Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen Page 12

  Inside were form rejection letters, dated 1996. Dear Ann McAllester, Thank you for your letter regarding your poetry… And, attached by a paper clip, dozens of pages of photocopied poems in my mother's handwriting. I skimmed through many of them. They were not good, but they let me into my mother's mind. One long poem, dated May 21, 1996, was titled “Death,” and it ends:

  I will go into

  The earth

  One day

  And decay,

  Until only my bones

  Shall show.

  Where will I be then?

  Matthew

  Won't be able

  Then

  To phone me.

  My grand-children

  Won't be able, then,

  To sit on my knee,

  And play with my hair

  Because I will be dead,

  Then.

  But what of my presence [sic] state

  Then?

  What will it be?

  What is it now?

  For I live in a dream.

  Deeper into the packed suitcase were more poems, hundreds of them, manically scribbled during the years I had spent in New York, the place to which I fled as soon as I was able. The poems reminded me of the evening courses she took in Edinburgh when I was about ten. She'd spent hours poring over Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath (not, perhaps, the right reading for my mother), and rereading Ulysses, over and over. Then came her own poetry, which reached its prodigious, awful zenith in the mid-1990s, as the contents of the suitcase made only too clear.

  There were also notebooks filled with detailed writings on the Bible, Nietzsche, Tristan and Isolde, Wittgenstein, Auschwitz, Babylon, Hiroshima, the Hapsburgs, Martin Luther King, Greek plays, Gnosticism, Camus, and on and on. There was a notebook of Greek vocabulary, from the time she'd decided, when I was a teenager, to study for a degree in theology in Edinburgh. Among the notes, the names and addresses of two priests she became obsessed with and stalked.

  I found a file folder that contained the legal correspondence surrounding her divorce from my father, which I glanced at briefly until I decided that it was, fundamentally, none of my business. I unsealed two more large envelopes of poems, never looked at since she'd sealed them years ago. Another notebook featured my old address in Brooklyn on the inside cover, opposite a schematic that featured the word Auschwitz in the center and seemed to depict some relationship between Persians, Britannicus (from Racine?), Sleeping Beauty, Nero, and Tzonis (which I looked up on the Internet—a professor of architecture, including classical architecture, seemed to be the only possible connection. It was, possibly, a made-up name). In the pages that followed there were notes on her reading: Foucault (rubbish!), Sartre, Nietzsche again.

  In a cardboard tube were diplomas: a bachelor's from Edinburgh University; typing and copying diplomas from a secretarial college in London; teaching diplomas enabling her to teach elementary school and high school. I found a file on her intermittent years of teaching in Edinburgh, a halfhearted career that came and went over the course of twenty years, and the first thing I pulled out was a letter, never opened, offering her a temporary job in the fall of 1986 (she taught French and history). But she was completely mad in 1986, I thought to myself. Crazy but often functional, always intimidating and well spoken, and articulate to the point of pedantic even when she was drunk or delusional. She was a madwoman with wonderful syntax. That same year, another head teacher thought better of offering her work. Writing from his school near Edinburgh, this head teacher commended my mother's teaching skills and personality but suggested she wasn't quite up to teaching special education.

  The files seemed to show that 1986 marked the end of her teaching.

  I randomly chose another letter. It was open and was dated December 17, 1986. It was from the headmaster of the Catholic boarding school in Lancashire that my grandfather and uncle attended. I am sorry, the headmaster wrote, that you are having trouble with your son Matthew but…I am unable to help since all our sixth form places are filled this year.

  There was another letter testifying to her attempts to ship me off, from another leading Catholic boarding school's headmaster, who explained to my mother that he did not like to accept boys who did not want to attend his school.

  Can I have this back please when you have read it—M. knows about it! my mother had written in red ink, presumably to my father, from whom she had been divorced for three years by that time. And then I remembered: I had seen this letter before. It was a year of war between my mother and me.

  One afternoon I find a letter lying on the kitchen table, opened, its return address clear: Ampleforth College, York. I know the letter must be about me. I read it. And when my mother comes home, I am not respectful.

  “Fuck you,” I yell at her. “You need to understand. I am never going to any fucking boarding school. I hate living here, but there is no fucking way I am ever going to boarding school.”

  I go to my bedroom and punch the door, slightly dislodging one of the panels from the frame. I begin to mount a campaign to live on my own, in a studio flat, reasoning with my parents that, seeing as they have ruined my life, the very least they can do for me is to let me live on my own, away from them. This is an unsuccessful campaign.

  Most teachers I have at high school take me aside at some point over the years to tell me that my mother has been in touch and that “I understand things are difficult at home.” One of them explains to me that school rules would not allow me to live alone, even if my parents green-lighted and funded my escape fantasy to my own flat.

  My end-of-term reports make regular, implicit references to something going wrong at home: When he has sorted out his present unhappiness he is going to really enjoy life, my teacher writes, when I am twelve.

  I am so pleased he has settled again, the same teacher writes when I am thirteen. It was not nice to see him so sad.

  Matthew has been more settled this term, writes another when I am fifteen.

  Matthew prefers to be self-contained, which requires him to give off signals that all is well and under control, the same teacher writes, later in the same year.

  Away from the chaos of home, I look to girls for comfort. And I take it all a little too seriously, having my heart crushed at the age of fifteen, running away to the highlands on a train, and sleeping in a field in the rain for a night. That defeats me and I return home—to a telling-off from two unimpressed policemen. Teenage girls, I realize when it's far too late, can't offer me an alternative to a happy family.

  But they do offer real joys. In 1987, when I am seventeen, I meet a beautiful blond girl named Clara. She's going through a brief Goth phase when we meet. She plays the violin and gets caught shoplifting jewelry We go out to pubs in the dark streets of Edinburgh and get drunk among friends. For the first time in my life I am regularly having sex—in Edinburgh's private gardens at night (scaling spiked railings, spreading my jacket out on the sloping grass for Clara like a teenage Walter Raleigh draping his cape over the puddle for his queen), at a bus stop, in spare rooms of houses where we are babysitting. Before Clara, it had been snatched moments. This is different and amazing. We have friends—two sisters—with a big house and parents so alcoholic and dysfunctional that every weekend their house fills up with teenagers drinking cheap wine, making coq au vin, flirting on the sofa in front of Mickey Rourke movies, making love in the bedrooms upstairs. Often, I don't call home to say where I am. I know my mother is sedated by Scotch and pills and, besides, fuck her. Why should I call? At other times I stash Clara in my bedroom. My friend Stefano also has a beautiful girlfriend. The four of us writhe under quilts on the two beds in my room one Friday evening as my mother cooks dinner downstairs. We're unashamed by our proximity, but also too young to be turned on by it, merely seizing the rare opportunity to have sex in a comfortable bed. My mother leaves us alone, not imagining that an orgy is going on above her head. We giggle as the twenty minutes of the same record—by the Communards—
come to an end once again; I get up from on top of Clara, put the stylus back on the vinyl, and “Don't Leave Me This Way” begins for the sixth time. The door is locked, and when my mother calls up the stairs we troop down, flushed, for a meal with laughing looks, and we return for more Communards afterward. On a Saturday night while my mother, upstairs, lies under the heavy quilt of her sleeping pills, Clara and I hold each other in my narrow single bed. In the morning Clara sneaks out the front door while my mother is in the rear of the house. A few days later Clara's mother calls to thank mine for allowing Clara to stay the night. I have no defense for my deception and don't bother to mount one. My mother has long since forsaken her right to impose rules, I have decided.

  “Your mother tells me you had Clara over to stay and lied about it,” my father says on the phone, from his small house in a mews on the other side of town. My sister and I spend one night a week there. “She also tells me you don't mind your Ps and Qs.”

  He is more inquiring than angry, and I think I sense an amused admiration for my sneaking a girl in under Mum's nose and a sympathy for what drives me to use bad language toward my mother. Perhaps there's some guilt in there, perhaps some yearning to make things better somehow.

  “Yeah,” I say, “that's true.” I do not apologize.

  I'm angry that he's managed to get out of a situation that he helped to create, one that I'm stuck with, one that was not of my making.

  “It's not very fun living here,” I say. I know he knows that already. His house has a small spare room, but I don't want to move there. My mother is the victim here, I believe, and for all her raging and drinking I feel loyal to her. My sister has left home for college, and my mother would be left alone for the first time in her life. Besides, I live this kind of unfettered life without rules that I know would end if I moved in with him. I tell him again that I want to get out of here but I don't want to live with him either. So I stay. And the war intensifies.

  Later that year, I am with my mother in the car, driving out of the psychiatric hospital. My mother now has regular appointments there, and I go along sometimes while she sees her doctor. I sit in the car or amble around the grounds.

  “The doctor thinks you should see someone here in the Young People's Unit,” my mother says as we drive home, referring to the part of the hospital that is for children and young adults with severe psychiatric problems. She and I have been arguing a lot. On a recent evening I had picked up her small tape player and thrown it across the kitchen, smashing it.

  “Excuse me? You're the crazy one. I don't have a problem.”

  * * *

  When I thought about the hospital, for the first time in a long while, I began to wonder about her illness, to ask myself a question I had years ago given up asking: Could the doctors have treated her more effectively? Could they have fixed her? As I went through her papers, I remembered my fury at the doctors who could not or would not see that she was desperately mad and needed help. As far as I knew at the time, they diagnosed her as depressed and an alcoholic. When she went back to the hospital in Edinburgh, it was to the Alcohol Problems Unit. But the alcohol was just a symptom of her madness. How could psychiatrists not see this but a teenage boy could? My sister felt the same way. “They treated her like a drunk,” she told me, when I asked her if she, too, felt the doctors had let our mother down.

  Did it need to happen, the lost twenty-five years of my mother's life? Was it unavoidable, my making do without a mother for most of my life? If she had been diagnosed and treated earlier, would she have been able to control her alcoholism? Would her body not have been so brutalized and bashed around until it gave up? Would she have lived a happy life? Would she still be here with me? Would I not be someone who had hidden with great comfort in the fury of other people's wars but who now walked through the streets of London feeling unprotected, afflicted at times with a vague sense of fear because my mother could now never defend me, could never dive into the sea to save me from drowning?

  Perhaps it would do me no good to see the documentation of mistakes. My father wondered aloud if this was such a good idea. “These are deep and dangerous waters that you are going into,” my uncle Paul, my mother's brother, warned me.

  But I had to figure it out. After all, I'm a reporter. It's my instinct to ask, to dig, to uncover. I usually work best if I'm angry, if someone in a position of power has done something bad to someone who is helpless, and I had begun to feel the traces of an anger inside me whose size and power scared me. I suppose I had felt it many years ago, but I had sat on it and forgotten it. The life my mother should have had. The mother I should have had.

  It was a bit silly, but I decided to look up which famous, successful people had been born in the same month and year my mother had been born. People whose lives had worked out. Joe Pesci. David Geffen. The economist Joseph Stiglitz. Mike Leigh and Michael Mann, movie directors. George Harrison. Howell Raines, a famous editor at The New York Times (one day older than my mother). Blythe Danner, the actress—and mother of Gwyneth Paltrow—who is as beautiful now as my mother could have been (three days older than my mother).

  Had someone made a catastrophic mistake? Had someone in a hospital had it within their power to keep my mother sane and happy, to let her have a full life?

  I don't believe in suing doctors. They do their best and their best is usually miraculous and beautiful, acts of life and love. We all make mistakes. I just wanted to know if someone had made a mistake with my mother.

  I asked a friend who works in health care if I had a legal right to my mother's medical records. I did, he believed.

  I called the local government office in London that stores medical records. In the British socialized health service, a patient's medical records are meant to follow them around for life, from doctor's office to doctor's office, from birth to death.

  “My mother died a while ago, and I'm trying to get hold of her medical records,” I said to the lady who answered the phone.

  “Why do you want them? Are you working with a lawyer?” she asked.

  “No, I'm not. I just want to see them for personal reasons,” I said. “I don't have a lawyer.”

  The lady said I had to make a written request and they'd send me copies. Perhaps. There would be a charge of ten pounds and I'd have to pay for the photocopies. I said I was fine with that.

  28

  WHILE I WAITED FOR THE MEDICAL RECORDS, I CONTINUED to report on my mother's life. The process, the sensation of discovery in and of itself came to give me a pleasure and comfort I had never got on any other story.

  Once I knew my mother had been born in London and christened close to where I now lived, I wanted to find her first address. I wanted to look at the house to which she had been taken when her parents brought her home as a newborn. I could not find her birth certificate among her papers, and her siblings could not remember the address, even though my aunt Jennifer could visualize the house. My uncle Paul, the youngest of the four siblings, thought his parents had lived in Harrow-on-the-Hill during the war, in suburban North London.

  There was a clue in something Jennifer, the oldest, remembered: The name of the department store at the end of the road where they would collect their rations during the war was John Barnes, she told me on the phone from Rhode Island. An Internet search indicated that John Barnes had been located on Finchley Road, in West Hampstead. There was a supermarket in a lovely old modernist building on Finchley Road. I called it and the automated answering message said: “Welcome to Waitrose John Barnes.” Now I had a fix on the neighborhood; my grandparents must have lived in West Hampstead, not Harrow-on-the-Hill. It was very close to where I now lived. But which street? Which house?

  I called the church where my mother had been christened and where we had held her funeral and asked if they had a record of the christening. The lady who took my first call did not get back to me. An Irish lady took the second call and within an hour called me back, saying she was putting a copy of the certificate
in the mail for me.

  “Does it have the address on it?” I asked.

  “Oh, I didn't look. Let me see,” she said. “Forty-five Compayne Gardens.”

  Of all the streets in London. Almost twenty years ago, I had stayed in a flat in Compayne Gardens. The father of my college girlfriend, Sophie, lived there at that point. Until I moved back to London after covering the war in Iraq, it remained one of only a handful of places that were familiar to me in the city of my birth.

  I dug out an old address book. Sophie's father had lived at 43 Compayne Gardens. I had stayed several times in the house next to my mother's first home. London is a big city.

  My uncle Paul remembered his father talking about how the Jewish family next door, émigrés from prewar Europe, had had the foresight to have a rather smart bomb shelter built in their garden. My grandparents, carrying Jennifer—aged three or four—and my infant mother, would climb over the garden wall to the neighbors' house during German bombing raids and shelter with the Jewish family in their state-of-the-art concrete bunker.

  My own memory rushed back to the front of Sophie's father's building: the blue plaque noting that a famous Zionist had lived there once.

  I drove the short distance to Compayne Gardens. There was 45, my mother's first home. And there on number 43 was the blue plaque, which noted that Nahum Sokolow had lived in that house until 1936, the year of his death. I remembered a street in Tel Aviv named Sokolow. And a quick bit of research told me he had been a Russian/Polish journalist and Zionist leader who had translated into Hebrew for the first time the great Zionist leader Theodor Herzl's utopian novel Altneuland.