Little Boy Blues (25 page)

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That was the first of the countless arguments we would have over religion. They didn’t stop until she died. But nothing ever really changed after that first time. That fight was the only fight. We just fought it over and over, making up our dialogue and sticking to it catechistically. What I could not see then—never saw, until I was long grown and she was gone and it was too late to do anything about it—was that the fight was not about religion. It was about our very different ideas of who I was and should be. She would have said that we were arguing over my soul. It was inconceivable to her that the boy she had reared could ever believe anything but what she had taught him to believe. As an adult, I barely existed for her. I was a nuisance to be swatted away.

I regret that I didn’t simply say thank you when she said, “Every Sunday, no matter what, no matter where your father was, I got you up and got you to church.” Or I could have said, “You succeeded better than you knew.” If it hadn’t been for her, I would have had no God to quarrel with. My whole family—but my mother first and last—saw to it that I learned the Bible early and that I learned what it meant to live like a Christian. That I never learned to believe like one was no fault of theirs. I saw all this after the fact. While she lived, the stalemate went on, with neither of us ceding anything. We were both stubborn, both convinced we were right, but more than anything both convinced that some day, somehow, things might change between us.

I didn’t see all this until she’d died. Death doesn’t clarify much, but it does put an end to arguments, says no to change, illumination, compromise, all the things one hopes for from any
dispute. Death forces you to realize that there is no more to be said, that what was said is all there is or will be.

  Postlude  

Adolescence spoils many relationships between mothers and sons. Where once there was intimacy, overnight there is distance. For more than thirty years, from about the time I turned fifteen until not long before she died, my mother tried to reconcile us, to bring me back. I came to think of her as a woman marooned, abandoned by her husband and separated from the rest of her family, first by distance and then by death, until I was all she thought she had left, although she had not had me for a very long time.

“We have so much in common,” she would begin, selling me on the idea of us, again and again. “We both love to read. We both love music.”

“Yes, but—” I would always answer. There was always a “but—” I never entertained the possibility that my mother and I might have more in common than I wanted to admit. I was too busy resisting her gravitational pull. I had broken free of her when I went off to college, and I was determined to put as much distance as I could between us, although it was really just a matter of
adding more links to the chain (as long as she held the lease on her apartment, I always kept a key). In part that distance was achieved by insisting on our differences. If I had been less insecure, or just thinking a little more clearly, I might, for example, have thanked her for making music a part of my life. I never liked hearing her say it, but she was right when she told me, over and over, that what I learned from piano lessons or singing in the choir would stay with me always. Now and then I catch myself humming that descending melody that kicks off “Country Gardens.” Every time I hear it, I find myself correcting the mistakes of my younger self. There is an unmistakable bounce in the rhythm that could only denote dancing. How could I not have heard that? How can I remember so well a song I was so anxious to forget in the first place? And how could I have unconsciously become so fond of such a tune? In music I discovered an ever-expanding universe, where questions and discoveries multiplied upon themselves. How can you hear a melody for the first time and feel as though you’ve known it forever? Why do we often feel, when we play or sing a song, or sometimes merely listen, that we have somehow just plugged into something infinitely greater than we are? All I know is that music is far more unshakably mysterious than any religion I ever encountered, and that I have my mother to thank for that awareness.

What I could have said to her, and it would have been the truth, was that we both loved it when she played the piano, and that was no small thing. When she came to visit, it was the high point of her stay for me whenever she went to the piano and began to play. I could never be objective about her playing, never listened like a critic. I have no clear notion of her talent. That was not what I was listening for. I didn’t care if she’d played “Tuxedo
Junction” or “Satin Doll” a hundred times in a row. I didn’t care if she used music to impress people, to ingratiate herself. What mattered to me was that whenever she sat down at a keyboard, she seemed, in my mind at least, to become transformed. Hearing the first few notes, I would always forget everything about her that drove me away—her pettiness, her selfishness and her self-absorption. To hear her play, for me, was like breathing pure oxygen. The command and assuredness with which she sailed through a song lifted me up. I was in her thrall as surely at fifty as I had been at five. That never changed. She never held back, and listening to her was like looking into her soul. All the good that was in her came out then. Her talent was bigger than she was. It made up for a lot.

The last time my mother tried to play the piano, she could barely sit at the keyboard. It was the week before Christmas in 2003. I had come to Winston-Salem for a few days. Her birthday and Christmas were a week apart, and her friends Charlie and Ginny Gunn always had her over for a birthday supper. So I bundled her up in her room at the assisted-living facility where she had been staying for the last four years, got her in my rental car and took her to the Gunns’, where we celebrated her ninetieth birthday.

Her final year was tough—tough for her and tough to watch, as she spiraled down. She’d lost the ability to do any sort of arithmetic several years before, but otherwise she was more or less herself. Then, suddenly, she began to decline, shuttling from the present to some indeterminate place in the past, then to another, then back to the present, fleetingly, then the cycle would begin again. What made all this almost unbearable to watch was the anxiety that accompanied these journeys through time, anxiety
that manifested itself in questions about how long it would take to get to her destination, or whether there would be a meal upon arrival, or if we had enough to feed an extra guest who was coming to visit us, or when they would arrive, and why were they late. It seemed clear to me that some corner of her brain was still aware, and powerfully disturbed by her inability to stay focused in the present, and it was this anxiety, paradoxically, that was giving shape to her questions and her distress.

The familiarity of her old friends’ home kept her focused for most of the dinner, so much so that after dessert Charlie asked her if she would like to play the piano. In her prime, she wouldn’t have needed an invitation. She would have been playing before supper began. Now she had lost her old enthusiasm. He had to ask her several times before she tentatively assented. When we helped her to the piano bench, I worried at first that she might topple off if no one helped her sit upright, but she seemed to manage that, hunching over the keyboard so far that her nose almost touched the keys.

“What would you like to play, Margaret?” Charlie asked, and I knew this was the wrong question when I saw the confusion in her face.

“How about ‘Silent Night,’ Mother? Play that.”

She gave me such a timorous look—nothing coquettish now, just baldly childlike—that I wondered if somehow she could have forgotten the carol, but after a few very long seconds, she reached back and found it. She put her hands on the keyboard, each fingertip finding a key, but she did not immediately begin to play, She touched the keys as though she were palm to palm with another’s hands, as though she were greeting someone. Then she began to play, tentatively, almost meditatively, feeling her way, like
she was composing the melody as she played it. She got as far as “Round yon virgin.” Then her left hand dropped into her lap. The right hand went on alone for another couple of bars, barely carrying the melody, each sketchy note fainter than the one before. When that hand stopped, she did not remove it from the keyboard but sat there staring at it, as if she were wondering how it got there. Standing at her shoulder, I silently said my goodbyes. She would live on another four months, but for me, right then, she was gone.

After my mother died, I thought I would begin to see the story of her life, its final shape, because by then it was a story, with a traceable trajectory punctuated by death. But the story kept changing even after she was gone. The morning she died, in the infirmary of the retirement home where she’d lived for five years, after the hospice worker had left, after the funeral director had arranged for the removal of the body, I sat alone, in a chair beside the bed where my mother’s body lay, surrounded by the boxes I had brought to hold the few personal effects she had left. Someone had pulled the curtains back, and the room was raked with sunlight, which somehow made it seem an even more ghastly day. Besides the packing, I had calls to make: her friends, her minister, my wife, a few relatives. I welcomed the work, relieved to be distracted. I worked the phone for an hour or so and then began sorting through her belongings. Everything was a question. Do clothes go to Goodwill or to the rescue mission along with the paintings on the walls and the rocking chair? What do you do with a dead woman’s alarm clock? It was all like working a puzzle. At some point, I heard voices murmuring in the hall outside my mother’s room. Turning around, I saw a sea of black faces and white uniforms—nurses’ aides, orderlies, all the support staff on
duty—crowding around the door. I had no idea why they were there, and my confusion must have shown in my face, because one of them quickly stepped forward to ask if they might be allowed to pay their respects.

No sooner than I had welcomed them in, the room filled up in a hurry. At first no one spoke. The only sound was the dry rustling of starched uniforms. A few of the women were weeping, but not many, and nearly everyone else was smiling. One by one, they began to press around me to say how much they loved my mother, what a special patient she had been, how they would miss her on the ward. I was trying to digest this information at the same time I was being pushed farther and farther back into the room. When I had become completely surrounded, trying to listen to one woman and then another, I caught the eye of the woman who had spoken first, and she immediately took charge, clearing the room, organizing a line so everyone could take a turn at the bedside.

It was impossible not to feel good in that room, surrounded by all that positive feeling, all that love. But some part of me refused to accept it at face value. I couldn’t help thinking that somehow I was being gamed, conned, hoodwinked. I just wasn’t sure how or why. And I couldn’t stop thinking of all the times, in the months before my mother died, when she had rambled on, with no regard for who was listening, talking about colored people. Most of her monologues dwelt on Kershaw, where “the colored people were so good to us.” Specifically, she talked of Christina Bell, the family cook. “Tina was family. Oh, she loved us and we loved her.” As her mind deteriorated further, she became paranoid, and her words turned uglier. A colored girl had stolen her ring. (It was still on her finger.) That nigra (who? we were alone) was sullen, up to
something. Most of the time, I had no idea who she was talking about or to whom she thought she was speaking. “Malcolm will have a word with her when he gets here,” she would assure me. Every time one of the orderlies entered the room to change her sheets or refill her water pitcher, I winced as soon as she began to talk. And yet, here they were, all the people who had every reason to be hurt by her language, and they couldn’t stop telling me what a sweet, kind woman she had been as they moved to the bed to take her lifeless hand.