At the funeral, a community choir, made up of all the choirs of all the churches, sang a hymn called “Crown Him with Many Crowns.” I had not realized what a popular guy my father was, but there they all were, the people who had filled his days, his life.
My mother asked me how I could wear the suit I had chosen. “Because it was the only one I had that wasn’t at the dry cleaners,” I yelled at her. “I didn’t plan for this.”
Betty was in a mood with me. I knew I looked bad, still skinny from speed and tired from years of stress and no sleep. She treated the son of my father’s sister from California as her partner in public. He was a married man with children. He had the right suit. He was appropriate for public display. All this may have been my imagination. Maybe she was just trying to show my cousin that she was grateful for his attendance. Maybe I just felt ashamed of myself.
Evelyn Fleming held my hand when they lowered the casket into the ground. After it was done, my mother looked at me, stumbled, and then caught herself, just stood there for a minute looking completely undone as if she had no idea where she should go or what came next. I went over, took her hand, and led her to the hearse, where she closed her eyes until it was certain we were far away from the grave. I never let go of her hand.
. . .
“Are you mad at me?” Betty asks today. “Have I done something wrong? I’ll bet you wish I would die.”
“Not until you eat this damn meat loaf,” I say, shoving a casserole dish into the oven and trying not to hear her. She is an old woman, but I still hate to hear her talk about dying. “Actually, I am so grateful,” I tell her, “to have you here. I cannot imagine a world without you. You know that I love you?”
Looking a bit uncomfortable, she says, “Yes, I do.”
I know not to expect a response. This is not On Golden Pond. My mother’s reticence is not something that will change. She signs birthday cards to old friends, “Sincerely yours, Betty Hodgman.” She is of a generation who existed before feelings were spoken of.
We are two Americas colliding here, old and new.
When people ask Betty if she is on e-mail, she stares back and asks, “What kind of a question is that?” Every day it becomes more apparent to me, and I think to her—a woman who still calls the refrigerator an “icebox”—that her world is gone and she is standing almost by herself now, the only one who remembers how it was here, wondering half the time what it is that people are talking about.
Every magazine or paper I pick up seems to have an article on dementia, which seems to trouble almost all of those from her generation who survive. It is a plague. I have considered going from room to room with a pad of yellow squares, writing down the names of things, labeling every item.
Sometimes I think of all the people who have traveled on their own across the world, people who have gone far from home, from villages to sprawling cities where nothing and no one is familiar. My mother has also traveled—across time for more than nine decades, from one era to the next, from a world she knew to another where much she was taught does not apply. Things are changing so fast; there is no period of adjustment now for anyone. My mother tries to keep up, but it is such a complicated trip. The faces that time taught her to trust are all missing. She lives in a foreign land where it is up to me to try to make her feel at home. She has walked so far, through time.
I never wanted to hurt my parents. That has always been my excuse for not making more of an effort to force them into a reality where they could really know me, where we could have shared a little more about our lives. When the subject of my sexuality, of who I really was, finally came up, after so many silent years, I was almost forty years old. My father was gone, someplace where he could not hear my words.
Betty and I were riding through the countryside on the way home from the stockbroker’s. She was talking about how my failing father, dead just days, had nearly killed them both a few months back, driving too fast near that spot, by an old one-room schoolhouse a little way past Curryville. He had been trying to get her home from an eye doctor’s appointment before bad weather set in.
At some point, she asked me about my old friend David. “He never married?” I shook my head.
“Is he homosexual?” she asked.
“I am not sure,” I said. “I never see him anymore. But you know I am. Surely. After all this time. You must understand this.”
The passing headlights threw streaks across her face. She looked pained. It would be awhile before we would return to a safe stretch of highway. “I had thought it would pass,” she said, before telling me that my father could never accept it, could not speak of it, would not speak of it. After watching the TV movie An Early Frost, he had commented of the father of the gay man in the film, “‘He hated it, but he loved his son.’ That is all he ever said about it.” That is what she told me.
“You never talked about it?” I asked. “With him? The two of you? Not at all? I just can’t imagine it. Never? You said nothing about me?”
She shook her head.