The Narrow Door (24 page)

Her eyes stay open as if she wants us to keep going.

Maybe it’s easier to make contact with her now that her language is out of the way. In recent years, any exchange with her has been puzzled by what dementia had done to her ability to interpret and speak, and though we tried not to judge what came out of her mouth, I’m sure she took our reactions in. Of course she took them in. My mother and her “inferiority complex,” a phrase she’d used often about others, though she was too proud to apply it to herself. The barrier must have frustrated her. Now she looks at each of us in the room—first my father, then Bobby, Michael, then me—with her strong, steady gaze, and just for a minute we have the old mother back. She is taking each one of us in, in a way she hasn’t done in years. She might not know who we are. We could be the police. We could be the president of the United States. We could be her parents, twin brother, her childhood friend, Bridgie Carey. But she does know we’re beside her now. She does know we’re Loved Ones.

But there is that instant when language returns. I get up to leave before my father and Michael leave. “Bye,” I say to the room in general. “Bye!” my mother says in an unlikely voice, in an almost animal voice, as if it takes great effort to pull up that sound from her chest. And we laugh some to hear her come back for just a second from the place she’s already on the way to.

Two nights later, an email from Denise:

2010 | 
One day, halfway through an email, a friend asks, what are the benefits of being an elegist? What does one get from taking on that role, playing the part of the rememberer? I lift my face from my laptop and stare at the dry ivy in the planter on the window ledge. A baby is crying down on the sidewalk. It’s hot in the kitchen. I don’t have words for her question, not right away at least. I might be annoyed. I’m wondering if she’s suggesting that there are pitfalls, dangers I should watch out for. I certainly don’t want to look admirable. I don’t want to seem as if I’m someone to be held in high regard. I also don’t want to seem as if I am of dignified character, because I am focusing on someone else, rather than myself. This is love as perfection. The dead person can’t talk back, can’t show up late for a dinner date, can’t sit there with food on her face, with sour breath. None of the day-to-day uncertainty between people, nothing fraught with the possibilities of hurt feelings and one person misunderstanding the other. Gone, gone are the dead. Unreachable, transformed. Ash. Smoke. Bone chips. And no wonder the stories we tell about them stir up in our loins a positive charge, a reminder that we’re not numb yet.

2009 | 
My mother loved to take the three of us on day trips. “Rides,” she called them. Ten miles from home, twenty. She could never sit still. The destination was less important than the looking along the way. The little shacks and trees. The duck blinds and the abandoned developments and the sand roads into the pines. I wonder if she’s relieved to move again now that she’s dead. She’d spent so much time inside. Think of it: fourteen months in a chair, or in a bed. Not moving since she visited her condo that final time. There she sat on the violet living room sofa she’d once picked out the upholstery for, hands folded on her lap as if she were sitting in the house of a difficult stranger, who insisted she be well behaved, though that stranger never deigned to show herself. And once those two hours were up, and it was time to go back to assisted living, she seemed more than ready to go.

Two days after my mother’s death, M and I hike the Seal Haulout Trail in Montauk State Park, following a path that’s sometimes marked, sometimes not, sometimes dwindling off into bog and stream. Stones and roots make walking a challenge. Our arches already hurt in our shoes. Beech, vernal pool, muck, skunk cabbage, daylily, lichen, boulder. Splash. A frog? Maybe a frog, or a turtle going under. But later we definitely see a living creature, from a few hundred feet away: a seal out in the rocks in Block Island Sound. She holds us in her attention, with a whiskered, beagle-like face. I wave back. She keeps looking, then plunges her head beneath the surface. She comes up again, surprised we’re still there, but more interested finally in the boat idling nearby. She must be thinking of the dangers of the boat, the possibility of it running over her, the importance of staying away. She appears to be the last of her kind around. The water is already too warm for the likes of her here. They’re already up in Maine, the Bay of Fundy, Newfoundland. I watch her for as long as I can before we turn and head back up the mown path beside the woods.

The woods. Fly sounds, bird sounds, leaf flutter. The droning of bees in a shadbush grove. Violet butterfly, no wider than my thumbnail, flying leaf to leaf to leaf. And just around the corner, a hairy creature in the water: bronze, substantial, pointing its face away from us. A beaver? Dam in the making? I know beavers are out here—the local paper says there’s a lone one in Scoy Pond a few miles away. Last summer one was run over by a car on the North Fork. But a sighting is too good to be true. I try for a picture, but the creature goes under and stays under, and I never get a look at her tail, the deciding factor. Maybe the creature is simply a muskrat; muskrats are much more common in these parts. In any case, the creature is the third wild animal I’ve seen in forty-eight hours, and I haven’t said one word about the two randy iguanas racing along the seawall behind my father’s building last week. “It’s my mother again,” I say to M, and just as I hear myself say those words, a blue jay squawks over our heads and we laugh at ourselves again.

2009 | 
A few months before her death, Denise and I develop a plan for her to see the new house in Springs. I want her to walk through the gardens, to stare down into the fish pond, to look at the spring light pooling in through the skylights. And maybe I think the visit would be a boon to her, to keep her going forward through rough times.

So, the train. Too many steps up and down into stations. Not enough bathrooms; she needs to be near a bathroom. The jitney isn’t much better. Philadelphia to Amagansett: even in the best travel conditions we’re talking five hours and that’s not counting waiting time or layovers. We decide finally that she’ll take the train from Philadelphia to Metropark. An hour ride. I’ll meet her at Metropark and we’ll drive over the Goethals Bridge, across Staten Island, over the Verrazano Bridge, the Belt Parkway, the Southern Parkway, the Sunrise Highway, the Montauk Highway, and take as much time as we want to get there. I’ll map out possible stops along the way. For some reason, the thought of driving past the Parachute Ride and Deno’s Wonder Wheel with her strikes me as especially appealing, though it will be unlikely she’ll notice what I’m pointing out. She’ll be talking fervently, with concentration on her face, looking a little above the brake lights of the car in front of us.

In the weeks ahead, we talk about the trip every few days, where Denise will sleep, what she might need to bring along. All the things she brought to the Pines and more. And every time I drive through the tunnel of trees toward our house, I imagine her making the small Denise sounds of approval.

2010 | 
One day, many months after her death, Denise’s sister-in-law, Nancy, mentions reading an essay in which I make an appearance. As soon as Nancy tells me about the essay, I tell her excitedly, oh, please, send it right now. I have not known this essay existed and I’m greedy to see it. I keep checking my inbox waiting for it to appear, and when it doesn’t appear, I try to busy myself with a hundred other things. I cannot help but wonder if Nancy has reservations after her initial decision to tell me about the piece. Maybe she sees an aspect about the portrait of me that I might not find too sweet. The title, “The Freedom of Failure,” certainly rivets my attention. If I make an appearance in it, then, well, maybe I’ll learn about the tension between camaraderie and competition and how she saw those things playing out between us. At least I didn’t imagine it, and on that level I feel an unexpected comfort. Every time I think of the essay, I feel my heart rate slow. The aperture of my attention widens.

And if I don’t want to hear it? Shock is better than silence; shock makes us feel awake. What a thing, to be spoken to, anew, by someone whose voice you never thought you’d hear again, except for her walking toward you one day, in a dream.

Twenty-four hours pass and still no essay in my box. There are many ways to fend off disappointment, and I spend the day being more productive than usual: writing a long letter to a student, writing a blog post, writing emails to friends I haven’t answered in a long time, boring business emails that require a certain amount of cheer I have to pull up from down in me. I don’t even need my usual cup of coffee at five o’clock: look at my energy, concentration, my refusal to sit still for a single second. I chew the flavor out of all twelve sticks of cinnamon gum, and I’d probably start chewing some more if there were another pack within reach. I’d chew and chew until I spit it out in the trash, until the taste is pure chemical, until I’d never want another stick of gum again. And I wonder how many days I should wait before I say, hey, Nancy. Did you forget that essay?

2009 | 
M and I get in the car one day and set out for Camden, New Jersey. Camden would seem like an unlikely destination for a hot summer weekend in August, but it is the site of Walt Whitman’s house, the only house he owned in his lifetime. We’ve been here before, thirteen years before, but we’re coming back as M has been commissioned to write an article about the house, which would require a refreshed eye. Who knows? Maybe the house
has
changed in thirteen years. We drive down Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. We take in a grassy park, a marina, and an outdoor concert hall on the same spot from which Whitman took the ferry to Philadelphia. We see acres and acres of empty lots, simultaneously rural and desolate, as if an entire community had decided to pack up and go. But Whitman’s house stands firm in gray-beige clapboard. And maybe that’s why I’m not disappointed when we find out, by way of a sign, that the house is closed for vacation. “We should have called,” we probably moan at once, and there’s an almost comic acceptance to our predicament. This is what you get when you choose not to plan out the next hour ahead. On the steps next door sits a young man with a kind, curious face. We get to talking. He seems to know the house, love the house, and I like knowing that he knows that Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde were visitors. He has watched the outsiders come to his neighborhood, he has met people who wouldn’t have visited this block otherwise, and he has taken them in, thought about their funny shoes, considered the looks of awe and focus on their faces. Just as Whitman’s book takes us all in, from the distance of a hundred years ago.

We turn down Haddon Avenue toward Harleigh Cemetery on the eastern edge of town. The grave would not be closed for vacation; graves are always open for business. At least on a hot Saturday in summer. But the grave is not so easy to find. Its location is eclipsed by signs marking the final resting place of another Camden poet, the haiku poet Nick Virgilio, who in his life must have made sure that visitors looking for Walt’s grave would see his first. (In life, one of Nick’s projects was the city’s Walt Whitman Center, and after all that work in another poet’s memory, who could not have been a little competitive?) Only after making a few wrong turns, past phragmites and a lake filled with blond water do we find the often-photographed mausoleum in a dense glen of ivy and trees. It might be tangential to mention that I was born in the hospital on the hill overlooking the grave, but it’s true: a mere two hundred feet away. It makes me wonder whether my hospital room was pointed toward that grave, or at least turned in that direction. From birth to death—and my mother holds the moist infant me in her arms.

We park. We get out and slam the doors. We walk up to the gate to the Whitman family crypt, where Walt’s mother, father, and brother lie stacked together inside the dank, moldy space, messy with spiderwebs. But if the whole family is side by side, then why is the name Walt Whitman etched into the arch above? A totalizing vision. He designed the building, after all; why not simply: Whitman? The two of us are confused by the hubris of it, and our discomfort is only heightened by the chiggers making a feast of our bare ankles. The smell of the Cooper River wafts over the weeds. Part pea soup, part rotting bone pulled up from a wetland, part sick. It is not a healthy-water smell. The smell sends us back to the car, where we roll up the windows, turn on the manufactured air full blast, and dedicate ourselves to scratching our bare arms and legs until they’re speckled with little red dots.

We drive up Haddon Avenue past boarded-up blocks and clusters of men hanging outside the few storefronts we see. The day has been big. We’ve been shaken by what we’ve seen; we just can’t put a name to that feeling yet. Should we need to? In truth, our hopes for this visit haven’t actually panned out—we can already see that now. But that kind of vague disappointment seems to be true of all things we long for too much. There’s a physical quality to the aftermath, like the letdown that comes after having eaten too much sugar.