My mother spoke for the first time.
“We might not for a very long time, darling,” she said.
“Well, I can’t leave school,” Jeebs said mulishly, not looking at anyone.
“Then you might as well go apply for all those scholarships,” my father said tightly. “Because I’m not paying for a son who won’t come home to help out when he’s needed.”
“Fine,” Jeebs said furiously, tears beginning to run down his cheeks. “Fine. I’ll do just that.”
He turned and ran upstairs. No one spoke for a long time. Then my mother said, “It’s a terrible shock for him. He’s never had to face anything like this before. Neither of you darlings have. I hate it for you,
hate
it. But you’ve got to know, and to be realistic about it. Otherwise it will hurt you even more.”
Presently Jeebs came back downstairs. He was wearing his baroque traveling uniform and stood in the hall beside his bags.
“I’m going to Aspen with Dubby’s family,” he said. “I just called him, and he’ll meet me in Denver. I’m going on the train. I’ve got enough money for that. I don’t believe any of this crap. You can’t make me. And don’t worry about taking me to the station. I’ve called a cab, and I’ll wait for it outside.”
And he turned and went out the front door and slammed it. Shortly we heard the soft honk of the cab’s horn, and the door slamming as Jeebs got in. We listened until it was out of hearing range.
This time it was my father who had tears on his face. “I don’t believe we raised a son who could do that,” he whispered.
“Darling, he’s scared to death,” my mother said, her voice clear and strong. “He’ll be back. Wait and see. Give him time to adjust.”
“I hate him,” I said, beginning to cry in earnest. “I hope he falls off a mountain and dies.”
No one said anything more. Wilma came and slurped at my tear-stained face with his huge tongue. The fire and the old mantel clock ticked. The late afternoon slid into the tender blue of an early winter night.
Jeebs did not come home, and it was a long time before he called. By then a lot of things had changed.
I
t was the worst Christmas I can remember. None of us seemed to know what to do for one another. My mother smiled brilliantly at us across the Christmas dinner table, and said that she didn’t believe she’d ever had better dressing than the oyster pecan dressing that was Emma’s specialty.
“Or better sweet potato casserole, either,” my father said heartily. “Is it candied or something?”
As a matter of fact, I knew that he loathed sweet potatoes; and they were on our holiday table only because Jeebs loved them.
There would be a silence, and then they would both begin to talk at once, and fall silent. My father would smile his stretched smile at my mother and say, “Go ahead. You were first,” and she would giggle, a strange little sound as sharp as broken glass and as elusive as spilled mercury, and shake her head and say that she couldn’t remember what she had been going to say. They would both look at me, and I would stuff and stuff my mouth with turkey and green bean casserole so I would not have to speak. I don’t think I could have. Anger at Jeebs burned in my throat like bile. At Jeebs and at my parents, too. Why couldn’t we all talk about it, say that Jeebs was an insufferable little shit and we were better off without him, and go on with this Christmas as we had in Christmases past?
But I knew that was not going to happen, so I said nothing and waited mutely until the apple and mince pies, both with dollops of whipped cream on them, were brought from the kitchen and served, so I could bolt mine down and plead fatigue and flee to the sanctuary of my room. After I was safely there, Wilma groaning happily with a full stomach from a comfortable nest in my bedclothes, I could hear them talking downstairs in the sitting room. I could tell from the absence of light cast into the hallway and on the stairs that they probably were sitting with only the lights from the tree and fire. They often did that on Christmas night, and I had always loved knowing they were there in that warm, magical radiance and I was snug and warm up here in my bed, with days and days of holiday left to me. But tonight my mother was crying; I could hear her soft, strangled little sobs, and my father’s voice, also soft but deeper, going on and on. Finally both voices ceased, and I heard them start up the stairs toward their bedroom, and I turned over and buried my head in Wilma’s side. It was a long time until I slept.
A couple of days after Christmas my mother went back to the hospital for her third and, she hoped, last chemotherapy treatment. It was the last one in this series, she told me before she went, and she had been told it would probably make her quite sick, but when the sickness was over they hoped,
she
hoped, that she would begin to feel stronger and better than she had in a long time, and we could get back to the business of living.
“It’s been awful for you. I know it has,” she said. “I’ve hated every minute of it. But this could very well do the trick, and I would count the long tiredness and the silly hair loss and the famous nausea well worth it, if we can have our lives back.”
“When will you know?” I said.
“We’ve talked about this, baby. It may be a long time. We may never really know. The thing is just to feel better, be stronger. And the doctors believe that can happen, and your father and I do, too.”
“So maybe we could still go to St. Thomas?”
I had gotten, from my parents, a glistening black wet suit and tanks and goggles for scuba diving, and a certificate for instruction at the Central YWCA downtown. I was beside myself to put them on and sink into my green crystal world and not have to come up for ages and ages.
“Maybe we could. We can surely shoot for early summer. I’d love that myself.”
“Will Jeebs go with us?” I asked, holding my breath.
“If he wants to,” my mother said. “I hope he will.”
“How can you want him to go, after what he did? How can you just—”
“Because he’s my child and I love him,” she said, smiling a little, though not at me. “And because he’s desperately sorry about the way he acted.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know,” my mother said. “Jeebs is not as strong as you are, Lilly. I think I’ve always known that. He can think of nothing but to run away when he’s frightened and sad. But he’ll be okay, in his own time. We mustn’t push him.”
Well, I think we should shun him like the Amish do,
I thought, but did not say. I had no intention of forgiving my brother his treachery at Christmas, and felt achingly guilty that my mother thought I was strong. What would she think of me if she knew about the diver’s suit and the helmet? They, truly, were for escape as surely as the physical act of Jeebs’s flight.
My mother was right: the third chemotherapy treatment made her sicker than I had known a human being could be. My father brought her home; she had insisted, saying she could throw up as well in her own bedroom as in the hospital. She was trembling, and holding on to his arm when they went up the stairs, and she slipped gratefully into the fresh, pretty linens that Flora had ironed to perfection, smelling of the lavender soap my mother always loved. The room was cool and dusky with the winter sun shut out by the curtains, and there were bowls of hyacinths and lilacs, my mother’s favorites, set about. The instant she smelled the flowers, she vomited violently all over her cream wool dress and alligator pumps, and she did not stop vomiting for three days. It was a visceral, savage vomiting; after half a day of it I thought it must surely tear her slender body apart, erode her throat, and I ran upstairs to my room and put on my albums of the Beach Boys and let the sounds of California surf wash over my ears and my heart.
But over it all I could still hear the brutal retching, the agonized heavings of a body trying to expel sickness even when there was nothing left to expel. Between bouts I heard my mother crying softly, and the equally soft voice of my father, talking, talking, talking. Late that night she was still vomiting and crying, and my father was still speaking softly, and I pulled the covers over my head and fixed Wilma in a death grip—he was whining softly—and finally slept. I dreamed we were all on a ship going to Europe, and were all seasick in vast, wave-roughened water, but knew that when we reached calmer water it would all be over. When I woke, rather late the next morning, we had not reached calmer water and my mother was still vomiting.
My father came into my bedroom, hollow-eyed and stricken.
“Did you get any sleep, Puddin’?” he asked. His voice was hoarse.
“I think so,” I mumbled. “But I bet you didn’t. I bet she didn’t. How can she live through all this? Won’t it just . . . tear her to pieces?”
“They say not,” he said, trying to smile and failing. His jaw was blue with whiskers, and I realized that I had not seen him unshaved for a very long time.
“It sounds it, but the doctors say that when it’s over, it’s over. She may not even remember it very well.”
I knew I would never forget the sound of my mother struggling to expel her cancer, and that he would not, either.
“What can we do?” I said, beginning to cry. He sat down on the side of my bed and scratched Wilma’s fat speckled stomach and pushed my tangled hair off my face.
“Be here. Just be here. Let her know no one is going to leave her. She thinks she’s going to die from this nausea, and she keeps saying, ‘Don’t let me die alone. Stay with me.’ So that’s what we’ll do.”
“You have to sleep sometime, Daddy,” I said. “I’m scared you’ll get sick, too.”
“I can sleep when she does,” he said, smiling. It was a real smile. “I’ve got years and years to sleep.”
“What do you talk to her about?”
“Mostly I read to her. I think it helps a little; at least when I stop, she gestures for me to go on.”
“What are you reading?”
“Well, I’ve gone through most of the Penrod and Sam books. She used to love those when she was a kid. And some of
The Little Colonel
. I don’t know why that doesn’t make her sicker. And we’re starting on
The Jungle Book
. That’s a good one. We both love that. Sometimes she whispers along with me, when she recognizes a passage. ‘We be of one blood, Thou and I.’ ‘Mark my trail!’ Mowgli and Akela and Baloo and Shere Khan are the only ones who can get her to sleep a little.”
“I used to love that book too,” I said.
“That’s what she said.
“Flora is cleaning her up a little, and Emma has taken her a little tray of bouillon and crackers. I doubt that she can keep them down, but she needs to try. She’s terribly weak.”
“Is she going to die?” I quavered, hearing the terrible storm of viscera starting again.
“No, baby. But she’ll probably wish she could, before this is over.”
“And this is supposed to cure her? It’s awful; why can’t they find another way?”
“This is the best thing they’ve got. It sounds like it’s destroying everything in her, but it destroys cancer cells too. And after it has, you just . . . build everything else back up.”
“I wouldn’t ever want anybody to do that to me. I’d rather die.”
“No, you wouldn’t, Lilly. When it comes right down to it, nobody would rather die. If I didn’t think it would help her, I’d never let her go through this again. But the thing is, it
does
stop. Meanwhile, all we can do is go through it with her. I’m pleased and honored to do that.”
He smiled again, and went away to take a shower, and I lay listening to the dreadful sounds from my mother’s room and then picked up
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
and immersed myself in Captain Nemo’s mad and radiant plans for great cities under the sea.
“I’d live there,” I whispered to Wilma. “I’d live there in a minute; I’d be the first one to go. You could come with me and be the first dog at the bottom of the sea.”
He whined and thumped his tail and put his head back down on his paws. He did not sleep. Like me, he simply listened to the agony emanating from the big bedroom down the hall.
Days later, while my mother drifted in and out of an exhausted sleep, a letter came from the financial officer of the Groton School. My father opened it, and smiled a little.
“Jeebs is as good as his word,” he said. “Full scholarship. Grotty shouldn’t cost us a penny from now on out.”
“Is there anything from him?”
“No. I imagine he rather likes the statement the official notification makes. Sort of ‘See? I told you so.’ I expect we’ll hear from him before long.”
“He ought to know how sick Mother is! He ought to think he did it! We ought to call him and tell him.”
“No,” he said. His face was serious and his voice was firm. “Your mother would never forgive us. Now that he’s shown us he can do it all by himself, I expect he’ll call. And when he does, no one is to mention this little siege of nausea to him. He’s frightened enough as it is.”
He left my room and I sat seething. Jeebs had behaved unforgivably, and all he got was sympathy and understanding. What would have happened to me if I’d literally run away from my ill and terrifying mother?
I found out the next day.
All through the previous night, and this morning, until about noon, my mother retched and cried, retched and cried. And my father stayed beside her, reading, reading, reading. Late in the afternoon the raging sickness seemed to abate a little; I heard the vomiting less often, and the crying stopped.
The day after this one, Monday, was the day I returned to school, and I was packing up my swim bag and shuffling through the books we were supposed to have read over the holidays. I had read nothing but Jules Verne. My father came into my room, freshly shaved and in clean clothes, his face ravaged but smiling, and said, “Your mother’s sleeping right now, and I really think the worst of it is over. I have to go over to the office for about an hour. I wish you’d go see her when she wakes up. She’s been asking for you. Maybe you could read a little to her this afternoon. What are you reading now?”
Silently I held up Jules Verne, feeling my stomach go cold with fear. I could not, could
not
go into that malodorous room and look at my corpse of a mother. I would die if I had to.