In January of 1981, her mother was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus.
A nurse came to the apartment, but her father did his share of nursing too. Eileen would go over after work and find that he’d given her medicine, bathed her, changed her clothes, made her a liquid meal—she could no longer eat solid foods—and tucked her in. He’d moved into her room, and slept in the other twin bed.
The day her mother entered the hospital for good—November 23, 1981—her father mentioned some pains in his chest. They admitted him and found that he had been concealing his own cancer, which had spread throughout his chest cavity, colonizing the organs. They gave him his own room, down the hall from her mother. They rolled them out to see each other once a day.
Her parents had slept in separate rooms for thirty years, but a few days before Christmas, when the doctors rolled her mother away from her father for what would turn out to be the last time, she called to him from down the hall.
“Don’t let them take me away from you, Mike, my Mike!” she said, for all on the floor to hear.
? ? ?
What they didn’t hear was what she asked Eileen later that night, with the tubes in her.
The curtain was drawn. The lights were off except for the one above her bed. Eileen had filled two cups with ice water, but both were left full and the ice had long ago melted.
“Was it worth it?”
Eileen leaned in to hear her better. “Was what worth it, Ma?”
“I didn’t touch a drop for twenty-five years. Did it make a difference?”
She felt an uncomfortable grin forming on her face. She wasn’t at all happy, but she couldn’t keep this ghoulish smile away. She didn’t want to show her mother how much she was hurting. Through the open door, she heard the distant beeps of call buttons and voices in intercoms. She had worked in a hospital for twenty years, but somehow she felt she was in a place she’d never been before. Under the green glow of the fluorescent lamp, her mother looked like a wraith, her skin so thin you could count the veins.
“How can you ask that?”
“I’m asking you.” Her mother shifted her head on her pillow with great effort. Her cheeks were two smooth hollows beneath large, alert eyes. “Was it worth it?”
Eileen had thought of the time since her mother had gotten sober as the happiest of both of their lives. There had been a quiet thawing of the glacier in her mother’s heart, with occasional louder crackings-off of icebergs of emotions, until, after Connell was born, it had melted so thoroughly that all that remained in an ocean of equanimity were little islands of occasional despond. Her mother appeared almost joyful at times. But perhaps it had been a performance.
“Of course,” Eileen said, taking her hand.
“I wish I hadn’t stopped.” Her mother didn’t look at her but gazed at the folds of the curtain, her other hand palm down on the blanket.
“Think of all the things you wouldn’t have had. Think of all the lives you touched. We had some great years.”
Her mother pulled her hand back, folded it into her other one. “I would have given it all away for a drink.”
“Well, you didn’t.”
“I still would.”
Eileen took her hand again and held it with force. “It’s too late. You did all that. You can’t take it back. You had a great life.”
“Fair enough,” her mother said, and in a little while she was dead.
? ? ?
Her father died two weeks later. In going through the papers, Eileen learned that he had cashed in the bonds and sold the life insurance policies decades before. Maybe that was how he’d gotten her mother’s ring back from the pawnbroker. Or maybe he’d incurred bigger debts than she’d ever suspected. She knew he’d always played the horses, but it had never occurred to her that he’d had an actual gambling problem. If so, he’d been good at keeping the consequences from her. She remembered something she’d witnessed when she was ten, at her friend Nora’s apartment after school. Nora opened the door to a man in a dark suit and hat who told her to give her father the message that he should pay what he owed. Eileen was standing behind her. “You kids will pay if he doesn’t,” the man said, pointing at Nora and herself. “Tell him.” Eileen went home frightened, and when she told her father what had happened, he said, “He didn’t mean you. He thought you belonged to that girl’s father. But you don’t. You belong to me.” It was impossible to imagine any man having the courage to show up at her father’s apartment that way, not when her father counted every Irish policeman in the city as an ally, and many of the non-Irish too. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t in someone’s debt. Maybe that explained why they’d never lived in a house. And maybe it explained why he’d been so adamant that she own one herself. In any case, she had to dip into her savings to pay for her parents’ funerals.
The wakes were so close together that she worried few relatives would be able to return for her father’s, but those who’d flown in for her mother flew back, and if they hadn’t there would still have been standing room only at the parlor.
She was staring at his coffin trying to understand how he could fit into that little box when a black man about her age came over and introduced himself as Nathaniel, the son of Carl Washington, her father’s longtime driving partner. Nathaniel asked if she knew how their fathers had come to drive together. With all the stories told about her father over the last couple of days, she was amazed there was one she hadn’t heard.
“My father was the first black driver Schaefer ever hired,” Nathaniel said. “The first morning my father showed up for work, none of the other drivers were willing to be paired with him. There were rumblings of a walkout. My father wondered if he was going to have to go find another job. Your father walked into the warehouse after the others and took one look at everyone back on their heels with their arms across their chests and said, ‘Get in this truck with me, you black son of a bitch.’ Then he hopped up in the truck without another word.”
She cringed, but Nathaniel was smiling.
“His language could be rough,” she said.
“My father heard worse,” he said. “Your father wouldn’t drive with anyone but my father after that. For twenty years. I don’t know if you remember, but he used to hold a Bronx route.”
She nodded.
“Once he had my father with him, he insisted on being switched to the Upper East Side.”
“I remember when he switched.”
“?‘There’s enough blacks in the Bronx,’ he told my father. ‘Let them see a black face in that neighborhood for a change.’?”
She put a tissue to her eyes and handed him one as well.
“Big Mike this, Big Mike that,” Nathaniel said. “Growing up I heard your father’s name around the house more than the names of people in my own family.”
He waved his wife and children over and she greeted all of them in turn.
She was embarrassed to learn that Mr. Washington had died a few years before. She was even more embarrassed to see in Nathaniel’s face, when she said, “I wish I’d known,” that he never would have dreamed she’d show up at his father’s funeral.