A Mother's Love Read online

  BY MARY MORRIS

  Vanishing Animals and Other Stories

  Crossroads

  The Bus of Dreams

  Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone

  The Waiting Room

  Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail

  A Mother’s Love

  PUBLISHED BY NAN A. TALESE

  an imprint of Doubleday, a division of

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor

  with a dolphin are trademarks of

  Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell

  Publishing Group, Inc.

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious,

  and any resemblance to actual persons, living or

  dead, is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Morris, Mary

  A mother’s love/Mary Morris.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3563.O87445M68 1993

  813′.54—dc20 92-25031

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80998-8

  Copyright © 1993 by Mary Morris

  All Rights Reserved

  v3.1

  To Larry, for everything

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank my friends John Harbison, Gerard Jacobs, Susan Eve Jahoda, Annette Williams Jaffee, Michael Kimmel, Varley O’Connor, Jodi Picoult, Mary Jane Roberts, Mark Rudman, Rena Shulsky, and my husband, Larry O’Connor, for all their insights during the writing of this book. Also my editor, Nan A. Talese, Jesse Cohen, Diane Marcus at Doubleday, Frances Apt for her scrupulous copy editing, and Amanda Urban, Marie Behan, and Sloan Harris at International Creative Management for all their support. And my parents, Sol and Rosalie Morris, for always being there.

  ONE

  BEFORE SHE LEFT, my mother used to practice her leaving on me. She’d say, “Come on. Let’s go for a ride.” “What about Sam?” I’d ask, for I always wanted my sister, Samantha, along. But Sam was not yet five, and my mother would drop her off at Dottie’s trailer before heading with me into the desert. We’d get into the car and my mother would drive. She’d put the radio on High Desert Rock, roll down the windows, and sing all the way. Her raven hair was still long and straight then. I’d rest my head back, a girl of no more than seven, feeling the wind through my own dense red curls, wishing that I had my mother’s thick, black hair.

  After a while I’d just sit beside her in the passenger seat and stare at the desert, across the expanse of dust and sand. It was as if we were living on the edge of the moon and not in the state of Nevada. The light moved across the contours of the arid red land and its beauty was otherworldly. At times it was a soft pink like a baby’s flesh. At other times it appeared as if the world were on fire.

  My mother would drive until she found a scenic place where she wanted to stop. She’d peer into the bottom of canyons and toss pebbles down the dark crevasses, counting the seconds until we heard the plop as they hit. Or she’d stand at the rim of the meteorite crater and gaze across its cavernous hole. The meteorite crater—that gaping scar a few hours from where we lived—was her favorite place to go. “Just think,” she’d say, “some big stone came flying out of space and made this hole. Think of the power of the thing that did that.” The meteorite itself had disintegrated when it struck. Scientists suspected that a piece of it was left in the southern slope, but no one had ever found it, though sometimes my mother dug with a stick as if she were looking.

  She liked to walk the rim of the crater. She’d say, “You wait here, Ivy. It’s too far for you,” and she’d leave me sitting on a bench, the wind whipping my face until tears slipped from the corners of my eyes. She’d head out on the trail that meandered along the rocky ridge for some three miles. My mother wandered, her body growing smaller and smaller as she followed the sometimes treacherous path. If she wore a dress, the wind from the crater would get under the skirt, making it billow up as if it could carry her away like a spore. When she reached the other side, my now diminished mother would wave and wave. I’d wave back, motioning her to return; she seemed so small and insignificant there on the other side of the crater of that meteorite which upon impact had wiped out every form of life for miles and years to come.

  It has been twenty-five years since I saw my mother on the lip of the meteorite crater. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Often I have thought of her leaving as if it were a story told to me by someone else. At other times I have wondered if my life hasn’t shaped itself around this single event. Still, there were years when she hardly came to mind. But when I was pregnant with Bobby, my mother floated from the safe place where I had tucked her. As I lay awake during the darkened nights, she came back to haunt me.

  I thought of her especially after Bobby was born when his cries woke me and I could not get back to sleep. Often he only wanted to be comforted, because he wasn’t hungry or wet. It seemed as if he were afraid of something. I patted his back, rocked him. There, there, I said. It was what the nurse had taught me in the hospital. Pat him to calm him. Put him over your shoulder after he eats. Test his bath water with your elbow. I learned these lessons by rote the way, as a student, I had once memorized the subjects I did not understand.

  One night when Bobby was six weeks old, he woke with a start and it took a long time before I could get him settled down. Then I couldn’t get back to sleep. I listened to sounds of people coming up the stairs—the would-be actress returning from her waitressing job, the bookie who managed the all-night coffee shop. I gazed out the window at the street below. The garbage had been picked through. Beneath my window lay chicken bones, a soiled Kotex, a pair of torn pajamas; on the sidewalk there was a lone shoe. The broken window across the street in the building where the drug dealers lived was boarded up now. Just the week before a naked man, blood streaming from his wrists, had stood in its smashed window frame, shouting, “Bruce! Bruce!” Christlike he’d stood, five stories up, while disembodied voices called, “Jump! Jump!”

  Throwing open the window, I thrust my body outside. A cold breeze blew in. Craning my neck, I tried to look up. The city loomed, casting an eerie light on the clouds. If only I could see above the houses, I told myself. If only I could see the sky. I could hear Bobby breathing heavily in the middle of the unm
ade bed. Pulling myself back into the room, I put my face beside his. His skin smelled of talcum powder and perspiration. When he sweat, he smelled like a puppy. I pulled the cover across him, but he did not stir. We’d been like this for days, for weeks, it seemed, the two of us holed up as if we were on the lam. Running away. But in truth we weren’t running. That is, no one was chasing us.

  The room was littered with debris from the night before—containers of Kung Po chicken, Mandarin eggplant, bottles of beer, milk cartons. On a milk carton the face of a missing child stared at me. Since Bobby was born, I’d thought a lot about the missing, the vanished, the disappeared. The other day in a movie house where I’d gone for a matinee, until Bobby’s cries sent me out of the theater, a mother and daughter sat down in front of me. They turned to each other in the dim-lit theater, heads bowed together as if in an embrace, silhouetted against the flickering screen.

  My mother didn’t leave all at once, though that was how it felt when my father snapped his fingers together, explaining to some acquaintance what had occurred. “Gone,” he’d say, the click of his fingers piercing my ear. “Just like that.” But I knew it wasn’t a sudden leaving. It had happened over months and years—a rehearsed, choreographed event. My mother lived like an army on constant alert, prepared at any moment to take up arms, advance, evacuate. I knew this, but I never told my father. I always assumed she’d take me with her when she went.

  Instead, she took my sister, Sam. I heard from them at first—a postcard from here and there—but I never saw them again. The postcards came from places like Sioux City, the Wisconsin Dells, or Idaho Falls, with no return address. She’d send a picture of a water slide, a dinosaur park. On them she’d scrawl absurd things about the landscape or what they were doing. On one she wrote, “They have great French fries here.”

  I’ve tried to remember the last time I saw them, but I have no memory of it. It could have been over breakfast or in the schoolyard. They could have been dressed in skirts or slacks. There was probably the usual flurry of activity—my mother’s hurried kiss good-bye, a lunchbox pressed into my reluctant fist. In a sense it was as if my mother was always gone, so her physical departure didn’t matter that much. She seemed to fade like a chalk image on the sidewalk after a rain, slowly washing away.

  Though I do not remember the night my mother left, I remember things about that night. My father had driven in the evening for Lucky Cab—something he did to make ends meet—and I’d gone with him. After his shift, we walked home along Paradise Road, carrying coffee for him and doughnuts for me, laughing about something funny that had happened. A full moon cut a path across the desert as if it were really a road. The planet Mars was on an orbit that brought it closer to the earth than it had come in two hundred years. It shone overhead like a red, pulsating football. “You’ll never see a night like this again,” my father said as we paused.

  Then we walked into our trailer on the outskirts of Vegas. The first thing we noticed was that it was clean, which was very rare. The dishes were washed, the beds made. The drawers and closets were neatly arranged, and half of everything they contained was gone. My father trembled as he moved from room to room, through the trailer looking for what was not there. Then he sank into a chair, his head buried forever, it seemed, in his hands.

  It was after midnight as I sat at the window, drawing. I had tried to go back to sleep, but I only tossed and turned. So I sat at my work table, as I did many nights, while the baby slept. I drew sharp lines, the curve of a face. Coloring it over with an oil pastel, I drew it again and again, scratching at it with a fingernail. I built layer upon layer, coloring, scratching, drawing again, until the face seemed to come from somewhere deep within the image. Carefully I cut features—a nose, lips in profile—out of the clippings I kept in a basket. These I glued down, then brushed with oil paint.

  Pausing, I looked outside. The plaintive sound of a saxophone came from the upper floors of the building where the drug dealers lived. It was dark in the ground-floor apartment of the old woman with the scrawny yellow Chihuahuas. Then she opened her refrigerator door, and I could see her naked body with its loose-fitting skin, dangling breasts. During the day she swaddled her dogs like babies in a confusion of rags and towels and rocked them in her window. Once in a store I saw numbers tattooed on her arm. Pablo’s light was out, which was unusual, because he stayed up until all hours since his wife had died years ago. He too dressed his dogs and cat, only he had festive outfits for them—elf hats for Christmas, rabbit ears for Easter.

  Then I noticed, walking up the street, the woman who lived across the way—the one who was about my age. She lived in the renovated building, next door to the drug dealers’, that had gone co-op before any other on the block. Her apartment was directly across from mine, but one story up. It was late for her to be coming home, a sleeping child in her arms, another shuffling behind. Her hair was pulled back and she wore a black scarf around her head. With the child in her arms, too big to be carried really, she looked like a refugee in a war film. She had not always looked this way. For most of the six years I had lived in my building, I envied her all the things I thought she had.

  Shortly after I’d first set up my work table at the window, the U-Haul van blocked traffic on the narrow West Side street. For an afternoon I listened to the blare of horns as she and her husband carried in their cinderblock bookcases, their old brass bed, the stained mattress that looked as if it had been stolen from a dormitory room. He was lean then and had more hair. She was pregnant with her first, who was now picked up by a school bus, but she was still tall and sleek. When her husband spoke to her, she laughed.

  I have always done my artwork at the window—the jewelry I design and repair by the piece, which pays the bills. In recent years I have begun the paintings and collages of indeterminate faces. I work with things I find. I have drawers full, all neatly labeled. Souvenirs from motel gift shops—Oz memorabilia from Kansas, flamingos from Florida. Tickets, trivia, broken watches, instructions from an earthquake emergency kit, packets of Day-Glo stars. I create collages by building image upon image, sometimes cutting them out of newspapers or old postcards. Others I draw freehand. In my paintings concrete forms—roller skates, a tornado, a coffee cup—rise out of the abstract, but beneath the surface there is the face.

  A few years ago I had a one-woman show and a critic called the face my “ghost face.” He said the face, receding, elusive, was always the same. “Clearly,” he wrote, “there is some story hidden here.” After that review, I stared at my paintings, wondering whose it was, for it was not my mother, nor was it Sam. Before Bobby was born, I worked eight hours a day for the jewelry store in the diamond district, where the Hassidim, with mischievous glints in their eyes, come in, reaching into their pockets and pulling out fistfuls of gems. But on weekends, I painted my faces and watched the woman across the way.

  When her first child was born, I knew because the delivery trucks brought the crib, the playpen. The old mattress was tossed into the street. A new futon arrived. She supervised the changes with the baby dangling in her arms, and I admired her energy and her verve. They got a white-and-black spaniel. She had her hair cropped short and he let his grow long. He began to wear jeans, except when the limo picked him up a few times a year, and then he wore a tuxedo, which made me think that he was in the entertainment industry—a producer of commercials or TV shorts—and had to go off to an awards banquet or important screening. Often she went with him. She’d wear slinky sequined gowns, strapless. (She wore the same midnight blue gown on several occasions.) I hardly ever saw her go anywhere else, unless it was to the store with a child in tow. A few times she went out with what appeared to be a manuscript tucked under her arm. Then she wore a skirt and blouse, and looked rather conventional. But when she got dressed up, when she tossed her head back to laugh, there was something glamorous about her.

  A second child came, a boy this time. She grew pale and thin during the pregnancy, while her husband became
rounder in the belly and balder on top. He began to smoke. She didn’t laugh anymore when he talked. Now she planted flowers with a fury around the trees on the block and hammered up warning signs for dogs. In the morning she’d fling open the window and gaze down to check the flowers. The spaniel died and they got two new dogs—mutts that she never walked. They never ran or went to the park. She just took them to the curb, let them go to the bathroom right there, cleaned up after them, and took them back upstairs. The dogs, like her, were confined to the home.

  When the little boy was toddling, she had her hair dyed an odd shade of gold, and I began to think something was wrong. She didn’t want the second child. There was something else she wanted to do. A sadness that I’d sensed had always been there was no longer covered up with a smile. But soon her hair went back to normal. They put ski racks on the top of their car. She planted flowers around the trees the following spring. That summer they took their vacation as usual.

  One day a few weeks before Bobby was born, as I worked at the window, her husband came to the door in a ponytail and jeans. He took a last puff from a cigarette and crushed it out with his heel, so I assumed she didn’t know he was still smoking. Then he rang their buzzer. He’s forgotten his keys, I said to myself, surprised, because this had never happened before. She looked down with no expression on her face. A few moments later the children appeared, bundled in jackets, with small backpacks, ready to head out the door. He looked up at her, but she seemed unaware of his being there at all. He dropped his eyes to the sidewalk, shaking his head, and took each child by the hand, leading them away.

  Since then, wondering how it was possible that I’d missed this, I have watched her more closely. Now she has a Russian wolfhound, a ridiculous brown thing. When she goes out with her children, she walks ahead of them. Once I heard her shout, “I’ve only got two hands!” It is just recently, as I’ve noticed her gazing in the direction of my window, that it has occurred to me that she has been watching me as well.