Virgo

Last night I dreamed of my mother. I had not dreamed of her in a very long time, and in fact in the dream I never saw her. I was on the ocean, or perhaps only the Gulf coast, a long strip of resort hotels and condominiums. My mother and I had somehow become separated, and I was trying to find my way back to the hotel where she was staying. I didn’t know or couldn’t remember the name of the place, but I knew what it looked like, and I described it to a woman I was talking to—someone who knew this stretch of beach, though I have no idea who she was and am now unable to describe her. I remember telling her that the hotel I had in mind was not one of the four or five largest, but not one of the smaller ones either. It was perhaps six or seven or eight stories high, and a pale shade of green, I think. The hotels in my dream were mostly white, though there were blues, greens, and pinks among them—proof, to my own satisfaction, that we do at least on occasion dream in color.

At the end of this dream I had no more idea how to get to my mother than I did at the beginning. I was here, she was there. In fact I remember thinking in the dream that she might no longer be there when I got there.

A strange dream—or maybe not so strange if you know my history. My mother has been dead for years now. I saw her no more than six times in the last thirty years of her life. There was never a time, maybe in my life, when I could sit down and talk to her in a dead serious way, ask her questions, tell her things that mattered to me. Even during the war—my war of course, the 1940s war—when I was in the navy and she came to Chicago to spend a weekend with me, we talked about trivial things. In those years she was still beautiful; there was a youthfulness and a vitality about her. She had had four husbands, my father the first; and we both knew there would be others.

The second of her husbands was a major in the peacetime army who was coming up for lieutenant colonel and probably would have been a general if he had made it to Pearl Harbor, but he blew his brains out in a room at the Alamo Plaza not more than a year after they were married.

Her third husband was a second lieutenant, a big square-jawed boy from Pittsburgh who’d played college ball and who was twelve years or so younger than my mother. It’s true she could have passed for thirty. We were in the war by then. Another base. She took a little of the money from the major’s insurance and bought the lieutenant a convertible.

The fourth of her husbands booked bands. He and my mother danced to the music of those bands, and in one letter she told me: “We played the horses every day and danced every night in nightclubs across Texas.”

The fifth . . . no, there’s no use going into that one. The truth is, I never met him and knew him only as a name, never even talked to him on the phone, just knew he was a good-for-nothing son of a bitch from what my mother told me. “But,” she said, in that way she had of compressing things and at once defining them, “a spiffy dresser.” They moved around—Dallas to Fort Worth to Oklahoma City. I never knew what he did really. I think it was during that brief marriage that the big steamer trunk she stored the major’s treasures in—sterling silver candlesticks, oriental figures, curiosities he had picked up here and there around the world— disappeared forever. Maybe the fifth husband sold them. Maybe my mother simply walked out of some hotel and left them. In any...