life.”
“She never wrote me a suicide note.”
“I don’t believe it. Sally, you’re actually jealous because I got all the suicide notes?”
“Well, yes. I am.”
When our father died Sally had flown from Mexico City to California. She went to Mama’s house and knocked on the door. Mama looked at her through the window but she wouldn’t let her in. She had disowned Sally years and years before.
“I miss Daddy,” Sally called to her through the glass. “I am dying of cancer. I need you now, Mama!” Our mother just closed the venetian blinds and ignored the banging banging on her door.
Sally would sob, replaying this scene and other sadder scenes over and over. Finally she was very sick and ready to die. She had stopped worrying about her children. She was serene, so lovely and sweet. Still, once in a while, rage grabbed her, not letting her go, denying her peace.
So every night then I began to tell Sally stories, like telling fairy tales.
I told her funny stories about our mother. How once she tried and tried to open a bag of Granny Goose potato chips, then gave up. “Life is just too damn hard,” she said and tossed the bag over her shoulder.
I told her how Mama hadn’t spoken to her brother Fortunatus for thirty years. Finally he asked her to lunch at the Top of the Mark, to bury the hatchet. “In his pompous ole head!” Mama said. She got him though. He forced her to have pheasant under glass and when it came she said to the waiter, “Hey, boy, got any ketchup?”
Most of all I told Sally stories about how our mother once was. Before she drank, before she harmed us. Once upon a time.
“Mama is standing at the railing of the ship to Juneau. She’s going to meet Ed, her new husband. On her way to a new life. It is 1930. She has left the depression behind, Granpa behind. All the sordid poverty and pain of Texas is gone. The ship is gliding, close to land, on a clear day. She is looking at the navy blue water and the green pines on the shore of this wild clean new country. There are icebergs and gulls.
“The main thing to remember is how tiny she was, only five foot four. She just seemed huge to us. So young, nineteen. She was very beautiful, dark and thin. On the deck of the ship she sways against the wind. She is frail. She shivers with cold and excitement. Smoking. The fur collar pulled up around her heart-shaped face, her jet black hair.
“Uncle Guyler and Uncle John had bought Mama that coat for a wedding gift. She was still wearing it six years later, so I got to know it. Burying my face in the matted nicotine fur. Not while she was wearing it. She couldn’t bear to be touched. If you got too close she’d put her hand up as if to ward off a blow.
“On the deck of the ship she feels pretty and grownup. She had made friends on the voyage. She had been witty, charming. The captain flirted with her. He poured her more gin that gave her vertigo and made her laugh out loud when he whispered, ‘You’re breaking my heart, you dusky beauty!’
“When the ship got into the harbor of Juneau her blue eyes filled with tears. No, I never once saw her cry either. It was sort of like Scarlett in Gone with the Wind. She swore to herself. No one is ever going to hurt me again.
“She knew that Ed was a good man, solid and kind. The first time she let him bring her home, to Upson Avenue, she had been ashamed. It was shabby; Uncle John and Granpa were drunk. She was afraid Ed wouldn’t ask her out again. But he held her in his arms and said ‘I am going to protect you.’
“Alaska was as wonderful as she had dreamed. They went in ski-planes into the wilderness and landed on frozen lakes, skied in the silence and saw elk and polar bears and wolves. They camped in the woods in summer and fished for salmon, saw grizzlies and mountain goats. They made friends; she was in a theatre group and played the medium in Blithe Spirit. There were cast parties and potlucks and then Ed said she couldn’t be in the theatre any more because she drank too much, acted in a manner that was beneath her. Then I was born. He had to go to Nome for a few months and she was alone with a new baby. When he got back he found her drunk, stumbling around with me in her arms. ‘He ripped you from my breast,’ she told me. He completely took over my care, fed me from a bottle. An Eskimo woman came in to watch me while he was at work. He told Mama she was weak and bad, like all the Moynihans. He protected her from herself from then on, didn’t let her drive or have any money. All she could do was walk to the library and read plays and mysteries and Zane Grey.
“When the war came you were born and we went to live in Texas. Daddy was a lieutenant on an ammunition ship, off of Japan. Mama hated being back home. She was out most of the time, drinking more and more. Mamie stopped working at Granpa’s office so that she could take care of you. She moved your crib into her room; she played with you and sang to you and rocked you to sleep. She didn’t let anybody near you, not even me.
“It was terrible for me, with Mama, and with Granpa. Or alone, most of the time. I got in trouble at school, ran away from one school, was expelled from two others. Once I didn’t speak for six months. Mama called me the Bad Seed. All her rage came down on me. It wasn’t until I grew up that I realized that she and Granpa probably didn’t even remember what they did. God sends drunks blackouts because if they knew what they had done they would surely die of shame.
“After Daddy got back from the war we lived in Arizona and they were happy together. They planted roses and gave you a puppy called Sam and she was sober. But already she didn’t know how to be with you and me. We thought she hated us, but she was only afraid of us. She felt it was we who had abandoned her, that we hated her. She protected herself by mocking us and sneering, by hurting us so we couldn’t hurt her first.
“It seemed that moving to Chile would be a dream come true for Mama. She loved elegance and beautiful things, always wished they knew ‘the right people.’ Daddy had a prestigious job. We were wealthy now, with a lovely house and many servants and there were dinners and parties with all the right people. She went out some at first but she was simply too scared. Her hair was wrong, her clothes were wrong. She bought expensive imitation antique furniture and bad paintings. She was terrified of the servants. She had a few friends that she trusted; ironically enough she played poker with Jesuit priests, but most of the time she stayed in her room. And Daddy kept her there.
“‘At first he was my keeper, then he was my jailer,’ she said. He thought he was helping her, but year after year he rationed drinks to her and hid her, and never ever got her any help. We never went near her, nobody did. She’d fly into rages, cruel, irrational. We thought nothing we did was good enough for her. And she did hate to see us do well, to grow and accomplish things. We were young and pretty and had a future. Do you see? How hard it was for her, Sally?”
“Yes. It was like that. Poor pitiful Mama. You know, I’m like her now. I get mad at everyone because they are working, living. Sometimes I hate you because you’re not dying. Isn’t that awful?”
“No, because you can tell me this. And I can tell you I’m glad it’s not me that is dying. But Mama never had a soul to tell anything to. That day, on the ship, coming into port, she thought she would. Mama believed Ed would be there always. She thought she was coming home.”
“Tell me about her again. On the boat. When she had tears in her eyes.”
“OK. She tosses her cigarette into the water. You can hear it hiss, as the waves are calm near the shore. The engines of the boat turn off with a shudder. Silently then, in the sound of the buoys and the gulls and the mournful long whistle of the boat they glide toward the berth in the harbor, banging
