EDWARD MANAGED TO miss out on his grandmother’s demise, as well. Even though he had set up a vigil, Will was the one who was with her when she died at home, and the inebriated chauffeur was the one who got to call everyone.
Edward was beside himself. In the months, and the years that followed, he developed a New Age theory involving a parrallel spiritual world to help him make sense of the one in which he had been doled such wildly uneven shares. He became more convinced that our father had come back as him. He even took to calling people up and apologizing for killing himself. He tried to unravel the mysteries of his muddled life with knowledge gleaned from his fledgling faith. And from instructional Web sites like Healpastlives.com . . .
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When I allowed myself to consider Edward’s theology, I found the similarity to my other brother’s chosen Eastern path oddly reassuring.
When our mother’s breast cancer eventually meandered its way down to her liver (which, aside from the tumors, was surprisingly intact), she summoned Will, Edward, and me to her final Christmas. In Nantucket.
Nantucket? we all marveled. There’s got to be a mistake. She must have told the booking agent the wrong island. She meant Nassau. Or Nevis. Nantucket? Who the hell would rent a house in the North Atlantic for Christmas? An alcoholic Yankee on chemo, that’s who.
My brothers and I agreed to stagger our visits, so that no one would have to suffer unduly. A couple of days before Christmas I drove from Manhattan to the Woods Hole terminal in a whiteout blizzard, and spent the three-hour ferry trip cowering belowdecks in my car as we pitched across the stormy sound. It was after midnight when I rang what I hoped was the right doorbell. (Locating one out of a thousand historically correct clapboard houses is challenging when, out of mortal fear, you’ve been imbibing the special edition Stolichnaya originally intended to go under the tree.) In a flash, like she’d been waiting there all night, my mother threw open the door. She glared at me under the light of the reproduction gas lamp.
“Wha took you sho long?” she snarled.
“And merry Christmas to you too!” I said. The vodka coerced me into kissing her chemo-orange cheek.
At the end of the dim hallway, I could see her husband. He was seated at a table in a scrimshaw-decorated kitchen, his grizzled head in his carpenter hands. The girth of his waist had enabled the frogs on his belt to stretch back into tadpoles. Edward was sitting quietly beside him, and he gave me a brotherly Thank the Universe you’re here! look. My mother remained where she was in the entry, searching my face. I thought she was going to embrace me—I mean God knows she should have after the crossing I’d endured to get there—and I dropped my bags in order to receive her, but instead, she spat out, “Wrinkulsh and acne at your age?” and marched into the kitchen to refill her drink.
Two dirgelike days later, I crept up the narrow staircase to say good-bye. My mother was asleep with her two Rhodesian ridgebacks curled up like parentheses on either side of her. She looked like her tribesmen had already laid her out for burial; her flat, brutally scarred chest was ablaze with amulets of gold and silver, and ceramic and rock, and bead and bone. Bracelets and bangles lined her dehydrated arms, and a bit of bluish scalp peeped from under her embroidered emerald green skullcap. I didn’t wake her; I just stared at her for a long time. I wasn’t crying or anything, but I’m sure my face was an obliging flush of red.
The inevitable predawn phone call came in February. No way was Edward going to miss this one; he had stuck by our mother’s side (helping himself to her morphine patches) until one night the hospice nurse had cranked up the drip and she’d slept so well that she’d died.
According to my brother, the nurse was in hysterics. It had been her first death.
Out of curiosity, I recently Googled Charles Thomas, the glorified daddy figure of yesteryear. I’d seen his full name in my grandfather’s deposition, so it wasn’t hard to find him. There wasn’t a lot of info; turns out all along he’d been a CIA spook. The last entry I could find on him was a stint posing as a foreign service officer in Lisbon in the late 1970s.
There was no death date on any of the entries.