The Afterlife (15 page)

The numbers attached to the years and decades slowly changed, and with them the numbers in his bank account and on his apartment building. His first marriage took place in three different apartments, his turbulent second in four, his short-lived third in only one, and now he wondered if women had been not quite his thing all along. He had always felt most at ease, come to think of it, in the company of men, especially those who reminded him of his quiet, uncomplaining father. But it was the AIDS-conscious Eighties by then, and his hair had passed through gray into virtual white, and he was content to share his life with his books, his CDs (compact discs, certificates of deposit), and his modest little art collection, mixed of watery commercialism and icy minimalism. On the other side of the white walls of his apartment he could hear the mumble and thump of his neighbors, and he liked that. He had come home, in the Fifties, to semi-detached living.

Three hours away, his widowed mother lived alone in the sandstone house. Joey had been the first to depart. A few years later, his grandfather died, suddenly, with a stroke like a thunderclap, and then, after a bedridden year, his grandmother.
This created an extra room upstairs, so Joey and his first wife and young children, when they came to visit in the Sixties, no longer had to camp out downstairs, on cots and the sofa spotted by the peanut-butter crackers he used to eat when condemned to reading the days away. The upstairs had two real bedrooms, to which the doors could be closed, and a kind of hallway beside the head of the stairs where he had slept for five years, listening to the four adults rustle and snore and creak while girls and prayers and the beginnings of poems all ran together in his brain. His grandfather, on his way downstairs in the early morning, would ruffle the hair on the sleeping boy’s head, and the gathering sounds of family breakfast, as Joey’s grandmother and parents followed, would rise under him with the smell of toast, a doughy warmth of life rising beneath the cold bare floorboards of soft old pine.

There was a fourth room, a small room in the northwest corner, where his mother had once been born, in a long agony of labor—a rural calvary, as Joey imagined it, with flickering lamps and steaming kettles and ministering cousins arriving by horse and buggy—that shaped her relations with her own mother into, it seemed, a ferocious apology, a futile undying adhesion in an attempt to make amends. She nursed her mother in the old woman’s long paralysis of dying, but not always patiently, or tenderly, and when the ordeal at last was over she was left with additional cause for self-blame. “I spent my whole life,” she concluded, “trying to please my mother, and never did.”

Joey would ask, irritated by these repeated surges of self-dramatization, “Did she ever say so?”

“No, but you knew her. She never said anything.”

“Unlike
my
mother,” he said, with an ironic pretense of gallantry.

She heard the irony. “Yes, I inherited Pop’s gift of gab,” she
admitted. “It’s been a curse, really. If you talk enough, you don’t feel you have to
do
anything.”

This fourth room had become the bathroom, with a tub but no shower, a basin but no cabinet. Toothpaste, sun lotion, hand creams, razors, dental floss, slivers of soap thriftily stuck together all accumulated on the deep sill overlooking the blackening shingles of the back-porch roof. After his father died, in the early Seventies, the house gradually lost the power to purge itself of accumulation. The family’s occupancy, which had begun with removal of the porch, the inner wall, and the chimney stones, now silted the attic and cellar and windowsills full of souvenirs of his mother’s lengthening residence.

On the theory that it would save the wild birds from being eaten, she had fed a stray cat that came to the back porch; this cat then became several, and the several became as many as forty. The kitchen became choked with stacked cases of cat food, and a site in the woods, at the end of a path overgrown with raspberry canes, became a mountain of empty cat-food cans. Tin Mountain, Joey’s children called it. Magazines and junk mail and church pamphlets sat around on tables and chairs waiting to be bundled and taken to the barn, to wait there for the Boy Scouts’ next paper drive. Photographs of Joey and his children and wives, Christmas cards and valentines from relations and neighbors piled up on available spaces like a kind of moss. Even the table where his mother ate had room eventually for only one plate and cup and saucer, her own. The house was clogging up, Joey felt, much as her heart—coronary angiography had revealed—was plugging with arteriosclerosis, and her weakly pumped lungs were filling with water.

His arrivals, as the years went on, seemed to accumulate, one on top of another. He would park his car by the barn and
pick his way across the line of stepping stones that in the decades since they were laid (even Granny, stiff and bent over, helping with the crowbar) had been silted over by the sandy soil and its crabgrass. On the back porch there would be a puddle of cats and kittens mewing to be fed. Entering the back door, he would try not to grimace at the stench of cat food and damp cardboard. His mother saved, in separate sections of the floor, the empty cans, and the plastic bags the supermarket bagged her groceries in, and slippery stacks of mail-order catalogues, and string and twine snarled in a galvanized bucket. Joey recognized in this accumulation a superstition he had to fight within himself—the belief that everything has value. The birds in the trees, the sunflower at the edge of the orchard, the clumsily pasted-up valentine received years ago from a distant grandchild—all have a worth which might, at any moment, be called into account. It was a way of advertising that one’s own life was infinitely precious.

There would be a peck of a kiss at the door, and he would carry the suitcase upstairs, past the dog; the last of the series of dogs was a whirling, nipping mongrel bitch who was thrilled to have a man in the house. The guest room had been his parents’ bedroom. When she became a widow, his mother had moved into her parents’ old room, closer to the room in which she had been born. The move was part, Joey felt, of an obscure religious system that had nothing to do with Christianity. He remembered how, in a surprising rite of that system, his parents on the day after his grandmother died took her stained, urine-soaked mattress outdoors and burned it, down near the stones he had dumped, darkening the sky all morning with the smoke.

Here, in this guest room, at night, without a wife to distract and comfort him, he would begin to fight for his breath. The bed sagged so that his back hurt. The pillow felt heavy and
dense. The sandstone hearth of the never-used fireplace in the room would emit an outdoor dampness. Birds and bats and mice would stir in the porous walls, and his mother’s motions would make her bed on the other side of the thin wall creak. Was she awake, or asleep? Which was he? He could truly relax only in the dawn light, when the dog would wake her, scrabbling on the bare boards with her claws, and the two females would slowly, noisily head downstairs, and the can-opener would rhythmically begin to chew through the first installment of cat-food cans.

The guest room for some reason had no curtains; in the dead of the night the moon burned on the wide sills as if calling to him, calling him back to a phase his whole adult life had been an effort to obliterate. The asthma, the effect of inner tightening and complication, wasn’t so bad, usually, the first two nights; he might manage five or six hours of sleep each, if he then could get away, back to cozy, salubrious New York. But on long holiday weekends he would struggle through the whole third night with the accumulated house-dust and pollen in his lungs, and with the damp hard pillow, and with the obdurate moonlight, so accusatory in its white silence.

He was aware of his mother and himself, lying each in bed, as survivors of a larger party that had once occupied this house. It was as if, on a snowy pass, they had killed and eaten the others, and now one of the two remaining must perish next. She, too, in her eighties, had breathing problems, and slept with her head up on two pillows. One night she woke him, with the soft words, “Joey. I’m not doing so well. Put on your daddy’s old overcoat and come downstairs with me.”

He was awake, his head clear as moonlight, in an instant. “Shall we call the hospital?”

“No, I just need to sit up. You know which overcoat, it hangs at the foot of the stairs.”

It had hung there for years, one of those curious comforting rags his father would acquire in thrift shops or outlet stores. Joey had often seen it on him, in the last year of the old man’s life, when his legs turned white and phlebitic and his nose turned blue with poor circulation and his eyes sank deeper and deeper into his head and his deafness worsened. But to the end his father had held his head high, and took an academic interest in the world. Once a social-science teacher, he continued to read fat books of contemporary history, and wrote Joey, in one of his rare letters, in his patient, legible schoolteacher’s hand, that being deaf made it easier for him to concentrate.

Joey wondered why his mother was being so insistent about the coat, but obediently put it on. It had a fuzziness unusual in dark overcoats, and was big for him, since his father had been bigger than he. She was right; once it was on, over his pajamas, he became a child again, and calm, and trusting. They went downstairs and turned up the thermostat and sat in the dark living room together, he on the sofa and she in her television-viewing chair, and he watched her struggle for breath, in little sudden shuddering gasps like the desperate heaves of a bird caught in the chimney.

“Do you hurt?” he asked.

She had little breath for speaking, and shook her head No, and her head underwent again the convulsion, as if trying to keep above water. “It’s like,” she gasped, “a squeezing.”

“Sure you wouldn’t like to drive to the hospital?”

A vigorous headshake again. “What can they do? But torture you.”

So he sat there, in his father’s overcoat, fighting sleepiness, wondering if his mother would die before his eyes. The dog, agitated at first by this pre-dawn rising, wheezed and resettled on the floor. The moonlight weakened on the sills across the
room, with their potted geraniums and violets and a night-blooming cereus that had been allowed to grow grotesquely long, so that its stem filled the window. His mother’s shudders lessened, and eventually she told him to go upstairs, she would sit here a while longer. In her old age she had become almost grafted onto this chair of hers. On a previous visit, she had shocked him by refusing, when the evening run of television comedies that she faithfully watched was over, to come upstairs at all; morning found her still sitting there, in her clothes. This irritated him, along with her television-watching. “Why do you watch all these idiots?” he once asked her. “They seem realer to you than I am.”

She did not deny it. “Well,” she had answered, “they’re always here.”

Now, her crisis past, he accepted her dismissal gratefully and yet reluctantly. He went upstairs feeling that this hour had been the most purely companionable he had ever spent with her in this house. To Joey in his father’s fuzzy, overlarge coat, as he silently watched his mother struggle and the dog stir and doze and the night-blooming cereus cast its gawky shadow in the deep window recess beyond the tasselled bridge lamp and the upright piano, it had been like one of those scenes we witness in childhood, from under the table or over the edge of the crib, understanding nothing except that large forces are in motion around us—that there is a heavy heedless dynamism from which we are, as children, momentarily sheltered.

When she had her next attack of breathlessness, he was not there, and she called the neighbors, and they called the township ambulance, which came at five in the morning. For all her talk of “torture,” she seemed to settle gratefully into the hospital’s ministrations. “They said I was quite blue, the oxygen
in my blood was down to nothing.” Rather gaily, she described the emergency-room doctors thrusting some violent sucking instrument down her throat and into her lungs.

Her bathrobe was turquoise with a maroon hem; she ordered her clothes from catalogues now and was attracted to loud colors. With her white hair all about her on the pillow, and the baby-blue oxygen tubes making a mustache, and the identification bracelet looped on her wrist, she looked festive and hectic and feminized. All day, young men in antiseptic garb came and tended to her, cutting her toenails, interrogating her bowels. Her bowels, to Joey’s embarrassment, had become a topic of supreme fascination to her. Her insides in general were brought uncomfortably close to the surface by the erosion of her body. His father’s method of coping with what seemed to Joey her unaccountable whims, including moving them all to the farm, had been to say, “She’s a femme. Your mother’s a real femme. What can you do?” He would shrug, and sometimes add, “I should have put her on the burleycue stage.”

This had seemed one of the man’s lofty, pained jokes; but now her femininity, which Joey’s father and then his succession of wives had shielded him from, was upon him. In her slightly dishevelled, revealing gowns, in her gracefully accepted helplessness and fragility, in this atmosphere of frank bodily event, his mother had her sex on her mind. She told him, remembering the first years of her marriage, in Pittsburgh, “There was this young doctor, Dr. Langhorne over on Sixth Street, who, when I went to him with these pains on my chest I couldn’t understand, told me to take off my clothes. Well, I trusted him, and did, and he looked me over for the longest time, and then told me, ‘You’re not obese.’ That was all he said.”

Her conviction, prior to Joey’s birth, that she couldn’t do such a normal thing as conceive and bear a child recurred in her self-accounting; old Dr. Mull, who kept brusquely calming her fears, who treated her as a normal woman and not as the monstrous product of her own mother’s agony, emerged as a kind of erotic hero, who swept her off her feet. “He told me to stop talking nonsense and trust in nature, and so I did, and the result was this beautiful boy!” Joey suddenly saw that his own self, which he had imagined she cherished for qualities all his own, was lovable to her above all as a piece of her body, as a living proof of her womanhood.