Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (31 page)

“Hi, Maddy!” they said.

O
N THE WAY
back from Gettysburg we pulled into my mother’s house. They had her in a hospital bed on the first floor now. She didn’t recognize Zach and me at first, but after a moment her face lit up and she spread her arms wide and gathered us all to her.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” said Mom. “Now you can take me home.”

“But, Mom,” I said. “You are home.”

I could see disappointment and betrayal play across her face. “Oh, Jenny,” she said. “Not you too.”

Zach gave me a hard look. “I’ll carry our stuff upstairs.”

The aide pulled on my elbow. “Just play along,” she said.

“How are you feeling, Mom?”

“Well, I have a lot of pain in my back still. But the main thing is, I just want to get out of here. If I were back in my own house, I know I’d feel better.”

The aide gave me an urgent look. “Have you seen the doctor recently?”

“Well, your uncle Dave was here,” she said. “He made me a strawberry pie.” This made a little bit of sense, since my uncle Dave was known for making pies. On the other hand, he had died seven years ago, so if he’d come by to visit my mother he’d brought that pie from a long way off.

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate what you’ve done for me,” said Mom. She looked around the room, which was filled with her favorite paintings, a green sofa, a big green chair.

“What have I done for you?” I asked Mom.

“Bringing all these things from my house. Setting everything up to look just like my room. Did you have this place built right on the side of the hospital? It must’ve been so much work.”

I looked at the aide, who was now sitting down on the sofa with the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. “Mom, we didn’t build a room on the side of the hospital and fill it with your things and make it look like your house. This really is your house. You’re at home, just like you wanted to be.”

My mother gave me the same look she used to give me back in high school. “I can always tell when you’re lying,” she said.

“Mom,” I said. “I’m not lying. This really is your house. You’re right here. I’m with you.”

She shook her head in disappointment. “Jenny, she said. “I was counting on you to be the one person who would tell me the truth.”

“But, Mom—”

The aide, who had clearly been through this conversation before,
cleared her throat. “Mrs. Boylan,” she said, “the doctor is coming tomorrow. We’ll talk about all this with him then.”

“Tomorrow,” my mother said. “All right then. Jenny, you make sure you’re here when the doctor comes. And tell your father I need to speak with him.”

I felt my throat close up. “Okay, Mom,” I said. “I’ll tell him.”

I
WOKE THAT NIGHT
from a strange dream. I turned on the light and found myself in my high school bedroom. I had often dreamed as a child that I would wake from a mysterious slumber and find myself magically transformed to female. Back then, though, I’d always imagined myself waking up as a young woman, some sort of beautiful teenage thing. It hadn’t occurred to me that someday I would sit up in the middle of the night as a mother of two. I lay back on my pillow thinking how strange it was that most of the wishes I had ever had in this life had come true—although almost never in the manner that I had expected.

A phrase came to me from the dream world I had just left. “My mother is a fish,” I said out loud. Then I turned off the light and went back to sleep.

In the morning I remembered this whole incident and thought,
My mother is a fish? What?

It didn’t take too long to recall the line from Faulkner. The little boy Vardaman thinks it. In
As I Lay Dying
.

I
DESCENDED THE STAIRS
to the kitchen, got a cup of coffee, waiting to see what my mother was up to. “
Guten Morgen
,” she said to me. I looked at the aide, whose name was Monica.

“Don’t look at me,” said Monica. “She was like this when I got here.”

“
Meine Schwester
,” she said, taking me by the arm. “
Du bist so schön
.”

My sister, you are so beautiful.

German had been my mother’s language until the age of seven, when she and her family had come to America through Ellis Island,
fleeing the chaos of the Weimar Republic in East Prussia. It had been important to her, at one point, that I understand the difference between Germans and Prussians. The Prussians were scholars, she said. The Germans? Were not. Other times, she felt bad that Prussia was a country that they didn’t have anymore. “They carved us up between Russia and Poland,” she said sadly. “I come from a country that no longer exists.”

The country might not have existed anymore, but she seemed to have settled happily back into its language after eighty-seven years. Using what was left of my high school German, we had a nice little talk together, although in order to sustain it I had to pretend that I was my aunt Gertrude.
^*

My mother looked tired and sad. “
Es tut mir Leid
,” she said. “
Aber müssen wir nach New York zuruck gegangen. Wir müssen ihn finden
.” I’m sorry, but we have to go back to New York. We have to find him.

I knew where she was headed with this, and it was not a particularly good place for her to be traveling. After my mother’s family had landed in America, my grandfather had abandoned his family. He would be gone for years at a time, only to turn up unexpectedly, drunk as a gas station.
I used to have to pull him out of the pigpen
, my mother used to explain.
I was afraid the pigs would eat him
. One time he showed up with part of his third finger missing.

Then he disappeared for good. Years passed. The suspicion was he’d finally fallen into a pigpen someplace where there was no one to pull him out.

The phone rang at my aunt Gertrude’s house in 1965. The New York City morgue was on the line. “We’ve got your father,” they said.

My mother and her sister took the train to Manhattan, got off at Penn Station, walked over to the medical examiner’s office on Thirty-third and First. On the wall was an inscription in Latin:
TACEANT
COLLOQUIA EFFUGIAT RISUS HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE
.

Let conversations cease. Let smiles fade away. For here is the place where death is glad to help the living.

The two sisters were brought into a room where a body lay upon a table. A man in a white coat pulled back the sheet. They didn’t recognize him at first. Then they saw that the body was missing a finger.

“That’s him,” said aunt Gertrude. My mother nodded.

“He had your address in his pocket,” said the man in white. This unsettled my aunt. Considering that they hadn’t heard from him in thirty years, it seemed odd that he’d know exactly where she lived.

Later, in hearing this story, I thought of the line from Father Brown (and quoted in
Brideshead Revisited
). “I caught the thief,” said Father Brown, “with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”

“What do you want done with the body?” asked the man in white. “Shall we release him to you?”

My mother and my aunt looked at each other. It didn’t take them long to decide. “We don’t want him,” said my mother. “He abandoned us; now we’ll abandon him. See how he likes it.”

They left the morgue and got back on the train and went back to Philadelphia without him.

My grandfather was buried in the potter’s field of New York City, a small island off the Bronx called Hart Island. Prisoners from Rikers Island bury the dead there in pine boxes, one stacked up on top of the other.

In my twenties, I had gone to Hart Island to do a story for a magazine. It was a spectacularly haunted place, accessible only by a ferry run by the Department of Corrections. In addition to the potter’s field, the island featured an abandoned mental hospital and the remains of a nineteenth-century village. The prisoners from Rikers, dressed in orange, shoveled the graves as guards stood there with guns trained upon them and the sun shone down.

I had no idea at the time that I was standing upon the grave of my grandfather.

“
Wir müssen nach New York zuruck gehen
, Gertrude,” whispered my mother. She clutched my arm fiercely. “
Wir einen Fehler gemacht. Wir müssen ihn retten
.”

We have to go back to New York, Gertrude. We made a mistake. We have to rescue him.

It appeared as if my mother was having second thoughts—fifty years later—about having abandoned my grandfather. This wasn’t completely out of character, either. Of all the people I have ever known, my mother is the one least likely to bear a grudge. At age ninety-four, just as when she was a child, my mother was still trying to pull her father out of the pigpen.

I imagined going up to New York, retrieving my grandfather’s body from Hart Island. When I’d written that story, back in 1984, I’d learned that people did that all the time.

The world is full of second thoughts.

Zachary entered the room. He was sleepy. “Good morning, Grandmama,” he said. My son wrapped his arms around my mother.

“Hello, Zach,” she said, in English. “I understand you’ve been looking at colleges.”

“Yes I have,” he said. “I’m thinking of majoring in biology and theater. And I want to start an Amnesty International chapter.”

My mother looked at him proudly.

“I wish you’d known your grandfather,” she said. “He’d have been so proud of you, Zachary. So proud.”

Then her eyes fell to me. “Oh, Jenny,” she said. “When did you get here?”

“I just flew in from Maine,” I said. “And boy are my arms tired.”

She gave me a familiar, exhausted smile. “Always with the jokes,” she said, and looked at Zach. “The two of you. I don’t know which one’s worse.”

“She’s worse,” said Zach.

“Well, you’ll be glad to know I’ve been talking to real estate agents,”
said Mom. “I’ve decided I don’t want you to take me back to my house. I’m buying a new house. I’m moving to a place I’ve never been before.”

Zach cast a worried glance at me. “That’s good, Mom. We really didn’t want you going back to the old house. We don’t think you’d be happy there.”

“So you admit it,” Mom said. “This is a room you had built onto the hospital. And filled it with all of this duplication furniture.”

Monica looked at me. She nodded and mouthed the words,
Say yes
.

“Okay,” I said. “I admit it.”

“It was a very, very sweet thing to do,” Mom said, squeezing my hand. “I just don’t understand why you couldn’t tell me the truth.”

“We thought it might upset you,” said Zach.

Mom thought this over. “Yes,” she said. “I see. But it’s going to be all right now. I’m moving on. Don’t you think that’s exciting? I’m making a new beginning.”

“I’m glad you’re moving, Mom,” I said. I felt my heart in my throat. “It will be nice to have a new house.”

She reached up and squeezed my arm. She sang, “
Du, du liegst mir im Herzen! Du, du liegst mir im Sinn. Du, du machst mir viel Schmerzen, weißt nicht wie gut ich dir bin!
”

Which of course means, You’re in my heart, you’re in my mind. You cause me such pain! You don’t know how good I am for you.

“Is that German?” Zach asked me.

“Prussian,” I said.

Mom looked at Zach proudly and turned to me. In German she said, “I’m so proud of my son.” Meaning Zach. Then she looked at me. “
Es tut mir Leid für dich, Gertrude
,” she said. I’m sorry for you, Gertrude.

She didn’t say why she was sorry for her sister, but I had a guess. My aunt Gertrude had never had any children of her own.

L
ATER
, I
SAT
by myself in the living room in what had once been my father’s chair. The piano sat silently in the corner. It was as if the whole house was waiting now, preparing itself for what was about to happen.

I looked up at the mantelpiece. Just before Christmas in 1985, some carolers had come to the front door and sung for my mother and me.
Said the north wind to the little lamb, do you hear what I hear?
There were footsteps on the stairs behind us, and down the steps came my father, bald from the chemo, wearing his bathrobe. “Oh, Dick,” my mother had said. “You shouldn’t be out of bed.”

“I wanted to hear the music,” he said.

My mother and my father and I stood there in the front hallway, listening to the carolers. Some of the people singing were in their twenties. When we’d first moved into the neighborhood, they were little kids.

Said the king to the people everywhere, listen to what I say. A child, a child, slumbers in the night, he will bring us goodness and light
.

My mother guided my dad back up the stairs when the singing was done. I heard their footsteps go down the hallway, the springs in my father’s bed groaning as he lay back down.

I stood and leaned against the mantelpiece, and the tears poured out of me. It was a few months later that the maestro came for my father, in his tie and tails, and asked him to come away and conduct his orchestra.