Off Season (19 page)

“Neither did I,” my mother said, her voice flat and cold. “Until I understood about real evil. Those murderous fools changed a face I loved into something . . . broken and shamed. The cuts will heal. Her eyes won’t.”

She turned and went back upstairs. My father put together a supper of scrambled eggs for us. Mother called out that she did not want any. The light in her studio burned very late. I could not sleep until I saw it go out. Hate and rage and sheer monstrousness walked our house that night. I knew, huddled into my pretty flowered comforter, that we would never really be safe there again.

After that my mother took her car and went out every day and came back with more sketches of the beautiful, terrible faces. I remember a small black face trying to reach a drinking fountain that said
WHITES ONLY
. Reflected in the store window in front of him, his mother reached out to snatch him away, her eyes cut sideways, to see where danger might lie.

A white child in a flounced and ribboned bower of a carriage being wheeled across the Potomac Bridge stared out at a woman and a small boy on foot, crossing the bridge also. They were black. The woman pushing the carriage was black, too, dressed in starched black and white, and the Scottie she was walking along with the child shone ebony in the sun and wore a plaid collar.

A beautifully dressed white matron, eyes staring straight ahead, hands so tightly on the steering wheel that her knuckles were blanched, drove a small sports car along a street that was obviously far from her own streets, thick with lounging black men and tired black women with shopping bags. They all stared at the car, and at the tired, fat black woman in the backseat who had fallen asleep, her mouth open. The fear and the hate on the street were palpable.

My mother painted far into the nights. Flora’s older cousin Emma came at five now, to make our dinner and then walk home with Flora, who would not walk alone after dark on the streets of Washington ever again. We did not see much of each other in those fall and winter days of 1962; my father had buried himself in John Donne and my mother painted her faces and I slid deeply and dreamily underwater. My father had found a scuba-diving instructor at a Y near the university, and I was there almost every day after classes. Though I did well in my classes, school never again seemed so real to me as the living water; I literally forgot about the T Club and stole no more objects of erotica. My club mates finally dropped me, and I made no new friends except the girls I met at the Y.

In my father’s house in those months, everyone was deep inside himself, walking in his own world. Whenever we met, it was as travelers on the same safari might, all in search of different prey but bound by the familiar rituals of food and sleep, reporting equably and with vague affection on our days.

It did not seem a strange way to live to me then, and even looking back it doesn’t. Families are bound by myriad different cords, and as long as they hold, the family is safe. Ours held.

Late the next August of 1963, my mother joined 250,000 others, black and white, in the great March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. When she came home she disappeared into her studio for three days, eating the meals that Emma brought her on a tray. She slept, if she did, on the sagging daybed in her studio. When the three days were over there were six or seven unforgettable faces lined up against her studio wall: Joan Baez, Odetta, Bob Dylan, and Mahalia Jackson. All the faces were suffused with a kind of radiance, a dignity, a joy so intense that it was almost tangible.

The last painting was of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., almost at the precise moment, my mother said, when he uttered the words that galvanized a nation: “I have a dream . . .”

I have seen no portrait of Dr. King since that came close to the power and the sheer love, the transcendence, of the one my mother did on the evening of August 28, 1963. It was so far beyond technique—for my mother had little of that—that it rendered technique obsolete.

Many people wept when they saw those paintings. One of them was Katharine Graham, who was lunching at the Sulgrave Club on the day the club hung a few of my mother’s paintings in the lobby. The next month the paintings had all been featured in the
Washington Post
under the title “Faces Now.”

At the first of September the invitation to luncheon at the White House came. It was set for the first Tuesday in December. After November 22 in Dallas, of course, there could be no luncheon. But my mother could not have attended, even if there had been one. By then she had had the first two of her chemotherapies and the glorious, gilt-streaked copper hair was very largely gone.

CHAPTER 9

T
hey told me, of course. They must have; you cannot hide the toxin of fear and anguish that leaches into the viscera of a family when serious illness comes. But, looking back, I simply cannot remember the moment when anyone spoke to me of my mother’s cancer. I knew, dimly, that there was a new darkness in the house, but down in my sunlit, silent world at the bottom of pools, nothing but the reality of water and movement seemed to touch me.

There was no talk of illness at dinner or whenever, more and more infrequently, we came together. I knew that my mother was seeing a doctor downtown rather frequently, and that she had recently had what she called a little surgery, a woman thing, just a nuisance. She would not let me come to the hospital, and whenever I lingered around her bed when she was back home she shooed me out, saying she needed a nap before dinner. Flora and Emma stayed later, and brought my mother trays in bed, and when I protested that, fretfully, she said that she had been feeding the masses all her life, practically, and was by God going to have a little pampering now.

My father was quieter, and spent a lot of time in her room with her, but I had no sense that he had lost interest in me and my affairs. We talked of swimming and literature, and occasionally we took small after-dinner strolls with Wilma jingling along behind or in front of us. They were pleasant; late fall is a lovely time in Washington, mellow and still burnished. In the streetlights the big houses around ours looked solid and invulnerable, windows lit and wood smoke drifting out of many of them. I scuffed leaves and Wilma sniffed and scrabbled and panted contentedly. I sensed nothing of my father’s anguish. Or if I did, I pulled the helmet closer and all was well again, dreamlike.

I don’t know how long I could have clutched my denial to me, but after a morning in late October it was no longer possible. Stuffing towels and goggles and my swimsuit into my gym bag in my small, upper back bedroom, I heard a scream so terrible that I seemed to feel it in my bones, in my teeth. It turned my legs and arms to water. I could not stand. I sagged onto my bed, hands trembling so hard I could not hold my gym bag and dropped it onto the floor. Dimly, I heard my father’s footsteps start up the basement steps, heard Wilma whine in the kitchen, and then bark. I threw my bag back on the bed and ran down the hall to my mother’s bedroom. She was not in it, but I could hear water running in the adjacent bathroom and my mother crying softly. Sick with fear, I put my head around the door.

She was leaning on the washbasin, her arms stiff, her head bent low, as if she was going to vomit. I started toward her, and then stopped. The basin was full of shining copper and gold coils of hair. More of it lay on the floor beneath. It looked like nothing so much as a beautiful, dead animal. I screamed and screamed and screamed.

“Lilly.”

I looked up at my mother. Her voice was calm again, but her beautiful, narrow head was bald, or nearly; patches of the glorious hair still clung to her skull. Her head was white, bone white. In places it gleamed like porcelain. I stared at her, incredibly, still beautiful, but a corpse. I saw my mother dead, yet moving and breathing. My hands flew to my own head, I suppose to see if my hair, so like hers, was still there. My mother closed her eyes and took me into her arms, where I stood rigid with fear. The specter of sickness raised its dead-eyed head and stared at me, smirking. I pulled away, slowly, staring. The illness, where was it? In her decimated head, her arms, her stomach? But I knew it was her breast, and I think now I had always known that. In the breast she pressed me to. I backed farther away. Could it leap into me?

“It isn’t contagious, you know, Lilly. We talked about that, remember?” Her voice was fully her own, light and sweet and still a bit husky, as if she was about to laugh.

“I told you I’d probably lose some hair. The medicine they give me does that. It’ll grow back. Come on, darling, let me get dressed and we’ll have some hot chocolate in the garden room. You can miss a morning of school. I’ll write you a note.”

Still, I could not look at this beautiful woman in my mother’s bathroom. Wilma came pattering in, his toenails clicking, and leaned against my mother and thumped his tail. My father was behind him. My mind flew to
The Golden Bough
. My father’s face gazed as if he had gazed upon the face of Medusa.

“Oh, darling,” he said. His voice was strangled in his throat. He went to her and took her in his arms and held her against him. She leaned into him, her eyes closed.

“Can I have your hair?” I said suddenly.

“Lilly, really. That’s simply not appropriate,” my father said crossly.

But my mother smiled at me over his shoulder.

“Of course you can. You can sleep with your old mum’s hair right under your nose, if you want to. You can make a mustache out of it. Why do you want it?”

“I want to put it in something like a pillow, and keep it.”

“Well, as long as you’re careful who sits on me.”

Normalcy was slowly seeping back into the bathroom.

“So what happens now?” I said. “How long does this stuff go on? Till Christmas? We’re still going to St. Thomas, aren’t we?”

We’d leased the same villa on the beach in St. Thomas for Christmas, and I could not wait. We were ten steps away from an azure world that floated me in its heart.

We all loved it, all but Jeebs. Jeebs was so entrenched in the earth and its bones and the soaring space inside his mind that water and sky were no longer in his lexicon. Later in the summer that we came home from Edgewater he had gone to a math camp in Massachusetts and returned with his heart’s bags already packed. That winter, his last at St. Albans middle school, he had begged for and gotten private tutoring in esoteric mathematics and gone, on his school breaks, to special programs for gifted students at MIT and Harvard. He had been at the latter when we had gone to St. Thomas early this summer, and he planned to attend another one for the two weeks before he started high school at Groton. Set for St. Albans high school, my father’s old school, he had changed his mind and lobbied passionately for Groton.

“Why?” my father asked, genuinely puzzled. Jeebs had never expressed much interest one way or another in where he would go to high school and college. My father was leaning toward George Washington for him, and I knew that my mother rather liked Georgetown. But I had never heard Jeebs state a preference.

“Because you almost automatically get into Harvard or MIT from there, and there’s nowhere else I want to go,” Jeebs said as if my parents should have known this.

“That’s a lot of money, darling,” my mother said. My father said nothing, but I knew money would be foremost in his mind. It had recently dawned on me that we were not rich; that we simply lived like the rich. Almost everything I took for granted as simply privileged and special had come from someone else.

“I’m a shoo-in for a full scholarship, if I want it,” Jeebs said briskly. “All my instructors say so. It never occurred to me that I’d need to, but I can apply anytime. It’s no problem.”
For me, even if it is for you,
hung in the air among us all, unsaid. All of a sudden I wanted to kick Jeebs. He stank, these days, of pretense and elitism, two qualities that had always been vigorously discouraged in my family.

I wondered then if Jeebs did not know about my mother’s illness, or if he simply did not care. Unfairly, I preferred the former. I wanted to know something of overpowering import that this new Jeebs did not know. I liked thinking that my parents simply had not told Jeebs yet. It made me feel grown-up and competent, the chatelaine of cancer on Kalorama Circle.

“Is Jeebs coming home?” I asked as we stood in the bathoom.

“Yes,” my mother said. “He’s staying home over Christmas. It’s time for a family powwow.”

“So we’re not going to the villa?” I said, putting as much pathos into my voice as possible. I felt, suddenly and savagely, that I wanted to punish my mother for her illness.

“Not at Christmas,” my mother said. Her voice was cool and remote, as it became whenever I intentionally wounded her. “We really need to have this family discussion. Maybe at spring break. It’ll be nicer weather then.”

“Well, I don’t want to have some stupid family powwow,” I said, almost in tears of rage and contrition and what I know now to have been fear. “I’m not going to it if we have it.”

“Yes, you are,” my father said, his voice suddenly steely. I had rarely heard that voice before. “You can’t live underwater anymore, Lilly. Your mother needs us now. This is a family affair.”

“What is?” I shouted, daring him to say it. It was, finally, my mother who answered.

“Cancer, Lilly,” she said. “I don’t think you quite took it in when we told you. I have breast cancer, and we need to name it and talk about it and decide together how we’re going to handle it. I’ll need all your help.”

“Will I have to stop swimming?”

“No.”

“Well, I won’t stop swimming. How long does this last?”

“We don’t know. I just started treatment. We’ll know more about that later.”

“I’ll bet I will have to stop.”

My father roared at me, but my mother laughed. “I wouldn’t do that to you for the world, my little selkie.”

“What’s that?”

“A seal who turns into a woman and then back into a seal,” she said. “Who can’t really live away from the water.”