Wanda slapped Freddy because she was ashamed of him. I didn’t want anyone to be ashamed of me. All of this was a long time ago. Maybe people don’t understand it now.
In a school play, Freddy and I were cast, fittingly, as best friends, two gentlemen arriving to call on some pretty women on the Riviera. It was a musical, The Boyfriend. During rehearsals, Freddy was, as usual, reticent, standing far away as he said his lines to me. Like almost halfway across the stage. Like almost in Cleveland. It was like he was doing Hello, Dolly! in another county. But on the night of the actual performance, there we were, in front of everyone. Something was going to happen. I watched the coach’s face in the audience and the expressions of some of the other boys as Freddy threw his arms across my shoulders and kept them there, hanging on, drawing me closer to him and not letting go. It was just too much; there, in front of everyone, we were more than chums about to fetch some ladies for an airing on the plage. This was something else. Who were we now, so suddenly? I was suddenly very uncomfortable. My cheeks went hot, just like at football. Embarrassed, I tried to move, but his hand stayed around my shoulders. At that moment, something passed between us. I knew it. The people watching seemed to be aware of it. The other boys felt it. I thought the world sensed it. There was talk, I think. Later. For a while, I guess.
After that night, Freddy never visited our home again, barely spoke to me, moved farther down the hall when I approached. We were no longer close. By that time, I had many other friends; I was popular, a funny guy, a little bit beloved by some, part of things. At last. But I could not understand why there had been this rupture, and I felt ashamed, as if I had done something terrible. For years I was ashamed to think of it.
. . .
I ask Betty, who is just sitting with her cards in her lap, if maybe when it cools down she would want to go sit on the deck for a while. To get some fresh air. She shakes her head. She says nothing. There is much we have said nothing about, and, yes, it is too late now. I kept silent. I didn’t tell them who I was. They didn’t ask. We didn’t know what to do about me. She would have helped me, if she had known how. She just didn’t know. I didn’t know what to ask for. I was scared. So was she. We never broke open. It was too frightening and we have all paid the price. My father never knew all of who I was. I never gave him the chance.
Betty never says anything, really—about me or herself. She has never told me about anything that ever happened to her. If I could ask her anything, it would be this: “What was it, Mother, that just shut you up, so tight and quiet?”
I hope there was nothing, that this was just her way from the beginning. I hope there was nothing that hurt her, back there someplace.
10
My mother is standing with her purse open, clutching one strap and staring at a framed watercolor of a field of flowers as if it were a window, as if it were her window. She looks as if she were home, surveying the yard and the roses, monitoring Alice’s comings and goings, worrying that my aunt has been invited someplace she has not.
But this is not her window. This is just a picture in a frame; the flowers are not pink, not her roses, and this is not her home. This is something else to her; this place for old people to come to is giving up, whatever words I use. This is the stop where everything she knows is left behind and she won’t go quietly. She won’t let go of home. It is her most sentimental quality, one we share, our attachment to our place. She has not lost this longing: Her mind has not altered radically or broken in two; it’s more that the surface, the coating, has been rubbed away a bit. You can see more of what is there, the hard and soft, but she is still my mother and she still does not surrender. Or maybe this is how I need to think about her—unconquerable.
I rush up to retrieve her purse, which is full of dirty Kleenexes, loose charge cards, and an old Vuitton billfold I bought her in the city when she came to see The Lion King and I left the tickets in a suit I spilled syrup all over and sent to the dry cleaners. We have argued for hours about this trip to Tiger Place, which I have characterized—to her and myself—as simply an outing for information’s sake.
As she sits on the couch outside the administrator’s office, she glares at me as if being sold into white slavery, gearing up for a battle I don’t have in me. She knows that if she fusses enough, I will fold and give up this whole idea.
Waiting for our tour, Betty rummages in her purse, pretending to disregard the passersby, little ladies in groups, little birds in running shoes, who squint at her, assessing the new recruit. Betty just stares down at her old sandals, slowly pulls her feet back under the chair.