The night before his departure for Washington, DC, my mother had a long-planned party for her librarian friends from Chicago. We did not like her parties with book lovers because for a few days beforehand she banished us from the kitchen. It was as if her favorite authors were coming, or real celebrities. Then, once the librarians sat down to dinner, they’d go into their ridiculous swoons over the novels they adored, and they’d end up arguing about who was great and who wasn’t, the professionals growing increasingly noisy and high-spirited while the spouses glumly ate their food. That night, my mother was just about to recite for the assembly what, in her opinion, was a perfect description of a human being, her performance piece for special occasions. In college she had committed an entire page of Edith Wharton to memory, a paragraph devoted to the physical description of a single character. She was about to begin with, “Mr. Raycie was a monumental man.”
Right before she opened her mouth my father made a face that was a problem for both of them. He didn’t just close his eyes. He shut them hard, he shut them tight, not, however, as if he were going to have a restful little pause. No, in order, it seemed, to blot her out. It was hard for him when she was that animated, when she was that monstrously joyful. Maybe there was a Lombard gene that made it difficult for the men in the family to endure too much enthusiasm or energy, so that even someone as quiet as Gloria was excessive for Stephen. My mother happened to notice her husband as he was bracing himself, right before he shut his eyes, just before the wince sealed his face. That wall against her seemed to have a specific temperature; for her, it, his very head, that wall, was hot. So hot it scalded her eyeballs, so hot she had to scrabble for her empty plate, blindly grabbing at it to save it from the heat. Instead of rescue, though, she raised it, she turned her whole body from the table, from him, the plate in the air, for a moment still whole. And then with all her strength she brought the china down, the blue-and-white pagoda scene smashing into slivers at her feet.
The librarians looked at my mother. They looked at my father, and next not at anyone. “Whoops,” Mrs. Lombard cried.
“Whoooa, Nellie!” one of the women brayed, the oldest joke in my mother’s book.
Even before one of the husbands said, “Time to go!” my father was leaping up to fetch the coats.
William and I had already gone through the D.A.R.E. program at school and we knew our mother was a real true Alcoholic, and that the glass or two of wine she had at dinner on many evenings, and the three she had at her parties, were going to ruin her life and eventually kill her. My father occasionally joined her but usually he drank cider so he was safe. When there was half a bottle corked on the counter we sometimes poured the rest of it down the drain, to save her from herself. She made the excuses that Alcoholics make, the kind of thing Officer Radewan at school had warned us about. My mother insisted that red wine was good for the heart, that it reduced low-density lipoproteins and was also instrumental in reducing breast cancer—at least some doctors thought so. “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” she’d say, “wine is food. It’s part of a meal. William, do not look so sad. I’m not in danger. Get this out of your heads, you two, that wine is evil, will you please? If you don’t, I’ll really have to become a drunk.”
She said that if we wanted to see what an Alcoholic looked like we should inspect the postmaster more carefully, or her patron, Mrs. Prinks. But we were not fooled. We usually forgot during the day that she had an addiction, a disease, but at dinner we again remembered, her affliction on full display. Officer Radewan had shown the class a photograph of an Alcoholic’s liver, the crusty, shriveled black slab, our mother probably already secretly on the list for an organ transplant. When we recalled that she was an Alcoholic we knew that her occasional violence was first and primarily the result of the wine. But even if she was merely drinking water the closing of my father’s eyes, the blotting-out, always made her temporarily lose her mind. Sometimes we did think he could have closed his eyes a little less firmly, that he didn’t have to look as if he were about to have a knife plunged into his chest just because she was going to recite Edith Wharton. We didn’t know that our parents were objecting to the other’s self, that enormous hulking thing each possessed, that a self of course is not inconsequential.
The day after the party my mother went off to work, still furious with her husband. Stephen, all set for Washington and beyond, had asked my father for a ride to the airport. Gloria, he said, probably wouldn’t be equal to the task. We had to go along to pick up the secret agent because on the way to the city we were hopping off at our friends, the Plumlys.
My father parked on the gravel down the slope from Gloria’s cottage. We got out of the car thinking to quickly play with the cats on the porch while the luggage was loaded, while Stephen and Gloria had their smoochy good-byes. When we all got up the little hill Stephen opened the door. He leaned out, saying to my father, “Got a small problem here. A glitch.”
“You all right?”
“My passport is not, ah, it’s not available.”