This Is Not for You (16 page)

“Katherine, is there nothing I’m to be allowed to do? Have I come all this way to be rejected and scorned?”

Doris said, when I repeated this comment to her, asking for suggestions, “Tell her she’s doing a marvelous job of being all the hellish relatives who weren’t able to attend. Without her it wouldn’t even feel like a wedding.”

“Why don’t we accept the bridesmaids’ dresses?”

“And have her decide what they’re going to be?”

“Even that would be better than more scenes.”

“Well, ask Monk.”

Monk said dismally, “Andy and I are going to elope, if we get married at all. Why don’t you marry him? I won’t even ask a bit of liver.”

“Just the bridesmaids’ dresses, Monk,” I pleaded.

“She’ll make Esther wear white. It’s all part of a plot. “You’ll all be in white, and Andy won’t know which is which. He’ll get his harem after all.”

But once Mrs. Woolf had that much of her way, she was suddenly cooperative. The only thing she insisted on, when Monk and she went to choose the dresses, was that Monk not be shown the prices. The dresses were simple, becoming to us all, and probably shockingly expensive.

“You’re a real P. R. man, Katie,” Andrew said, not much approving. “I should send you to Canada to deal with my family.”

“They’re not coming, I gather.”

“No,” he said.

“They’re all right about it, aren’t they?”

“Just fine,” he said. “My father sent me a check for ten thousand dollars.”

“Lovely.”

“And told me that was that. It was a grand letter, a ‘good luck, son, now that you’ve become a man’ letter.”

“What does he mean?”

“That now, whether I know it or not, I’ve chosen to be independent.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Go right on as if nothing had happened. I’ll get as far along with the Ph.D. as I can. Then I’ll raise hell.”

“Will that work?”

“It always has,” he said. “Now, I haven’t said a word to you about any of this. Ramona doesn’t know, and I don’t want her to. There’s no point in worrying anyone about it.”

That evening you and your mother came to my flat for dinner. It was part of the “getting to know how you live” program “without actually moving in” program that I was trying to run.

“Now, this is a perfectly pleasant place to live, Esther,” your mother commented at once.

“But no Lady Alice,” I said.

“Thank heavens. That woman hasn’t any real rank. No one who drinks like that could have.”

“But in other ways she’s very proper,” I said to head off a more violent protest from you.

You shrugged, picked up one of my textbooks, and sat down on the floor to read.

“Always interested in books,” Mrs. Woolf said cheerfully “That’s what I admire most in you young people. And envy you, too. I was never encouraged to be serious about anything, but I mustn’t complain. I can live it all through Esther and you… and Ramona, too, of course. Do you think Andrew’s just a little bit cold, a little bit hard?”

“He’s a man,” you said, looking up from your book.

“I’ve known other men willing to accept wedding presents.”

You gave me your drowning dog look and went back to your reading.

“He’s a bit proud, that’s all,” I said. “And, you know, I think your idea of giving them a check is a marvelous one. Why don’t you make it out to both of them and not be very specific about how they should spend it? Then, when they get around to setting up a real house, they could buy something with it.”

“And just how much had you in mind?” Mrs. Woolf asked, her tone suddenly hard, her face candidly inquiring.

“You be a bitch with Kate, Mother, and that’s the end!” you said, slamming your book shut.

“Darling, you misunderstand. Katherine’s giving me advice, very good advice. You’re too emotional. I find artists are, don’t you, Katherine? It’s been a great relief to me that Esther had the good sense to make a friend of you, someone sensible and practical. I asked Katherine how much I should give because I want to be generous without being embarrassing, dear. It seems so easy to make a mistake.”

I could have forgiven her everything but the dissolving of your face. You wanted to believe her. You wanted to be mistaken. That left you no choice but to betray your own understanding. You must have been manipulated into mistrusting yourself from the time you were a little girl. No wonder you had no ordinary sense of an emotional climate. But, of course, it was the same training that made you able to tolerate me.

The wedding occurred and is recorded, just as yours is, along with all the other public occasions of our living, in photographs and clippings, stored on the shelf. I do not want to be our social historian. I remember perversely what wasn’t the dramatic center, the heel of your shoe breaking off at the reception, your mother’s imperious search for strawberry tea when the reception was over and it was time for dinner, the late night phone call from Monk, who had left her passport behind.

Two days later I left England myself, called home for the first time and the last.

M
OTHER’S FIRST STROKE ONLY
temporarily handicapped her. The slight drag of mouth, the droop of eyelid, and the occasional scrambled sentence were less and less noticeable as the days passed. Because I was at home and could share the extra chores with the housekeeper, a nurse wasn’t needed. And Mother submitted to my personal tending of her much more easily than I expected her to, for she had always been physically a very private person. It was as if she simply withdrew her identity from her body, treated it and let other people treat it more as if it were something that belonged to her, yes, but like her clothes and her furniture which someone else had always been allowed to keep clean and repair. She was grateful for each thing she was again able to do for herself, but it was the pleasure of returning independence, not modesty or dignity which she had never lost.

Doris, who at first had planned to follow me in a day or two, postponed and finally canceled her trip as the reports grew more encouraging and Mother made it clear that she would rather spend time with Doris when she was really well again. I was a little surprised that Doris could be so easily persuaded to stay away. I couldn’t have been, but my relationship with Mother wasn’t at all what Doris’ was with her. They were never openly unpleasant with each other, but there was always tension between them which in Doris was a quick impatience, in Mother a tone of doubting surprise or willful bewilderment. Between Mother and me there had always been an odd consideration. We did not want to get in each other’s emotional way, and we never did, sharing a strong, negative sensitivity to each other. But we were both very much aware of the duties we had to each other, and we both liked duty. While I did what a daughter should do for an ailing mother, she accepted my attentions, whatever they had to be. But, as she recovered, she gradually withdrew until I could feel her preparing to dismiss or set me free. I had been there a month when she suggested that it was time for me to return to England.

“Would I be awfully in your way if I didn’t go back until fall?”

“Of course not, dear. But what about your work?”

I didn’t know how much of my wanting to stay at home was a disenchantment with my work, how much a reluctance to go back to London itself, how much a realization that Mother was now old and frail and therefore temporary. In that month there had been a slow healing going on in me, too. I wanted it to continue, as if there were a stage beyond being restored that I could discover in that quiet house, in that wall-enclosed garden with my healing, dying mother. I gave a simple explanation and was given permission to stay.

Informative postcards from Andrew and disgraceful ones from Monk made it clear that they were enjoying Europe and were not planning to be back in England before the autumn themselves. I tried not to calculate the expense of those months for Andrew, but it was obvious that he was refusing to accept his father’s word as the last. I simply hoped he was right.

There was no word from you until late in June when I had three pages of your child’s hand, filled with exclamation marks, faces, and date lines to indicate the number of times you had tried to begin again or go on. Nothing in the letter brought me any sense of your work, your mood, your living. The fact of it suggested that you were lonely, as well you might have been with both Monk and me gone. Because I could have gone back and didn’t want to, I chose to be irritated with your inability to write a letter and did not answer it at once. I press the point now to make it seem an important failure. For you I’m sure it wasn’t.

I did not write to you until nearly the end of August, and that was no more than a brief, sharp note to say I would not be going back to England at all. Mother had had a second, more severe stroke, and this time Doris came.

“You’re as brown as a whole Indian,” Doris said when we met at the airport. “It’s nice of you to look so well. It makes me feel less guilty.”

“There’s nothing to be guilty about. I’ve done nothing but please myself all summer.”

Driving from the airport to the hospital, Doris wanted to be told just what to expect, and I tried to be accurate, but nothing could really prepare or protect her from her first sight of Mother, whom she hadn’t seen for more than a year. There was no introduction now, no renewed recognition. Mother lay, partially paralyzed, invaded by tubes, eyes tracking nothing but her interior dilemma, brain receiving little but the garbled messages of its own catastrophe. My throat tightened, but not for her who seemed too isolated to expect and therefore inspire sympathy. Doris held her hand, stroked her forehead, spoke to her quietly.

“Mother? Mother, darling, it’s Doris. I’m here, Mother. I’m here with Kate. It’s Doris, Mother.”

I walked over to the window and watched a man in a wheelchair being taken to a car in the parking lot.

“She doesn’t know me, either,” Doris said to my back.

“It’s too soon,” I said. “She will.”

“You try.”

I did not want to, but I couldn’t refuse. I went to the other side of the bed, touched the insensitive, paralyzed hand, and spoke very softly. Saliva suddenly spilled from the drawn corner of Mother’s mouth. I wiped her face. She did not respond.

“Tomorrow or the next day or the next,” I said to Doris.

“Hasn’t she known you at all?”

“I don’t think so. It’s hard to tell. She may not have any way of showing what she knows yet.”

At first I waited for Doris to suggest that we leave. Finally, trying not to be uneasy about the slight shift in authority, I made the suggestion myself.

“She can’t live through this!” Doris said as we walked toward the car. “I don’t care what the doctors say. She could never be right again, could she?”

“It’s hard to know.”

“Oh, Kate, pray she has another in the night.”

She did not. The following morning she was much the same. Her color was perhaps a little better. She seemed to be differently restless, as if she might sometimes be aware of vague shadows outside her own mind, but these were not yet signs for Doris, who needed some shocking, normal occurrence, like the sound of Mother’s conscious voice.

We spent a great deal of time at the hospital, not always in Mother’s room. We went to the cafeteria for snacks, to the lounge for magazines, even sometimes out beyond the parking lot to the eucalyptus groves for a short walk. Doris did not talk much. When she did, she talked about Mother, but they were short, specific observations which, gathered together, made no more sense than they did separately. Doris obviously wanted to come to some conclusions, but, until she had really taken in the facts and accepted them, she could not.

Without being able to mark the precise moment of it, we began to be certain that Mother did sometimes recognize us. Her noises became attempts to speak, then speech itself, our names. The pain she was now in was definitely again a healing pain. The doctors continued to say exactly what they had said before: that she could gradually recover or die in the night; but Doris, who had prayed for the simpler solution, now turned her mind to the problems of Mother’s less and less theoretical life.

“When she’s stronger, she should go into a nursing home,” Doris decided.

“She’ll want to come home,” I said.

“Well, she can’t. I can’t stay with her indefinitely, and neither can you.”

“I can,” I said, but carefully. “Doris, I’d like to.”

“It’s not something I’ll let you do whether you want to or not.”

“Why?”

“Katie, you don’t owe her anything. You’ve given her more than she had any right to expect.”

“It’s not true, Doris, but anyway that’s not the point. I simply want to.”

“Why?”

“I love her.”

Doris looked away from me, hesitated, and then said, without turning back, “I should be glad that someone does.”

“Doris?”

“I have a different problem. I love you, and you’re only twenty-two years old, and she could go on living for years.”

“I don’t think she will, you know. If only for a little while… a few months, and, if it’s too hard or if it begins not to make sense, then—”

“You’d never admit it.”

“I would, Doris. I promise. Will you let me try?”

She would not agree then, but it was still a decision that could be put off. Mother would have to be in the hospital at least another month, perhaps a good deal longer, and, while she was there, neither Doris nor I could think what we might do but visit her daily and settle less tentatively to a domestic routine of our own. During Mother’s first illness the legal steps had been taken for me to handle her routine financial business, and I continued with it now. Because I had also made the decisions for the household, I found myself naturally in charge of those, too. If I had not been intent on proving to Doris that I could take charge, I might have been shyer of doing what was more naturally hers to do. But she had never really lived in the house and could not have run it without alarming the housekeeper, cleaning woman, and gardener. Mother’s fear of fire had made a cold, decorative hearth in the living room, a chimney clogged with birds’ nests, and odd rituals for emptying ashtrays. Her love of privacy had inspired an elaborate system of door answering, during which even an invited guest was thoroughly inspected through the peep hole before bolts were shifted and the second inspection carried out in the hall. In every aspect of the domestic day, there were the quirks of Mother’s quiet life to which I had grown so accustomed that I hardly noticed them; for Doris they were a constant irritation. Yet she never made a direct complaint. And, when she did complain to me, she suggested good-humoredly wild alternatives. Together we let the house go on as if Mother were still at the center of it, and perhaps that, as much as anything else, let Doris drift gradually into accepting Mother’s return to it. Perhaps, too, it made Doris restless enough so that she finally agreed to go back to England before Mother was allowed to come home.