The Long Journey Home (37 page)

Sometimes, when a child seemed to be struggling to express himself, I would spend time alone with that child, asking questions and taking dictation myself when it seemed too much for him or her to try to both express himself and write. This was the case with Jesus Mendez. When we were alone together in the library, he told me the poem he wanted to write while I did the actual writing.

He wanted to write a poem about his baby sister. “She was the prettiest thing I ever saw,” he said sadly. Then he told me about going into the baby’s room. He described how his mother lifted her hand and how it fell back on the bed. The tension was palpable.

“The baby was dead.”

I worked to write with a calm, steady hand, but my heart was racing. When Jesus went back to his classroom, I sat in the library, remembering his words: “She was the prettiest thing I ever saw.” I remembered how beautiful my long-dead sister’s eyes were. When Jesus told me about the baby’s hand falling back onto the bed, and that she was dead, I was once again in the hospital with Mother and Harriet. As I wrote Jesus’s poem, my head was filled with my own mother’s words:
Ring for the nurse, Margaret. Harriet’s dead
. Working with Jesus had reopened that old wound, and I went back into the pain.

When I got home that day, I again wrote about my sister’s near death. Again I cried. Listening to the children was an act of healing for me, just as it was for them. I remembered the dream I’d had years before, that all of human history was stored in my mind. In the dream I was panic-stricken that history would begin to unroll in my bloodstream and my heart would burst with the pain. “Don’t worry,” a voice in the dream had told me. “History will unroll in your heart only as your heart grows large enough to hold it.” Teaching the children at the Donahue School, I felt my heart growing larger every day.

I could no longer endure the relationship with Suzanne. Both when I was leaving my marriage and later when I was leaving Dr. Turcotte, Suzanne was my major emotional support. For Suzanne, I was the major catalyst for change in both her marriage and her relationship with her mother. I don’t claim this as truth, only as my interpretation.

I never said that I wanted her to leave Bob. But if she loved me as much as she said she did, if I mattered as much as she claimed, I wanted the respect that love deserved.
When she realizes how she’s hurt me, when she finally fully claims her love for me, things will be different
, I told myself. But if Suzanne had entered into our relationship fully, if she had given the relationship the respect and attention it required, she well might have lost her marriage. And above all else, she wanted to keep her marriage intact.

“Do you realize how much pain I’ve gone through for you? Do you think you’re the only one in pain?” Her voice still reverberates in my brain. And yes, she did go through pain. I knew that. But enduring pain solved nothing for either of us.

“Married woman who will neither stay or go,” I wrote in a poem at the time. I wrote two books of poetry to Suzanne and destroyed them, crushing poem after poem in my fist. I wrote and discarded page after page of journal entries about the relationship. Yet we continued the same old tug-of-war.

I thought again of how, when I was a girl, Mother’s friend Francis told Mother about people asking how she could love her brain-damaged daughter, Kate, with her wild green eyes, nightmarish noises, and violent stomping. Francis always answered that she loved the daughter Kate could have been.

What about the daughter she had? What about Kate?
I asked myself many times over the years. Thinking about this once again, I looked at my relationship with Suzanne in a new light—that
light
. I was mourning
the relationship I imagined possible with Suzanne, not the relationship we had.

Nothing was ever the same after that.

The deepest truth I knew was that the relationship with Suzanne could never work, and in time I found the strength to turn away. Turning away from Suzanne was a major step toward being kinder to myself. I look back with sadness at the pain that some if not all of our children suffered during the years of the relationship that Suzanne and I loved, fought, worked, and struggled through. Yet, given who and where we were emotionally then, I see no other way we could have lived our lives.

There was always a place where Suzanne and I failed at understanding each other, and as frustrating as it was, it never canceled the love we felt.

I
RECENTLY CAME ACROSS A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN 1985, ON MY FIRST
trip back to Georgia since 1969. It was a simple snapshot of Mother and Mercer on a bridge of gray weathered boards that spanned a body of water in the Okefenokee Swamp. They’re crossing the bridge, their backs turned to me. They were walking away from me when I snapped their image with my camera.

How unexpectedly the significance of a thing can change. Mother and Mercer are crossing the weathered gray bridge, and now both of them are dead. Unprepared to see this image of my mother and brother walking away from me, I felt my heart plummet, then fill with emotion.

When Mother had asked me if there were special things I wanted to do while I was in Georgia visiting them, I mentioned going to the Okefenokee Swamp. From as far back as I could remember, I’d been fascinated by it, but I had never been there. Mother’s friend Vereen Bell had written a book about it titled
Swamp Water
before he went off to World War II and got killed. Every time we drove past his house in Thomasville, I thought about him drowned in his crashed plane in the Pacific Ocean, starving on a raft with the rest of the crew, or being eaten by sharks.

I was six years old in 1941 when the movie
Swamp Water
, starring Walter Brennan, Anne Baxter, and Dana Andrews, was released. It was terribly exciting to see a movie made from a book written by my own mother’s friend. It was also exciting to see a place in Georgia made into a Hollywood movie.

But the main reason I wanted to go to the Okefenokee was my intense fascination with the swamp itself, old and primitive, mysterious and wild, with its alligators, turtles, lizards, diamondback rattlesnakes, cottonmouths, black bears, bobcats, and great blue herons; its red-tailed hawks, ospreys, wild turkeys, woodpeckers, and egrets; and its abundance of fish, frogs, and crayfish.

Islands of peat bog gave rise to trees, shrubs, and grasses, the ground itself trembling underfoot. Indians gave it the name Okefenokee, meaning “Land of the Trembling Earth.” Indians who lived and died there as early as 2500
BC
; Indians who shared the land and its abundance until de Soto came with his men, bringing with them diseases that killed the natives by the thousands. Finally, the last of the Seminoles were driven into Florida by soldiers. Now the Okefenokee holds its silent history in the roots and wood of its ancient trees.

Cypress trees still stand that were growing there when Dante was writing his
Divine Comedy
, Michelangelo was being born, and Hieronymus Bosch was painting
Ship of Fools
. The same cypress trees were sprouting roots and branches when Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn and Ivan the Terrible died in Russia. The same giant cypress trees were reaching toward the magnificent sky as my brothers and sister and I were born and grew up in South Georgia. I had always longed to see the Okefenokee, where wildness and the wonder of nature existed side by side, where the distant past and present were one.

As important as the Okefenokee was in my imagination, the thought of a trip there was eclipsed by the thought of seeing Mother. During my therapy with Dr. Turcotte I’d cut off my relationship with her. It was only after I’d terminated my relationship with him that I
called her again. “Now you realize that I’ve loved you all your life,” she said. For all of Dr. Turcotte’s faults and his evaluation of Mother’s negative influence on my life, I couldn’t let him carry the full responsibility for my cutting her off. I blurted out: “Just because I’ve cut off my relationship with Dr. Turcotte does not mean that he alone was the problem between us, Mother.” I was afraid that I would slip back into old patterns of saying the things she wanted me to say and not expressing my true feelings. “There are still many things that we need to work on in our relationship.”

I might just as well have been talking in ancient Greek. The whole concept of working on relationships was incomprehensible to her. Mother’s method of relating when hurt or when she disagreed with me was to withdraw in punitive silence. If I wrote something in a letter that she didn’t want to deal with, she simply wrote back without responding to whatever it was that I’d brought up. Her silence about my concerns had made me feel invisible.

When the boys were young, Chris said that our dog Cream sometimes acted like his grandmother, whom he called Amah. When something happened that displeased Cream, she turned her chin up and looked the other way. “Just like Amah,” Chris would say. “Just like Amah.”

After I terminated my relationship with Dr. Turcotte, I wrote Mother a letter inviting her to come up in October to see the fall leaves, a thing she’d often talked of doing once she retired from teaching. She refused my invitation, replying: “I told you I’d like to come and see the fall foliage if John and I still got along well.”

I was stunned. When she had first said that, I thought she meant it as an expression of her own lack of security, that she would come for a visit only if she felt herself not to be a nuisance to John. I’d not realized that the statement had been about her relationship with me as well. But now I understood that she was refusing to accept my invitation. During the years when she’d visited us, she spent most of her time with me, but now I saw more clearly than ever her great love
of John, their casual way of bantering and the pleasure they both derived from it. She also respected him for his Ph.D., while Daddy had dropped out of college to join the army near the end of World War I. “Oh, Margaret,” she’d said in a tone that sounded almost prideful, “You and John make me think so of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.”

I had groaned inwardly, wondering if she had any idea what she was saying about us. I’d tried and failed too many times to gain her understanding and support. John’s abuse of me came in bed, long after Mother had gone to sleep. I knew Mother looked up to John, while she was puzzled by me. But that she so quickly rejected my invitation—and in such a hurtful way—left me in an inarticulate daze. I said a confused goodbye and hung up the phone. After regaining my composure I wrote a note asking if there wasn’t enough between the two of us to warrant a fall visit even though I was divorced from John and living alone.

She responded to my letter with silence. There was no more talk about her visiting me, but in time we were once again writing and talking with some ease. Later, I again invited her up. This time she replied: “I am an old woman now and too afraid to fly.” The next year I called and asked if she would like me to fly down for a visit. I was hoping to come to a place of resolution with her while we were both still alive. She sounded excited by the prospect of seeing me.

The night before my flight, I dreamed that Mother’s house caught fire.

The fire started out back in the bamboo that divided our property from that of Cousin Heinz. I knew that the fire was too huge to be stopped. I rushed into Mercer’s room to get my cigarettes, then went outside to stand with Mother and Mercer to watch the house burn. I felt relieved to have rescued my cigarettes. I knew that it would take some time before the house burned to ashes, and I would have been terribly upset to have no cigarettes as I stood watching the blaze.

Mercer’s room had been mine before it was his. I’d grown up in that room, had lain in my bed watching the moon rise over the bamboo, had painted at my easel that stood in one corner, had written at my desk between the two south windows, and stored my books in bookcases underneath the windows. Of course my cigarettes would have been in that room, his room now, with its large TV and stereo, and my paintings on the wall. I hadn’t been in Georgia in sixteen years, since the year after Daddy’s death, and had seen neither Mercer nor Mother since Mercer’s brief visit in 1976. Now we were together again in my dream and the house was burning to the ground.