A Ticket to the Circus (56 page)

That night, before I went to sleep, I talked to my father, as I sometimes did. I said, “Daddy, you have to come to me in a dream tonight and tell me what to do, because I’ve run out of options. You are the one who told me to bring her up here and take care of her, but it’s not working out. She’s going to kill all of us, including herself.” And I immediately fell asleep and had a dream. I was standing on the lowest step of a Roman-like arena, with a dusty circle in the middle and tiers of stone bleachers. It was a bright sunny day, and off to the side of the arena was a small stone building. My father stepped out, wearing a gray suit I had seen him wear dozens of times. He was young and handsome, and with him was my aunt Effie, who was a beautiful blonde with big blue eyes when she was a girl, and that’s how she looked. She turned to Daddy in surprise and said, “J.A., where are you going?” He looked right into my eyes and said, “Well, she said she wanted to talk to me.” And then I woke up.

It was so real. It wasn’t a dream; it was a visitation. I had no doubt. But why did he leave so quickly? He didn’t tell me anything! Then somehow the idea popped into my head to look online for information
on assisted living. I had never thought of that before. I’d been so focused on making her happy living with me, like Daddy had said. I got up, went to the computer, and immediately found a place in Orleans that was not only the closest place to us but the nicest and least expensive. The next morning I took mother and Danielle to look at it.

It was beautiful. There were huge bushes of rhododendrons blooming, cool shade trees, and the building itself was red brick and well kept. We went to the office and a nice older woman showed us a couple of rooms that were occupied, and they were lovely. Each had a view and its own little terrace, and the women who lived there were friendly. She showed us one unit that someone was in the middle of moving into, a two-bedroom, which was really lovely, but unfortunately there was nothing available right then. I told her that we would take anything that became available, a studio, one-bedroom, or two-bedroom. I asked her to just call us the minute she had something. That put us at the top of the list, because most people weren’t that flexible. That was on a Sunday. The next morning, the phone rang early. “Mrs. Mailer? I have some news for you. The two-bedroom you saw yesterday is available. I didn’t want to say anything yesterday, but the person moving in died the night before, and I didn’t feel like I could offer it to you until I had spoken to the family. I’m sure you understand.” I was so happy, I nearly jumped for joy.

“Thank you, Daddy. That was quick!” I said to him when I got off the phone. “But you really didn’t have to kill somebody off to do it.”

My mother became a new woman. I took her to Dr. Brian O’malley and he put her on Prozac, for starters, which had not occurred to us before, amazingly. And we went to a furniture store and picked out a whole houseful of furniture. She had some money from my father, and she just went through the store and picked out anything she wanted. She didn’t once look at the price. She had never in her life done that. She had always scrimped and saved; my father had never wanted to buy anything new. She used to have to buy the cheapest desk or chair and pay it out, and now she was getting anything she wanted! We went to the mall and she picked out sheets and towels and dishes and silverware. It was like she was a girl again and was getting her first apartment. I had never seen her so happy. We had a great time arranging the furniture and fixing things up, like girlfriends, finding art and
hanging pictures. We went every week to the Christmas Tree Shop and got flowers and cushions and everything she needed for her new little place. Dwayne and Thomas came and made planters for her to put on her patio, and we got a wicker table and chairs so she could sit outside and watch the birds at the bird feeder and the squirrels. I got bookcases for all her books. She was a different woman, and we were so much happier, too. Norman was getting better, and the tension in the house was gone. If only she had been on Prozac throughout my childhood, it would have been a much different childhood.

Mother in her new apartment.

T
he phone rang at seven in the evening; it was Judith. “I’m sending that fax Norman needed,” she said. “Look for it to come through any minute.” I heard the hum of the fax upstairs as it started to work.

“Oh, Judith, you sent that already this afternoon. I guess it slipped your mind. But thank you so much. It’s late. You really ought to take off for the day.” Judith worked out of her apartment in Brooklyn, so taking off didn’t mean she would go anywhere. For twenty-odd years she had worked down in the little office we’d owned on the floor below our apartment, but Judith was a chain-smoker and nobody in the building except for her smoked. We had tried everything to keep the smell down. We had professional-grade fans and smokeless ashtrays, and we had asked her to smoke outside, which did not work, as her office was three flights up and she couldn’t go longer than five minutes without a cigarette. Finally, when one of our neighbors threatened to take us to court, she moved her center of operations two blocks over to her own apartment and Matt took over the office as his room. It was great for him, but to get it in habitable shape, he had to sand and scrape, seal and varnish and paint, getting rid of layers of brown nicotine stains and smoked-in smells.

At nine o’clock, the phone rang again, and again it was Judith, saying she was going to send the fax.

“Are you all right, sweetie? You’ve sent that fax twice now. Is anything the matter?” It wasn’t even a fax that was worth anything, just a small thing that could have been taken care of in a few days.

“I guess it’s these antibiotics I’m taking. Levaquin. They seem to be making me a little hazy.” Judith had been sick for months with a nasty little cough, a smoker’s cough, which, in fact, she had had for years. But it had recently gotten worse. She did not appreciate advice, and if I ever said anything such as “Maybe you should stop smoking until your bronchitis clears up,” she would get icy and tell me it was not any of my business, thank you. She even believed that smoking was
good
for her, as the smoke killed germs. I had never in my life seen anyone
smoke as much as she did. There were few breaths in her day that did not contain smoke. Still, she was positive she was going to live to be in her nineties, as her father and mother had both done. They’d been smokers, too, after all.

But Judith was increasingly making me nervous. She had begun to do odd things in the previous few months. She had bought a house, sight unseen, in Appalachia, a house that even by Appalachian standards was cheap. It had formerly been a double-wide trailer, but somebody had taken the wheels off and put it on a concrete slab foundation. She was taking driving lessons. She was going to move to a place most people were fleeing from. It was going to be beyond bizarre—Judith, who was a Wiccan priestess, who read charts in the stars and divined spirits, was going to be living in the land of the fundamentalist Christian churches. Would she bring a sweet potato pie to potlucks? Or would she keep to herself and troll the Internet? I couldn’t imagine. She fully intended to continue working for Norman, that much we knew. I guess Appalachia was no farther than the keyboard of her computer.

The phone rang at ten o’clock. It was Dwayne. He was out at a restaurant across the street from his house, and his roommate, Tony, had come over carrying a cellphone with Judith on the line. She had told Tony to go get Dwayne and tell him he had to come to the office and receive the fax she was sending, that it was most important. Tony was so used to her precise competence that it didn’t occur to him it was a little strange that she had called on his cellphone and told him to walk it over to the restaurant where Dwayne was having dinner. Dwayne assured her that he had gotten the fax at two in the afternoon and not to worry about it. But he was concerned, as was I. The phone didn’t ring anymore, but she started to send the fax, over and over, until I finally went upstairs and unplugged it. Sue and Marco were staying in our apartment in Brooklyn for a year—Marco was taking a sabbatical—and as soon as I thought Sue would be up the following morning, I called her.

“Sue, could you go over and see about Judith? She is acting strange and I’m worried about her.” Sue went over, and while Judith was obviously not feeling well, she seemed to have her wits about her. She again blamed the antibiotic, Levaquin, and she refused to go to the doctor. Neither of us knew what to do, so we did nothing. Then a few days
later, Judith decided on her own to go to the doctor, but she would share precious little information with us. She was fine. There might be some benign polyps on her liver, but she was sure they were nothing. They were going to take an X-ray, but the nurse who was to do it somehow tripped and fell over a cart and hurt herself badly, so it was postponed. Then Judith couldn’t get the X-ray because her insurance wouldn’t pay for it at the clinic she was going to, and she would have to go across town to another clinic. There was always some reason she couldn’t get this X-ray.

Finally, she said she was going in to get a little biopsy, that while she knew it was nothing, they wanted to be really sure. And the next thing we got was an email from a dear friend of hers, Peter Levenda, telling us she was dead. She had died on the table, while they were doing the biopsy. She’d been riddled with cancer from all those years and cases of cigarettes—lungs, liver, and brain. I think nobody was more surprised at her death than Judith herself. She was a master of denial. She even said that cigarette smoke was good for her plants, that was why they were so big and lush. Her cat, though, didn’t fare as well. When her friend Noel came and got the cat, it started to go through nicotine withdrawal out in the fresh air and had to be treated at the vet’s with nicotine patches for a while. She’s fine now. If there ever was a case showing the harmfulness of secondhand smoke, this is it.

Then started a bizarre chain of events, the likes of which I hope never to see again. Judith had no will. She was the only child of elderly only children who were long dead, and she didn’t have a cousin or any relative at all. Her friend Peter was the closest person to her, and she had Noel, whom I knew, but they weren’t allowed to go near her. She had sent Peter an email saying that when she got out of the hospital she was going to make a proper will and name him the executor, but that never happened. People from the office of the public administrator, Kings County, New York, swooped in and taped off her apartment, then ransacked it looking for anything of value; they took all her jewelry, a coffee can full of change, and a white satin ceremonial robe hanging in her closet. They dumped her family albums into the bathtub and ripped the bed apart looking for—what? Cash? Stocks? I don’t know. They threw Norman’s papers all over the room and confiscated
her computer and all of her work materials that were in fact ours. They took her signed books from Norman.

It was a scandal, the way they treated her possessions. And we couldn’t get back our papers or her computer hard drive. A lot of Norman’s work was in limbo. It took a lawyer and more than a year to get them back. I’m still not sure if we got everything. In the meantime, no one was allowed to claim her body, or even see the body. No one had permission to bury her next to her parents or do anything at all, so for months she lay in a cold storage locker, and then they quietly buried her in some potter’s field, without telling us. We don’t even know where. It was a ghastly lesson in the “kindness” of the state and the need to have a will.

The only thing we could do was have a memorial service for her. We had it in Brooklyn, which was nice. She was a private person, as we’d all known, but we then began learning about her secret life, of which we’d had no clue. It seemed she had worked tirelessly for Palestinian causes. She had a website and had apparently spent all her money helping Palestinian people. She’d bought a bread oven for a small village, she’d arranged to have a little girl brought to the United States for surgery, and she’d been the mentor of a young journalist who wrote about Palestinian affairs. We’d had no clue about any of this. Maybe she didn’t tell us because Norman was Jewish. Maybe she didn’t tell us because she just didn’t want us to be a part of her life, but it was the saddest, most hollow feeling when I realized I hadn’t known her at all, and during those nearly thirty years she’d thought of us as only employers and not friends, as I had thought we were. I hope she is at peace, wherever she is.

   
THE MAILERS CONTINUED
to grow. Sue and Marco’s three children, Valentina, Alejandro, and Antonia, were in school in Chile. Danielle and her husband, Peter McEachern, lived in Connecticut with her daughter, Isabella, and his two children, Colin and Hayley. Betsy and Frank Nastasi lived in the Village with their daughter, Christina Marie. Kate and Guy Lancaster had a little girl, Natasha. Stephen and his wife, Lindsay Marx, had two children, Callan and Teddy. Michael
married the talented and gorgeous singer Sasha Lazard at a ceremony in Tulum, Mexico, which I wasn’t able to attend because of one of the surgeries, and a couple of years later they had Cyrus, a beautiful little boy with his mother’s blond curls, his father’s and grandfather’s blue eyes, and his grandfather’s ears. Barbara’s son, Peter Alson, married the writer Alice O’Neill on the beach in Provincetown, and they in time had Eden River, whose second name comes from the poker term, as Eden was conceived at the World Series of Poker. Then Matt and his beautiful girlfriend, Salina Sias, got married on South Padre Island in Texas, and we all went down for that. I wasn’t feeling well at all, but I took a lot of pain pills and pasted on a smile.