Girl of My Dreams (13 page)

My mother's appetite, always small, now disappeared. Her pains returned, localized in her mouth and stomach. “I saw a lot of this in France with soldiers who had been weeks in muddy dugouts on the front lines,” the doctor told my mother, “but I don't know where you could have picked up trench mouth.” He had found ulcerous sores in her throat. He thought the trench mouth was combined with severe food poisoning and gave her doses of laudanum and arsenic. The first dulled her pain while the second almost killed her. A day later her temperature rose to 105 but was controlled by aspirin and an ice bath. “You've had a bad reaction to the arsenic,” the doctor said, “but it'll do the trick, scares off the poison, roots out secondary infection before it can spread.” Sure enough, the third day my mother felt better, and the fourth day, Friday, we went back to the hotel. She was weak and still had no appetite but the pains and fever were gone.

My father, arriving Saturday to find our hotel rooms converted into a sick bay, looked more stricken than my mother did. “My word,” he kept saying, “my word, I should have been here, why didn't you get a message to me, I'll never forgive myself, how could I not have been here?” He seemed to be talking to himself, blaming himself for my mother's illness. He couldn't do enough for her, sending out for flowers, plumping up her pillows, grabbing a tin pail of mine and rushing out to the beach, returning in a few minutes with shells for my mother to look at. Worried about my mother, I wondered if I could ever love anyone so much as I did my father. He was perfect; he'd get her better in no time. Why hadn't I brought up shells for her to see?

Over the next week, my mother slowly regained her strength. When she had some of her appetite back, we packed our luggage to leave. We were moving on to Kansas City. The morning of our departure my mother was again felled, this time by a pain so severe she couldn't move. A new doctor saw her in the hospital, a muscular younger one who was a surgeon. After he operated, which it seemed to me took about three years, he came out all in white to speak to my father. I heard two new words, “pancreas” and “tumor.” I wasn't allowed to see her until the next day, and she was so pale, so white, I was reminded of all the ghost stories I'd ever heard. I was taken back to the Coronado alone, so my father could stay with my mother until dark, but I couldn't find anyone to play with. I didn't think of my parents as a moose and a deer anymore.

We stayed at the Coronado another month while my mother recovered from the surgery. The muscular surgeon came several times to see her. Once I saw him in the corridor just before he entered our rooms, and he looked solemn, but as soon as he came into my parents' presence he put on a happy face as if he'd gone onstage. My father kept very busy, bustling around my mother and, when she didn't need him, sending telegrams. The day we left my mother developed a cough.

We went up to Santa Barbara to stay with friends of my father's—the yachting Converses, who saw themselves as pioneers in the attempt to turn Santa Barbara into Newport West—and the sun shone every day. My mother was much better. She read Robin Hood to me in the afternoons, sitting in a gazebo the Converses had at the end of their high-hedged, gravel-pathed formal garden. As we roamed cheerfully through the Sherwood merriment, robbing the rich to give to the poor, chased by the evil sheriff of Nottingham, my mother's voice faltered a few times, as if she had something in her mouth that wouldn't go down, and I asked her if she had a sore throat. It was uncharacteristic of me, self-centered as I was, but I recall being anxious about her. “Oh no,” she said, “it just takes time to get all well.” Her soft skin felt as good as ever.

“Syrilla's a fighter,” I heard my father say to Morrill Converse one morning, though that would be the last way I'd have described my mother, who could hold an opinion firmly but was gently reticent in her presentation, “and by the time you see us in the spring this will all be history.” My father had gone to school in Chicago with Loretta Hibbs, who had, as people said then, married far above her station when she met Morrill Converse while he was married to his first wife and she was working as a waitress on his father's 150-foot schooner. That kind of situation could easily propel a move from Newport to Santa Barbara in those days. “I don't know why your father cultivates such a wealthy acquaintance,” my mother said our last afternoon in Santa Barbara, looking up from the budding romance between Robin and Maid Marian. “He's really not himself around such a person. It may be he wants you to grow up a Republican.”

It was on the train east that I saw the small stain on her cheek. A random flaw, it didn't seem possible, could she please wash it off? It was like a dark coffee stain, a little yellow around its brown, the rest of her skin the color of milk, the skin I loved to feel with my fingers and my own cheek. I wheezed once on the train when I went to bed but hid it from my parents by pulling the covers over my head. The wheeze went away. Every night coming across the country I went to sleep thinking she'd wash in the morning and the stain, the ink on her cheek below her left eye, would be gone.

In New York we stopped, as my father put it, in rooms just below one of the egg-shaped turrets of the Ansonia Hotel at Seventy-third Street and Broadway, which cost under a hundred dollars a month. We went up and up in an elevator with brass fittings and a dark mirror in back that frightened me to look into because it made faces cloudy. My grandmother came each morning to stay with my mother, and I was put into the Horace Mann School in the Bronx. When I came home my mother would be in a chaise longue the Ansonia provided us. “Tell me, my owenly boy,” she would say, “the news of the rialto.” A lump was found on her chest. Grover Cleveland's cancer doctor—or one of them—was still kicking and he was put on the case. He cut out the lump. I heard the word “scirrhus,” and then I heard the word “malignant.” Another lump was found on her thigh, and they cut again. I turned nine, and my mother insisted on taking me to the Central Park Menagerie and buying me sweaters at B. Altman. She managed this with smiles, smiles all afternoon. My father was holding her up by the time we returned to the Ansonia. I felt I'd had a birthday that wasn't a birthday though my grandmother also made a kindly fuss.

“Why doesn't your mother ever bring you up to school?” a boy at Horace Mann asked me. “Where is she?” “She's at flower,” I answered and that shut him up and mystified him too, as it had me at first. I'd heard my Grandmother Stedman tell a friend that her daughter had gone to flower, and I didn't know what she meant. Then my father told me she was at the Flower Surgical Hospital.

My teacher at Horace Mann, Virginia Daniels, introduced me to
Treasure Island
. She smelled like toast with marmalade and always had a question for me—“What do you suppose the Admiral Benbow Inn looks like, or Long John Silver, or his parrot?” I think this is when I began to be interested in moving pictures, though that was hardly what Mrs. Daniels had in mind in 1918. “Adventures of the body,” she said, “will lead you to adventures of the soul. In a couple of years David Copperfield and Little Nell will get hold of you.” But I wasn't at Horace Mann except for the one semester.

They gave her arsenic again, and again she almost died. She had more pain in her throat. Another stain appeared on her upper leg, which I saw when she got out of bed to go to the bathroom. I stayed home from school one day and read to her and she smiled. “I remember when I first met Long John Silver myself,” she said, coughing. “I never trusted him from the start.” She smiled her little smile again. It was becoming difficult for her to talk. She napped. “How's Mama?” my father asked when he came back to the Ansonia in the afternoon. “Well,” I said, suddenly feeling grown-up, “she's sick.”

When my father and I walked to the kiosk to take the subway to the Bronx he showed me newspapers and magazines for every interest—one for sports, one for gossip, another for foreign affairs, a fourth for metropolitan scandal, and many more. “You never get tired of this city,” he said, “but sometimes it won't leave you alone.” Then we'd be shooting through a tunnel on our way uptown. “Think of the faces on the train,” my father said, “as X-rays that lead straight into hearts if you can read then properly.” We sometimes rode the subway with a scowling classmate of mine, Aidan Pugh, who was accompanied by an Irish governess. He wore knickers and a tight little bow tie while I shuffled around in short pants and a long tie that flopped from side to side when I ran the bases in ballgames. Aidan Pugh always looked as though he was finding fault, and even in sunlight his eyes were overcast.

One day he said to me just as class was starting up after lunch, “Hey Jant, I hear your mom's going to die.”

“No she isn't, Pugh, damn you.” Mrs. Daniels, who should have given me a demerit for profanity, instead sent Aidan Pugh to the vice-principal's office, which I took as a dark augury. But that afternoon my mother was well enough to take me to Rogers Peet to buy some knickers of my own, which gave me hope. The stain on her face was permanent now. I never asked about it. We both liked the red and tan houndstooth checks on the knickers. “I know they're a little large now,” she said, “but you'll grow into them.”

In two weeks my mother was back in the Flower Hospital. After school the assistant baseball coach would drop me at my grandmother's apartment on West Seventy-eighth Street, where I sat on her hearth doing homework and waited until my father picked me up after hospital visiting hours were over. I could beat my grandmother at backgammon.

Three weeks later I said to Aidan Pugh, “Pugh, see what an ass you are. I visited my mother yesterday, and she's coming home next week.”

Two weeks after that my father returned from the hospital to my grandmother's and told me he had the worst news in the world. Then he mixed up his tenses. “Mama is died,” he said. That was when my grandmother said, “Think of your mother, Owen, as having gone to the other side of the earth, to China. She's Chinese now.”

8

New York to Hollywood

This time my wheeze continued for two days until a doctor came to my grandmother's apartment and had me breathe from a tube. My father, gray in the face now, carried on. He said, “We must be stoic, Owen.” I thought he meant something about a stick, we must be like sticks. I may not have gotten that too far wrong.

Owen's father had no funeral for his mother, so Owen cannot describe the scent of lilies and lilacs in a crowded church, the musky perfume of maiden aunts as they dabbed their eyes, the sonorousness of the minister, the feeling of abandonment as he stood outside the church afterward in the new knickers his mother had bought him, while his father let go of his hand to greet fellow mourners and thank them for coming, telling each of them he or she had a special place in his wife's life. Because none of that happened. What his father did do was to put an engraving on his mother's simple stone in the old graveyard in Litchfield, Connecticut, which can be seen there today: “The earth's of her, not she of it bereaved.”

Observing my life now from the outside, I wrote in my diary, the diary she had started me keeping, that I felt Owen had been taken to a railway station by his mother—we'd traveled so much that way—only to watch her board the train and leave without him. “I'm not little Owen any more,” I wrote three days after she died, “I'm on my Owen now, my Owen self. I'm not the me I was but some other he. And the rain came crying down upon us, again.”

A self-pitying attempt at lyricism by a nine year old. But what did I mean by “again”? When had it ever before rained in my life, rained in the metaphorical way young Owen was using here? Were there problems between my parents? Possibly, but he—I?—may be referring to some other problem that afflicted but did not originate within the family, related only in that both difficulties happened to Owen himself. Is there such a thing as a reverse premonition? Could he be recalling subsequent misfortunes that had not yet occurred? The “us” is ambiguous. Surely he is not using “us” as the royal we.

Yet Owen now sees himself as both I and he. He has subjectified himself, that is myself, with a new identity, a boy whose mother has died, while also objectifying himself into a character he is free to write about. “Us,” then, may be his two mirrored selves. The possibility also exists that “us” is Owen and his father, two males facing an uncertain future deprived of the female they love, or even, telescoping all time into the present tense, Owen and his mother and father, the original trinity still extant though shattered by the physical if not psychological removal of the mother.

The character he was free to write about, however, lasted only a few sentences. The next entry in the diary is fairly scary, at least to the diarist. A silence lasted two weeks, two weeks when I stayed away from school, after which I dumbly scratched out:

TSO RMLA VA VA VA SHAAAH URZ VEBM SIM SIM FAK RUP RI TOT SHIGAH. TOT TOT EK EKR EKROP VA.

‘RIMMA METTNUP KLIW.'

‘MYAWKI NUPPA.'

SILVE MEK VA VA WIKL URZ RMLA TOT.

RAHYOZHOY!

After such silence, such sounds. Ending in the middle of a diary page. On the following page was written:

OKRABRU SULEE.

And then: “You break rules. Rules break you.”

With the remark about rules, the boy has found recognizable words after weeks of nothing since the phrase about the rain crying again. He is learning speech, not a speech, speech itself, having been deprived of it for a space.

Ashamed, I couldn't show my diary to my father, nor my grandmother who had now begun to mourn the defeat of the natural order of death between her and her daughter. But I was lonely to share. One day I decided to show my diary to Mrs. Daniels, my teacher at Horace Mann. I held my breath while she read the entry about being left at the train station, then the gibberish, then the recovery of normal language. She took hold of me with a hug that smelled like warm toast. “Sometimes nonsense is the best sense,” she said. “Just observe. Watch. Watch and remember. You'll be all right, Owen.”