Near the end of that last summer visit with Mom, during the week of the Democratic National Convention, she asked me to take her to the clinic for her chemotherapy. My sister had been shouldering the burden while I blithely vacationed with friends. I had always been squeamish around medical facilities, the same way I was squeamish around funeral homes and cemeteries. As if allowing death to enter your mind might allow it to enter your body. I preferred the blissful ignoranceof denial.
In contrast,Mom seemed to bedenial-free, and I was in rather in awe of that. When it came to the subject of death, Mom was a thousand leagues ahead of me. She was a long-time Hospice volunteer and faithful funeral-goer with abookshelf full of books such as On Death and Dying and On Life After Death, the kind of books I assiduously avoided. True, I had read my share of novels on the subject, but that seemeddifferent somehow, like looking at an eclipsethrough special lenses instead of with the naked eye.
The breezeless August afternoon was scented with hot asphalt and clover. Mom seemed smaller as she inched along in her walker, her silver wig a little off kilter. Inside, in the bracing antiseptic temperature-controlled air, the nurses’ eyes lit up. “Oh! This is the famous son from South America!” said a sharp-faced nurse. “We’ve been waiting for you to visit.” Did I detect a trace of sarcasm?Or was I just being paranoid?
The treatment room featured five naughahyde recliners, their occupants reading or resting their eyes or staring ahead as if they were customers in a hair salon. Only they weren’t. Each was hooked up to a “dripper” as Mom casually called it. The man in the next recliner, wearing an Atlanta Braves cap, was listening, eyes closed, to headphones. With alarm I noted that he was younger than I was.
Mom told me to help myself to a juice out of the minifridge while they hooked her up. The little homey touch—free juices—was probably intended to make the place seem less impersonal. Mom, in her recliner, and I, in a folding chair beside her, sat facing a row of wigs perched on mannequin heads.
“I wish I could have the face to go with the pretty hair,” Mom said. It struck me an obvious attempt to calm me down. Probably something she learned in one of those books.
While the guy in the Braves cap nodded to his music and the nurses chattered in their station, Mom suddenly pulled out a pad, a pen, and a small tape recorder. “I thought this might be a good time for you to take some notes for my memoir.”
“Mom, I thought you were getting What’s-her-name to do it.”
“I told you, Marlene’s bipolar. She’s not reliable. Besides, you’re the best.”
“I’ve got some errands I need to run.”
“What errands?”
“Go by the post office and the mall, buy some things to take back to Colombia.”
“Like what?”
“Things I can’t findthere. Like certain spices. And like . . . a lint remover. You know that kind with a roller?”
Mom’s lips stretched flat with skepticism. “How often do you use a lint remover?”
“Not often. But when you need one, you really need it.”
“Well, the treatment lasts four hours and the Post Office doesn’t close until six, so you can stay here with me for a while.”
With a sigh,I sat back in the chair. What else could I do, short of making a scene and confirming the suspicions of the nurses? Who would understand a son who lived so far away and didn’t relish the opportunity to spend time with his mom? No one. But they didn’t know her like I did. I had always marveled at the unwavering affection everyone showed fortheir mothers and wondered why I couldn’t have a mom like that. One who could be reduced to just sweet old Mom. I had a mom who wasn’t so easily reducible.
Mom held out the pen and pad.
“Look, Mom, I appreciate your wanting to share your memories, but why can’t you get someone else to help you?”
“I need someone who can condense seventy-four years into an interesting narrative with historical value. It’s the story of a woman who came of age in the repressive fifties, matured intellectually during the Women’s Movement, and flowered sexually as an AARPer. It’s a story people need to hear. What do you think of this as a title: A Bit of Herstory?”
“Mmmm . . .”
“I’m not saying it has the makings of a masterpiece, according to your standards. But it will certainly generate a wider readership than the stories you publish in those obscure literary magazines. Sorry, but you know I only say that because I think you deserve greater recognition.”
I bristled. Mom was always saying I needed to do more self-promotion. Whenever I visited from Colombia, she would have interviews “lined up” with the local newspapers. “Call Marty Slocum from The Independent,” she would say when I arrived. “He wants to do an article about you.” “Why would he want to write about me?” I asked. “Just because I live outside the country? That’s not news.” “You are news!” Mom declared.
The mannequins observed me steadily, only pretending to be inanimate.
“Just humor me, Carl,” Mom said. “When I’m gone I won’t know whether you followed through or not.”
I accepted the pen as if it were a blade. Mom turned on the tape recorder.
“As I said,” she began, “the book is going to have four sections: youth, motherhood, political activism, and romantic adventures. This will be the last chapter of the romantic adventures: Roy Lee Wells, my last true love.”
I glanced around to see if anyone was listening.
“After Howard, I kept hungering, more than ever, for that one special man. Howard had opened up my passionate self and I needed to find outlets for that.”
I cringed at the word “outlets.” I had never been comfortable conversing with Mom about sex. Consequently, she seemed to take every opportunity to show how open-minded she was on the subject. Several times she told me that while all her friends had been shocked and outraged over Bill Clinton and Monica, she kept saying: “What’s the big deal?”
“But I was up to my fifth different chemo treatment,” Mom said, “and there wasn’t much else to try. I wastired most of the time and it hurt to walk. I had stopped searching Senior Mates altogether. And precisely then, when all hope seemed lost, I received an email from someone out of my past: Roy Lee Wells, a high school classmate. His wife had recently died of heart trouble and he saw my name on the Duke Alumni web site.”
Though this sounded plausible, it was also possible that Mom was still trolling Senior Mates. She had been known to fudgeon details such as who contacted whom. She probably figured the truth would never come to light and if it did, she could blame it on a faulty memory, and if that didn’t work, she could dismiss it as a trivial point.
“Roy Lee is an internist who lives in Atlanta,” Mom said. “He always ran with your Aunt Sally’s crowd, so I only remembered him as a freckle-faced kid. “But apparently I made quite an impression on him.” She winked.
I deadpanned.
“We started emailing every day. I didn’t tell him about my health status at first and I hoped he wouldn’t find out until I could decide on the right moment to break the news. He was still grieving over the loss of his wife and I was hoping that by the time we got together I would have some hair.”
I glanced back at the guy in the Braves cap. He looked ten years younger than I was! I checked my watch, wondering how much longer I would need to stay. Mom had told me several times that she wasn’t afraid of death. When she asked how I felt about it,I said, “It’s not so much that I’m afraid. It’s just that I it strikes me as sad.”
I knew Mom felt that my shakiness on the subject of deathwas due to the absence of God in my life, but in my mind my lack of faith stemmed from all those years she drug me to church.
“I was having a ball with Roy Lee,” Mom continued as the tape recorder rolled. “I thought: This is the perfect man for me. Too bad he had to come into my life so late. He wasso affirming and appreciative of my willingness to correspond. And what a story-teller!”
She pulled a folder from her handbag and put on her reading glasses:
This is the story of my last smoke. I casually lit a cigarette, got in my old BT-13, and took off. When I gained altitude, I happened to look down into the belly of the plane. The right wing tank had developed a leak and I was looking into a half-inch pool of 100-octane gasoline—-with a lighted cigarette in my mouth. No other option: I swallowed that potential fuse whole and lighted. Never had the stomach for smoking since.
“Good stuff, huh?” Mom asked.
I mumbled an approval.
“Then he sent me this:
Fran, I have no explanation for the way I feel about you. Never in a million years would I have believed in email romances. But now we have one—and at our age! What will the neighbors and children think? Frankly, my dear, I don`t give a d—!!!
I found Mom’s romance somewhat amusing and curious since it marked afundamental shift in her attitude. In the thirty years since she split with my dad, she’d had her flings but she’d never come close to establishing a steadyrelationship. Why was that? Jill said it was because of her exacting tastes: in addition to an impressive pedigree and an ideological purity, she required a high level of physical attractiveness. (Once when I asked if she would consider going out with an old retiree I knew, a bit of an oddball, I’ll admit, and she said, “Oh, no. He’s so skinny!”)Add to that her insistence on having things her way, and it was unlikely that the men who met her prerequisites would go along with her program.
But here at the end of her life, with Howard and now Roy Lee, Mom seemed to be loosening the levers of control, opening herself up to risk,and going all out to land herself a man. So why now? Because of her approaching demise? Did that make her conscious of what she’d been missing all along? Was this something she had failed to calculate? Had she misgauged the vectors? And was this transformation due to an involuntary emotional need, or to a desireto end her life with a dramatic flourish.
Mom sipped applejuice through a straw.“I was anxious to see Roy Lee,” she said, “but things got complicated whenI learned that my new treatment wasn’t working. I had to move on to a more potent one which made me nauseated and caused me to lose my hair. I was also having double vision and they said I might need radiation on my brain. Not good news, but I was hoping the treatment would take care of the problems.
“Meanwhile, Roy Lee made plans to visit. I still hadn’t told him about my condition but I intended to do so before he arrived.”
But not before he had already promised to come, I mused.
“I wrote and told Roy Lee I had very little hair, little energy, and was on a walker. I told him the visit would be a true test of our relationship.
“This is how he responded:
Fran, Oh ye of little faith! You should have known you couldn`t chase me away. I have fallen for you and your mind, not your state of health. And I know without a shadow of a doubt that you will cope with this problem in your typical “Molly Brown” way. I am your companion for good and will stick to you like flypaper. Remember: The past is gone. The future hasn’t arrived. The present is here and to be enjoyed to the max.”
I leaned over to examine the message. I wondered about this Roy Lee, a man in his seventies who hadjust lost his wife. Mom had said that like most doctors, he was conservative, but that she was “working on him.” Jill said he had struck her as a decent guy when they talked on the phone. He told her, “You’re mom is strong on those emails!” Maybe,having yet to see her, he was still fixated on the memory of Mom when she was young.
Mom pressed tenderly on the tape that held her IV tube in place. The skin surrounding it was red and swollen. “I was all ready for Roy Lee’s visit when my femur, weakened by the radiation, suddenly snapped. That’s when they operated and put in a rod. I tried to talk Roy Lee out of coming, but he wouldn’t hear of it. It was sweet of him but in a way I wish he hadn’t. Seeing me for the first time in a hospital bed, post-op, pale and splotchy and swollen from the medications, must not have been the most appealing sight. He is so fit and youthful-looking! And there was nothing for him to do for three days except sit at my bedside, go out to dinner, and then go back to his hotel.”
“So did things go downhill after that?” I asked.
“Not at all. Our correspondence continued as strong as ever. Here’s another story he sent :
Once I was running late so I decided to plot my course once underway. A bad move. My BT-13 had an open canopy and when I unfolded the map the airflow blew it to the bottom of the plane. I flew on for about an hour, searching unsuccessfully for a landmark. It was getting dark. Finally, in desperation, I took off my shoe and, reaching down between the rudder boards, with my left hand on the base of the stick, my left elbow on the left rudder pedal, and my right hand on the right rudder pedal, I managed to snag the map with my toes. But by then I was so hopelessly lost it did no good. I had to land in a farmer’sfield. Thank God for a full moon.
When Mom glanced conspicuously at the notepad in my lap, I jotted down a few notes just for appearances. I had no intention of writing her memoir. But as she said: after she was gone she wouldn’t know the difference. Besides, why cast aspersions on her inflated self-image? In the name of truth? Was truth that sacred? Wasn’t it sometimes cruel? Besides, didn’t everyone secretly believe that his life was exceptional?
“I didn’t hear from Roy Lee for over a week,” Mom said. “He was busy trying to sell his house, a huge place on Lake Lanier. He planned to use the proceeds to buy some property in the Bahamas. Also, he was studying to renew his pilot’s license. He told me the first thing he would do when he got it was fly here, pick me up, and carry me off to his beautiful villa on the Caribbean. I told him I’d have my bikini ready.”
Outside the window, in the inviting, sun-washed grass, a bee landed on a patch of clover. I was carried back to summers past when Mom wouldchauffer me to the Community Center pool, with its thick, heady scent of chlorine, the squeals and splashes echoing off the tiles, and pick me up again in the evening to take me home, red-eyed and sun-baked, my bathing suit soaking through my shorts, to a meal of fried chicken and butter beans out on the picnic table with the crickets.
“Roy Lee’s messages were becoming more sporadic,” Mom said. “I urged him to write more of his aviation stories and I promised to help him try to get them published. At first he didn’t seem very enthused, but after my encouragement, he decided it would be a nice heirloom to leave to his kids and grandkids. I set up a consultation with a woman here who has a publishing company.”
“Publishing or printing?” I asked.
“Both,” Mom said, sidestepping my semantic snare.
Again I saw through her strategy: feeling Roy Lee slipping away, she was trying to reel him in with appeals to his ego.
“When Roy Lee finally sold his house,” Mom said, “he flew down to The Bahamas to check out someproperty. Since he still hadn’t received his pilot’s license, he flew down commercial several times with a friend.”
With a friend? I scribbled on the pad, noting the conveniently gender-neutral term.
“My sixth treatment was delayed due to a low white count. I still had little energy, but working on Roy Lee’s book project kept me going. I met with the publisher regularly to discuss design and marketing. I was anxious to have it come out just right. And I was looking forward to Roy Lee’s getting his pilot’s license. Then he sent me this:
Fran, darling, I am finally writing an introduction. How is this for a starter?
For those who follow, I leave to you a glimpse into my life—its thrills, its improbabilities. My escapades were made possible in large part by the time in which I lived. Shortly after World War Two, surplus airplanes were very low in cost. I bought my BT-13 for 300 dollars and I flew over 1000 hours in that wonderful friend. My service time in the Counter Intelligence Corps was made possible by seizing the opportunity to join a reserve CIC unit and then go on active duty . . .
“Isn’t that wonderful writing?” Mom asked. “I was thrilled that Roy Lee had finally finished and we could move forward with the publication. I made a list of all his relatives and friends who might want a copy . . . ”
I looked at my watch. “Sorry, Mom, but if I don’t leave now, I won’t have time . . .”
“O-kay,” she said, “Go ahead. And remember, tonight is the convention. I’m hoping we can watch it together.”
*
In the mall, a place I always found disorienting, the time slipped away from me. Fortunately Mom wasright about the Post Office being open until six. I stood in a long line to mail my letters, and sweated anxiously through a road construction traffic jam, but still I made it back to the clinic by five-thirty. However, when I tried to open the front door, I felt a strange sensation.
It was locked. I knocked and got no response. Finally the sharp-faced nurse appeared, glaring indignantly.
“Sorry, is my mother . . . ?”
“She’s already gone,” the nurse snarled.
A band of heat gripped my forehead. “What?”
The nurse paused a moment to revel in my distress. “We waited and waited.” Another pause. “Finally one of the nurses had to take her home.”
I stood there paralyzed. When I began to stammer, the nurse shut the door.
I drove like a maniac toward Mom’s house, tailgating, cursing the other drivers, and mashing my horn the instant the light turned green. How could I have failed to realize that the clinic closed at five? Of course it closed at five. That was the regular closing time for nearly everything in the country. Maybe I was thrown off by the fact that everything in Colombia closed at six, or because the Post Office closed at six. Or maybe I was thinking of a hospital instead of a clinic. At any rate, what I had done was unpardonable: a son arriving late to pick up his mom from her chemotherapy! That son deserved to be shot, especially since this was the one and only time he had ever accompanied her.
Reaching her house, I jumped out of the car and raced inside. Mom was sunk into the sofa in front of the TV, weak and nauseous from the treatment. She was wearing a look of anger and hurt that made me feel weak and nauseous as well. Immediately I launched into an impassioned apology, groveling and lashing myself with insults, declaring myself a horrible monster to preempt her saying it, pleading for forgiveness, crouching suppliantly and wringing my hands, doing everything short of falling on my knees and kissing her feet, though I came close.
Then I awaited her verdict.
“You’re so inconsiderate,” Mom said, her voice brittle and quivering. “The only person you care about is yourself.”
I saw that I was not going to get off easily. “I know, what I did was terrible. I can’t believe it happened. I was thinking . . .”
“No. You weren’t thinking,” Mom snapped.
“You’re right,” I said, willing to admit to anything to win back her graces.
“Just leave,” she said, eyes locked on the TV. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
Panic surged through me. I couldn’t bear being denied her forgiveness.
“I’m really sorry,” I said, my voice high-pitchedwith contrition. “Please let me stay here and watch the convention with you.”
“No, I don’t want you here.”
“Mom, please . . . ” I was sitting on the edge of the sofa, bent over in an awkward position, my hands squeezed between my knees, trying to trying to look as harmless and invisible as possible. I didn’t dare sit back and get comfortable for fear that my presumptuousness would fuel her ire.
A commercial ended and the broadcast of the convention in Boston resumed. The commentators were discussing Kerry’s upcoming speech. We sat there unspeaking, the tense air thick as vapor, staging a revival of the drama we had enacted so many times before. In the beginning the balance of power had tilted toward Mom; then it had tilted my way me because I had the option of simply staying away. But at this moment, I needed her forgiveness. It mattered to me immensely, and she knew that. She had me where she wanted me.
Twenty minutes passed as we silently watched the screen. Joe Biden spoke, followed by Joe Lieberman. Next up would be a biographical video of Kerry. Finally I ventured a commentdesigned to make a response irresistible.
“What do you think about this strategy of highlighting Kerry’s military background?” I asked.
Mom made me sweat a few more seconds before speaking. “I think it’s great.”
“Why?” I asked, setting her up.
“Because for too long the Republicans have claimed the mantle on security and portrayed Liberals as weak. I think it’s smart to neutralizethat line of attack.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I totally agree.”
Only then did I ease back in the sofa.
As we watched the Kerry biography and the enthusiastic reaction of the party hat-wearing crowd, I felt a warmth spread through me. These were our best moments, sharing our political convictions. Victims of decades of conservative demagoguery, sufferers of defeat after defeat, including the robbery of the last election from Gore, we had managed to keep hope alive, and this time, finally, we would win.
Suddenly Mom took a deep breath that seemed to catch her off guard. An abrupt involuntary inhalation. I had recently noticed she did that quite often. What was it? I wondered. A kind of arrhythmia? I had never experienced it myself, at least at that time. But since then it has happened to me frequently. And every time it happens I think of Mom.
In the corner of the room sat a large stack of boxes filled with copies of Roy Lee’s Flying Stories. Many of them Mom had lovingly gift-wrapped for members of his family.
“Are you going to mail them?” I asked.
“No,” Mom said. “I’ll give them to Roy Lee when he visits.”
“Have you talked to him lately?”
“He’ll probably call tonight.”
I glanced over at the silent phone.
“And so,” Mom said, seizing the moment,“will you help me with my memoir?”
“I think the Roy Lee part is interesting,” I said. “Boy, things were really different in those early days of aviation.”
Mom sighed impatiently. “Will you help me?”
Of course if I lied she would never know. Maybe she wanted me to lie. Certainly, I was too drained for another fight. “Okay,” I said.
Mom’s face softened. It shone. Now it was time for Kerry to appear. The phone seemed poised to ring. I had apparently been forgiven. Our hopes were riding high. All through the speech and the celebration and the applause, nestled there on that comfortable sofa in Mom’s cozy house, I felt a remarkable harmony arise between us. It was our last chance for redemption.
Of course we didn’t know then that the phone wouldn’t ring, that the books would remain in the boxes, and that just five days after Kerry’s rousing delivery, the Swift Boat ads would hit the airwaves, attacking Kerry at the heart of his image. And that in November he would lose and in December Mom would die.
This was still July, the trees were thick with foliage, and all our dreams lay within our grasp. Bathing in that sea of tranquility born of absolution, I was ready to do anything to show my gratitude, even if it meant agreeing to write Mom’s memoir. And not just in any fashion, but just the way she wanted it written, with just the right slant.
And it would end like this:
.
She is entering her last days, the memory of Roy Lee fresh like a blush, her mind calm, her heart full. There is even a little twinkle in her eyes. From her porch she gazes up at the vast blue sky and detects a tiny speck that grows into a plane, an antique BT-13, its wings glinting in the sun as it circles and prepares to land, then touches down in the field below her house. The cockpit swings open and out pops Roy Lee, dapper in his flightcap, aviator glasses, and Von Hindenburg scarf. He raises up with hisstrong,agile arms and leaps acrobatically to the ground, racing up the hill and onto the porch, where he smiles and offers a bow.
“Got you bags packed, young lady?” he asks.
“Of course,” she says, as he whisks her off into the bright Caribbean-blue sky.
Tim Keppel’s fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Literary Review, Mid-American Review, New Delta Review, Prism International, The Dublin Quarterly, El Malpensante, and elsewhere. The Spanish translation of his novel A Family Matter was recently published by Alfaguara, as was his story collection Earthquake Watch. Keppel teaches literature at the Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia
