Going Within (32 page)

She spoke of seeing God in and around everything. She described love and light and God in much the same way that my dad had done when he lay dying in the hospital. So, I thought this was probably her time.

Then she came home, bouncing back the way she always did. It was wonderfully mischievous of her.

Leaning over her chair on the day I left her, I thought I’d be humorous about the emptiness I was feeling.

“Listen,” I said, “do you think you can wait and not die till I come back from shooting my movie?”

“Your movie?” she said, perking up, though her eyes were unable to focus. “Where are you going to shoot your movie?” she asked.

“Baltimore,” I answered.

As though she knew something I didn’t know, she smiled and shrugged and said, “Baltimore? Oh, okay.”

That was all, but in that “Oh, okay” I heard something I didn’t understand.

The morning she died I woke up with a start. Then the phone rang. It was Mother’s nurse in California who said, “Your mom just took her last breath.” Suddenly I felt Mother next to me in my rented house in Baltimore. The TV suddenly switched on to static. I pulled myself out of bed. Then I heard her talk to me in my head. She wanted me to drive to our old house in Virginia. I blindly got dressed, called the assistant director, told him I wouldn’t be in that day, and got in the car. My mind was tumbling so fast. I remembered her expression when she said Baltimore. Then I realized—Mom and Dad had met in Baltimore. They had married in Baltimore. She taught dramatics there at Maryland College. Dad had attended Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He died at Johns
Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. And now I felt her next to me as I drove from this city of firsts for her, realizing this was the only way she could come back and die here. Because I was going to be in Baltimore, she had computed her decision to leave at the same time.

I should have recognized that light in her eye, I said to myself. I should have remembered that “Oh, okay” never meant yes with her. Yet if I had stayed in California with her, perhaps it would have prevented her from squaring the circle of her life.

I got in my rented car and went to our old house in Virginia. It looked the same. I sat in the car for a while and I felt Mother speak to me in my mind. Not in words, but in feelings. She urged me to go into the house to a drawer in an old cabinet and retrieve a letter. It was a drawer I had not known about. I opened it and found a letter she had written to me twenty-five years before. I couldn’t tell if it was a letter she had never mailed or a copy of one she had mailed. I opened it with real trepidation and read it.

The letter had to do with my daughter and my husband. Mother was warning me about certain things. I broke down and cried. Had I understood that letter twenty-five years before, it would have altered the course of my life.

I was eighteen years old and working in the chorus of a Broadway musical when I met my husband, Steve Parker. It happened after the show one night as I sat with some girlfriends in the restaurant bar across the street from the stage door. As soon as Steve walked in and sat down, I knew my life was to take a new course. Yes, he was handsome, almost overly charming, intelligent, and had azure eyes of a depth and perception that touched me immediately. But more than that, our connection had the shock of destiny to it. I have looked back many times at what happened between us—the things the letter warned me about—and I still conclude that it was meant to be and there was nothing I could have done to
alter or avoid the experience we were intended to have together.

Now I cried as I walked through the house feeling Mother and her wisdom in every room. Feeling how right she had been about so many things and how wrong I had been in not listening to her more. She slowly guided me through the house as though she was taking one last walk with me. This was the person who had given me life and now she was proceeding to another level of her own. It was the last time I would see the place as we had lived in it, and I felt we were doing it together.

I stopped in the living room with the white sofa and the red pillows—she loved that color combination. I sat down on it the way she used to. I crossed my legs as she used to. I felt that I was her. I thought about how much she had wanted to be a recognized actress. How much she had lived through me. I thought of her soft, measured voice reading me poetry. Why didn’t she pursue her dream? I wondered. Then I felt her say, “Because I wanted to be a mother more.”

It seemed so simple as I sat there on her sofa, reflecting on who she really was and might have been. Then I felt her tell me to go back to work, not to hold up production, not to keep people waiting. Again, the show had to go on. Warren and I might have believed we were not from a show-business family, but now in retrospect, because we have both lived out the unfulfilled fantasies of our parents, I think we had a greater inspirational motivation than the Barrymores or the Redgraves. And Mother and Daddy were just as theatrical in real life. They often seemed to perform their relationship, as though, in the absence of a real audience, they made our household the stage.

I sat for hours in the living room sobbing, feeling and remembering some of their dramas, which even transcended earthly reality! I went into the bedroom where Mother said Daddy had visited her soon after he passed on. She said she smelled his pipe and saw his
face quite clearly. It wasn’t entirely comforting, she said, because she wanted to be free of him and felt that even after death he was observing her. I went to the underwear drawer where she claimed he had placed a hidden valentine in between his socks for her. Valentine’s Day had been their special day, so she was never really certain whether the valentine was placed there before or
after
his death. She was perfectly prepared to accept this “after death” theatricality as proof that she would never be free of him. I walked away from the underwear drawer thinking that Mother had her theories of life after death and I had mine. One last time I passed through all the rooms and out of the house. I knew I’d never return. I didn’t think she would either. And she didn’t. For a theatrical life-after-death gesture she followed me back to Baltimore.

This is what happened.

When I returned to Baltimore that night, I lay in bed watching the swan outside my window, because it reminded me of her.

The house I was renting had an alarm system, but I didn’t know that and therefore hadn’t turned it on. Suddenly the alarm went off. I didn’t know what to do. I certainly didn’t know how to turn it off. Then I heard Mother in my head again. “The switch is in the closet in the guest room,” she said. I got up, went to the guest room, opened the closet, and there it was. I turned it off and got back into bed. I turned on the TV set. I couldn’t get a single station without static. Then the light in the living room, where I had placed the letter and other treasures retrieved from Mother’s belongings, began to dim slowly and come on again full force. When I walked into the room I could feel Mother. Once more the light dimmed and came back again full force.

She had always claimed to have an electromagnetic field that prevented her from wearing regular watches. They speeded up on her, she said.

Now I actually felt she was using her force field to
communicate with me. It was her way of saying, “I’m still here.”

That night was full of theatrical bells and whistles, lights and static. She exhibited all the special effects she longed for in her own life. As a matter of fact, by morning I was so amused at her antics that I nearly went outside and got the hose so I could turn the water on
her
and come full circle.

I feel that I came to a real resolution in my relationship with my mother. It took nearly sixty years. She was my stage mother, my insistent inspiration, the person whom I acted for, and in the end the one who released me from her own dreams. I would be an actress for myself now, and she could move on to another level of understanding.

GOING WITHIN

A Bantam Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition published May 1989
Bantam paperback edition/March 1990
Bantam reissue/November 1991

All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1989 by Shirley MacLaine.
Gatefold insert illustration by Alex Grey.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 88-47942.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.

eISBN: 978-0-307-76507-9

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

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