What Happens Next?: Matters of Life and Death

The Life He Left Her

. 91. THE LIFE HE LEFT HER my father died seven years before my mother would, and some months after his death, while visiting her, I walked from her apartment to the village cemetery, a distance of two blocks, to look at the gray marble gravestone. It had just recently been set. Reaching it, I saw that its polished face was relatively plain: just their names, and touches of scrollwork in the upper corners, but none of the beveled filigree distinguishing many of the neighboring stones. When I returned to her apartment, she was waiting eagerly for my opinion. Did I think the stone looked too bare? I said no, that its simplicity was elegant, which was true. But I could tell my words did little to reassure her. She said she wished she’d ordered a marble base. She was worried that the stone’s sitting directly on the ground made it appear unfinished, incomplete. She seemed to be fretting that the baseless stone and its design might reflect poorly on her taste and, I thought, even more on her generosity. I imagined her worrying that, in the judgment of her self-scrutinizing little town, the stone’s spareness only showed that she’d scrimped on the cost. In other words, not thinking it through, I regarded the stone that first day I saw it as marking a the life he left her .92. my father’s life and its end, not ultimately hers too, and certainly not their life together. She was, after all, still quite vibrantly alive. Which partly, but only partly, explains why I felt this way. And why I assumed it was how she thought of the stone, too. In my parents’ nearly sixty years of marriage, there were no public treacheries, no flagrant adulteries. Instead, their years together as I saw them comprised a long narrative of quiet erosion, colored chiefly by the steady wearing away of her respect for him. And in reaction, his retreat into a silent obduracy. My mother was an almost comically ardent Midwest chauvinist . She bristled whenever she heard some East Coast wag on radio or television make a crack about a hick farmer from Iowa. It was a label she both resented and was burdened by, cringing whenever she encountered what she saw as confirming evidence that it fit. I remember her once standing in the kitchen at the ironing board, shaking her head at the radio and muttering, disgusted, “Oh, good lord,” as she listened to an interview with one of the state’s long-serving senators, a man with the perfectly Dickensian name of Bourke B. Hickenlooper. The hard-consonant whine of his voice as she heard it sent visions of milking stalls and hog lots out into the world. I believe she lived in a kind of mortal terror of my father doing something that would reveal him to be a hick farmer from Iowa and her, the wife of one. Once, in Boston, they took Sue and me to brunch, and at the end of the meal my father got the check and put down his credit card. But he’d not tucked the card into the leatherette folder’s little plastic pocket so the waiter could see it. Noting this, my mother made a sound of complete exasperation, a prosecutorial near-syllable, moist and mean, at the back of her throat. Then she opened the folder and, rolling her eyes, put the credit card into the plastic pocket. Imagine the effect of such relentless monitoring, of his knowing she was waiting for his next mistake as he chose the wrong the life he left her .93. spot in a parking lot, arranged suitcases in the trunk in the wrong order, chose the wrong shirt to wear, the wrong living-room lamp to turn on. And the result in him was a kind of silent-film sped-up jumpiness as he offered the wrong hand or rushed to open the wrong door. Earlier in their marriage, when I was growing up, I recall that she got angriest when she accused my father of drinking too much, of being drunk. I remember the scene, reenacted countless times, of her meeting him at the door when he got home from the village later than she thought he should have. Where have you been? . . . Don’t lie to me . . . I can smell it on your breath. I remember sitting in the back seat of the car coming home...