Wait Until Tomorrow (5 page)

We moved away from that house and the dark woods where I had played war with the neighborhood kids and into a secondstory apartment with a solid door. My mother also let me have a dog, a very protective chow chow. She would not be caught off guard again.

The only time I saw my mother cry during my childhood was on the day we took my brother David to the train station. At seventeen, he'd joined the US Navy, where he would travel the world playing the trombone in the Navy Band. My other brother, Jo, was at the Eastman School of Music on a full scholarship.

My mother cried when her youngest son left, but otherwise, she kept a tight rein on her emotions. Once when she was the chorus teacher at a disadvantaged high school, she was confronted by some young thugs during a period of racial unrest.

“Why aren't you afraid of us? All the other teachers are scared,” one of them asked her.

“All you can do is hurt me,” she answered. “And I'm not afraid of being hurt.”

They left her alone.

My brothers remember a frailer person than I do—a woman so defeated by her disastrous marriage that she would lie on the couch for days. But she did get up. She got up to give piano lessons in the converted garage where the two Steinways (hers and my father's) nestled next to each other. She could always work. When my brothers were teenagers, she drove them on cold mornings to their early band rehearsals, she took them on their paper routes, and she somehow kept the family afloat while her husband drank and consorted with other women.

Once, while taking my brothers to the beach (before I was born), she stopped at a red light and looked over at the car next to her. My father was in the car—with another woman and her children—heading to the beach.

“He never went to the beach with
us
,” she would say when she told me this story. She didn't seem angry so much as incredulous.

My brothers were fourteen and fifteen when my father left. We grew up in different families. I was not awakened by the early morning brawls. I did not see the devastation that my father
wrought on my mother's psyche. Instead, I grew up with a woman who loved to laugh, who entertained at countless parties with her piano and her wit, who rolled down hills with me as a child, who bowed to no one—a woman who was fearless and generally happy.

Then she got old.

SUMMER 2002

Hank, Emmy, and I are piled into the Blazer. God, how we miss Tallahassee where we had a forty-five-minute jaunt down to the coast for some play at a spit of land called Mashes Sands, followed by a meal of stuffed shrimp or blackened grouper at Angelo's Seafood Restaurant.

Hank and I are chasing some semblance of happiness, which somehow eludes us in Charlotte. He doesn't care for life in suburbia. I think it's just fine. There are woods behind our house and a little creek, and a neighborhood full of girls. Emmy and the gang rove from house to house in a pack, cleaning out refrigerators and scattering girl stuff in the bedrooms. But I do miss the water, so we're heading toward the ocean with a stopover in Edenton to see my mom.

Edenton, North Carolina, managed to escape the developer's ravenous maw that ate up most of the American South during the twentieth century. Situated on the Albemarle Sound, the town is a warren of streets lined with antebellum mansions and historic houses that sport Georgian columns or Victorian curlicues. Each house has its own style, some with cupolas on top and a few with the original glass windowpanes from a century or so ago. You won't find a Walmart in these city limits.

My mother moved to Edenton a year or so before Emmy was
born. She took a job as the music director of an Episcopal church that had been established in 1736. She was seventy years old. She discovered Edenton because in the summer she was musical director of
The Lost Colony
on the Outer Banks. When it was time to “retire,” she gave up her church job and theater gigs in Jacksonville and moved to the smaller church and the smaller town.

She kept her job at
The Lost Colony
, and sometimes lived during the summer in a big apartment complex called the Grove, populated by young actors and singers. I knew better than to call her late at night after the show because she usually wouldn't be home. She was busy being the life of the cast parties.

During the rest of the year, she lived in a two-hundred-fifty-year-old pink house with wide sloping floorboards. The living room was bright with pretty white interior shutters on the windows. The ancient white bookshelves and the big black Steinway were also there. My mother held choir rehearsals in the living room, and there always seemed to be people coming in and out.

One summer when we still lived in Florida, we came up for a visit and went to see
The Lost Colony
. As we sat in the bleachers, I looked up. There was my mother standing on the hill, conducting the choir below with a blue flashlight beam.

“Look, Emmy,” I said. “There's Grandma Roz.”

Emmy was awestruck. My daughter was seeing her grandmother as if for the first time, making music happen with a wave of her hands.

But after the botched operation, my mother quit
The Lost Colony
. She couldn't make it up the hill in her walker.

Now she lived in Edenton year-round. We'd breeze in and she'd make time to go out for a meal or two, and then we'd breeze out, and she'd go back to her busy life of rehearsals and performances. Even after the back surgery, she still maintained a full schedule. Or so I thought.

We tromp up the stairs of the old pink house and enter. Mom greets us with a bright smile. She's sitting in her chair, her walker in front of her. Emmy hugs her and Hank says, “How are you, Roz?”

“I'm fine. How are you?” My mom and Hank get along fairly well.

My mother keeps a candy dish full of York Peppermint Patties on the table for choir members. Emmy and I scarf down a couple. Then Hank and I leave Emmy and my mother to entertain each other while we check into the Travelodge. I know that Emmy will be playing the new piano pieces she's learned or practicing a new choir song with my mother accompanying her. Or maybe they'll paint pictures together. Those two never have a problem finding something to do.

As usual, we take Mom out to dinner. She wears one of her colorful dresses with a necklace of red Chinese beads. At the table over crab cakes and shrimp, Mom and Hank wind up discussing computer synthesizers and how musical vibrations work.

“The speed of the vibrations determines the pitch,” she is explaining to us. “The size of the vibrational waves determines the volume. That's how you can make the same sound loud or soft. And then there are variations that determine the quality of a note.”

Hank takes the conversation up an esoteric notch or two over my head, but I'm happy that these two smart people can find something to talk about, and especially thrilled that they deftly manage not to talk about politics. In that arena, they don't have anything in common. My mother, though not the most politically active person in the world, did get out and support the Socialist Party candidate back in the 1940s. She has fairly strong opinions about the idiocy of George W. Bush. Hank will not reach that conclusion for several more years.

When the check comes, Mom tries to pay, but Hank insists on getting the bill.

That night while Emmy stays with Grandma Roz, Hank and I study the North Carolina map in our room at the Travelodge.

“Let's go down to New Bern and then to Charleston and back up to Charlotte this way,” Hank says. Our original plan was to come back through Edenton, but I agree that this gives us a chance to see more of the state.

The next morning we arrive at my mother's to say goodbye to her and pick up Emmy. My mother is in her chair and we're gathering up Emmy and her stuff.

“Mom, we've had a change of plans,” I tell her. “We're not going to be coming back through Edenton on our way home.”

I know she's going to be disappointed, but I am completely unprepared for what happens next. My mother, tiny and frailer than I have ever seen her, sinks back into the cushions of her chair. Her face crumples and the good-time girl begins to weep.

CHRISTMAS 2002

Hank and I have been practicing for tragedy for a few years. We put Jaxson down in early 2001. Well, I did. As I pulled out of the garage with the sick old dog in the backseat, Hank and Emmy stood in the doorway, Emmy wailing and Hank barely able to breathe. Then, at the end of 2001, my friend and Emmy's godmother, Kitty, died of breast cancer. She was only thirty-three years old.

With elderly parents we are always expecting the “news.” While we wait for the inevitable, like farmers watching the skies for ice storms, disaster comes from a completely unexpected direction. In the summer of 2002, Hank's sister Beth, a golf pro at an exclusive resort, is diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She is six months younger than I am.

 

We've been going to California for Thanksgiving or Christmas for the past ten years. We often take off for the mountains there to give Emmy a chance to play in the snow. We stop in rustic little restaurants for hot chocolate. Occasionally, Hank and I even leave Emmy with the grandparents and go out on our own, something we almost never do at home. We are always more in love with each other in California. We go to different beaches. We take Emmy and the dog to the park where Hank played as a boy.

This Christmas is different. This Christmas we linger nearby. The shopping is less frenzied, the dinners more subdued. This Christmas as we sit in the family room, Beth comes through the doorway, gaunt, hollowed, stoop-shouldered. Tears fall at their leisure from lashless eyelids as she recounts these long six months since July: the trips to the emergency room, the good nurses who bathed her as if she were a baby, the scar from sternum to pubis, the row of chairs in the chemo room. She takes off her wig and swigs from a beer, this soldier who looks at us from the middle of the trench, and the words pour like coins from a torn pocket. We are the dream of home she's falling toward, the place where she plans to be born again.

Usually Southern California is dry in the winter, but this Christmas it won't stop raining. My mother-in-law Jean tries to gather the strength to be the mother she has always been, cooking and cleaning, even though she's in her seventies now. But she's shell-shocked from these past six months. Still she manages to make dinner every night, and she and I indulge in our annual conversation marathon at the dining table. Hank Senior has put up a tree; as usual it's given birth to several litters of presents.

We have the dog with us. We always do. The dogs have blurred in my mother-in-law's mind. Satan, Jaxson, and now Merlyn. Each one black, each one male, each one a lab. Merlyn is the sneakiest of the three. Something glinting on the coffee table is an invitation for a quick snatch and dash—and there goes one of your favorite pair of earrings. Merlyn was born trouble—maybe that's why he has become my dog instead of Hank's.

 

I remember the first time I met Jean and Hank Senior, the day I stumbled out of the backseat of the rental car, barefoot and clutching a two-year-old Emmy. Emmy had been crying after the five-hour flight, so I sat in the backseat and held her and sang songs
with her while Hank drove and Jaxson rode in the front. I'll never forget the look of surprise on Emmy's face as two elderly people swooped out of the house and fell upon her in adoration. For the first time in Emmy's life, I simply let her go as Jean took her from me and fussed over her and Hank Senior stood by, chuckling in admiration.

And that's how it was every time. For those one or two weeks of the year I was able to relinquish my role. I could let go of my maternal vigilance and relax. It was wonderful.

“My God,” Jean confided to me. “If I'd known he had you in his life all those years, I wouldn't have been so worried about him.” But for the six years that Hank and I had been together before Emmy was born, they hadn't met me. Hank Senior didn't say much about the past. He just sat in his recliner with the sports channel on, let Emmy muss his hair, and pretended that she had “stinky feet,” which always sent her into paroxysms of laughter.

 

Now, ten years later, Emmy, with her pants rolled up, steps outside into the inches-deep water and lets it graze her bony white ankles.

“It's a flood,” she says, looking at the grassy lake in her grandfather's tidy lawn. The drops continue to spike the water and ripple. The cat prowls to the window, watching this cold California rain. It is almost Christmas, Emmy is almost grown, and the child within struggles to manage the lanky bones, the beauty that has captured her wild-hearted spirit. Gingerly she comes back inside searching for fuzzy slippers for her chilled little feet, laughing and pushing back her long hair, a mermaid walking into the living room on new legs.

Beth teaches Emmy and me how to play Texas Hold ‘Em. Emmy's a natural at the game. I guess her acting talent helps her bluff. I'm always the first one out of chips. We play for hours.
The year before I'd almost gotten back on a plane and gone home when Beth started quoting Ann Coulter, but this year Beth and I put our politics aside. Cancer will do that.

At night we sit together in the family room: Hank's parents, brother, sister, nephew, and Emmy and me. Merlyn scours the floor for dropped crumbs. We watch movies or play Clue. We eat chocolate-covered cherries and Christmas cookies. A fire burns in the fireplace. While Emmy and her cousin are occupied in another room, Beth tells Hank that she thinks she'll be lucky if she lives another five years. Turns out she's off by one. She'll be around for six more years.

INTERLUDE

Why do we weep?
The moon beckoned and your bright and shining soul said “Yes!”
Leaping free.
We wept.
We still weep on our sad planet,
While your untarnished soul reaches radiance,
The expanding universe will not hold you;
Time will not stretch to touch you.
Why do we weep?