She called, unusually, on a weekday afternoon. “Oh, this terrible body of mine,” she said. “It’s given me nothing but trouble, and now it’s going to kill me. Tom, I’m so sorry. I’m letting you down, I’m letting Cynthia down, I’m letting everyone down. Dr. Van Schyllingerhout has been so patient with me, he’s tried so hard, he says I’m one of the reasons he won’t retire. He’s almost eighty, Tom, and still seeing patients. I’m such a disappointment to you all. But your dumb old mother has cancer.”
More pitiable even than her cancer was her impulse to apologize for it. I probed her news for a silver lining, but apparently there wasn’t one. She’d simply had rotten luck. Because the steroids had put her at high risk for cancer, Dr. Van Schyllingerhout had been giving her biennial colonoscopies, but the cancer must have appeared immediately after her previous one. In two years it had spread beyond her colon and was likely inoperable. They were going to open her up to relieve her blockage, blast her with radiation, and then do further surgery to see what could be salvaged, but the prognosis was poor.
“I’ll be there tomorrow,” I said.
“Tom, I’m so sorry. I hate to burden you with this. I want to live to see you happy and successful. But this dumb old body of mine, always the same dumb thing…”
I walked into Anabel’s workroom and sat down and cried. Anabel later told me that my tears had terrified her — she was afraid I’d come in to say I couldn’t live with her anymore — but once I gave her the news she put her arms around me and cried with me. She even offered to come to Denver.
“No,” I said, drying my face. “You stay here. This will be good for both of us.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” she said. “That I’m going to work better without you, and you’re going to be happier without me. And that’ll be the end of us. You’ll think, Why am I with this crazy woman who can’t do her work? And I’ll remember how much better I worked when I got to be alone all the time.” She began to cry again. “I don’t want to lose you.”
“You won’t lose me,” I said. “It’s just some time apart.”
The argument I made to her, and to myself, was that we needed to reconstruct our separate identities in order to go on together. I genuinely believed this, but my reasons for believing it were bad. I was postponing for as long as possible the guilt of abandoning her. I was also hoping, unrealistically, that she might spare me from this guilt by being the one to leave.
In a hospital corridor in Denver, while my mother was in post-op, I conferred with Dr. Van Schyllingerhout. He was a compassionate-eyed bald man with an aquiline nose. He’d been good to my mother, but he was unmistakably pissed off about her cancer. “The surgeon is unhappy,” he said in an accent less like Leonard’s than I’d remembered. “He wanted to take more, but your mother is adamant about not wanting a stoma. It’s a quality-of-life choice we have to respect. She doesn’t want the bag. But you hate to tie a surgeon’s hands. Her chances are worse now.”
“How bad?”
He shook his head, pissed off. “Bad.”
“I appreciate your respecting her wishes.”
“Your mother is a fighter. I’ve had many patients not as sick as her give up and take the colostomy. And of course you know the story of her leaving Germany. She was in a situation of indignity that she refused to accept. With the will she has, she should have lived another thirty years.”
So began my admiration of my mother. It’s odd to say this, given how sick she was, but she gave me hope about my own life. My situation with Anabel was surely no more of a torment to me than her bowel was to her, and abandoning her mother and siblings couldn’t have been easier than what I had to do to Anabel. If my mother could fight through it, so might I.
Her surgery seemed to have excised the phrase dumb old mother from her vocabulary, along with others like it. She came home from the hospital without her self-deprecation. Under the influence of Cynthia, who was now a single mom and living in Denver with her daughter, her political views had also softened. “I’m starting to think that money really is the root of all evil,” she said to me one night. “As soon as you have money, you have envy. That’s the problem with the Communists, they envy the rich, they’re obsessed with redistributing money. And, I’m sorry, but I look at Anabel’s family and all I see is the harm the money did to it.”
“That’s why she rejected it,” I said.
“But rejecting money is just another way to be obsessed with it. It’s just like the Communists. The productive workers get exploited by the lazy ones. I’m sorry to say this, but it’s not right that Anabel doesn’t work — that you’re the one who has to make up for her obsession. She would have been better off not having money in the first place.”
“Her family is messed up, for sure. But she’s not lazy.”
“When I’m gone, you’re going to have a little money from this house. And I do not want that money going to support Anabel. That money is for you. It’s not much, but your father worked hard, I worked hard. Please promise me you won’t give it to the daughter of a billionaire.”
I considered my hardworking parents. “All right,” I said.
“Do you promise?”
I made the promise, but I wasn’t sure I would keep it.
That summer, I started eating meat again. I went to Nevada and wrote a story for Esquire about the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository. I also nursed my mother through her radiation sickness and saw a lot of Cynthia and her little girl. Now it was Anabel to whom I made Sunday-night phone calls. She claimed to be having productive thoughts, and only when she said things like “Don’t forget me, Tom” was it less than nice to hear her voice. She wouldn’t have guessed that I was eating meat again, and I didn’t mention it.
My mother continued to surprise me. After she’d recovered from her second, conclusively discouraging surgery, in October, she asked me to take her to Germany before she died. She’d been following the political developments there, the swelling exodus of East Germans through Czechoslovakia, and for the first time in many years she’d tried sending another letter to her family at its old address. Three weeks later, she got a long letter back from her brother. He and his wife were still living in the old place, his mother had died in 1961, his little sister was twice divorced, his older son had been admitted to the university. At least as my mother translated it to me, his letter was devoid of resentment, as if her disappearance were just another fact from a difficult childhood he’d long since put behind him. There was no mention of the many earlier letters he hadn’t answered. I wondered if he might never have been resentful, only fearful that the Stasi would frown on his corresponding with an escapee. And now people had stopped being afraid of the Stasi.