Off Season (22 page)

“That looks good. I think she’d like that,” my father said.

“Well, Daddy, you see, there’s this . . . I have a swim meet tonight.” I gestured at my packed bag.

“Before school even starts?”

“It’s a makeup,” I lied fluently. “With Cold Farm. We won’t be eligible for the regular schedule until we make it up. I thought I told you.”

“Maybe you did,” he said distractedly. “Well, you can read to your mother tomorrow. I’ll drop you . . . where?”

“At the Cold Farm pool house. But you don’t have to drop me. Helena Boykin and Shirley Tate are meeting me at the corner, and we’re going to take the bus. It goes right past Cold Farm. Mr. Boykin said he’d bring us home.”

“Well, go along then, and good luck,” he said. “I’ll tell your mother. Don’t be out late.”

“No sir,” I said, and grabbed up my bag and my coat and scarf and ran downstairs.

I went out into the cold, clear night and closed the door firmly enough so that they could hear it. Then I walked down to the bus stop on Rock Creek Parkway and took a bus to Chevy Chase Circle and sat through two showings of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
at the Avalon Theatre. When I caught the bus back it was nearly eleven, and if it occurred to me that I had never been out so late before alone, it did not bother me at all. I was drifting along Fifth Avenue with Holly Golightly, eating Cracker Jacks and looking like a startled gazelle in the fabulous store windows I passed.

“I’m home,” I shouted up the stairs, and went straight to my room. I threw my swimsuit and towel over a chair and dampened my hair under the shower, and was just into my flannel pajamas when my father came in.

“We were getting worried,” he said. “Who won?”

“Oh, Cold Farm,” I said yawning elaborately. “They always do. All their swimmers are eighteen and built like whales. I don’t know why we bother.”

He smiled.

“Well, get to bed. School day tomorrow. I told your mother you’d read
20,000 Leagues
to her when you got home. She’s looking forward to it.”

“How is she?”

“Better. She had one more session of vomiting right after you left, but nothing since then. And she ate a little bouillon, and she’s sound asleep now. I think we’ve turned the corner.”

“I hope so,” I said in Holly’s voice and floated to my father and kissed his cheek, and drifted into bed. He looked at me for a moment, and then smiled and went out.

After the door had closed, Holly Golightly gave me a little flutter-fingered wave, turned, and glided out of my room, still munching Cracker Jacks, her tiara slightly askew. I was alone except for Wilma, who apparently had not seen or smelled Holly. I twisted and tossed with guilt for most of the night.

The next afternoon when I got home from school, I picked up Jules Verne and went down the hall to my mother’s room, my heart pounding in my throat. I rapped softly on the door. Perhaps she was asleep; perhaps—

“Come in,” she called, in almost her old voice. I went in. She was propped up on a pile of fresh, lacy pillows, in a coral nightgown I had never seen, a matching turban on her head. She was still deathly pale and lines that had never been there before cut her face, but she had put on a little dusting of pink blush, and there was light coral lipstick on her mouth. She wore eye makeup, too. I felt giddy with relief. All right, so she was thin almost to the point of transparency, and there were great yellow bruises on her hands and arms, but she was still my beautiful mother, and still very much alive. A little tray of cookies and a teapot sat on her bedside table. There was a book facedown on the coverlet beside her. I glanced at it:
The Tropic of Cancer
.

I wanted to laugh aloud. She saw me suppress it.

“Nothing like a little Henry Miller to get the juices going,” she said. “One day you might want to read it, if you’re feeling a little juiceless.”

I said nothing and she looked at me more closely. “Unless, of course, you already have.”

I shrugged and she laughed.

“Come in, darling, and let me get a look at you.” She stared at me until I began to fidget, and then said, “Still a pretty girl. Maybe even prettier. I’m glad to see there are no gills. What have you brought to read to me?”

I held out Jules Verne and she laughed again.

“Why am I not surprised? Well, I’ll enjoy that. It’s been years since I read it.”

I read the chapter that had always fascinated me most; the most seductive evocation of what might be found underneath the sea if one could only get there, the passage where Captain Nemo takes Arronax into the forest of Crespo Island. At first I faltered over the words, but then their power took over and I lost myself in the fecund magic of the undersea forest.

When I had finished, she was silent for a little while, and then looked at me, smiling her strange, oblique kitten’s smile.

“It’s very beautiful, isn’t it? No wonder you want so badly to live under the sea. But you must remember to come back, darling. As an old poet I like, Robert Frost, said, ‘Earth’s the right place for love.’”

Does she know about the suit and the helmet and all?
I wondered.
No. There’s no way that she could.

“Pass the cookie tray, sweetie, and pour us a cup of tea. Maybe tomorrow we’ll press on.”

We ate the cookies and drank tea by the light of the fading afternoon, until Flora came in to turn on the lamps and I heard the front door slam as my father returned from the university.

“Thank you, Lilly,” my mother said.

“Thank you, Mama.”

I could not have said for what.

Washington’s cranky and erratic spring seldom comes breathing in when it is expected, so that cherry blossoms and tourists freeze simultaneously along the mall. But this year it slipped in early, and as Easter approached, Washington’s legendary flowering trees and shrubs were in full plumage. Rock Creek Park was a cave of shining new green, Georgetown’s window boxes and pot gardens blazed with color, and the suburban enclaves like Spring Valley were massed with surging azaleas and camellias and tulips. The skies over Washington were a soft, washed blue, and the Potomac ran clear and singing.

“I never saw a prettier spring here,” my mother said one noon in the garden behind our house. My father had bought her a little umbrella table with four chairs, and our sometimes gardener, Randolph, had mowed and trimmed and fertilized, and set pots of blooming annuals around the perimeter of the little brick patio where the umbrella table sat. She loved the garden and the table and chairs, and spent most afternoons there in fair weather. Today she and I were having lunch there, it being the beginning of Easter holidays. We sat drinking lemonade and waiting for our tuna salad to come, and I could not stop looking at my mother.

She had been right. There had been no more sickness after that first bestial three days back in January. She had gained a bit of weight, so that the hollows in her face were filling in, and the faint flush on her cheeks was natural. Her hair was beginning to come back, too; a soft fuzz of copper that promised curls later on. She still covered her head sometimes, but did not always bother. Today she wore a broad-brimmed straw hat she had bought last summer in St. Thomas. It had cutout work around the brim, and in its flickering shadow her face looked mysterious and beautiful, like a saint’s in a niche. I loved that hat. In it she was a young girl on a holiday in the sun.

Flora came with lunch, smiling, and said, “Y’all finish that now, Miss Lizabeth. We got fresh strawberries for dessert.”

“Oh, Flora, are the strawberries out? How wonderful.”

“They’s out in California,” Flora said, and went back into the house. We both laughed. From under the table Wilma thumped his ropy tail. He did not aspire to tuna fish, or he would have been mobbing the table.

“Your father tells me Jeebs called last night,” she said.

“Yes ma’am,” I said, not looking at her. Jeebs had indeed called, in response to my father’s letter of congratulations and the handsome check he had sent for Jeebs’s birthday. He was not coming home for Easter, he said, but was rather going to Bermuda with his roommate’s family, who had a house there.

“But I’ll try to get home early in May,” he said. “Tell Mom hello for me.”

“Would you like to speak to her?” my father had said. “I don’t think she’s asleep yet.”

“No, just tell her I called and said hello, and . . . wanted to know how she was doing.”

“She’s much better. She’s through with the chemo for now, and she’s up and about and feeling good. But I know she’d want to talk to you.”

“I’ll see her in May,” Jeebs said, and hung up soon after.

I was furious with him, but my father only said, “It’s a start, Lilly. By summer we’ll all be back to normal, God willing. For Jeebs, it’s a pretty big step.”

I thought it was less than a baby step, but said nothing. Now my mother said, across the table, “I’m sorry I missed him. I really wanted to talk to him.”

“We thought you were asleep, and he said he’d be home in May, anyway,” I said, and then heard myself rushing on: “But he said to give you his love and tell you he was sorry about Christmas, and he couldn’t wait to see you . . .”

I fell silent. She was grinning at me under the hat brim, a young girl’s impudent grin.

“He said no such thing and you know it,” she said, “but I love you for saying he did. You’ve come quite a way with me, haven’t you?”

“I don’t know what—”

“You saw us that day at Edgewater, didn’t you?” she said gently. “Mr. Burns and me, in my studio?”

She did not have to explain further. The image of her head thrown back and her beautiful breasts bared to the groping, spidery old hands came surging up from wherever I had buried it, so clearly that I almost gagged, and closed my eyes.

“Yes,” I whispered. And then, “You meant me to see it, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did. You were as good as the CIA about spying on me that summer. I was pretty sure you’d see.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted you to learn something about being kind. You weren’t a kind child, Lilly; well, children hardly ever are. But you were such a natural leader, and things fell so neatly into your lap, that I was afraid that somehow you might never learn it—”

“You think that was kind?” I roared. “I think it was sickening! Those old hands all over you; for a long time I thought it was him who gave you cancer with his old yellow hands.”

“But you did learn about kindness, Lilly. Somewhere along the way you did. You couldn’t have told me that lovely lie about Jeebs if you hadn’t. It’s one lie I’ll always treasure. And you mustn’t think Mr. Burns gave me . . . anything. In fact, he may just have saved my life. It was he who found the lump, that day.”

But as it turned out, Mr. Brooks Burns did not save my mother’s life. Three days after our lunch she developed a troublesome cough, and then shortness of breath, and was admitted to the hospital so that her doctors might draw some fluid from her lungs.

“It’s not unusual when you’ve been bedridden as long as I was,” she said. “They don’t even expect me to be there overnight.”

So I went, instead, to swim practice, and it was Flora who told me when I got home, eyes brimming with tears, to get a cab down to the hospital because my mother was in a bad way.

“Yo’ daddy already there,” she said. “And he done call Mr. Jeebs and he on his way. You tell yo’ dad we got lamb chops and mashed potatoes tonight, do he want to come home for a minute and have his supper.”

I don’t remember the cab ride to the hospital. I do know that I was singing to myself, over and over, witlessly, “Moon River, wider than a mile . . .”

When I ran into the intensive-care waiting room my father was sitting on a sofa, staring at the wall. His face was a perfect blank.

“Where’s Mama?” I said, my voice high and quavering.

“She’s in there,” he said, pointing to a room whose door was closed and bore a sign that said
NO SMOKING. OXYGEN IN USE
.

I started for the door, but he called me back.

“We can’t go in, Lilly. She’s on a ventilator, and they’ve got her hooked up to a million tubes. There’s a nurse with her all the time, and the doctor looks in every hour.”

“
Why?
What happened?
”

“During the procedure she aspirated some of the fluid back into her lungs, and pneumonia set in before they even got her back to her room. They’re giving her everything they’ve got for it, but she hasn’t got many white cells left to fight with, and it—doesn’t look very good.”

“But she’s not going to
die
! People don’t die of pneumonia now.”

“Lilly, she isn’t getting better. She’s slipping in and out of a coma. The doctor says we ought to . . . speak with her now, if we’re going to. I’ve called Jeebs—” He stopped. His face was slack and blasted. He did not look at all like my father.

A nurse put her head out of the room’s door and motioned to us.

“She’s awake now, I think. She’s not in any pain. But she’s very, very tired. She wanted to see you, but I can’t let you stay more than a very few minutes.”

We tiptoed into the room and looked down at the slight mound that was my mother under the starched covers. She was lying with her eyes closed, and we could hear the long, monotonous sigh of the respirator, and the slight hiss of the oxygen unit. I felt a momentary crazy stab of relief. There had been a mistake. This was not my mother. Only a few days ago I had sat under a garden umbrella and laughed with my mother in the noon sunlight. This woman had never laughed. This woman had never breathed.

She opened her eyes and turned her head and looked at us. A very faint smile stretched her cracked lips.

“What a crock,” she whispered. “George, darling . . .” and she moved a claw-like yellow hand very slightly and he lifted it slowly to his lips and kissed it. Tears slipped from his closed eyes.

My mother looked at me.

“Pretty girl,” she whispered. “My pretty girl . . .”

It was the last thing she said to any of us. She slipped deeply into a coma and did not stir again, and she died the next morning just at dawn, barely thirty minutes before Jeebs got there.