Saturday's Child (57 page)

She was perplexed. She'd read my poems. She'd now read Kenneth's. He'd talked to her proudly about our Bloomsbury “open marriage,” which didn't shock her; she was a sophisticate accustomed to moving in European art circles. She knew he had lovers. “My gay brother,” she'd called
him, and “my lesbian sister,” he'd responded, as arm in arm after dinners they had careened tipsily ahead of Blake and me down the cobblestone streets of Vienna's First District, loudly singing “Ich grolle nicht” from Schumann's
Dichterliebe
together. She made it apparent—to me and subsequently to Kenneth—that she was in no way out to destroy our family. Rather, she wanted to earn a place in my life alongside it. I actually thought, for the space of that afternoon's conversation, that this time things might be possible. I arranged for the three of us to talk. After all, Kenny had said repeatedly that he could have understood if only I'd been involved with a woman …

Boom. Crash. Bang
. We hadn't even gone to bed together, but there were scenes, storms, weeping. … Look, we can do this shorthand, right? I mean, to hell with the details. You get the drift.

The holy family left Vienna with the adults barely on speaking terms and poor Blake in gloom. I recall feeling devastated, waving goodbye not just to Iliana but to the woman in myself I'd glimpsed, might have become, and knew now I never would be.

Yet this time there was a different factor. I had underestimated how seriously Iliana took her Taurus-horoscope characteristics. She was a stubborn little bull. She was also a romantic. Huge boxes of ivory lilies arrived for me at
Ms
. (raising eyebrows
there
). She phoned. She wrote. She was sure she could convince her brother Kenneth of the injustice of his position. I felt
wooed
. I realized I had never been desired to the point of being wooed before, and decided there was certainly something to it. Sixteen days later, like the battleship
Intrepid
, Iliana arrived in New York.

She'd come to give a poetry reading herself, at Womanbooks, then New York's feminist bookstore, but she remained for eleven days, having taken personal leave from the UN. She stayed with my friend Lois Sasson, who was becoming the godmother of my peripatetic adventures in passion. I'd met Lois in the early Seventies; we'd become buddies when I participated in a Broadway reading she produced to bring attention to the plight of “the Three Marias,” imprisoned Portuguese feminist writers.
⁷
I had seen her through some trying times of her own, but during this period, well—god
love
Lois, she put up with a lot. I was to stay with her during my various
exiles from home so often that we renamed her spare room the Robin Morgan Memorial Den.

But now Iliana was ensconced in it.

Sometimes life conspires with chance and compels you into living when you're doing your best to stay safely dead. Or, as the psychologist Mary Jane Sherfey wrote about sexuality, “the strength of the drive determines the force required to suppress it.”
⁸
During those eleven days, I had two overnight trips for speeches in Virginia and at Brandeis (during which time Lois took advantage of my absence to interrogate poor Iliana, concluding that the latter really loved me, and that she, Lois, approved—but that she worried Iliana, a Taurus like herself, might be possessive). Kenneth meanwhile made a good-faith effort to live up to his own rules: he, Blake, Iliana, and I had an indigestion-provoking Chinese dinner. Then he announced he could not sustain the proximity, for which I actually didn't blame him—wondering only why, for so many years,
I
had sustained it regarding
his
relationships. He took off for Key West again. As fate would have it, Blake went on a five-day school field trip. And Iliana de Costa and I became lovers, right in the Robin Morgan Memorial Den.

Breaking Up

What gets lost in such
Sturm und Drang
is the rhythm of daily life, which manages to persist no matter what. I leaf back through old datebooks in amazement at its consistency. Somewhere in all this,
Depth Perception's
galleys arrived for me to proofread, and
The Anatomy of Freedom
manuscript went back to the copyeditor with my comments and changes. Somewhere, somehow, taxes got done, clarinet and piano concerts and teacher-parent conferences got attended, political meetings were held, writing deadlines met,
SIG
contributors soothed, funds raised, speeches delivered, planes boarded, money borrowed and repaid, laundry done, groceries bought, meals cooked. Women are indefatigable. So it's just as well I was one.

But things would get worse before they got better.

The relationship with Iliana was not to be dismissed. This time Kenneth's resistance only fed the passion. She and I
both
wrote. We
both
phoned. Throwing caution (and
her
credit cards) to the wind, she came to New York for ten days again in late May, and brought me to Vienna for five days early in July. She came again for a few days in August, then again in September. Kenneth dug in and wanted me to live elsewhere than our home, even when she wasn't around. I refused to leave Blake. This time I foolishly tried to fight for both the relationship and the marriage. There were ghastly battles wherein I questioned why Ken's new friend, a sweet young man named Rafi, was allowed to stay in the home I was financially supporting, but I wasn't. (It's remarkable how much courage it takes you to screw yourself up to ask such an obvious question—only to find that your big-deal heroic asking of it gets you nowhere anyway.)

There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. Blake went to camp again—this time no doubt
eager
to get there. In the early fall, he spent as much time as possible with me in my latest diaspora—mostly at the apartment of Suzanne and her husband, Bob Levine, when they were away and we could have it to ourselves—to do them a favor, as they gracefully put it, and “cat-sit.” In November, Doubleday sent me on a twenty-city book tour to promote
The Anatomy of Freedom
. In December, Iliana arrived to stay, having got herself transferred to the UN's New York headquarters, and having found herself an apartment.
⁹
Throughout it all,
Sisterhood Is Global
ground on, as did the lectures and my work at
Ms
. From the serenity of today, I look back on the ten months following April 1982 as one of those relentless periods of turmoil you cannot imagine having survived, although you know you did.

Then again, I do know how I survived. I had to, because something more important was happening, something that added heavily to the burden of other crises but emotionally dwarfed everything else. In July, I'd had a phone call that my mother had been taken to the hospital.

At this point Faith hadn't spoken to me for almost three years. When
Archie Thurman had died in the mid-1970s, we'd grown closer for a while. I'd been so glad to be there for her, to defend her—the interloper second wife—against Archie's family, and to help her through the mourning process, which, to my amusement, hadn't taken her all that long. Then one day, I'd noticed tremors in her hands, but in reply to my questions she'd replied sharply that it was her nerves. It took weeks of prodding to get her to the doctor. The verdict was Parkinson's disease, a particularly hideous blow for someone who only ever had one thing: her pride. She'd defended it fiercely, fighting for it, lying for it. Now she would be forced to surrender even that.

As time went on, the medication produced results as bad as or worse than the disease: periodic blindness, bouts of depersonalization, paranoid delusions. She was in and out of hospitals all through the late Seventies. I grew adept at smuggling in Chinese food and her favorite rotisserie chicken, since she loathed hospital trays. If I could coax her into a good mood, we would
shhhh
and giggle while she ate and I stood watch, in an echo of our long-ago two-person church-step picnics. But there were distressing days. Once she attacked me physically, screaming that I was an imposter imprisoning her and bringing her poisoned flowers in order to steal her money. She flew at me to bite my wrist, but her teeth closed on my watch. She bit so hard she broke the crystal.

Sometimes she did have clarity, returning like Persephone from her hell as I, in our role reversal, paced the world like Demeter searching for ways to reclaim her. In those moments of comprehension, we would discuss what to do. It was obvious that on her return home, she'd need a professional aide to look in on her on the alternate days when I couldn't get there or if I was out of town, someone who would help with groceries, maybe cook a little when I couldn't do my usual cook-for-a-week-and-leave-portions-in-Mommie's-freezer. She didn't want that. She wanted me. In person. All the time. She offered to buy us a town house (with the invested earnings from my childhood)
if
we would all live in it together. Kenneth and I did consider it, but decided it was hardly a helpful development for an already endangered marriage. When we declined, she raged that I was abandoning her.

Grave illness, like any crucible, can transform people into their best or basest selves. Faith's disease was cruelly degenerative, and exacerbated
her worst traits. She did hire a long-suffering aide, but she switched doctors every month; they were all incompetent if they didn't agree with her opinions of what she needed. To me, she grew more intractable and domineering than ever before: I had destroyed her life and I was selfish, ungrateful, “like Lear's bad daughters.” Denouncing me seemed her primary pleasure. Every time I went up to see her in her Fifth Avenue co-op, I felt I was going through a loin-girding ceremony for combat. Finally, after one blowout, she refused to speak to me—the standard ritual—but this time she stuck to it no matter how often I kept phoning. So I stayed in touch with the aide, her doctor, and her few last friends, who began to complain that she wouldn't see
them
anymore, that she was becoming a recluse. She fired the aide and hired another when she learned I'd “been spying” on her. At last, all my sources were cut off by her executive order, and she still wouldn't speak to me. Her latest doctor suggested I have her declared legally incompetent, but the idea revolted me. So I just kept calling, positive that one day she'd relent and not slam down the phone at hearing my voice.

In July of 1982, however, the voice on the phone was that of an older woman with a Jamaican accent. She was one of my mother's two current companion-aides, she said, and she was calling despite Faith's having forbidden her to do so, because she didn't know what else to do. I was on my way to the hospital as I hung up.

Mercifully, the future veils itself from us. I didn't know I was entering into a real-life drama of such magnitude that it would diminish my tolerance for all fabrications thereof ever after.

I was shocked at how she'd changed: tiny, wizened, virtually paralyzed, her body cramped into the distorted tensions of last-stage Parkinson's. The disease seemed to have advanced with terrifying speed—until I discovered, tucked away in her apartment, a shoebox crammed with unfilled prescriptions for medication she'd refused to take, since doing so would have been to acknowledge the diagnosis, and since she must have feared the delusions even more than the rigidity. She was in the hospital this time because she'd fallen out of bed and fractured a hip, lying on the floor for half a day until the aide arrived at the usual time. The doctors had also put her back on medication for the disease, but they announced that she
couldn't possibly return home. Once they stabilized her, they said, she had to be put in a full-care nursing facility.

“Why? Why me? What'd I do to deserve? Mama, I'm not a whore, not a whore, notawhore,” she kept muttering, in a slurry singsong to rupture the heart. Her other refrain was “Home. Wanna' go home. Where's home? Is there home?” Nothing I could say was understandable to her, and she didn't react to my stroking her, kissing her, holding her. She was in exile from her own mind.

From then on, the discoveries broke and broke again over my life like waves intent on convincing an abandoned lighthouse it was time to fall dark at last. Once before, buffered by the distance fiction bestows on a writer entering its environs, I revisited these months, in
Dry Your Smile
. There's no way to parse them in comparable detail here. Reality, like poetry, requires distillation.

The discovery of what it was to search for a nursing home not functioning on a circle of hell. The discovery that there was no way legally to arrange for Faith's transfer or access her finances to pay for it unless I went to court to become her guardian-conservator, which meant having her declared incompetent. The discovery that there were moments when she had perfect clarity, making the incompetency approach all the more repulsive, even though imperative. The discovery, then, that there was almost no money in her bank account, that her stocks had been sold and her savings withdrawn, that her jewelry and furs—including the mink coat I'd triumphantly bought for her years earlier—had vanished. The discovery that hundreds and hundreds of checks, ranging from sums of $50 to one at $60,000, had been forged—and cashed. The discovery that letters purportedly written and signed by her, instructing her brokers to liquidate her stocks, had also been forged. The discovery that neither her brokers nor her bank had ever questioned these unusual instructions, drastic withdrawals, or squiggly signatures, and claimed they weren't liable. The discovery that Medicare would not pay for her to be in a nursing facility so long as she owned a co-op, which meant it had to be sold as soon as possible, even if at a loss, to pay the nursing-home fees of $4,000 a month. The discovery of evidence that it was her aides, two women in their sixties, one from South Carolina and the other from Jamaica, who had managed
to make off with more than $400,000—all of Faith's investments and savings from the entirety of my childhood earnings plus whatever Archie's family had settled on his widow. The discovery that my mother had been willing to trust two strangers rather than her daughter. The discovery of how odious it is to spend one's life in meetings with doctors, lawyers, and accountants. The discovery that the district attorney's office now wants to locate and prosecute these two elderly black women, who have for the moment vanished, for grand theft—
but
that the DA cannot locate or reclaim any of the money. The discovery that the trail grows cold after one of the women had donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to her pentecostal church down South and the other—well, the other had a heroin-addicted son whose child she was raising, so we can surmise where
her
share had gone. The discovery that the DA won't prosecute those truly responsible—the brokers and bank officers who never blinked when stock-liquidating documents and checks for huge sums came their way because, as the young ADA shrugs, “Those guys have power. It's a lost cause.
You
can sue them.
If
you can find a lawyer to take your case. But it'll take a decade. And you'll lose.” The discovery that he's correct. The discovery that since no funds are recoverable anyway, I realize I will discourage what I regard as the purely vengeful prosecution of these two aides—women who have spent their entire lives cleaning up after people who could afford to make messes. The discovery that all the lawyers—the DA's office
and
mine—don't understand why tracking down and sending these two women up for thirty years, and placing the grandson (who is Blake's age) in foster care, is an unacceptable conclusion. The discovery that they can't prosecute without my cooperation and that I dare announce I'll be a hostile witness. The discovery that social workers and doctors can keep Faith in the hospital only so long, once she's stabilized, meaning money must be found
fast
to pay for the one humane nursing home I've finally located. The discovery that it's possible, with the help of women friends, to plow through the mad attic her apartment has become, sort things out, clean and scour, have certain items appraised for sale, and sell them; have the place painted, fumigated, and waxed; put it up for sale, convince the co-op board of the reliability of almost the first buyer, sell it, and pay for her to enter the best nursing facility in Manhattan—all within eight weeks. And the discovery that nowhere amid all her pack-rat-saved
papers and documents is there anything resembling a marriage license or divorce decree, neither of which ever existed.