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Authors: Hilma Wolitzer
Tags: Fiction
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when Scotty kept doing that maddening Woody Woodpecker laugh. “Is Helen coming?” my father asked again, a little louder this time, and I had a flash of Richard Widmark hurling his wheelchair-bound victim, screaming, down a flight of stairs.
My mother had been dead for so many years. She died when I was in graduate school, not in the unimaginably distant future, as she had promised. She’d developed breast cancer while I was still at Swarthmore, and my father told me about it in a phone call, at the end of finals week. The fact that he was using the phone at all should have alerted me, but somehow it didn’t. “Mother isn’t well,” he began. His usually rich and sonorous voice had thickened and grown faint.
“What?” I asked, thinking distractedly of a cold or the flu. He sounded funny; maybe he’d caught it, too. But my mind was elsewhere, on some academic prize or social event.
“Alice, darling, she’s in the hospital. She’s had a mastectomy.”
For a moment, I couldn’t make sense of the word. Did it have something to do with the ear? But I held one hand against my own breast, where I’d already registered the news. “But why didn’t you tell me!” I wailed. “I would have come home.”
“We didn’t want to upset you before your exams. She’s doing very well,” he said. “Harvey Wagner did the procedure.” The
procedure
! I pictured a younger Dr. Wagner cutting precisely into a pink lamb chop at our dining room table.
She did do very well for what seemed like a long while, and I let myself be seduced into solace and calm. My father was a doctor, after all, and he loved my mother as fiercely as I did. I came home to see her and then went back to school, where I fell in love, with a series of books and boys and the possibilities of my own potential. I worried about her, of course I did. But she was on the borders of my concentration, not in its center. Only I resided there.
In the solarium a volunteer banged out sprightly show tunes on an upright piano, and for several minutes we were relieved of the burden of conversation. After the last number, a merciless rendition of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” there was some halfhearted clapping, like the applause in my parents’ living room after I’d recited my poems. I was about to suggest we take my father back down to his room when he leaned toward me and looked into my eyes, more directly and intensely than he had in years. His speckled talon poked me in the chest. “You should take care of that lesion, dear,” he said.
5
As soon as Ev left for the office on Monday, I put my mother’s accordion folder on the kitchen table and reheated the coffee. I had looked into the folder from time to time since my father had given it to me, but I’d hesitated to really explore its contents. Privacy had always been a priority of my mother’s—you knocked on closed doors, you allowed people the sanctity of their thoughts. And she’d become more discreet about her poems after that first publication. She kept writing, though, and after a while she began to publish occasionally in more respected journals, like
Poet Lore
and
Prairie Schooner.
She was so modest, she didn’t even mention those acceptances until copies of the issues with her poems in them arrived. My father had apparently taken his cue from her to be more low-keyed about her latest successes, too. There were no more delirious waltzes around the house, and no grand announcements or ribbon-tied copies of literary magazines distributed as table favors to friends. I can only remember his playful warning to her, after she’d been paid fifty dollars for one of the poems, “Well, Helen, don’t spend it all in one place!”
I had been missing her with something like the old, pervasive longing lately, and I’d begun to associate that revived ache with the peculiar feeling in my chest. Was there a clue to the link between them, or at least some consolation, to be found in her writing?
My mother had been dead for so many years. She died when I was in graduate school, not in the unimaginably distant future, as she had promised. She’d developed breast cancer while I was still at Swarthmore, and my father told me about it in a phone call, at the end of finals week. The fact that he was using the phone at all should have alerted me, but somehow it didn’t. “Mother isn’t well,” he began. His usually rich and sonorous voice had thickened and grown faint.
“What?” I asked, thinking distractedly of a cold or the flu. He sounded funny; maybe he’d caught it, too. But my mind was elsewhere, on some academic prize or social event.
“Alice, darling, she’s in the hospital. She’s had a mastectomy.”
For a moment, I couldn’t make sense of the word. Did it have something to do with the ear? But I held one hand against my own breast, where I’d already registered the news. “But why didn’t you tell me!” I wailed. “I would have come home.”
“We didn’t want to upset you before your exams. She’s doing very well,” he said. “Harvey Wagner did the procedure.” The
procedure
! I pictured a younger Dr. Wagner cutting precisely into a pink lamb chop at our dining room table.
She did do very well for what seemed like a long while, and I let myself be seduced into solace and calm. My father was a doctor, after all, and he loved my mother as fiercely as I did. I came home to see her and then went back to school, where I fell in love, with a series of books and boys and the possibilities of my own potential. I worried about her, of course I did. But she was on the borders of my concentration, not in its center. Only I resided there.
In the solarium a volunteer banged out sprightly show tunes on an upright piano, and for several minutes we were relieved of the burden of conversation. After the last number, a merciless rendition of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” there was some halfhearted clapping, like the applause in my parents’ living room after I’d recited my poems. I was about to suggest we take my father back down to his room when he leaned toward me and looked into my eyes, more directly and intensely than he had in years. His speckled talon poked me in the chest. “You should take care of that lesion, dear,” he said.
5
As soon as Ev left for the office on Monday, I put my mother’s accordion folder on the kitchen table and reheated the coffee. I had looked into the folder from time to time since my father had given it to me, but I’d hesitated to really explore its contents. Privacy had always been a priority of my mother’s—you knocked on closed doors, you allowed people the sanctity of their thoughts. And she’d become more discreet about her poems after that first publication. She kept writing, though, and after a while she began to publish occasionally in more respected journals, like
Poet Lore
and
Prairie Schooner.
She was so modest, she didn’t even mention those acceptances until copies of the issues with her poems in them arrived. My father had apparently taken his cue from her to be more low-keyed about her latest successes, too. There were no more delirious waltzes around the house, and no grand announcements or ribbon-tied copies of literary magazines distributed as table favors to friends. I can only remember his playful warning to her, after she’d been paid fifty dollars for one of the poems, “Well, Helen, don’t spend it all in one place!”
I had been missing her with something like the old, pervasive longing lately, and I’d begun to associate that revived ache with the peculiar feeling in my chest. Was there a clue to the link between them, or at least some consolation, to be found in her writing?
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