Leaving the World (2 page)

‘Your father has left us,’ she said. Her tone was flat, stripped of emotion.

‘What?’ I asked, not taking this news in.

‘He’s gone and he’s not coming back. It’s all here.’

She held up the letter.

‘He can’t do that,’ I said.

‘Oh, yes, he can – and he has. It’s all here.’

‘But this morning . . . he was here when you got up.’

She stared into the ashtray as she spoke.

‘I cooked him his breakfast. I drove him to the station. I talked about going to some barn sale in Westport this Saturday. He said he’d be home on the 7:03. I asked him if he wanted lamb chops for dinner. He said: “Sure . . . but no broccoli.” He gave me a peck on the cheek. I drove to A&P. I bought the lamb chops. I came home. I found this.’

‘So he left it before you went to the station?’

‘When we were walking to the car, he said he forgot that Parker pen of his and dashed back inside. That’s when he must have left the note.’

‘Can I see it?’

‘No. It’s private. It says stuff that—’

She stopped herself and took a long drag off her cigarette. Then suddenly she looked up at me with something approaching rage.

‘If only you hadn’t said . . .’

‘
What?
’ I whispered.

She raised the letter to her face. And read out loud:

She tossed the letter onto the counter. There was a long silence. I felt for the very first time that strange traumatic sensation of the ground giving way beneath my feet.

‘Why did you tell him that?’ she asked. ‘
Why?
He’d still be here now if only . . .’

That’s when I ran upstairs and into my room, slamming the door behind me as I collapsed onto the bed. But I didn’t burst into tears. I simply found myself in freefall. Words matter. Words count. Words have lasting import. And my words had sent my dad packing. It was all my fault.

An hour or so later, Mom came upstairs and knocked on my door and asked if I could ever forgive her for what she had said. I didn’t reply. She came in and found me on my bed, curled up in a tight little ball, a pillow clutched against my mid-section.

‘Jane, dear . . . I’m so sorry.’

I pulled the pillow even closer to me and refused to look at her.

‘My mouth always reacts before my brain.’

‘And I was so stunned, so distraught . . .’

Words matter. Words count. Words have lasting import
.

‘We all say things we don’t mean . . .’

‘Please, Jane,
please
 . . .’

That was the moment I put my hands over my ears, in an attempt to block her out. That was the moment when she suddenly screamed: ‘All right, all right, be calculating and cruel . . . just like your father . . .’

And she stormed out of the room.

The truth of the matter was: I wanted to be calculating and cruel and pay her back for that comment and for all her attendant narcissism (not that I even knew that word at the time). The problem was: I’ve never really had it in me to be calculating and cruel. Petulant, yes. Irritable, yes . . . and definitely withdrawn whenever I felt hurt or simply overwhelmed by life’s frequent inequities. But even at thirteen, acts of unkindness already struck me as abhorrent. So when I heard my mother sitting on the stairs, weeping, I forced myself up out of my defensive fetal position and onto the landing. Sitting down on the step next to her, I put my arm around her and lay my head on her shoulder. It took her ten minutes to bring her weeping under control. When she finally calmed down, she disappeared into the bathroom for a few minutes, re-emerging with a look of enforced cheerfulness on her face.

‘How about I make us BLTs for lunch?’ she asked.

We both went downstairs and, yet again, pretended that nothing had happened.

My father made good on his word: he never returned home, even sending a moving company to gather up his belongings and bring them to the small apartment he rented on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Within two years the divorce came through. After that I saw my dad sporadically over the ensuing years (he was usually out of the country, working). Mom never remarried and never left Old Greenwich. She found a job in the local library which kept the bills paid and gave her something to do with the day. She also rarely spoke much about my father once he vanished from her life – even though it was so painfully clear to me that, as unhappy as the marriage was, she always mourned his absence. But the Mom Code of Conduct –
never articulate that which is pulling you apart
– was clung to without fail, even though I could constantly sense the sadness that coursed through her life. After Dad left, Mom started drinking herself to sleep most nights, becoming increasingly reliant on vodka as a way of keeping at bay the low-lying pain that so defined her. But the few times that I danced around the subject, she would politely but firmly tell me that she was most aware of her alcohol intake – and she was well able to control it.

‘Anyway, as we used to say in French class: “
À chacun son destin
.”’

Everyone to their own destiny.

Mom would always point out that this was one of the few phrases she remembered from her college classes – ‘and I was a French minor’. But I’m not surprised that she kept that expression close to mind. As someone who hated conflict – and who went out of her way to avoid observations about the mess we all make of things – it’s clear why she so embraced that French maxim. To her, we were all alone in a hostile universe and never really knew what life had in store for us. All we could do was muddle through. So why worry about drinking three vodkas too many every evening, or articulating the lasting grief and loneliness that underscores everything in daily life?
À chacun son destin
.

Certainly, Mom put up little resistance some years later when, at the age of sixty-one, the oncologist to whom she had been referred told her she had terminal cancer.

‘It’s liver cancer,’ she said calmly when I rushed down to Connecticut after she was admitted to the big regional hospital in Stamford. ‘And the problem with liver cancer is that it’s ninety-nine percent incurable. But maybe that’s its blessing as well.’

‘How can you say that, Mom?’

‘Because there is something reassuring about knowing
nothing
can be done to save you. It negates hope – and also stops you from submitting to horrible life-prolonging treatments which will corrode your body and destroy your will to survive, yet still won’t save you. Best to bow to the inevitable, dear.’

For Mom, the inevitable arrived shortly after her diagnosis. She was very pragmatic and systematic about her own death. Having refused all temporary stop-gap measures – which might have bought her another six months – she opted for palliative care: a steady supply of intravenous morphine to keep the pain and the fear at bay.

‘You think I should maybe get religion?’ she asked me in one of her more lucid moments towards the end.

‘Whatever makes things easier for you,’ I said.

‘Jessie – the nurse who looks after me most mornings – is some sort of Pentecostalist. I never knew they had people like that in Fairfield County. Anyway, she keeps talking about how if I was willing to accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior, I’d be granted life ever after. “Just think, Mrs Howard,” she said yesterday, “you could be in heaven next week!”’

Mom flashed me a mischievous smile which then faded quickly as she asked me: ‘But say she turns out to be right? Say I
did
accept Jesus? Would it be such a bad thing? I mean, I always had comprehensive automobile insurance when I was still alive . . .’

I lowered my head and bit my lip and failed to control the sob that had just welled up in my throat.

‘You’re still alive, Mom,’ I whispered. ‘And you could be alive for even longer if only you’d allow Dr Phillips—’

‘Now let’s not go there again, dear. My mind is made up.
À chacun son destin
.’

But then she suddenly turned away from me and started to cry. I held onto her hand. She finally said: ‘You know what still gets to me? What still haunts my thoughts so damn often . . . ?’

‘What?’

‘Remember what you said to your father on the night of your thirteenth birthday?’

‘Mom . . .’

‘Now don’t take this the wrong way, but you did say—’

‘I know what I said, but that was years ago and—’

‘You said: “I’m never getting married and I’m never having children,” and followed it up with the observation that “nobody’s actually happy” . . .’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing – and found myself thinking:
She’s dying, she’s on severe painkillers, ignore what she’s saying
, even though I knew that she was having one of her rare moments of perfect lucidity right now. We had spent years sidestepping this issue. But in her mind I was still to blame for my father’s departure.

‘You did say those things, didn’t you, dear?’

‘Yes, I said them.’

‘And the next morning, what happened?’

‘You know what happened, Mom.’

‘I don’t blame you, dear. It’s just . . . well, cause and effect. And maybe . . . just maybe . . . if those things hadn’t been said at that specific moment . . . well, who knows? Maybe your father wouldn’t have packed his bags. Maybe the bad feelings he was having about the marriage might have passed. We’re so often on the verge of walking out or giving up or saying that it’s all not worth it. But without a trigger . . . that
something
which sends us over the edge . . .’

I hung my head. I said nothing. Mom didn’t finish the sentence, as she was racked with one of the small convulsions that seized her whenever the pain reasserted itself. She tried to reach for the morphine plunger that was attached to the IV bag by the side of her bed. But her hand was shaking so badly that I had to take it myself and press the trigger and watch her ease into the semi-catatonic euphoria which the morphine induced. As she drifted into this chemical stupor, I could only think:
Now you can fade away from what you just said
 . . .
but I have to live on with it
.

Words matter. Words count. Words have lasting import.

We never spoke again. I did take some comfort in the knowledge that my parents could never stand each other and that my long-vanished father would have ended it with Mom no matter what.

But – as I’ve come to discover – there is a profound, vast gulf between
understanding
something that completely changes the contours of your life and
accepting
the terrible reality of that situation. The rational side of your brain – the part that tells you: ‘This is what happened, it can’t be rectified, and you must now somehow grapple with the aftermath’ – is always trumped by an angry, overwrought voice. It’s a voice railing at the unfairness of life, at the awful things we do to ourselves and each other; a voice which then insidiously whispers:
And maybe it’s all your fault
.

Recently, on one of the many nights when sleep is impossible – and when the ultra-potent knockout pills to which I am addicted proved defenceless against the insomnia which now dominates my life – I found myself somehow thinking back to an Introductory Physics course I took during my freshman year in college. We spent two lectures learning about a German mathematical physicist named Werner Heisenberg. In the late l920s, he developed a theorem known as the Uncertainty Principle, the details of which I’d so forgotten that I turned to Google (at 4:27 in the morning) to refresh my memory. Lo and behold, I found the following definition: ‘
In particle physics, the Uncertainty Principle states that it is not possible to know both the position and the momentum of a particle at the same time, because the act of measuring would disturb the system.
’

So far so theoretical. But a little further digging and I discovered that Einstein abhorred the Uncertainty Principle, commenting: ‘
Of course we can know where something is; we can know the position of a moving particle if we know every possible detail, and thereby by extension we can predict where it will go.
’

He also noted, rather incisively, that the principle flew in the face of a sort of divine empiricism, saying: ‘
I cannot believe that God would choose to play dice with the universe.
’

But Heisenberg – and his Danish theoretical collaborator, Niels Bohr (the father of quantum mechanics) – countered Einstein with the belief that: ‘
There is no way of knowing where a moving particle is given its detail, and thereby, by extension, we can never predict where it will go.
’

Bohr also added a little sardonic retort at the end, instructing his rival: ‘
Einstein, don’t tell God what to do.
’

Reading about all this (as the sun came up on another
nuit blanche
), I found myself siding with Heisenberg and Bohr. Though everything in life is, physically speaking, composed of elementary particles, how can we ever really know where a certain particle – or that combination of particles known as an action, an event, another person – will bring us?
Einstein, don’t tell God what to do
 . . . because in a wholly random universe, He has no control.

But what struck me so forcibly about the Uncertainty Principle was the way it also made me trawl back to that New Year’s Day in 1987 – and how, in my mother’s mind, Heisenberg was right. One launched particle – my dismissive comments about marriage – results in a logical, terrible outcome: divorce. No wonder that she embraced this empirical doctrine. Without it, she would have had to face up to her own role in the breakdown of her marriage.