by Tod Davies.
When my mother was at the end of her life, as so often happens, the past sometimes was more there to her than the present. This was lucky for me. She had been so cagey about telling me stories of her past. “You’ll write about them. I don’t want you to write about them. I want to write about them.” But she never did, and now, as my nieces and nephews pointed out at her funeral, “Now you are writing about them!” We had a good laugh, which I think my mother would have appreciated.
I valued the conversations we had then. There had been a lot of lost time in the years past. Her trauma had led her to a defensiveness that didn’t let some truths through. For example, that I loved her far more than I loved any other human being. She was angry with me, almost as long as I could remember, and it turned out it was because she had been left alone to give birth to me, the first child of my parents. My father, immature, afraid, had run off on a business trip of six months. Three months before I was born. Three months after I was born. It was Aunt Celia and Uncle John who took my mother to the hospital.
It was, my father told me later, the worst decision of his life.
When he returned, the last thing he wanted was to cart a baby around. He wanted to be wild and free with my mother. And there was his mother, almost predatory in her need to have her first grandchild with her. He insisted they leave me with my grandmother. “I didn’t want to,” my mother said wistfully, many years later when we finally were able to talk about it. “But you know, he insisted. And then you loved your grandmother more than me.”
I laughed. I tried to explain to her that it was impossible for a toddler to love her grandmother more than her mother, “Even if you had beaten me, it was biologically impossible.”
But she clung to the idea that somehow I had wounded her unforgivably. “You ran away from me and hid behind her!” she wailed, that first time she finally was able to admit what was behind the constant mystery of her simmering anger with me.
People do cling, I find. They are terrified to discover the true reason for their anger, and they won’t give up the displacement onto a less scary subject. In this case, my mother’s understandable rage at having married a man, married into a family, so little concerned with her, with her needs, with her feelings. It had been her idea, that marriage. She’d written to him when he was on a trip in Europe, and said she had four other proposals, and if he didn’t come home and marry her, she was taking one of the others. She, so beautiful, so exotic, so glamorous, he was scared to marry her, but even more scared to lose her to someone else. He came home. He married her. He got very drunk on their wedding day, which she cried about when she told me later. He ran away. It took him a few years to reconcile himself to the life that he, after all, had chosen freely, and in that time he had three children he hardly knew.
If he ever did.
Anyway, there she was, a foreigner, in the land that had bombed the land where she had been. Her life, she must have thought, depended on these people, my father and his feckless family. His brother, my ghastly Uncle Bud, made pass after pass at her. He told my father they’d slept together, right before she was married, which of course wasn’t true—why on earth would my fastidious mother sleep with Bud? “Didn’t Dad punch his lights out?” I asked, when she told me this after he died. She just gave a little shake of her head. “No,” she said sadly. “He always loved Bud.”
“Why did you marry him after that?” I asked, outraged.
“Oh,” she said, shrugging. “You know.”
I did know. She didn’t want to admit she’d been wrong. She had picked out a path for herself, and she was going to forge ahead. She was going to be right, or die in the process. And she had no intention of dying. Not until the proper time.
So it was better to be angry with me, her small and then big daughter, the one who was a hellion as a child as she had been, so easy to be angry with. The one who always forgave her. The one who would never want to kill her, no matter what she did or said.
It was many years even after that first conversation about what had gone wrong before we made things right. Though I tried, gently, every so often. There was always a barrier. I think the barrier was that my father was still alive. Somehow, she had to keep a fantasy going about that marriage. It wasn’t a bad marriage. They had fun together, and created a wonderful family. But it hadn’t been what she wanted, how she had wanted it.
How many marriages are? I mean, if you take the illusions away.
Finally, though, at my oldest nephew’s wedding, I took charge of her. We had a little casita with two bedrooms to stay in, and I guarded her and her needs. She saw that, and she gave a little happy crow. “You’re taking care of me!” I said, “Like you took care of me.” She told me then about how when we had been alone, those three months, every time she had come to see me in my crib, I had looked so adoringly at her that she just felt full of love.
“But you stopped loving me,” she said sadly. “You loved your grandmother more.”
“Mother,” I said, as patiently as I could manage. “That is ridiculous. You need to put that one away right now. I loved you more than I loved any other human being. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even like my grandmother much. She spoiled me, and you left me with her, so what was I supposed to do? But I thought she was a bully to her kids, and blind to her youngest son’s rather disgusting behavior. I hated going over there. But little kids don’t have a choice. All I wanted to do was go visit your sister and her family. I loved it there.”
I had said many different versions of this over the years, but somehow they had never gotten through. Now we were sitting alone, the night before my nephew’s wedding, in a little fish restaurant where I had ordered a glass of wine for myself, and water for her.
What was it I said that night? Was it the place? Was it the first upcoming wedding of the next generation? I’ll never know. But she looked at me, and something dawned on her face, and she put a hand across the table and put it on mine.
“Is it true? Really? You really didn’t like your grandmother?”
“It’s really true. I mean, I liked her because she was my grandmother. But she was an awful bully. And always so you couldn’t see what she was doing.” I said, “Also, I loved you more.”
My mother looked raptly across the table. Then she gave a big sigh, and she said, “This is the happiest night of my life.”
She ordered two glasses of wine for us, and we toasted. To the happiest night of her life.
It was a pretty happy night for me, too.
So there, at the end of her life, the one issue that had reared up between us got taken down. We could talk about anything. Even the past, which she had withheld from me before.
She told me about Mudd.
The funny thing was, the first time, she called him ‘Max’, which had been the name of the other animal she had loved so much. The cat that loved her and no one else.
Mudd was another beast entirely.
“He was a big, big dog,” she said, spreading her arms out to show me. “Black and brown.”
I had the impression he was a shepherd of some kind.
“Do you remember the stairs? They went up and up and up to the church—so high!”
She would confuse me sometimes with her older sister, winding in and out of the past and the present easily, with me following along.
“We’d go to Mass. Mudd would walk me to the foot of the stairs. I remember that. Do you remember?”
No need for me to answer. I just nodded and held out the box of See’s candy that she loved so much. She took another chocolate, ate it, and nodded.
“After Mass, it was so far down the stairs. I was so small. But I went down, step by step by step.”
“And there was Mudd waiting for you,” I said.
She nodded. And smiled. “He was waiting for me.”
We sat there for awhile, and then she returned, as often happened, abruptly to the present. “You know,” she said. “I don’t mind what happens next. As long as I’m comfortable and you children are happy.”
“That’s what we want too,” I said. “Not just for you, but for ourselves as well.”
She fell asleep then, sitting up. I brushed her hair out of her face and rearranged her pillows. And sat, thinking about those stairs, so high up, so far down, with Mudd waiting patiently for her to arrive.
After she died, I went, in my half sleep, to that place I think of as my own home, in a world different than this one. Walking in the front door, I was met by my dog Gray. He wanted me to see what had happened while I was gone.
The entire house was covered with flowers. Violets, roses, daisies. From another room, I could hear laughing. It was my mother, Violetta, and her sister, Cecilia Flora, laughing the way they must have when they were children together. Gray and I gazed at each other, and then he pointed his nose over to the door from where the laughter came.
There, sitting by the door, were a cat and a dog. Max and Mudd.
Patiently waiting for my mother, as both of them had done when they all were alive, in this world. There they are, alive, in that one, where Gray waits for me, patiently, too.