Lying here, she isn’t so sure.
Hospital or no hospital, she’s dying all the same. Her body is a city and the tumors that riddle it little insulting middle-class suburban outposts of disease, springing up overnight in her liver, her lungs, her stomach, her spleen, her spine. They have tried one treatment; they have tried another. Nothing helps. Better to go in a favorite bed, with a favorite view, surrounded by people she has known and trusted. Not these men with clipboards. Not these women with needles and white hats. Not lost in an artificial jungle of sympathy. Where is her son? He brought her here. Where is he, that son of hers? She calls his name.
“Yes, Mother.”
“I want to go home.”
She cannot see his reactionhe sits slightly behind her, where he knows she cannot turn to see himbut she knows what he’s doing: tugging on his earlobes. His father did the same thing.
“You can’t go home, Mother.”
“I can and I will.”
He says nothing.
“David.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“If the child is a girl I don’t want you to name her for me. That’s morbid.”
“It’s a boy, Mother. We’re going to name him Lawrence. You already know that.”
“I know nothing of the sort. What kind of a name is Lawrence?”
He sighs. “We’ve talked about this already.”
“When.”
“Several times.”
“When.”
“Weeks ago. Several times. In fact, you asked me the day before yesterday.”
“I asked no such thing.”
He says nothing.
“When are the children coming to visit.”
“They were here, Mother.”
“When.”
He says nothing.
“When were they here,” she says, afraid to hear the answer.
“Yesterday,” he says.
“That’s a lie.” She grips the bedsheets, terrified. Why is it that she can remember events and faces and stories and whole conversations from thirty years agoand yet she cannot remember her grandchildren, yesterday? That shouldn’t be possible. Her memory is impressionistic; the closer she gets, the less she can resolve. Her nose to the canvas and all she gets are dots and smudges. And her mind has worse tricks than that up its sleeve, much worse. Old memories keep springing up where they do not belong; at times she calls David by his father’s name. She overhears David and the doctor discussing the president, and she expresses her opinion about Roosevelt and the two men look at her and David says, “It’s Kennedy, Mother.” The doctor is a young Jew named Waldenberg or Waldenstein or Steinbergwald or Bergswaldstein. He is bald and joyless and she doesn’t trust him. She asks David for Dr. Fetchett and is informed that he has been dead since 1957. That is nonsense; Fetchett has been in the room. He comes in daily to take her temperature. He stands at the foot of her bed, commiserating. Dear Bertha, you look so pale. Would you like a glass of whiskey? A kind of second sight has taken hold of her; before her illness, she never would have been able to see him so clearly. The forehead filigreed with blue veins and the enormous pores and moist nostrils, like a cow’s. Not a handsome man, Dr. Fetchett … And yet she sees the wilting flowers and cannot remember who sent them; demands over and over to know why she cannot go home.
Worse than the loosening of her mind still is her awareness of that loosening. She had expected that one of senility’s few comforts would be its self-negation; she might be confused, but she wouldn’t know she was confused. But she sees how people talk to her. They use soothing tones meant for animals and children. They push food upon her. They ask her to sign documents relinquishing her authority. They coax and wheedle and she sends them away. They don’t have her best interests in mind. She won’t deal with them, not as long as they continue to patronize her. Still they come, these lawyers with their pens and notaries and contracts and wills and lawsuits and mortgages. She refers them to David and still they come.
They are crafty. They wait for him to leave and then they sneak in. It’s enough to drive a lesser woman up the wall.
Bertha has never been one to succumb to anger; hers has been a life of self-control. She did not become a Mullerremain a Mullersave the Muller name from extinctionby losing her head. She may be sick, but she’s not dead yet, and as long as she can draw breath, she will believe that all problems have solutions; that no turn of events, no matter how bleak, cannot be turned further, bent into an advantage, the barrel twisted back toward the shooter. Her memory has decided to run riot. Fine. Let it. She might not be able to remember the day of the week, but she can bring back her childhood with a thrilling vividness. She will enjoy herself. She opens the album and remembers.
She remembers: walks in the forest and wonderfully sour Kirschkuchen and the yeastiness of her father and the soapiness of her mother. Baths in a small wooden tub, the stump of a barrel. A wooden soldier that clapped its hands when you pulled a string in its back, a painted top that cut bright orange circles in the air. The housekeeper taught her to sew until she was reprimanded for doing so and thus Bertha never learned more than a simple running stitch. The day her parents told her they were moving to America she ran crying to her best friend Elisabeth’s house, but nobody answered and in her time of greatest misery she felt lonelier than ever. At home she cried in her mother’s arms and her mother promised We will always be together, I will always take care of you. The journey will be long but you will see so many things girls your age never get to see. Bertha was unconsoled.
The port at Hamburg, the ship’s huge fluted mouth belching loud enough to shake her in her shoes. The waiters in long black coats who called her Mademoiselle. In the big dining room she ate snails; they tasted like rubber and butter. She did not get seasick; her mother did. They sunbathed on their private veranda. Her mother read to her from a book of fairy tales, using different voices for each character. The princes were noble and the princesses gentle and the witches sounded like grinding chains, everyone exactly as they should be. As they sailed into the sunset she thought of her home and she wrote lots of letters to Elisabeth that she intended to deposit in the mailbox as soon as they landed but forgot about when she saw the green lady in the sea.
She remembers her first sight of Central Park, from their hotel window. She was disappointed. She’d hoped it would be bigger. It didn’t compare to the parks and woodlands she knew. It was full of wheelbarrows, trenches, overturned earth. It wasn’t a park; it was a pit. She cried, and to quiet her down, her father gave her a package of peppermints that she ate, one by one, until she was sick.
She remembers school. She remembers being teased. She remembers the tutor. She sells seashells. Who sold those seashells? She never found out.
At Bloomingdale’s, tailors stuck her with pins. She didn’t enjoy the process but then the dress came. Everyone fussed over her, but she didn’t need their confirmation, she could see for herself: she had talent. In yards of green silk, she outshone Lady Liberty herself. Standing before her mother’s three-sided mirror, she decided that it would be terribly ungrateful if she did not use her gifts to become someone important.