Missing Mom (42 page)

I stifled nervous laughter. My hands were small fists drawn up inside the long sweater sleeves. Like a child in distress I’d drawn my feet up beneath me in the breakfast nook. Watching this man I scarcely knew swabbing at his shoes where a tomcat had sprayed him I felt so powerful a wave of tenderness, for a dazed moment I didn’t know where I was.

“It’s other cats he smells on me, maybe. Dogs! There’s at least six dogs, mostly boxers, at our place. That big old shingle-board farmhouse on North Fork, probably you’ve seen it?—kind of an eyesore, used to be a farm property owned by some relatives of mine now it’s going to be torn down next year and all that land made into a subdivision. It’s about a mile north of that eyesore trailer court, where they never take the Christmas lights down.”

I was astonished. “That’s where you live?”

One of the doomed old farmhouses with stone foundations from the 1800s, in that beautiful hilly countryside. Not sleazy-chic North Fork Villas as I’d assumed.

Strabane explained that his life was “complicated” at the present time. Not his professional-cop life but his personal life. “I went to live with my grandfather last year, poor old guy couldn’t handle all the family he’d acquired. We’re talking about eighty years of acquisition. His oldest daughter, not living now, had this stepson from one of her hippie communes, this guy has been in the wind for twenty years but they keep waiting for him to return like the Messiah. It’s Reuben’s wife, this sweet sad woman who’d liked to think of herself as my mother, when I was in need of a mother which hasn’t been lately, of course, and what keeps turning up of her family from West Virginia including some so-called cousins of hers that, looking at me, seeing who I am, they can smell the fact I’m a cop, start acting really nervous. Plus there’s remnants from Grandpa’s old bluegrass band, and old lovers of his must’ve been underage when he knew them, and ‘fans’ that show up and pitch tents in the pasture like the year is 1965 and we’re into Flower Power. Jesus! My grandpa the celebrity, I think you met once—Jimmy Friday?”

Now I was truly astonished. “Jimmy
Friday
? Your
grandfather
?”

“‘Friday’ was never his name. ‘Harold Burkholtz’—my mother’s name was ‘Burkholtz’—was his name. The audience my grandfather was aiming for with his special brand of country-and-western music, he figured ‘Jimmy Friday’ had a hell of a better chance.”

It seemed a lifetime ago, I’d interviewed the elderly bluegrass performer with the frothy white hair and slyly sexual manner, on the occasion of his memoir
Songs My Daddy Taught Me: The Mostly True Tales of Jimmy Friday
. After last May, I hadn’t given Jimmy Friday another thought. To remember him now, the sweetly seductive old man eyeing me so wistfully, clasping my hand in his and lifting it to kiss in parting, was an effort like trying to haul a dream up into consciousness even as it’s sinking downward to oblivion. Strabane was saying he hated to disillusion me but his Burkholtz grandfather hadn’t any background remotely like the one “Jimmy Friday” had invented for himself, that seemed to have been modeled after the life of Johnny Cash, the man he’d most admired and envied.

I saw Strabane’s mouth moving. I saw him smile. I saw that his nose was just slightly asymmetrical, must’ve been broken. I saw that his skin was olive-dark, there were fine, almost invisible scars at his hairline. And the hairline was corroding, at the temples. And the bristly-oily hair was threaded with gray, at the temples. The eyes, the kindly-moist eyes. The slightly red-veined eyes. The eyes of a man who has seen too much and who knows too much but maybe he won’t tell you, for he is kind. I wasn’t following much of what he was telling me about Jimmy Friday, the doomed farmhouse on the North Fork Road, six—six?—boxer dogs of whom one was the mother, the rest were pups. I was thinking how the Nikki who’d interviewed Jimmy Friday had been so
young
. Had been so
ignorant
. Fuming and cursing at her recorder. Playing the damned tape, trying to make sense of the interview, and Mom had still been alive.

That morning. “Jimmy Friday.” My last chance to have saved my mother.

Strabane was saying he’d been married, too. For three years, in his early twenties. A girl he’d met on a blind date arranged by an army buddy. He’d been in the U.S. Army stationed in New Jersey and in Oklahoma and in South Korea—where the average American didn’t know the U.S. has had soldiers for fifty years!—and in all these places “nothing was happening, and always the same way every day.” His marriage hadn’t lasted. Fell apart like wetted Kleenex. His wife who’d claimed to love him for all her life got herself pregnant at an embarrassing time when they’d been like 50,000 miles apart for months but they’d decided, for the sake of their families, to pretend the baby was his no matter the baby turned out to look nothing like him. But the consequence was, Ross Strabane was financially responsible for this dependent child, he was the legal husband and father and even when Robin divorced him, and was living with another guy, and later another guy acting as “legal counsel” for some questionable tribe of Indians hoping to be legitimized to operate a casino in the Catskills, still the state would not recognize any change in Ross Strabane’s status. The state did not allow DNA testing after the fact, out of a legitimate fear that welfare rolls would be even worse than they are now. “I can see the logic of it. It’s a social necessity. Half the guys paying child support might not be willing to pay if they learned who their kids’ actual fathers are. As a police officer, I can see the point. But as a civilian, I wonder if it’s fair. For sure, when it’s you, it hurts like hell. Not that I would not have paid. Not that I would not have bailed out my ex-wife when she was desperate. I would have, and I did. Now the boy is almost eighteen, they’re living in Yonkers and he’s been twice in juvie hall, twice in drug rehab and dropped out of high school without graduating and his goal in life is to be the ‘white Snoop Doggy Dog.’ Anyway my ex-wife is remarried. She will make her way like a sleepwalker. Just that, by the time I was twenty-eight it was like that part of my life was finished. You know what a phantom limb is, you don’t have the limb, you have just the pain. So I went into police work. This work has saved my life. I told you, Nikki, there was this older detective who’d investigated a case involving my family, he’s retired now, but I keep in touch, he’s been a model to me, it’s like he is always with me, working on a case. Because what I do is mostly in my head, not on foot. I need to make connections. I need to work backward from what there is, which is somebody hurt, I work back to who did the hurting, and why. What I respect about police work, it has its own dimension. I never talk about my work with civilians. I have friends not on the force, I’ve had women friends, I don’t talk about it. Women have objected, they say that I am ‘secretive’—‘in my own head’—‘weird.’ But I don’t talk about it. With you, I needed to talk about certain things but no more, that case is closed. Another thing women object to, your time at work. Well, I’m a detective, I’m not a meter reader. I’m not a mailman. I don’t have the same schedule every day. I can work ten-twelve hours on a new case and sometimes longer. I can’t sleep, at the start of a case. Sometimes I sleep in my car, if it’s an emergency. The way we located Lynch, it was an emergency. Because he would have hurt other people. He’d have hurt his relatives if he knew they’d rat on him. His old grandma, he’d have hurt. If there’s like a kidnapping, an abduction. You have to act fast if there’s any chance the victim is alive. Your own life, your ‘private’ life, is nothing.” Strabane paused. He’d been speaking rapidly, passionately. I had never heard any man speak in such a way. “Any woman I loved, I would want to protect her from such knowledge. You can see that, Nikki, right?”

Yes. I could see that. But I couldn’t reply, I’d drawn my legs up beneath me in the breakfast nook in a kind of paralysis.

Strabane said, “I know it’s hard for you to be around me. I know, I remind you of certain things. But if you knew me better, I wouldn’t.” He paused. He ran both his hands through his bristly hair. “Each time you saw me, like around the house, the meaning of me would be lessened. The past would be lessened.” Again Strabane paused. He was watching me closely. Like a man who’d backed himself into a corner, who had words to utter he could not fully comprehend, he said, finally, “The future becomes wider, see? As the past is lessened.”

I untangled my legs. I went away. I went to my parents’ bedroom where I’d left a selection of Dad’s neckties, I had intended to give to Wally Szalla months ago. Except knowing that Wally wasn’t the type. No Szalla was the type to wear a dead man’s cast-off ties. I brought them to Strabane in the kitchen, and told him to take his pick, as many as he liked: “They belonged to my dad. Maybe his taste is like yours.”

A shiny zigzag blue and silver tie. A Madras tie, a gift from me in maybe 1975. An oddly narrow tie with dizzying red checks that, when you looked more carefully, were tiny elephants. Another narrow tie, brass-colored, that looked as if it had been braided out of thistles.

Strabane said, “These are great, Nikki. I can use them all.”

He’d been holding the neckties up, admiring. The ugliest of all, the braided-brass, he held against his chest. I reached for his hand, both his hands. I gripped them hard. They were nearly twice the size of my hands, but I gripped them hard. I embarrassed Strabane by pressing my warm, wet face against his hands.

“Don’t leave, Strabane. Just yet.”

There was a thin razor-scar across the knuckles of Strabane’s left hand, but I took no notice at the time.

In my apartment in Chautauqua Falls, I found my inscribed copy of
Songs My Daddy Taught Me: The Mostly True Tales of Jimmy Friday
. On its cover was a close-up photo of a sly-smiling elderly gentleman with a full head of very white hair, gripping and plucking at a guitar in a suggestive way. Elderly Jimmy Friday wore country-and-western attire, wide-brimmed straw hat, string tie, a belt with a large silver buckle
JF
. He was a remarkably handsome man, despite his creased and weatherworn skin. He was winking at the camera, and wetting his lips with the tip of his tongue.

I brought the book home to show to Strabane that evening.

“‘To Beautous Nicole From ’ One & Only ‘Jimmy Friday!’”

Strabane read the inscription aloud in a tone I could not determine. Later I would come to recognize this tone as guarded, wary. A tone that signaled the sensible query
What kind of bullshit is this?

Strabane leafed through the pages of his grandfather’s memoir, shaking his head. He’d read the book, various pieces which had been previously published as interviews, then refashioned by a series of ghost writers, as a kind of tall-tale chronicle, the biography of someone who might have existed as “Jimmy Friday” if there’d ever been a “Jimmy Friday.” He said, “People are all the time asking, if there’s somebody ‘known’ in your family, are you proud of him? You can’t give the true answer.”

“Which is?”

“Which is you never meet the person you’re supposed to be ‘proud of.’ It’s only out there, in people who don’t know him.”

“But your grandfather’s music is real. I’ve listened to it, my mother and some of her friends loved it, lots of people I know.” I was feeling emotional suddenly. Protective of the flirty old man who wasn’t here to defend himself.

Strabane said, “If bluegrass doesn’t drive you crazy it can be pretty impressive. Right.” He looked back at the floridly handwritten inscription on the title page. “One thing Grandpa is right about, ‘Beautous Nicole.’ The old guy got that right, at least.”

I foresaw that, in time, it would come to seem that Jimmy Friday had been the agent to bring Ross Strabane and me together, not a meth-head murderer named Ward Lynch.

“Ohhh, yes! I remember all my honeymoon couples.”

May was such a dismal rainy month in upstate New York, impulsively we decided to drive a thousand miles south to Key West, Florida, where the Windward Inn still existed! And here was the owner’s elderly mother Carmen peering at the photos of my parents spread before her at the front desk. Assuring me, “Of course I remember your parents, dear. Not their names of course but their faces. They were so happy together, always holding hands. This, with Oscar the parrot, who’s no longer with us I’m sorry to say, was taken in our courtyard where you can have breakfast tomorrow. Oh your mother, what a lovely woman! She made friends with Oscar right away. He had a way of pecking some people but not your mother. I can see that you take after her, dear. Doesn’t she, Eduardo?”

The middle-aged son Eduardo, owner and manager of the Windward, was looking on with a faint, forced smile. It was off-season in Key West and both son and mother were eager to please their guests from the north who’d only just checked in. I would note Carmen’s tact, not inquiring if Gwen and Jonathan Eaton were still living.

What Mom had fondly remembered as a quaintly small “historic” hotel was the most decrepit hotel on South Street, so overgrown with crimson bougainvillea your first impression was there wasn’t any structure beneath, only just gorgeous flaming blossoms through which white-shuttered windows and white wrought-iron balconies too small to be anything more than ornamental protruded magically. When we drove up, Strabane leaned over to squint through the bug-splattered windshield of his car, doubtfully.

“This is it? ‘Windward’?”

“I think it must be. Oh.”

“Well. It’s something we can afford.”

We
. As if
we
had had experience with myriad things affordable and non-, in the brief time we’d begun to have experiences together.

The Windward Inn was at the wrong end of South Street and on the wrong side of South Street with no access to the beach but if you could appreciate funny, funky places it had its charms. In the lobby were palm fronds and enormous seashell decorations, potted orange trees with dust-laden leaves, a pungent odor of gardenia air freshener and insecticide beneath. There was no longer the living Oscar but a stuffed brightly feathered replica in a bamboo cage near the stairs. In the off-season, rates had been enticingly lowered yet much of the hotel appeared to be deserted. Strabane and I had registered at the desk as two distinct entities yet Carmen insisted upon assigning us the “honeymoon” room, with a view of the shabbily romantic courtyard below.

Carmen, in her mid-seventies, had dyed-black hair drawn back into a sleek chignon in which a single red rose had been twined. She wore flamenco reds and oranges, spike-heeled open-toed shoes. When she moved, hoop earrings swung at her ears and a dozen glittery bracelets jingled on her arms. Each time she sighted me she called out gaily, “Such a pretty girl! Like your mother. And your father, too—such a gentleman. Ohhh yes, I remember all my honeymoon couples.”

I asked Strabane if he believed Carmen.

“Mmmm.”

I laughed, and kissed him. I liked it that my lover was a man who believed almost no one, almost nothing, almost never. My mother would have pretended in her childlike-Feather way to be shocked by such skepticism but in her heart she’d have agreed. She’d have whispered in my ear
Nikki, he’s the one
.

As Mother’s Day approached in Mt. Ephraim I could not sleep. I was terrified of the thoughts that assailed me and the phantom smells: the butcher shop on Mohigan Street. I was depressed by the cold wet spring but anxious on those occasional days when the sun appeared and the air warmed and lilacs began to bud. Strabane came to find me in the kitchen in the middle of the night, where I was curled in a corner of the breakfast nook like a child with my bare feet drawn up beneath me. He pushed in beside me, awkwardly he held me. He didn’t speak for a while and then he said, “Maybe we’d better go away for a while. I have a week coming.”

He wasn’t an impulsive man. But he could behave as if he was, for my sake.

“But I want to help you drive. I love to drive.”

“My car, I drive. Being a passenger doesn’t work for me.”

It was a dreamy trip. It was a trip into the future: cold rain and fish-belly skies gradually changing to sun, ceramic-blue skies, startlingly warm air. From time to time, Strabane did allow me to drive while he nodded off in the seat beside me. I smiled when, asking him if he’d slept, he said, “Not really. Just closed my eyes.”

We listened to CDs: Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell. We listened to
The Best of Jimmy Friday’s Bluegrass
. In the interstices of the CDs, we talked. Through Pennsylvania, through Maryland and D.C. and Virginia and the Carolinas. Through the length of Florida to the very tip south of Miami, and at last Route 1, narrow, mesmerizing, through the succession of Florida keys floating in the pure-blue Gulf of Mexico, to the southernmost, Key West, we talked.

Often, it would seem that we talked aimlessly. Knowing that, if a subject was evoked, it might be dropped because it would be taken up at a later time.

On the morning of the second day of the drive Strabane mentioned, as if casually, that he’d been offered a job in Buffalo. A promotion to Detective First Class with the Buffalo PD. He did not tell me, but I could surmise, that the promotion had to do with the excellent work he’d done in the Eaton case.

The Eaton case
. In the end, it had turned out well for the professionals. It had turned out very well. I understood that Detective Strabane couldn’t help but feel pride in his work, in its well-publicized conclusions. I understood that my mother’s death, and even the brutality of her death, had made this success sweeter, in some quarters.

I understood and I was not bitter, I think. In even the most secret recesses of my heart, that Strabane would never penetrate, I did not resent his success but was happy for him. I think.

I waited for Strabane to ask me if I might want to come with him.

I waited, and wondered what I would say.

At the Windward Inn we went to bed late, and we slept late. Often during the day we put the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on the door. We ate in outdoor cafés, Cuban and Cajun food. Strabane drank Mexican beer, and I drank sparkling water. Once on a whim I ordered a Singapore sling but after the first swallow I pushed it from me. “Not good?” Strabane asked, and I said, “Too good.”

On Mother’s Day there was early-morning rain, then the sun came out bursting like an egg yolk. We had a late breakfast in the shabby courtyard. Oh, but it was a beautiful little courtyard, I thought. No matter the crumbling stucco, the cracked flagstones where weeds poked through. No matter the white wrought-iron tables and chairs needed repainting. The gorgeous crimson bougainvillea that, close up, had leaves riddled with tiny insects. Strabane was reading the Miami newspaper. I half-shut my eyes seeing in a corner of the courtyard my young mother, not yet my mother, a large upright gaily feathered bird with a hooked beak perched on her shoulder. I heard her laughter which would have a small cry of alarm in it, for surely the parrot’s claws hurt her shoulder, the parrot is a sizable bird. I saw my young father, not yet my father, looking on vigilantly, to rescue her if the parrot should become belligerent.

A memorial service was planned for my mother, scheduled for mid-June. By that time, I would have moved out of the house at 43 Deer Creek Drive, I thought. The house would be listed with a realtor. Clare and I would have made our final choices, what to take with us from the house, what to put in storage, what to dispose of.

During the time we were away, Strabane made numerous telephone calls. Some of these were professional, others seemed to be personal. I made only a single call, to Clare.

“Nikki! Where the hell are you!”

“In Key West. At the Windward Inn.”

“The Windward Inn? Where Mom and Dad went?”

“It’s beautiful, Clare. It’s changed from what Mom remembered but it’s very attractive, romantic…”

“I thought you’d done something like that. Rob and I both thought. I’m pissed at you for not telling me but I don’t blame you for getting out. I don’t blame you at all, sweetie.” Clare paused. It sounded as if she was in a bowling alley. “This weather! Hear that thunder?”

“Here, it’s eighty degrees. The sky is clear. The air smells of bougainvillea and oranges.”

“Are you with that man?”

“‘That man’—who?”

“The detective. You know perfectly well who.”

“Clare, he isn’t married.”

“Isn’t he! That’s a change.”

I couldn’t determine if Clare was angry with me or in fact happy for me. I was reminded of her vehemence when she’d been captain of the girls’ high school basketball team and felt the need to speak sharply to girls who’d made errors on the court even though the team had managed to win.

There was a need to scold, but also to celebrate.

I love the water, it holds you up.

Well, maybe. If you can swim.

On our drive south we’d stayed at motels and, in the morning, swam for a festive half-hour or so in the pools. Strabane was a fast, sloppy swimmer. He reminded me of a sea lion, over-large and graceless. I watched him in the corner of my eye. I stared at him openly when he wasn’t watching me. For we were in that stage when the sight of the other still has the power to shock.

Covered in dark wiry hairs like a pelt. His chest, his forearms, his abdomen, his legs and even the backs of his toes. There was a swirl of spiky hairs hidden beneath his swim trunks, at his groin. It was curious how his face and forearms were olive-dark and the rest of his body pale. At a motel in Georgia he clambered from a pool streaming water, making a snuffling noise through his nose and rubbing his eyes, a man I’d never seen before, who excited and frightened me.

Outside Daytona Beach, we were leaving a restaurant to return to our car when we heard raised voices, saw several loutish guys bunched about two girls, and Strabane listened, and went over to them, and said something to them, and abruptly the guys backed off and got into their car and departed. And when I asked Strabane what he’d said to them, he said, “What I always say. ‘Some problem here?’”

The Windward Inn! That it still existed, that I could climb the creaky stairs my parents had climbed, stand in the very place in the courtyard where my parents had stood thirty-five years ago, seemed to me wonderful. How badly I wished that I could tell Mom.

I’d have told her that Carmen remembered her and Dad. Even if it wasn’t true, Mom would have wished to believe me.

Strabane bought an inexpensive disposable camera. We asked strangers to take pictures of us including one of us in the courtyard of the Windward Inn. I had to wonder what the fate of these snapshots would be after thirty-five years.

Such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. You know the sun is there but you can’t see a thing.

It was the day following Mother’s Day.

In the man’s arms I did not think of any other man. I did not think of any other place. I did not think of May in Mt. Ephraim: the sweet-sickly smell of lilac that had the power to make me physically ill. I did not think of the eleven-year-old girl pushing open the door to her mother’s bedroom and the last, fleeting moment before she saw what lay inside. I did not think of pushing open the door to our garage and that last, fleeting moment before I saw what lay inside. Eagerly I kissed the man who was kissing me, the man in my arms, I held him tight like a drowning woman. I thought
This is now, I am here. This is now.

Next morning I slept heavily as if my bones had turned to lead and my eyes were stuck shut. I was naked in an unfamiliar bed and there was a naked man beside me whose name, for a panicky moment, I could not have said. I felt the mattress ease and lift as he slipped from the bed. I understood that he was being thoughtful, or cautious. I heard the floorboards creak as he padded about barefoot. I heard the door to the room being opened and shut quietly and when some time later he returned, I was still in bed and probably I hadn’t moved. Through shut eyelids I saw the man standing indecisively at the foot of the brass bed looking at me.

“Nikki?”

He waited, watching me. I was at the bottom of a pool of water, I was pushing myself up to the surface. My lungs ached, I’d been holding my breath for so long.

“Nikki. Hey.”

Eventually, I came to the surface.

We were walking on the beach. The sand was crumbly, my feet sank into the sand and I was having trouble walking. Circling in the air above a pier were prehistoric-looking birds: pelicans. The sky above the Gulf of Mexico was purely blue, beautiful. I was very happy and yet a sudden sensation of weakness came over me, a terrible sensation of sickness, emptiness. I told the man I was with that I had to return to the hotel. I apologized, I had to leave him. Stumbling and staggering I returned to the Windward Inn. I returned to our room and lay on the bed. It was a bed with a slightly sunken mattress and a jiggly brass frame. It was a bed you would call quaint. I was very weak lying on this bed though it was a comfort to me. Through slats in the part-broken blind waning sunlight glowed. I wanted badly to be alone but the man followed me and came to ease himself onto the bed beside me. The weight of him in the bed! He was so heavy, he was so warm, he was breathing so audibly, almost for a moment I resented him. Intruding into my grief as if to steal it from me.

He gripped my hand. My fingers were icy and unresponsive. I thought
You can’t warm me, I am ice
. I remembered how I had run from Mom where she had fallen in the garage and I had paused to look back at her and saw that she was alive, she was alive and breathing and her eyelids were fluttering open. She was looking at me—she saw me! She tried to speak my name. She was very weak from losing so much blood but she had strength enough to call my name. But when I returned to her, and tried to lift her, she had died, it was too late. And so I had failed her after all. And then I had abandoned her to strangers. I thought
I am on trial and the trial will never end
.