I was worried about my mother. She had not called to tell me she had made it home, and I could only make local calls on the phone by my bed. Or I could make collect calls, which would mean that whoever answered in my childhood home would be asked if they would accept the charges; that is how it was done. An operator would say: “Will you accept the charges of Lucy Barton?” One time only had I called them like this, it was when I was pregnant with my second child and I had had some sort of altercation with William, I have no memory about what. But I missed my mother, I missed my father, I suddenly missed the stark tree in the cornfield of my youth, I missed this all so deeply and terribly that I pushed the stroller with little Chrissie in it to a telephone booth by Washington Square Park and I called my parents’ home. My mother answered, and the operator said that Lucy Barton was on the line calling from New York, would my mother accept the charges?, and my mother said, “No. You tell that girl she has money now to spend, and she can spend it on her own.” I hung up before the operator had to repeat this to me. And so that night in the hospital I did not call my parents to see if my mother had gotten home. But William called them from our apartment in the Village, because I asked him to. And he said yes, she had arrived safely back at her home.
“Did she say anything else?” I asked. I was terribly sad. I was as sad, really, as a sad child, and children can be very sad.
“Oh, Button,” my husband said. “Button. No.”
The next week, my friend Molla came to visit. She said, sitting right next to the head of the bed, so close, it seemed, Nice to have had your mother here, and I said yes, and she told me that she hated her mother terrifically, and told me the whole story again as though she had not told it to me before, how much she hated her mother, and when she’d had her babies she had to see a psychiatrist because she was saddened by everything her mother had not given her. Molla said all this to me that day, and recording this now I think of something Sarah Payne had said at the writing class in Arizona. “You will have only one story,” she had said. “You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.”
I smiled at Molla as she talked, I was very glad to see her. I asked her finally about my own children, did they seem terribly distressed I was not around? She said she thought that Chrissie seemed more able to understand, she was the older one, so that would be natural; Chrissie had a long talk on the stoop with Molla, and Molla had listened as Chrissie told her Mommy was sick but getting better. “You did tell her I was getting better, didn’t you?” I said, trying to sit up. And Molla said she had. I loved Molla for this, for her concern about my darling Chrissie. I asked her about Jeremy, how was he?
And she said she hadn’t seen him, he must be away. I told her that was what my husband had said too.
Molla chatted then about other mothers she knew from the park, one was moving to the suburbs, another was moving uptown.
When she left, I was exhausted. But I had been glad to see her. I thanked her for coming. She said, Of course, and she bent down and kissed my head.
My husband came to visit. It may have been a weekend day, I can only think it must have been. He seemed very tired and he did not say much. He was a big man, but he lay down next to me on my skinny bed and ran his hand through his blond hair. He turned on the television that hung above the bed. He was paying for me to have it, but because I didn’t have one growing up, I think I’ve never quite understood television. And in the hospital I seldom put it on, because I associated it with people being sick during the day. Whenever I was told to walk the halls for exercise, pushing my little apparatus of IV bags, I saw that most patients just stared at their televisions, and it made me feel very sad. But my husband turned it on, and he lay next to me on the bed. I wanted to talk, but he was tired. We lay quietly that way.