Between Them Read online

  And still, in a way, even this news did not change things. The persuasive power of normal life is extravagant. To accept less than life when less is not overwhelmingly upon you is—at least for some—unacceptable.

  My mother and I had several talks. She was getting out of the hospital, and I—at least in my memory—stayed and walked out with her before I went back to my Massachusetts job. We made plans for another visit. She would come north to me when she was strong enough. We would imagine this as a future, even if it wasn’t quite enough.

  I resumed my teaching and talked to her most days, though the thought that she was getting worse, that bad things were going on, and I couldn’t stop them, made me occasionally miss calling. It quickly became an awful time for me, when life felt to be edging toward disastrous.

  She stayed out of the hospital during that time—September—went for blood transfusions, which made her feel better, but were foreboding. I know she went out with her friends. Had company in. Lived as if life would go on. And then in early October she came to me. I drove to Albany, picked her up, and drove us back to my rented house in Vermont. It was misty. Most of the leaves were down. In the house—an old remodeled barn—it was cold but cheery. I took her out to dinner in Bennington just to get warm. She said she’d had another transfusion for the trip and would stay until its benefits wore off or she became weak again—if that happened.

  And that was how we did that. One more kind of regular life between us. I went to campus, did my work, came home nights. She stayed in the big house with my dog. Read books, magazines. Fixed lunches for herself. Watched the Dodgers (this time) beat the Yankees in the Series. Watched Sadat be assassinated. Looked out the window. At night we talked—never serious or worrying things. With Kristina, who was working in New York and commuting on weekends, we went on country drives, looked at antiques, invited visitors, lived together as we had in places far and wide all the years. I didn’t know what else we were supposed to do, how else such a time was meant to pass.

  On a sunny day in early November, when she had been with me three weeks and we were, in fact, out of things to do and talk about, she sat down beside me on the couch and said, “Richard, I’m not sure how much longer I can look after myself. I’m sorry. But it’s just the truth.”

  “Does it worry you?” I said.

  “Well,” my mother said, “yes. I’m not scheduled for Presbyterian Village until next year. And I’m not quite sure what I’m going to be able to do until then.”

  “What would you like to do?” I said.

  She looked away then, out the window, down the hill, where the trees were bare and fog was shifting. “I don’t exactly know,” she said.

  “Maybe you’ll start to feel better,” I said.

  “Well. Yes. I could. I suppose that’s not impossible,” she said.

  “I think it’s possible,” I said. “I do.”

  “Well. OK,” my mother said.

  “If you don’t,” I said, “if by Christmas you don’t feel you can do everything for yourself, you can move in with us. I’m going back to Princeton. You can live there.”

  And I saw in my mother’s eyes, then, a light. A kind of light, anyway. Recognition. Concession. Willingness. Reprieve of another kind.

  “Are you sure about that?” she said and looked at me uncertainly. My mother’s eyes were very brown.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” I said. “You’re my mother. I love you.”

  “Well,” she said and nodded, took in a breath, let it out. No tears. “I’ll begin to think toward that, then. I’ll make some plans about my furniture.”

  “Well, wait though,” I said. And this is a sentence I wish, above all sentences in my life, I had never said. Words I wish I’d never heard. “Don’t make your plans yet,” I said. “You might feel better by then. It might not be necessary to come to Princeton.”

  Richard and Edna, East Haven, Vermont, July 4, 1976

  “Oh,” my mother said. And whatever had suddenly put a light in her eyes suddenly went away. And her worries resumed. What might lie between now and later rose again. “I see,” she said. “All right.”

  I could’ve not said that. I could’ve said, “Yes, make your plans. In whatever way all this works out, it’ll be just fine. I’ll see to it.”

  But that is what I didn’t say. I deferred instead to something else, to some other future, and at least in retrospect I know what that future was. I think she did, too. You could say that in those days I had witnessed her facing death, saw it take her nearly out beyond her limits, feared it myself, feared all that I knew, and that I steadfastly clung to the possibility of her life. Or else you could say that I recognized something much more likely. I’ll never know for sure. But the truth is that anything we ever could’ve done for each other after that, passed by in those moments and was gone. Even together we were once again alone.

  WHAT REMAINS CAN BE TOLD QUICKLY. In a day or two I drove her back to Albany. She was too cold in my house, she said. She couldn’t stay warm, and would be better at home in Little Rock. Though there was not heat enough anywhere to make her warm. She looked pale. When I left her at the airport gate she cried, stood and watched me leaving back up the long corridor. She waved. I waved. It was the last time I would see her that way. On her feet. In the world. We didn’t know that. But we knew something was coming.

  And in six weeks she was dead. She never got to Princeton. Whatever was wrong with her just took over. “My body’s betrayed me” is one thing I remember her saying. Another was, “My chances now are slim and none.” And that was true. I came home to Little Rock to sit with her in the hospital, to try to amuse her, remind her of things we’d done, talk to her about my father, ask her to fill in parts of the past—hers and his and theirs—things I didn’t know, but which she declined to do as she slipped further away from me into a long, calm sleep, which one day did not end. I never saw her dead. I didn’t want to. I simply took the hospital’s word when the nurse called early one December morning, just before her birthday.

  But, as I said, I saw her face death over and over through that autumn. And because I did, I believe now that witnessing death faced with dignity and courage does not confer either of those—only pity and helplessness and fear. All the rest is just private—moments and messages the world would not be better off to know.

  Does one ever have a “relationship” with one’s mother? I think not. We—my mother and I—were never bound together by much that was typical, not typical duty, regret, guilt, embarrassment, etiquette. Love, which is never typical, sheltered everything. We expected it to be reliable, and it was. We were always ready to say “I love you,” as if a time would come when she would want to hear that, or I would, or that each of us would want to hear ourselves say it to the other, only for some reason—as certainly happened—that would not be possible.

  My mother and I look alike. Full, high forehead. Same chin, same nose. There are pictures to show it. In myself I see her, hear her laugh in mine. In her life there was no particular brilliance, no celebrity. No heroics. No one, crowning achievement to swell the heart. There were bad things enough: a childhood that did not bear strict remembering; a husband she loved forever and lost; a life to follow that did not require much comment. But somehow she made possible for me my truest affections, as an act of great literature bestows upon its devoted reader. And I have known that moment with her we would all like to know, the moment of saying, Yes. This is what it is. An act of knowing that confirms life’s finality and truest worth. I have known that. I have known any number of such moments with her, known them at the instant they occurred, and at this moment as well. I will, I assume, know them forever.

  Parker, Richard, and Edna, Jackson, Mississippi, 1945

  Afterword

  As I said at the beginning, these two memoirs were written thirty years apart. The one regarding my mother was written in the near aftermath of her death, in 1981. The other I wrote only recently, fifty-five years after my father di
ed in 1960. I have placed them in the order found here because records and shared memories of my father’s life stretch more deeply into the past than those associated with my mother; whereas my mother’s life stretched much further toward the present. The length of their life together and the length of their life with me, and the extent of my mother’s life lived alone, have seemed best represented by encountering my father first and my mother second.

  I have always admired Auden’s poem “La Musée des Beaux Arts” for its acute wisdom that life’s most important moments are often barely noticed by others, if noticed at all. Auden’s poem considers Brueghel’s famous painting The Fall of Icarus, in which Icarus is shown floundering in the sea, following his plummet—his fate unobserved by ploughmen tilling their fields on a nearby shore. “. . . Everything turns away,” Auden writes, resignedly. Both poem and painting offer their combined visions—rimed with pathos and irony—as an enduring truth of life: the world often doesn’t notice us. This understanding has been a crucial urge for most of what I’ve written in fifty years. Mine has been a life of noticing and being a witness. Most writers’ lives are.

  The fact that lives and deaths often go unnoticed has specifically inspired this small book about my parents and set its task. Our parents’ lives, even those enfolded in obscurity, offer us our first, strong assurance that human events have consequence. Here we are, after all. The future is unpredictable and hazardous, but our parents’ lives both enact us and help distinguish us. My own belief in lived life’s final lack of transcendance always turns me to thoughts of my parents. In difficult moments, long after their deaths, I often experience the purest longing for them—for their actuality. So, to write about them, to not turn away, is not only a means to remedy my longing by imagining them near, but is also to point toward that actuality, which—once again—is where my understanding of importance begins.

  Has it been my hope to testify to my parents’ lasting-ness? To their greater-than-obvious importance? In another son’s hands, a memoir might do that—try to confer an extra “dimension” where one might not have been evident before. I, however, have tried not to make grand claims for my parents. If anything, I’ve tried to be cautious, so that my own acts of telling about them and their influence on me not distort who they were. I’ve thus tried, as best I could, to write only about what I factually knew and did not know. My parents were, after all, not made of words. They were not literary instruments employable to conjure something larger. Lastingness seems foreign to them and to the sense they had of themselves. If you had known my parents, I’m comfortable you and I could come to different assessments of them. But my hope is that by this writing they would simply be recognizable as the two people I say they were. At day’s end, my fondest wish is that my notice of them will ignite thoughts in a reader’s mind that my parents can partly, usefully occupy.

  I have no children, and what I know of children and childhood and of being a parent, I know almost entirely from being my parents’ son. I believe that almost any child, except the most self-involved, perceives his or her parents as separate people—separate from each other and from oneself. For that reason it did not occur to me to write about my parents in any way but as individuals, rather than as a parental “unit.” What I didn’t anticipate, however, was that as close as they were to one another, how I perceive them is much the way they experienced their own lives—as being alone together. All parents must feel this to some extent, since all humans seem to. Between Them, this book’s title, is meant, in part, to suggest that by being born I literally came between my parents, a virtual place where I was sheltered and adored as long as they were alive. But it is also meant, in part, to portray their ineradicable singleness—both in marriage, and in their lives as my parents.

  When people ask me about my childhood I always say, as I’ve testified above, that I had a wonderful one, and that my parents were wonderful parents. Nothing about this has changed because of this writing. Although what I have come to understand is that within the charmed circumference of “wonderful,” that which was most intimate, most important, most satisfying and necessary to each of my parents transpired almost exclusively between them. This is not an unhappy fact for a son to face. In most ways it’s heartening, since knowing that this is so preserves for me a hopeful mystery about life—the mystery which promises that even with careful notice, much happens that we do not understand.

  I have now lived more years than either my father or my mother lived. There is almost no one alive who knew them. And I am, for that reason, the only one who knows these stories and can preserve these memories—at least until now. When I think about my parents after writing about them, I am aware of many things they did and said in my presence and caused to happen that I have not chosen to include here. For instance, why I didn’t cry when my father died, and the long-lasting influence of that fact on my life over time. Or, what I suspect to have been the difficult and complex nature of my mother’s growing-up in proximity of her colorful but troublesome stepfather. Both of these seem to lead away from my parents, not toward a closer notice of them. But I can attest that I have excluded nothing for discretion or propriety’s sake, but only because one recollection or another didn’t seem important enough, or because a crucial, truthful balance would’ve been forsaken by including it. John Ruskin wrote that composition is the arrangement of unequal things. Thus the chore for the memoir writer is to compose a shape and an economy that gives faithful, reliable, if sometimes drastic, coherence to the many unequal things any life contains. As I have already, repeatedly said, humans comprise much more than anyone can tell about them. And as for living so long without my parents, all I can say is that the rueful injustice of not having them close to me for more of my life is a far less significant injustice than the one done to them—being forced to leave life early, so long before they could’ve grown tired of it.

  A friend said to me recently that to him my parents’ lives—lives you’ve now read about—seem sad. But, setting aside their relative brevity, my parents’ lives do not seem sad to me, nor do I believe they themselves would have thought that sadness characterized their days. There was sadness. But when they were together, including when I was with them (and often because of it), their life—I believe—seemed to them better than any life they could’ve expected, given how and where they’d begun. To say what this “better” life amounted to is in some ways a light I have tried to shed. Writing these two remembrances, indeed, has been a source of immense exhilaration for me—quite different from what I would’ve expected, given the longing I often experience. I was fortunate to have parents who loved each other and, out of the crucible of that great, almost unfathomable love, loved me. Love, as always, confers beauties.

  Finally, in totaling up the reasons to write a memoir, there must be admitted the me part that is alloyed into the middle of all I’ve told—my needs, for my purposes, enforcing my version of good sense and continuity between today and long ago—my urge to reconcile my self-back-then when my parents were alive, with my self-now, decades after they’ve died. The memoirist is never just the teller of other people’s stories, but is a character in those stories. So, to write about my parents long after they’ve gone inevitably discloses hollow places, failures, frailties, rents and absences in me, insufficiencies that the telling, itself, may have tried to put right or seal off, but may only have re-opened and left behind, absences that no amount of life or truthful telling can completely fill or conceal. These I agree to live with. Though when I turn to regard life—my own or others’—I now never fail to be struck, amid the onslaught of all that’s happened and still is happening, by how much that’s gone from me. Absences seem to surround and intrude upon everything. Though in acknowledging this, I cannot let it be a loss or even be a fact I regret, since that is merely how life is—another enduring truth we must notice.

  Acknowledgments

  I owe great thanks to my friends Geoffrey Wolff, Blake Morrison, Michael Ondaatje, Ma
ry Karr, Joyce Carol Oates, and to the incomparable Eudora Welty, who in writing so affectingly about their parents, have provided models for me and made such writing seem both feasible and possibly useful.

  I wish also to acknowledge and thank my loved ones both present and gone, who over years and against odds have made me realize that I am part of a large and embracing family. These relations include my late aunt Viva Haney; my cousins Elizabeth Fay and Carrol Wayne Norris; my cousins Emmett Carrol and Bobbie Jean Haney, Jim and Barbara Horton; and my more distant but precious cousins, the late Euleta and W. J. Bowden; their daughter, Mary Prewitt; her husband, Dr. Taylor Prewitt, and their son, Kendrick, and his wife, Dr. Lindsey Prewitt. I must also remember the Gibson girls, Elizabeth Hickman, Margaret Helen Cheek, and Bessie Fengler, in observance of their years of loving friendship to me and to Kristina, and to my mother. I remember also, with love, my late Uncle Buster—S. E. Shelley—who came to the fore, unasked.

  I am grateful to Inge Feltrinelli, Carlo Feltrinelli, and to Tomás Maldonado, for generously providing a room and a table in Villadeati, where I could finish this book.

  I wish to thank Dale Rohrbaugh, Bridget Read, Leisha MacDougall, and Jennifer Field for their indispensable acumen and friendship in times of need.

  I wish as well to thank my enduring friend Daniel Halpern who edited this book with sensitivity and grace. And I wish to thank Amanda Urban for her decades of never-flagging, never-uninteresting, and loving comradeship—which continues. My gratitude, as well, to Patricia Towers, who long ago encouraged me to write about my mother. And my undiminished gratitude to Ben Wilson, M.D., for his empathy, candor and uncommon decency, many years ago now.