The stream of humanity pouring down the tunnel into the Red Line was too much for me. I walked for a while, watching the sky darken, then a light rain began to fall. At first it was a pleasant relief to the heat, then it fell harder. I had walked as far as New York Avenue and decided to hail a taxi. Three or four empty ones passed me and I thought of the old joke: What do you call two black men trying to get a cab in Washington, D.C.? Pedestrians. I raised my arm again and this time a car stopped, no doubt because the Ethiopian driver had a male companion with him and he felt safe enough. They looked back at me after I gave them my address, one saying, “Are you Ethiopian?” and the other, “You look Ethiopian.” I said, “No, I’m just Washingtonian.” I closed my eyes and drifted.
Mother’s bridge club was meeting at our house. Mrs. Johnson, widow of the mortuary owner Lionel Johnson, greeted me as she entered as if I were ten. “Oh, little Monksie, you’re looking so fit.” She was with her daughter, about my age, who carried her bag and wore on her face an expression of fatigue like the one I imagined I wore. “This is my daughter, Eloise,” Mrs. Johnson said. Then she saw my mother and told us to run on and play.The others arrived. And soon there were eight old ladies seated at two card tables, all of them too arthritic to shuffle and too senile to remember to whom the last card was dealt. While in the living room, eight children, around the age of forty, sat holding purses, stoles and umbrellas. We looked at each other and all regarded that as adequate and eloquent enough commiseration, then closed our eyes for naps.
“Hey, Washingtonian,” the cab driver said. “This your house?”
I paid and made my groggy way up the walk to find Lorraine sitting on the porch. “Enjoying the rain?” I asked.
She shook her head and looked at the door.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s the Mrs.”
“Is Mother all right?” At that moment I heard a noise at the narrow window by the door and turned to see Mother holding aside the curtain and staring out, somewhat wild-eyed, then she disappeared. “What’s going on?”
“She’s locked and bolted the doors,” Lorraine said.
If it was true, that the doors were bolted from the inside, then my keys wouldn’t help. “Why won’t she let you in?” I asked.
“She doesn’t recognize me.”
I went to the window and knocked. Mother’s face, at least it resembled her face, flashed wild again behind the glass. I spoke to her. “Mother, it’s me, Monk.”
“Go away,” she hissed. “We don’t want any.”
I looked back at the shrugging Lorraine.
“Mother,” I said. “Please, unlock the door.”
She dropped the curtain and was gone again.
I stepped out into the yard into the rain, away from the house, and looked up at the roof covering the porch and the windows of the second floor. I recalled the window behind the desk in Father’s study had a broken latch.
I climbed while Lorraine watched from the porch, having never moved from her seat. The bark of the crepe myrtle was slick and I felt my age as I hauled my weight onto the roof. I got the window open and crawled in, knocking over a stack of books on the sill. Then I looked up to see Mother.
She said, “Monksie, there’s a man at the door who won’t go away.” In her hand was the thirty-two-calibre pistol Father had kept in his nightstand. She pointed the gun at me and said, “You might need this.”
I walked slowly to her, watching her shaking hands on the dry metal of the gun. I pushed the muzzle away from me as I took it from her. “I’ll take care of the man, Mother. You just go to your bedroom and take your nap.”
I watched her turn the corner into her room, then checked the pistol to find it loaded.
I took Mother to the doctor. He x-rayed her chest and told me that she did not have any kind of lung infection. He did a CAT scan and told me that she had not had a stroke and that he could see no brain shrinkage. She did not have a vitamin B-12 deficiency. He did say there was a presence of tangled nerve fibers. He talked to her, waited and then had the same conversation with her a second time, to which she responded, “Why are we going over this again?”
When we were alone, the doctor stared at me.
“Yes?”
“You’re probably seeing the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. It could be due to a hardening of her arteries, poor circulation, any number of things. We just don’t know. But all that is really beside the point, because there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it if that’s what it is.”
“What about slowing it down?”
He shook his head.
“So, what do you recommend?”
“Right now things are not so bad. But everything could change overnight. The fact that she didn’t recognize you suggests that the disease is progressing somewhat rapidly. Finally, you’ll have to institutionalize her.”
“I can’t care for her at home?”
“It’s going to be awfully difficult. She really shouldn’t be left alone. She might wander away. She could hurt herself. Falls or other accidents. She could hurt somebody else. Fires, unlocked doors.”
The memory of her holding the pistol flashed in my mind.
“In the later stages, moving will be difficult for her. Her personality will disappear. She’ll lose her abilities to think, perceive and speak. At the very least you’ll have to hire a full-time nurse then.” He stared at me again, then said, “I’m telling you what will eventually come. This might be several years away. I can’t say.”
“Or it might be next week?”
“Unlikely, but possible.” I thanked the doctor, collected Mother and left.
Lorraine was putting Mother to bed. I was in the garage, staring at the nearly finished bedside stand. I looked at the edges and imagined Mother’s thigh bruising upon walking into one. I began to take off the point of one of the corners, finding that as I sawed the wood away I was making two points. I shaved and cut and tore away wood until the top of the table was nearly round and now too small to be practical. The rectangular, tapered legs were not only wrong for the round top but were stuck out beyond the area of the surface. I haphazardly fastened three of the legs to the top, then sat on it. It wobbled a bit, but I didn’t care. It was something to feel in my hollow stupor.
I was about twelve. Father was down to the beach for the weekend as usual. We had gone as a family in the boat to the city dock in Annapolis and bought sandwiches at the open air market. I had my favorite, soft-shelled crab on a hard roll. The day was not too hot. There was a breeze. Everything felt perfect.
Bill waved to a couple of buddies near the shops and seemed to want to go with them, but stayed. Father became cool when he saw the wave.
Lisa was sitting on the long seat in the back of the boat, reading, and I was sitting on the dock, my feet on our boat, eating my sandwich and telling her how I was going to be a writer some day.
“But I’m not going to write stuff like that,” I said. “I’m going to write serious things.”
Lisa laughed. “Yeah, like what?”
“I don’t know yet, but it won’t be crap like that,” I said.
“Monksie, your language,” Mother said.
“All I said was crap,” I said.
“That’s enough, Monk,” from Father.
“This is not crap,” my sister said.
Mother sighed.
“Is too. I want to write books like Crime and Punishment.”