Wait Until Tomorrow (29 page)

My two brothers are riveted. Here it is, our mother's masterwork. Mom falls asleep. She doesn't really care that much anymore. I gaze over at the three of them in profile. Jo's head punctuates the musical score. He is, after all, conducting the piece in the video. David holds his chin and thoughtfully gazes at the screen. Mother's
chin rests on her chest. Three pairs of eyeglasses reflect the flickering light of the screen. And I am watching them, as always. They are the musicians. I'm the one trying to tell the story.

Before we leave the Sanctuary, David and Jo want to hear Mom play the piano. No one else is around. The place is like a mausoleum at night. So we have the parlor to ourselves. I am still wanting a little requiem myself so I stretch out on the couch and shut my eyes. Mother plays the Moonlight Sonata. God, it's beautiful. She doesn't finish it. I don't think she remembers the whole thing. She tries to play other pieces with that amazing manual dexterity she once had, but the speed is gone.

“Slow down,” David says. “You don't have to play it fast. You know that skater Peggy Fleming? She never had the technique of other skaters, but she had so much grace that they couldn't hold a candle to her.”

David convinces Mother to play one of Bach's inventions very slowly, and the effect, I must say, is haunting. David and Jo fawn over Mother in a way I never do. But they understand music better than I do. They talk about her musicality. She has something that not many people have. And I'm remembering someone once saying they knew the instant when my mother took over from another accompanist. Suddenly the beat was exactly there, where it was supposed to be. But to me her piano playing is like air—just always there, always a part of my world. I'm afraid that, after she dies, there are certain pieces of music I'll never be able to listen to again. Goodbye, Moonlight Sonata.

Afterward, we leave mother with promises to return the next day before lunch. We have to see about getting her $3,500 bed that David bought three years ago fixed. You'd think a bed that cost that much would hold up longer than three years, but it has gotten stuck in the head-up position and won't move, so it is useless. The staff at the Sanctuary is worried that Mother will get
open wounds from the constant pressure on her back and buttocks from always sitting. Mother, on the other hand, doesn't even want to sleep on the bed. Her recliner feels more secure. But we have no choice. The bed must be fixed or gotten rid of.

(I know a woman who works for an HMO. She didn't really want to take the job because an HMO's reputation is about as good as the CIA's when it comes to people's rights. But she has been able to do good there. She told me one story of an elderly woman who had no family and nowhere to go. The woman was in a nursing home where she developed open wounds that simply couldn't be healed. My friend signed lifelong hospitalization for the woman. “We had to. I insisted. She had no family. This was the only way she'd be taken care of.” Well, there was one answer to my nagging question—what happens to people with no money and no family. They wind up with open wounds in a hospital bed or nursing home for the rest of their lives.)

My brothers and I go back to my house where we stay up late into the night and talk about spiritual experiences we've had. This is a conversation I've never had with David, who is so rational he makes Mr. Spock look giddy. But it seems almost everyone has had some experience that involves something more than our five meager senses. Jo talks about the experiences he's had with sweat lodges, and the time it got so hot he became like a crazed animal and rushed outside, followed by about nine other people. David mentions a Reiki session he had and visions that seemed to have come from past lives, visions of being killed and then morphing into the killer. I talk about those moments I've had of perfect awareness, like the time we were playing dodgeball at my first Isha workshop and no one could hit me.

 

Friday night we show
Knights of the South Bronx
in the media room at the Sanctuary. By the time the movie starts, we have a full house
including two of my colleagues from school, Darryl and Bill. Everyone in the room is transfixed by the movie. Tears slowly leak from my eyes somewhere near the beginning and continue to flow all the way to the end. I remember when they held the premiere for the movie in New York at the Fashion Institute of Technology. David flew Mom, Emmy, and me up to see it. This was in December 2005, and Mom was a little more mobile and a lot more awake than she is these days. David also got us a hotel room, since the one other time I'd brought her up to New York for a Thanksgiving visit she went berserk with claustrophobia in his apartment. But this trip would be a triumph for my mother. Ted Danson may have been the star of the movie, but David's star was shining just as bright that night. It was his success and the success of the children he worked with that we were all celebrating. After eight years of long hard work, paying for tournaments out of his own pocket, buying the kids food and clothes when they didn't have any, he saw his kids earn the national championship and a trip to the White House. The movie is a fictional documentation of that feat, and David has a cameo role.

Unfortunately, the theater was down a long set of winding steps and I didn't know how I'd get Mother down them. Someone who worked there volunteered to take her by wheelchair down the elevator and through the kitchen. I reluctantly let the person take the wheelchair from me, and Emmy and I went downstairs where a huge crowd of people milled around. Ted Danson was there. People from the chess world were there. David's ex-wife and current girlfriend were there along with his two kids. I kept looking around for my mother, who had vanished. I waited. I looked. I went back upstairs. I found the elevator. I took the elevator. I wandered through the kitchen. I went back into the party area. My mother was not anywhere. Panic set in. Was she freaking out somewhere?
Alone in a hallway, screaming right about now? I clawed my way through the crowd and finally got my hands on my brother.

“I can't find Mom,” I said breathlessly.

David swiveled his head in all directions before being seized upon by someone else and dragged off to make another speech. I began my search once again. And then, finally, she just showed up, smiling and thrilled to be here, basking in the attention. David's mother. “Yes, he was always wonderful,” she told everyone. I wiped the sweat from my brow and proceeded to enjoy the rest of the evening.

Tonight I am crying as I watch the movie again, but Mom doesn't watch it. Her head drifts down toward her chest. At one point in the movie, she screams. I suppose she dreams she is falling when that happens. She jolts awake and has no idea where she is. Jo reaches over and reassures her. The rest of us continue to watch the movie.

Afterward, David, Jo, my mother, Jacqueline (the eighty-fiveyear-old French woman), Bill, Darryl, and I sit in a circle and talk politics. We can't believe the W years are finally over.

“I refuse to remember them,” I say. “It's like they never happened.”

Mother then pipes up. “I went to Yale, you know,” she begins, and I'm thinking, here she goes again with the Yale thing, which didn't matter so much in the old days but now it's her claim to former greatness. But then she cracks everyone up when she adds, “But after Bush became president, I thought about returning the degree.”

 

At the Sanctuary the next day Jo performs a concert of Native American flute music. He explains that he got interested in the Native American flute when our mother needed some authentic
music for
The Lost Colony
. When he couldn't find a performer, he learned the instrument and recorded the music for the show himself. Ever since then he's been hooked on it. Jo intersperses his music with stories from Native American lore and from his own life. I'm sure these people have never heard of a sweat lodge and cannot imagine anyone playing a song on a flute for “Brother Rock,” but Jo's music casts a spell over them.

We spend the rest of the day with my mother, but she has become sour and unhappy. I think it's been too much for her. Too much stimulation. Too much attention, for once. Instead of eating at the Sanctuary, David and I go get Thai food and bring it back. But Mom hates the seafood salad we get for her and frowns and acts like she is being tortured, until the cook sends over some chocolate cream pie that the rest of us find inedible and she gobbles up. Then Jo fixes her some coffee and ice cream and she gets happier. But the pain in her leg has become her main focus, and so we take her upstairs, where I put down some hot soapy water to soak her feet. Then finally the night comes to an end. And we leave. The whirlwind tour is almost over.

 

I wheel Mom outside to the parking lot, following my two brothers. Jo is a big guy, his feet damaged by the chemo treatments of nearly twenty years ago. David is lithe and quick-moving, as if he's always trying to catch the subway. His vertigo is hidden in the canal of his inner ear. They are both still handsome to me—Jo with his nicely trimmed beard, bushy eyebrows, hair in a ponytail. He looks like a happy Buddha, but you'd never mistake that happiness for simplicity. He'll raise an eyebrow and shoot you with his green eyes. David, the cool and collected chess player, is not one to show anger except on rare occasions and then, don't fuck with him.

I push Mom into the shade of a truck, and we watch as Jo checks the oil in his Honda. There is always the sound of conversation when my brothers are present. They are not laconic in the least. They are full of jokes and stories. This time Jo is talking about this car: how he bought it for a thousand bucks from a friend of his, and how it still runs like a dream even as it edges up to the three-hundred-thousand-mile mark. He never drives it over sixtythree miles per hour.

Before they leave, each one of them leans over to hug Mom in her wheelchair, and although I've already hugged them goodbye, I insist on one more embrace from each of them. David, who was born under the sign of Leo, makes a little growling purr when he hugs. Jo's hug is all bear.

But as they pull out of the parking lot, and we roll over to the rocking chairs in the shade, I realize that this is an old familiar feeling: my brothers leaving to go on an adventure while my mother and I stay behind. It occurs to me that this moment's sorrow is a replica of the sorrow we felt forty years ago. And now that I've felt the grief of my own child leaving, I can only imagine how it was for my mother when her two boys became men and packed up their instruments—Jo with his tuba off to Eastman School of Music, and David with his trombone to the Navy Band.

I have always been aware of how deeply I missed them, how I longed for each return visit, greedy for every minute I could spend with them. But I've never really considered how that must have been for my mother to lose these two laughing, joking, story-telling heroes. Not only sons but fellow musicians. It seems a shadow swept across our lives at that time, and although we eventually grew used to their absence, that lonely darkness would return now and again. Sometimes back in Edenton and even at the Landings, I couldn't wait to flee her presence and the oppressive sense of misery that engulfed me. Here at the Sanctuary, surrounded by other
people, it can't seem to get to us. Until today, as we sit together in the shade while birds zoom around us. I don't want to go home. And I realize that the worst thing about her life must be the empty days. There is nothing she has to do. No errands to run. No projects to finish. The enormity of that vast emptiness swallows me.

I am despondent for days, but my new obsession eventually drives out the despondency. I take one of the old battered copies of
An American Requiem
over to Kinko's, make a fresh new copy, and put it in a bright red folder. Then I mail it to Mom's friend Karen in Jacksonville. Jim has enlisted her help in getting the production underway. So far we've had no luck finding a choir, but Karen has a hot lead; an old friend of Mom's happens to direct the choir at a college in Jacksonville, and he's excited by the idea. I'm not sure this is really going to happen, but maybe it will, and maybe this way I can fulfill that promise I made to my mother to keep the requiem alive.

 

Emmy comes home from New York, and the rain is falling just like it did on the day when she was born, ending the long drought that had gripped Florida for months.

“Tell me about your workshop,” I say. I want to hear everything. I was disappointed I hadn't been able to go up and see her performance of
Antigone
.
Antigone
is another of my favorite Greek plays. I admire the way she defies Creon when he orders her not to bury her brother. And, of course, it resonates with our situation.

For Emmy's production, the actors each began by describing how they wanted their own deaths to be recognized.

“I said that I wanted my life to be celebrated and that I wanted my ashes to be scattered on the beach in Florida, because that is where your friends all made their wishes for me.”

The wishes! She remembered the story of the wishes, and remembered my telling her about that evening in the summer of
1990 when she was a tiny infant. Four of my women friends and I took her to the beach, and in the light of the moon we sprinkled ocean water on her forehead and spoke aloud our wishes for her future. I don't even remember what we wished, but I have a feeling all the wishes have come true.

 

Then on August 3, 2009, with Emmy at her new house in Chapel Hill, getting ready for her new college, I realize my nineteen-year project is complete. I'll always be Emmy's mother. I will be around for advice and to help pay the rent. But my parental goal has been accomplished. She has gotten into a great college; found a house and negotiated with roommates, realtors, and landlords; registered for classes; and found a job—all without any help from me. That was the aim—for her to become a self-sufficient adult, able to make her own decisions and manage her own life. My job is effectively over.