On Tuesdays I’d go to Pueblo to pick her up, and sometimes as I drove her down to the ranch we’d get to talking—me doing most of the listening—about our kids and Uncle Walt’s health and those sorts of things. She was not an uncomplicated woman, I could see that, but she had a way of taking a subject that would otherwise fill me with apprehension—Uncle Walt’s trouble moving his legs, for example, or the problems a friend was having back home—and she would lift those things up into the daylight and show them for what they were: life’s simple, practical calamities, best considered head-on. I’d spend most of each week looking forward to her being there, planning conversations we might have. Then when Tuesday came, I’d find I didn’t have a thing to say to her—and be contented in her presence all the same.
One day when I picked Diana up she was complaining of a toothache, and by the time we got to the ranch it was clear the tooth was really troubling her. I got her some aspirin and some ice, and I could see her cheek was puffing up. When Aunt Cat went back to school to be a dental hygienist she learned to assist in root canals. I remember her saying that a bad tooth will only get worse, and so I told Diana that I’d drive her into town to see the dentist. She didn’t have any kind of insurance, but I told her not to worry about the cost. As it turned out, they sent her to the emergency dental clinic in Pueblo. There was quite a wait, and though I kept bothering the nurse to get her in as quickly as possible we spent most of the day together in the emergency room waiting area. It might sound like I was unconcerned by the discomfort she was in, but that’s not what I mean when I say that I appreciated each moment of that afternoon. The two of us, side by side in our plastic chairs. I felt—for no good reason—that there wasn’t a thing more that I wanted from the world.
To help her pass the time I told her about getting scarlet fever as a boy, which was complicated by an allergy to antibiotics and turned into double pneumonia, and how my cousins were always jealous that I got to go away to a big city hospital. I told her about the round windows in the walls that, in my delirium, spun and spun, and how the nurses put on a puppet show for me, with one of their old-fashioned white starched caps as a ship, how even now I can’t stand boats because they bring back the rocking feeling of that fever.
I told her about the day my son was born, and how that was the happiest day of my life, and, though she was trying to open her mouth as little as possible, she told me about how her daughter came out more quickly than expected in a big Soviet hospital without enough doctors, where, if it hadn’t been for one of the other expectant mothers catching her in time, the baby would have slipped right off the delivery table and onto the floor.
These were the thoughts that were going through my head as I walked to the medical archives, and it’s odd to say that as I was approaching what I imagine is as close as I’ll ever get to knowing my mother’s secrets, I wasn’t thinking about her at all. I didn’t know where Diana was at just that moment, but I made a plan to find out, and though the story of her daughter being born in that Soviet hospital was awful, in its way, telling it had made her laugh through her toothache—and me too, imagining the whale of a woman in the next bed lunging to catch a slick tiny person as she slid off the edge of the delivery table and into the world.
The medical archives had a slightly antiseptic smell, though that might have been my imagination. The building had been an elementary school once; there was a water fountain sized for six-year-olds in between the bookshelves and over it a display of old-time photographs of nurses and midwives posing gravely with unnerving implements.
A lady at a desk said something to me, then seeing I didn’t understand, she asked me in English what I was looking for.
“I’d like to see a hospitalization record from the H?tel-Dieu hospital,” I said.
“What is the name?” she said, and I spelled it for her. She typed some commands into the computer, and I waited, wondering if she had read translations of Inga Beart’s books in school, if she would ask me what it was like to be her son, and what I would tell her if she did.
“Ah, yes, okay,” she said. She began writing down a file number, then stopped. “Ah, but this is 1954.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“After 1939 these documents can go only to the patient.”
“Well, but she was my mother,” I said. “Look, it says right here,” and I showed her my birth certificate, glad I’d brought it with me for just this kind of thing. I gave her my passport too, so she’d know I was who I said I was.
“Okay,” she said. “But these documents can go only to the patient.”
“But she’s dead,” I said. “She died in 1954.”
“You have a paper showing this?”
“No,” I said. I hadn’t thought to get a copy of the death certificate. “She died when I was very young, see, and I didn’t know till later—”
“Yes, but we must have this document. Maybe she is still living, so we cannot give her file.”
“She is not still living,” I said. “My mother was Inga Beart, the writer. She was very famous and she died just a few months after the record was made, in November 1954.”
“Okay,” she said. “But I will have to see the document of her death.”
“It was in all the newspapers,” I said. “Everyone knows about it.”
“Please, you must be quieter. People are reading.”
“Everyone knows,” I said, quieter.
The woman typed something else into the computer. “I am looking, and we have no document of death for her. You can see only your own file, you do not have the right to look at what is hers.”
It occurred to me that she was right. What claim do I have over the personal information of a woman I never knew? All my life in one way or another, people have been telling me the same thing. I stood there looking at the woman for a moment, and I believe I had every intention of turning to leave. But I saw the blue door framed by the edge of the tablecloth, I watched the cup fall and smash into four pieces, petals of a china flower blooming as it hit the floor. I saw the red shoes, and how a piece of the cup must have flown up and nicked a spot just below her anklebone, where a drop of red blood beaded but didn’t run.
“But I’m her son,” I said.
I saw the stitches that anchored the strap in place, the scuff across the heel. I saw the way the slim bones adjusted themselves under the skin when she stood up and how veins covered the arch of each foot with bluish lace.
“Look,” I said. “I have the paper here. She was my mother.” I showed her my birth certificate again.
“Yes, if you want only your file, it’s okay,” she said.
“I want my mother’s file,” I said.
“You cannot have this file. Beart, Inga was in hospital in 1954. Files after 1939 can be released only to the patient.”
“Yes, I know,” I said.
“So you would like to see your documents?”
“What documents?”
“For Beart, Richard.”
“No,” I said. “You don’t understand. I’m an American, I don’t have documents here. Only my mother has documents because she lived in Paris for a while, and I—at the time I wasn’t with her.”
“They must be yours,” she said, looking at my birth certificate, then at the screen. “Documents for Beart, Richard at the hospital H?tel-Dieu. You will have to fill out this form here, with the number of the fonds first, like this, okay? I can help you.”
“No, no,” I said.
“You want the documents or you don’t want?”