Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent (7 page)

We soon learned that the whole incident was caused by a cancerous tumor that had been growing undetected on one of her adrenal glands; it was actually the tumor that had burst, not the gland itself as originally thought, although the gland was destroyed in the process.

Dr. Anderson felt confident that the entire cancerous mass had been removed from Mom’s abdomen in the surgery, but wanted her to continue getting tested every three months, just in case.

Mom had always named inanimate objects in her life—her homes, her cars—so it was only fitting that her tumor would have a name too: Wild Bill. She imagined Wild Bill as an out-of-control gunman who’d galloped in from nowhere and ripped a piece of her away. She visualized herself facing this gunman in the middle of the street and blowing him off the face of the earth.

For the next two years, we all thought she was out of danger. Every three months she went to the hospital for the afternoon and drank barium, a foul-tasting, radioactive dye, so her oncologist could scan her body for any growths that shouldn’t be there. And every three months her oncologist found nothing. As time went on, and each scan resulted in good news, I buried the possibility that anything more would come of Wild Bill.

Adam and I lived together back in New York, and after a while we stopped speaking about what happened that night and about Wild Bill. We went about our lives in the city, Adam working on getting his novels published and his plays produced, and me auditioning and occasionally getting cast in something. I hardly thought about Mom’s health scare until the Christmas following it when I went home for a visit, and saw taped to the side of the refrigerator a laminated copy of a notice she’d had printed in the Joliet
Herald-News:

I stood and read this ad over and over every time I opened the refrigerator during that visit, lingering at the kitchen counter with my orange juice or yogurt or peanut butter sandwich, trying to imagine once again what that horrible night must have felt like to her, and wondering what I would have done in her place, and feeling grateful that she had survived the ordeal. But as much as the ad touched me (especially the sweet line about Little Rachel thinking she dialed 911), it also left me ashamed. Ashamed that I wasn’t mentioned. Ashamed that I hadn’t been there for Mom in a way that merited her thanks. But the truth was I hadn’t really been there for her, not in any way that mattered. Not only was I a thousand miles away, living an extremely hectic New York City life, but I didn’t call her as much as she wanted me to—certainly not in the wake of Wild Bill—or go home for visits as often as she’d like. When I did call, I rarely asked her about Wild Bill, or talked to her about that night or her recovery or her prospects. I told her about my latest auditions and callbacks and all of the roles I wasn’t getting, and spoke of little else. So she was right not to thank me.

As much as I believed that, though, I still wanted some credit. I could feel the insidious pull of that need lingering in my gut. I was her son, after all, and she had told me that she’d made it through that night for all of us kids, not just her girls. So why didn’t she say that in print? Why did she strand Adam and me like that? It wasn’t fair. But as I stood at the kitchen counter and read and reread the notice and thought all of this through and swallowed down my shame and pride and fear, I glanced over at Mom placidly sitting on the couch reading a magazine, her foot bobbing incessantly up and down as it always did, her head slightly cocked, enveloped in her usual aura of calm, and I decided that I could never bring it up.

A year later, in the log cabin in the woods of Wisconsin, I also didn’t mention that I’d noticed her bones poking out of her already thin frame when I hugged her. I didn’t tell her how that frightened me. Instead I chatted with her about my work and my life in New York.

“I brought home some reviews,” I told her.

“Oh, good, let me see.”

Reading my press clippings was one of her favorite activities. She was much better than I at cutting them out and saving them in scrap-books, and I wasn’t good at sending them in the mail to her, so I was glad to share them with her in person. And since she couldn’t afford to fly out to New York to see everything I was in (and I couldn’t afford to buy her plane tickets), showing her my reviews was the next best thing.

“It sounds very interesting,” she said after reading one of the reviews of my current show, a dark, three-character, gay-themed play called
Trafficking in Broken Hearts.

“I wear panties in it,” I said, provocatively. Her eyes grew wide.

“Really? Panties?” Her brow furrowed. “Why?”

“I’m playing a sort of confused character.”

“Well, I guess so.”

“His brothers raped him as a kid, and this is one of the ways he’s adapted.”

“His brothers raped him? That’s terrible.”

“Yeah, it is. But it’s a great part.”

She started to read another review, peering down at it through her thickly-framed bifocals.

“Why can’t you play a nice normal person sometimes?” she said after a moment without looking up from the paper.

This was a conversation we’d had before. And whenever we did, I always felt that she was still holding on to the memories of my childhood performances as Snoopy, Oliver, Tiny Tim, the Cowardly Lion, and the Little Prince—roles that were sweet and innocent and appealing, in shows that were wholesome and clean. “Everyone always loved you in those shows,” she’d say, and that’s what she wanted to see me do again.

“Well, I can play normal characters too,” I said as she continued to read, “but this is what I was offered right now, and I’m having a great experience in it.”

She put the paper down. “I just think it’s funny that you play all of these strange characters, because to me you’re such a regular guy.”

“Well, I don’t know. I think this is one of the best things I’ve ever done. I get to be so different from myself, and that’s very exciting for me.”

“I guess so.” She nodded, almost imperceptibly frowning. “I’m sure you’re wonderful in it, I think you always do a good job, but sometimes I just want you to, you know, play a nice, regular person.”

“Well, maybe in the next thing I do I’ll get to do that.”

“I hope so.”

What we weren’t directly discussing was the homosexual content of the play. Mom and I had had a long history of talking—and not talking—about my sexuality, never to my full satisfaction, and I didn’t know where she stood with regard to it now. But given her discomfort with the subject, I was fairly certain that my being in a gay play was an issue for her. I toyed with pressing the conversation further but decided against it. I didn’t want to create friction during my short stay.

Later, as I was helping Mom do the dishes, I asked her about her neck brace.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” she said, the steam from the sink fogging her glasses. “My neck’s been bothering me a little, is all.”

I dried silverware in silence for a moment.

“Well, I hope it feels better.”

“Oh, I’m sure it will.”

I never knew how much to believe Mom when she talked about how she was feeling; she had a high tolerance for pain. When I was a tiny baby, she slipped and fell down a flight of stairs while clutching me to her chest, cushioning and protecting me from the pounding her body took. I wound up unhurt, but even though she was quite injured, she walked away from the fall without going to the hospital, and from that day forward she suffered from chronic flare-ups of back pain.

Over twenty years later, after one of the many sessions of scans for any traces of Wild Bill, her oncologist asked her if she’d ever broken her back.

“Not that I know of,” she said.

“Well, if it had happened, I think it’s something you’d probably know about.”

“I had a bad fall once, a long time ago, but I walked away from it.” “Really? Well,” he said, showing her the X-ray, “there is evidence here of a badly healed fracture.”

“Huh,” Mom said.

“So it would appear you did in fact break your back after all.”

“Well, I guess I did.”

Roberta and Chris and Bonnie and I took a walk that night, but Mom opted to stay in. “I’m a little tired,” she said. “You guys go on without me.”

“You sure?” Roberta said. “It’s beautiful outside.”

“No, I’m okay.”

“All right then.”

Mom was an avid walker. She took her dog Zelda out for frequent walks of over a mile almost every day, in any kind of weather. When she was in Toronto with me while I was filming
Adventures in Babysitting,
she’d often walked the several miles to the set. One day the cast and crew van was stuck in traffic during a heavy snowfall, and Mom beat us to the soundstage, impressing everybody in the van by chugging past us at a steady and implacable pace, her pale cheeks shining a rosy glow, her breath pluming out before her. So it was unusual for her not to join us.

“Have fun, guys,” she said as we bundled up and shuffled out into the crisp, frigid, clear Wisconsin night. And as we made our way down the pitch-black road, our flashlights bobbing their irregular circles and ovals on the pavement, no one remarked on her absence, even though it was like a noisy flare trailing after us. We all knew what her staying behind probably meant. But we didn’t discuss it. To discuss it would be to say that it was real, and no one wanted to say that it was real, no one wanted that at all.

I
n February 1995, while I was in rehearsals for an off-Broadway production of Nicky Silver’s play
Raised in Captivity
(yet another show in which I was not a “nice, normal” character), I got a call from home.

“They’ve found another tumor,” Mom said on the other end. “I’m going to have surgery so they can get it out.”

I didn’t want any more phone calls like this from home. I didn’t want to have to keep flying there for emergencies; I couldn’t afford the financial burden of these trips, and I didn’t have an understudy. What if there were complications and I had to stay in Joliet for a long time? What would happen to the show then? I wouldn’t want there to be cancellations because of me. But how could I even think about the future of the show when my mom was ill? Weren’t there priorities? Shouldn’t
she
be a priority?

Of course David Warren, my director, had no problem letting me go home. “You have to do what you have to do,” he said, without laying on me a shred of guilt. So I packed for a quick day trip, hoping that would be all I’d need, and booked a flight with Adam. We arranged for our friend Anna, who’d directed me in
Trafficking in Broken Hearts,
to pick us up at the Chicago airport; her clear-headed strength and dry sense of humor would do us some good on our drive from the airport to the grim University of Chicago Medical Center.

But when we emerged from the jetway into the harsh fluorescence of O’Hare International Airport, all zombied out and cottonmouthed by our journey, we were greeted not by Anna, but by our father. My heart sank; I wasn’t prepared to be the receptacle for his manic energy, and he and Adam didn’t get along, so our trip into town was probably going to be much less calming than I’d hoped.

Even though our parents had been divorced since I was two years old, Dad had always been at least tangentially involved in our lives. He’d traveled down from Chicago to visit us in Joliet occasionally, and I’d done father-son stuff with him as a kid, like attending White Sox and Cubs games, and I’d spent time with him and his second wife and their children at their homes, and I’d enjoyed many holidays with his extended family. But overall, I considered his relationship with me to be more friendly than parental. Except for receiving Dad’s minimal child support when it was due, Mom had truly been on her own when it had come to the daily grind of raising us kids. And maybe because I was so young when he left, I didn’t resent him so much for the divorce. But Adam and Anne both begrudged him for it, and over the years, Dad had become a pariah in our family. So I didn’t have any idea that he would have been alerted to Mom’s condition, let alone taken it upon himself to pick Adam and me up at the airport.

“I was just at the hospital,” he said to us, not even saying hello, his bright blue eyes more intensely focused behind his glasses than usual, his prematurely silver hair swept back from his pale face. “They didn’t get it all.”

Adam and I stopped and looked at each other, our bags weighing us down. “What do you mean?” I said.

“I don’t know much more than that. They just said they weren’t able to get it all.”

This didn’t make sense. It was supposed to have been a simple, routine surgery. They had to open up Mom’s abdomen, isolate the tumor, and then cut it out. Easy. They did this sort of thing all the time. Didn’t they? How much was the
all
of it that was so difficult to get? And what did it mean? Did it mean that this was the end, that Mom was going to die right now, or tomorrow, or in three months?

I didn’t ask any of these questions out loud; I just let them kick their way through my head as Adam and I silently lumbered behind Dad, following him through the maze of O’Hare and into his dilapidated, cluttered car. On the way to the hospital Dad tried to make small talk, his chipper midwestern voice bright and lilting. “I’m glad we’re getting to spend some time together,” he said, and, “So, how are things going for you guys in New York?” Adam and I answered in monosyllables (what I really wanted to say instead of “yes” and “no” was
SHUT UP, THIS IS NOT THE TIME FOR THIS, SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP,
but I didn’t), and eventually Dad quieted down. In the ensuing silence I sat staring out the window at the spectacular Chicago skyline.

When we arrived at the hospital, we paused briefly in its vast lobby to pick up our absurdly large laminated guest passes before journeying endlessly through corridor after corridor just to get to the elevator that would take us to Mom’s floor, where we then walked down even more corridors to get to her room. As we made our way through the garishly hued hallways, I began to think that I should memorize all of the details around me, in case I ever needed to act in a scene taking place in a hospital, or if I ever wanted to write a screenplay in which a character was dying. I imprinted on my memory the badly framed paintings by the masters (Matisse, Magritte, Cézanne, Monet) lining the walls; the insidious pall of the flickering fluorescents shining down from the ceiling; the generic, flat-out ugly, ’70s-era modular furniture randomly strewn around rooms; the constant stream of stone-faced, badged doctors and orderlies and administrative assistants rushing around us. I staved off my anxiety, swallowing it down as I walked. In order to avoid thinking about Mom and how frightened and disoriented and doomed she must be feeling, I thought about how all of these mundane details surrounding me in this hospital might come in handy in my work someday.

Finally, we reached Mom’s room, and walked in. Grandma Baird was there, and Roberta, and Anne, all slumping around in the semidarkness, all with hollowed-out looks on their faces, no one moving or saying hello. In the center of the room was Mom, the white sheets of her bed glowing in the light of her bedside lamp, her face grim and spent amid the tubes snaking out of her nose, her eyes more drunken and exhausted and wild than I’d ever seen them.

“Hi, Tonio,” she said, her voice ragged and dry. “Hi, Adam.”

“Hi, Momma,” I said, and sat down carefully on the bed, taking her hand in mine. Adam murmured hello and took a seat in a chair across the bed from me and gripped her other hand.

“What’s going on?” I said, and immediately regretted it. What kind of a question was that at this moment? Mom’s gaze in response was scared and stern and very very tired.

“I don’t know.” Her words slurred out of her mouth. “They said they couldn’t get it all.”

“But what does that mean?” Why was I so compelled to keep asking her these questions? Now was not the time. But then again, when would be the time?

“I don’t know.”

I could see out of the corner of my eye that Adam had put his head down, his free hand covering his eyes, and I wondered if he was crying, something I had never seen him do. And then I could tell that he was, silently.

“They can’t tell me why,” Mom continued.

“What do you mean?”

“No one will give me a straight answer.”

Even though I sensed her exasperation, I kept going. “Why?”

“I don’t
know,”
she whined, and I clenched my jaw and tried to resist asking her more questions. I didn’t want to keep upsetting her, and I didn’t want all the other eyes in the room burning into me, witnessing how much I was fucking up this moment with my mother. I could hear Dad jiggling his change in his pockets and attempting to make mumbled conversation with Grandma, who sat impassively in the corner. Roberta slumped in a chair, and Anne hovered near the foot of the bed, her eyes sharp and piercingly blue, her mouth set in a firm line. Mom, surrendering to the dope coursing through her body, closed her eyes and dozed off. I took the opportunity to slip out of the room, find a pay phone, and call Anna.

“Hello?” Anna said, her nasal midwestern twang strong and clear and an immediate comfort.

“Anna, it’s Anthony.”

“Hey, bubby.” Her voice softened, becoming more intimate and gentle. “How you doing?”

“Well, they couldn’t get it all.”

“Yeah, hon, I know. Your father told me. That’s how come he was there instead of me.”

“I know.”

“So how you doing?”

“Okay,” I said, and my chest tightened and I tried to take a deep breath. “It’s just weird. I don’t understand. It doesn’t make sense.”

“I know, I know. These things don’t make a whole lot of sense, generally speaking. You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, I’m okay. I’m worried about Mom.”

“Of course you are. That’s an entirely appropriate response. You should be worried about her.”

“Yeah.”

“You need anything, anything at all, you call me. You know that, right? You call me.”

“Okay, I will.”

“How’s your bro?”

“Fine, I guess. He doesn’t say much.”

“Don’t I know it.”

I looked down the hall at the doorway to Mom’s room and wondered if they all minded my being gone for this long, if they resented my being on the phone.

“You need anything at all, you call me,” Anna said again.

“I will.”

“Love you, bubby.”

“Love you, too.”

I hung up and realized that I’d been pacing the entire time, as much as it’s possible to pace while on a pay phone. I cracked my neck and all the knuckles in my fingers and swallowed and headed back to Mom.

There was so much silence in the room. Mom was asleep and none of us spoke to each other. I could feel Dad pace around and start to say something, then stop himself. At one point the silence was interrupted by a group of brusque interns on their rounds, dropping in just long enough to wake Mom, note her vital stats, and mutter medical jargon to each other. After their visit I went out into the hallway and tried to find Mom’s oncologist, Dr. Barron, to get him to come to her room and explain what exactly was happening to her and why, but I just kept getting shunted off to his answering service. Finally, much later, he lumbered in, a tall, boxy man, his wild, gray, madscientist hair framing a huge, square head.

“How are you feeling, Mary?” he said, his voice mellow and mildly benevolent.

“Okay.” She seemed much more alert now that he was there.

“Well, as you know, we couldn’t get it all.” That phrase again. “We’re going to have to very seriously talk about all of the options now.”

“Okay.” I wondered if Dr. Barron knew that my mom was a nurse, and that she would see and hear through any verbal smoke screens he might attempt to put in her way.

“I want to very strongly recommend putting you on a course of chemotherapy, combined with radiation treatment. We want to shrink and kill that tumor.” I hated chemotherapy, I couldn’t stand the idea of it, I didn’t want her to take it, it was poison. Why couldn’t they get it all?

“Why couldn’t you get it all?” Mom asked, weakly.

“We don’t know yet. I haven’t gotten the full report from your surgeon.” Mom started to ask another question, but stopped. “Now,” Dr. Barron continued, “I want to start you on the chemo as soon as possible. Time is of the essence. It will be rough, but I want to be aggressive. I want to beat this. I’ll be in to check on you later.”

“Okay…” Mom didn’t watch him leave. She stared at the ceiling, and I saw slow tears drip down her cheeks. Anne, Adam, and I surrounded her, touching her legs and holding her hands.

“It’s okay, Mom,” Anne said. It was one of the only things she’d said since I got there. “You’ll be okay.”

“I want to see my grandchildren,” Mom said, her voice cloudy from crying.

“You will, Mom, you will,” Anne said. But I couldn’t help thinking,
no, maybe you won’t, maybe you will die from this, maybe you will die from it very very soon, and anything we might say to you now won’t change that, why does everyone always think they have to pretend that nothing bad is happening, you are very very very sick, and that’s the undeniable fact, you can’t pretend that it’s not.
But I remained silent.

Mom stared off at the wall, exhausted, and I said, “Mom, I don’t know how much I’ll be able to come home, because of the show.”

She didn’t look at me as she said, “I know…” Nothing I had said all day seemed to help or comfort or please her, and I hated my inability to help, but I had to talk to her. How many more chances would I have? I had to cram it all in now, because the next time might be too late. I couldn’t bear to throw out empty false hope, because who really knew anything about what was going to happen?

And so I asked her, “What kind of chemotherapy are you going to have?” and she answered, “I don’t know,” and I asked her, “Why can’t anyone tell you what went wrong in the surgery?” and she answered, “I don’t know,” and I asked her, “Are you going to be able to go back to work?” and she answered, “I don’t know.” And with each question I asked, she seemed to shrink deeper into her bed, and the lines around her eyes etched themselves more vividly into her skin, and yet I couldn’t stop myself.

Finally, after a long silence passed between us all, it was time for me to return to the airport. I slowly stood and said, “Goodbye, Momma. I love you.”

“I love you too, Tonio,” she said, her weary eyes meeting mine for the first time in a while. I kissed her on the forehead and left.