The Summer Without Men (2 page)

but a tumult, too,

in the region of the heart and lungs,

an emptiness with a name: You.

*   *   *

My mother and her friends were widows. Their husbands had mostly been dead for years, but they had lived on and during that living on had not forgotten their departed men, though they didn’t appear to clutch at memories of their buried spouses, either. In fact, time had made the old ladies formidable. Privately, I called them the Five Swans, the elite of Rolling Meadows East, women who had earned their status, not through mere durability or a lack of physical problems (they all ailed in one way or the other), but because the Five shared a mental toughness and autonomy that gave them a veneer of enviable freedom. George (Georgiana), the oldest, acknowledged that the Swans had been lucky. “We’ve all kept our marbles so far,” she quipped. “Of course, you never know—we always say that anything can happen at any moment.” The woman had lifted her right hand from her walker and snapped her fingers. The friction was feeble, however, and generated no sound, a fact she seemed to recognize because her face wrinkled into an asymmetrical smile.

I did not tell George that my marbles had been lost and found, that losing them had scared me witless, or that as I stood chatting with her in the long hallway a line from another George, Georg Trakl, came to me:
In kühlen Zimmern ohne Sinn
. In cool rooms without sense. In cool senseless rooms.

“Do you know how old I am?” she continued.

“One hundred and two years old.”

She owned a century.

“And Mia, how old are you?”

“Fifty-five.”

“Just a child.”

Just a child
.

There was Regina, eighty-eight. She had grown up in Bonden but fled the provinces and married a diplomat. She had lived in several countries, and her diction had an estranged quality—overly enunciated perhaps—the result both of repeated dips in foreign environs and, I suspected, pretension, but that self-conscious additive had aged along with the speaker until it could no longer be separated from her lips or tongue or teeth. Regina exuded an operatic mixture of vulnerability and charm. Since her husband’s death, she had been married twice—both men dropped dead—and thereafter followed several entanglements with men, including a dashing Englishman ten years younger than she was. Regina relied on my mother as confidante and fellow sampler of local cultural events—concerts, art shows, and the occasional play. There was Peg, eighty-four, who was born and raised in Lee, a town even smaller than Bonden, met her husband in high school, had six children with him, and had acquired multitudes of grandchildren she managed to keep track of in infinitesimal detail, a sign of striking neuronal health. And finally there was Abigail, ninety-four. Though she’d once been tall, her spine had given way to osteoporosis, and the woman hunched badly. On top of that, she was nearly deaf, but from my first glimpse of her, I had felt admiration. She dressed in neat pants and sweaters of her own handiwork, appliquéd or embroidered with apples or horses or dancing children. Her husband was long gone—dead, some said; others maintained it was divorce. Whichever it was, Private Gardener had vanished during or just after the Second World War, and his widow or divorcée had acquired a teaching degree and become a grade school art teacher. “Crooked and deaf, but not dumb,” she had said emphatically upon our first meeting. “Don’t hesitate to visit. I like the company. It’s three-two-oh-four. Repeat after me, three-two-oh-four.”

The five were all readers and met for a book club with a few other women once a month, a gathering that had, I gleaned from various sources, a somewhat competitive edge to it. During the time my mother had lived in Rolling Meadows, any number of characters in the theater of her everyday life had left the stage for “Care,” never to return. My mother told me frankly that once a person left the premises, she vanished into “a black hole.” Grief was minimal. The Five lived in a ferocious present because unlike the young, who entertain their finality in a remote, philosophical way, these women knew that death was not abstract.

*   *   *

Had it been possible to keep my ugly disintegration from my mother, I would have done it, but when one family member is hauled off and locked up in the bin, the others surge forth with their concern and pity. What I had wanted terribly to hide from Mama I was able freely to show my sister, Beatrice. She received the news and, two days after my admission to the South Unit, hopped a plane to New York. I didn’t see them open the glass doors for her. My attention must have wandered for an instant because I had been waiting and watching for her arrival. I think she spotted me right away because I looked up when I heard the determined clicking of her high heels she marched toward me, sat down on the oddly slippery sofa in the common area, and put her arms around me. As soon as I felt her fingers squeeze my arms, the choking dryness of the antipsychotic cocoon I had been living in broke to pieces, and I sobbed loudly. Bea rocked me and stroked my head. Mia, she said, my Mia. By the time Daisy returned for a second visit, I was sane. The ruin had been at least partially rebuilt, and I did not wail in front of her.

Crying jags, howling, screeches, and laughter for no reason were not at all uncommon on the Unit and mostly passed unnoticed. Insanity is a state of profound self-absorption. An extreme effort is required just to keep track of one’s self, and the turn toward wellness happens the moment a bit of the world is allowed back in, when a person or thing passes through the gate. Bea’s face. My sister’s face.

My breakdown pained Bea, but I was afraid it would kill my mother. It didn’t.

*   *   *

Sitting across from her in the small apartment, I had the thought that my mother was a place for me as well as a person. The Victorian family house on the corner of Moon Street where my parents had lived for over forty years, with its spacious parlor rooms and warren of bedrooms upstairs, had been sold after my father’s death, and when I walked past it, the loss pained me as if I were still a child who couldn’t make sense of some upstart occupying her old haunts. But it was my mother herself whom I had come home to. There is no living without a ground, without a sense of space that is not only external but internal—mental loci. For me, madness had been suspension. When Boris abruptly took his body and his voice away, I began to float. One day, he blurted out his wish for a
pause,
and that was all. No doubt he had meditated on his decision, but I had had no part in his deliberations. A man goes out for cigarettes and never returns. A man tells his wife he is taking a stroll and doesn’t come home for dinner—ever again. One day in winter the man just up and left. Boris had not articulated his unhappiness, had never told me he didn’t want me. It just came over him. Who were these men? After I had pieced myself together with “professional help,” I returned to older, more reliable territory, to the Land of M.

It was true that Mama’s world had shrunk, and she had shrunk with it. She ate too little, I thought. When left to her own devices, she assembled large plates of raw carrots and peppers and cucumbers with perhaps one tiny piece of fish or ham or cheese. For years the woman had cooked and baked enough for armies and stored the foodstuffs in a gigantic freezer in the basement. She had sewn our dresses, mended our wool stockings, shined copper and brass until it gleamed bright and hard. She had curled butter for parties, arranged flowers, hung out and ironed sheets that smelled of clean sun when you slept in them. She had sung to us at night, handed us edifying reading material, censored movies, and defended her daughters to uncomprehending schoolteachers. And when we were sick, she would make a bed for the ailing child on the floor near her while she did the housework. I loved being unwell with Mama, not vomiting or truly miserable perhaps, but in a state of recovery by increments. I loved to lie on the special bed and feel Mama’s hand on my forehead, which she then moved up into my sweaty hair as she checked the fevern joved to sense her legs moving near me, to listen to her voice take on that special intonation for the invalid, songlike and tender, which would make me want to stay ill, to lie there forever on the little pallet, pale, Romantic, and pathetic, half me, half swooning actress, but always securely orbited by my mother.

Sometimes now, her hands shook in the kitchen and a plate or spoon would drop suddenly to the floor. She remained elegant and immaculate in her dress, but worried terribly over spots, wrinkles, and shoes that were improperly shined, something I didn’t remember from when I was young. I think the shining house had gone inward and been replaced by shining garments. Her memory sometimes lapsed, but only about recent incidents or sentences just uttered. The early days of her life had an acuity that seemed almost supernatural. As she aged, I did more and she did less, but this change in our rapport seemed minor. Although the indefatigable champion of domesticity had vanished, the woman who had fixed up a little bed to keep her sick children near her sat across from me, undiminished.

“I always thought you felt too much,” she said, repeating a family theme, “that you were overly sensitive, a princess on the pea, and now with Boris…” My mother’s expression turned rigid. “How could he? He’s over sixty. He must be crazy…” She glanced at me and put her hand over her mouth.

I laughed.

“You’re still beautiful,” my mother said.

“Thanks, Mama.” The comment was no doubt meant for Boris. How could you desert the
still beautiful
? “I want you to know,” I said, in answer to nothing, “that the doctors really say I am recovered, that this can happen and then never happen again. They believe that I have returned to myself—just a garden-variety neurotic—nothing more.”

“I think teaching that little class will do you good. Are you looking forward to it at all?” Her voice cracked with feeling—hope mingled with anxiety.

“Yes,” I said. “Although I’ve never taught children.”

My mother was silent, then said, “Do you think Boris will get over it?”

The “it” was actually a “she,” but I appreciated my mother’s tact. We would not give it a name. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what goes on in him. I never have.”

My mother nodded sadly, as if she knew all about it, as if this turn in my marriage were part of a world script she had glimpsed long ago. Mama, the Sage. The reverberations of felt meaning moved like a current through her thin body. This had not changed.

As I walked down the hallway of Rolling Meadows East, I found myself humming and then singing softly,

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!

How I wonder what you’re at!

Up above the world you fly,

Like a tea-tray in the sky.

*   *   *

I managed the mornings of that first week, working quietly at the borrowed desk, then reading for a couple of hours until the afternoon visits and long talks with my mother. I listened to her stories about Boston and my grandparents, to her recitation of the idyllic routines of her middle-class childhood, disrupted now and again by her brother Harry, an imp, not a revolutionary, who died at twelve of polio when my mother was nine and changed her world. She had told herself on that day in December to write down everything she remembered about Harry, and she did it for months on end. “Harry couldn’t keep his feet still. He was always swinging them against the chair legs at breakfast.” “Harry had a freckle on his elbow that looked like a tiny mouse.” “I remember Harry cried in the closet once so I couldn’t see him.”

I cooked dinner for Mama most evenings at my place or hers, feeding her well with meat and potatoes and pasta, and then I walked over the moist grass into the rented house where I raged alone. Sturm und Drang. Whose play was that? Friedrich von Klinger. Kling. Klang. Bang. Mia Fredricksen in revolt against the Stressor. Storm and Stress. Tears. Pillow beating. Monster Woman blasts into space and bursts into bits that scatter and settle over the little town of Bonden. The grand theater of Mia Fredricksen in torment with no audience but the walls, not her Wall, not Boris Izcovich, traitor, creep, and beloved. Not He. Not B.I. No sleep but for pharmacology and its dreamless oblivion.

*   *   *

“The nights are hard,” I said. “I just keep thinking about the marriage.”

I could hear Dr. S. breathe. “What kind of thoughts?”

“Fury, hatred, and love.”

“That’s succinct,” she said.

I imagined her smiling but said, “I hate him. I got an e-mail: ‘How are you, Mia? Boris.’ I wanted to send back a big gob of my saliva.”

“Boris is probably feeling guilty, don’t you think, and worried. I would guess that he’s confused, too, and from what you told me Daisy has been awfully angry with him, and that must cut pretty deep. It’s obvious that he#x2019;s not a person who does well with conflict. There are reasons for that, Mia. Think of his family, his brother. Think of Stefan’s suicide.”

I didn’t answer her. I remembered Boris’s hollow voice on the phone saying he had found Stefan dead. I remembered the yellow note stuck to the kitchen wall that said, “Call plumber” and that each letter of that reminder had an alien quality as if it weren’t English. It had made no sense, but the voice in my head had been crisp, matter-of-fact:
You must call the police and go to him now
. No confusion, no panic, but an awareness that the terrible thing had come and that I felt hard. This has happened; it is true. You must act now. There were drops of rain on the cab window, then sudden thin slides of water, behind which I could see the fogged buildings downtown and then the street sign for N. Moore, so ordinary, so familiar. The elevator with its cold gray panels, the low ringing sound at the third floor. Stefan hanging. The word
No
. Then again.
No.
Boris throwing up in the bathroom. My hand stroking his head, gripping his shoulders firmly. He didn’t weep; he grunted in my arms like a hurt animal.