to flatten and sprawl. My talking has slowed to the pace of the South. I have found and lost, uncovered and let remain buried. This town aches in my flesh. I will always live here, but I cannot live here.

Outside, before getting into the waiting car, I run my hands along the trunk of the pecan tree in the front yard. Its bark is corrugated and rough, so different from the smooth tan shell of
the pecans. A lifetime ago, I watched Blanche pick these pecans and shell them, mix together melted butter, eggs, sugar, dark corn syrup, and brandy, and sprinkle the pecan bits on top. After we boys started leaving home, we would celebrate each family reunion with Blanche’s pecan pie.

Three years have passed since Uncle Ed’s funeral.

And I am back in Memphis again, back for another death in the family, this time the funeral of my father. He was ninety-three.

In these last three years, Dad became completely deaf. He went blind in one eye. He broke his hip twice from falls. He became a regular customer of the Baptist Hospital, staying there for weeks at a time with mending bones, heart attacks, pneumonia, kidney problems. He rarely complained.

I began coming to Memphis every couple of months, sitting beside his bed in the hospital, sitting with him at his home as he dozed with a book in his lap, occasionally taking him for laborious walks through the grounds of the Botanical Gardens. Whenever I arrived for a visit, tears came to his eyes. Aside from his sons, few others visited him, as most of his friends were dead and those remaining he had ceased calling. Micah visited, a charismatic and visionary young rabbi who has helped bring together the different faiths of Memphis, and Liz, a loving next-door neighbor. Elton Holland, a former employee of Malco and in his late eighties himself, occasionally dropped by to reminisce. Elton brought Dad a bottle of 1973 Château Lafite Rothschild, unaware that my father drank only cheap Chardonnay. When I was emptying the house, I found the bottle in a closet, unopened.

During my trips home, as I witnessed my last parent’s life slowly extinguished, my own childhood in Memphis became a vanishing dream. As feeble as he was, while my father lived I felt that he connected me to my youth, to the comfort and love of a world safeguarded by parents, to the womb of a gracious southern town perched over a river. I would have to look inward now.

On my very last trip home, after Dad was gone, after the house had been emptied of all furniture and rugs and paintings and chandeliers, I peeked in a window and saw only one thing remaining: the demerit blackboard still hanging on the wall of the kitchen.