The Afterlife: A Memoir

PART V

I have often wondered what might have happened to my mother after she finally stopped drinking, in 1983, had it not been for her father, who, I suspect, worried over his daughter every day of his life as a parent, and who, in the years leading up to his death at the age of ninety, energetically sought reassurance, typically from me, though also from my sister, that his daughter would one day overcome her anger and make a place for herself in the world.

“Don, what do you think of your mother’s prospects?” he would ask me whenever I visited him and my grandmother in North Carolina. “Do you think she’s doing all right?”

All right? I never knew quite what to say. Should I speak the truth and risk upsetting him? Sometimes I said nothing. I remember sitting on the sofa in the house on McCoy Cove Road, feeling helpless, looking out the living-room window at the low gray mountains nearby.

My grandparents’ house was neither beautiful nor remarkable — not like many Black Mountain residences, some of which had been built as vacation bungalows in the Arts and Crafts style — but it was a good house, and my grandparents, while in their seventies and eighties, had done painstaking work on it and on the narrow, sloping yard that was given over, out back, to shade trees overhanging a picnic table, and to my grandfather’s vegetable garden and my grandmother’s flower beds. There was a garage out back, too, at the end of the driveway that passed the house as it climbed the grade from the road. Sometimes when he was in a storytelling mood, my grandfather might slip away through the kitchen and across the patio and up the driveway to his workroom at the back of the garage. A moment later, steady on his feet, and chewing a toothpick or a stick of Dentyne, he would come inside the house, lower himself into his chair, and begin volubly speaking. Often, my grandmother got up and left the room, because she did not approve of his drinking.

My favorites of his stories took place in the mountains. My grandparents had graduated — she in 1926, he a year later — from Tusculum College in Greenville, Tennessee. At around the time they were there, I remember him telling me, a scholarship was endowed by a widow who lived in, of all places, Miami, Florida. It was the widow’s desire, as I recall my grandfather’s understanding of things, that part of her money be used to educate students from the poorer reaches of the western Appalachias. She had herself been a child of the mountains, I remember from the story, and, through education, had found her way into the modern world. Because the pupils brought to Tusculum under her scholarship were largely unschooled, the college committed itself to their comprehensive education. In return, the matriculated men and women — who might go on to train in medicine or law or engineering, but who, I gathered, often quit with teaching degrees — promised to return to their home communities, where they would live and work for a set term of years.

Neither of my grandparents was a recipient of the scholarship. But for a time after he graduated, my grandfather recruited for it. He told of driving a Model A Ford along dirt trails and over hilltops and through narrow mountain hollows; sometimes, he said, he drove up creek beds. When he came across a house or a small subsistence farm, he would get out of the car and ask whether the inhabitants knew of any young people who might want to go to college. Were there any around, he would ask, who showed signs of being school material?

One of my grandfather’s tales had him driving a rocky creek bed that led toward a mountain hamlet. As my grandfather neared the hamlet, he heard rifle fire echoing from the darkness behind the trees. When he got close enough to see buildings, the firing let up. My grandfather drove into a clearing surrounded with old structures that featured cluttered porches on which, I seem to recall him saying, dogs and children sat eyeing him. It was a poor place, like most all the places he visited in that job, a place that I picture as a scene in a photograph taken by Walker Evans or one of the other photographers who worked for the Works Progress Administration during the Depression. That day, men with guns pointed toward the ground came out into the open — they came from here and there, not in a group — and gathered in a circle around my grandfather’s car, where they politely discussed his business with him. When that was done, my grandfather got back in his Model A and drove on. I can imagine one of the men saying to him, “Go on up that way and you’ll find a boy,” then waving a hand in the air. The mountain men retreated into the forest from which they’d come, and, after my grandfather had got a short distance away, their firing resumed. It is not clear to me whether my grandfather knew with certainty, or believed with conviction, that the men had been taking aim at each other. But I remember that he sometimes talked about the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys, which took place in the West Virginia and Kentucky mountains not terribly far north of the Tennessee farm country where he and my grandmother had been raised. The Hatfield-McCoy feud involved deliberate assassinations and a love affair, though it did not, contrary to folklore, carry on for scores of years. It lasted from 1878 until 1890, and exerted a tremendous hold on the imaginations of people living in that part of the world in the years during and immediately after its heyday as news.

According to my grandfather, one of the students who came to Tusculum under the widow’s scholarship had been born into a feud. O., a Kentucky boy, arrived at the college wearing a sidearm beneath his coat. O.’s father had killed a man and gone into hiding — not so much from the law as from the victim’s kin — and O. had vowed, in the event his father was killed by the man’s relatives, to avenge the death. For this reason, O.’s revolver never left his side. Did O. carry the gun to class? I might ask my grandfather, interrupting the narrative. Did he hide it in his pants at a Saturday-night dance? Did he keep it loaded beside the books on his desk? My grandfather thought he might have done these things. O. was ready at a moment’s notice to abandon school and hunt for revenge.

Until that time, he studied literature. It was customary in those days, the story went, for Tusculum students to produce a play at commencement, and in his senior year O. was encouraged by his teachers to write the play. My grandfather claimed to have seen the production, and described the work as a loving portrayal of O.’s family, and as an unromantic though somewhat comical depiction of backwoods poverty, stern religion, and alcoholism. It was, I suppose — and if I correctly understood my grandfather’s remarks about it — a work of American naturalism, possibly an accidental work of naturalism, and, I suspect, in keeping with styles taking hold on the American stage during the years between the world wars. This style could be seen in the works of Eugene O’Neill and others who had studied under George Pierce Baker, whose drama seminars at Harvard placed the literature of the theater in an active and responsive rather than a purely academic and literary context. Great plays are authentic, living stories of a civilization, and, in Baker’s view, the plays then being written for the American stage required, in order that our society could find itself mirrored in its contemporary theater, a milieu in which practical training in professional stagecraft might bring into existence a class of artists able to conceive and perfect what amounted to a new American art form. Baker’s famous classes became a foundation for the Yale School of Drama, founded in 1925. According to my grandfather, the commencement speaker for O.’s graduating class at Tusculum was a colleague of Baker’s who had gone to teach at the Drama School in New Haven. At the performance of O.’s play, which received rousing applause when the curtain came down, this guest speaker, startled to his feet by O.’s unexpected talent, promised him, before God and the Tusculum community, a place at Yale.

“What happened?” I sometimes asked my grandfather at this point in the story. It was our call and response.

He chewed his toothpick. “If I have it right, he went up to New Haven, and was there a year or two. I believe he might even have had a play produced in New York.”

“Did he carry his pistol?”

“Yes, he must have. He wanted to be ready to get up and go if he needed. He didn’t want to stop and so much as pack his bags. He wanted to catch the first train home. Well, one day he got word that his father had been shot. It was what he’d been waiting for. He folded the telegram and put it in his pocket and walked to the station and was never seen at Yale again.”

“He went to the mountains.”

“Yes. For years he tracked his father’s killer, but he never found the man.”

“Never.”

“Some years ago I was in Kentucky, Don, and I looked him up. He told me that after leaving Yale he dedicated himself to finding the killer. But eventually he realized that he simply would not find him. There was too much territory to cover. Don, you can walk twenty feet into those woods and lose your sense of direction and never come out. So he gave up. He became a teacher. By the time I found him, he was long retired.”

“Did he keep writing?”

“That’s a good question. I don’t know. I don’t believe he did, Don. I don’t think he did. Too much time had passed.”

But getting to the story at hand:

In 1994, my grandparents, too old to maintain their house, moved into a nearby assisted-living community, where they occupied a small apartment with a tiny yard planted with flowers. Several times I visited them there — an insomniac man in his mid-thirties, walking the long corridors of a rural home for the aged. I remember from those trips that the men and women of the place, who seemed ancient to me when I first arrived, began, as the days passed, to appear younger and more beautiful. The women in particular, in their laughter and their smiles, and in the way they might quickly glance away when aware of being looked at, showed evidence of themselves in their youth. I felt charmed by the ladies in my grandparents’ circle, and learned to understand that a woman near the end of her life has not given up her powers of seduction. While stopping after lunch to say hello, I might look into the eyes of a great-grandmother from Richmond or Atlanta and see, or imagine seeing, the girl who did not yet realize that everything and everyone ahead of her — the husband who would pass away, her children, and their children, since moved to distant cities — could come and go so quickly.

One afternoon in 1995, while I was talking to my grandfather about things that had happened before I was born, I saw a startled look pass across his face, as if he had seen something unexpected, and, in that instant, I was sure he’d felt the speed of time. A month later, on an October night, he walked into the bathroom, had a heart attack, and fell to the floor. He was ninety. Four years later, in the late summer of 1999, my grandmother followed him in her sleep. And two weeks after that, my mother, who had moved to North Carolina in the year following her father’s death, collapsed and was taken in an ambulance to an Asheville hospital.

It was not a surprise. At her mother’s funeral, her face looked worn and gray, the color of damp ash, and she was feverish and trembling. She could barely stand. When had my mother become such an old woman? Her cough had grown nightmarish, frightening to listen to. At her mother’s service, listening to her, it was possible to feel the worry and discomfort of the people sitting in the pews behind us, our grandmother’s elderly friends from church and town, and the small handful of relatives who’d driven in a single car across the mountains from eastern Tennessee, my mother’s uncle Orbin and her cousin Annette and aunt Dorothy. After the service, my mother found her way outside the church, where her cough abated long enough for her to light a cigarette and send herself into another fit.

That night, my sister and I stood on the porch at our hotel, and I told her that I thought our mother was a dangerous person. I said that I did not want to be alone with our mother. I said that I did not think our mother would live much longer. “A year? Two years?” I guessed. Then I suggested that Terry and I get ready for bad news ahead, because when the time came it would be up to us alone to handle our dying mom, who, during much of our childhoods, had been a drunk, a woman we had known — and, I think, in our memories, in our consciousnesses of ourselves, and in our bodies, continue to know — as a holy terror.

I remember my phone conversation with my mother, just over a week after my grandmother’s funeral. It was the morning after she’d been rushed to the Asheville hospital. I was back in Brooklyn. I sat perched on a low ottoman — slumped over, as if hiding in my own house. I pressed the telephone receiver against my ear, and my mother whispered that she was ready to die, and that she knew peace awaited her in the Universe. She told me she loved me, and would continue loving me when she was dead.

After hearing that, I had a conversation with her pulmonary specialist, who told me that my mother would not recover, and that invasive or aggressive therapies were out of the question. Radiation might give her ten months to a year. If the malignancy were left to grow unchecked, infections brought about through the blockage of one lung would kill her in half that time.

“Your mother has made it clear that she intends to refuse the radiation,” he told me.

We talked a while longer. He asked me about my own smoking, and I admitted to some; he suggested that it would be better not to do it, and I agreed. I thanked him and hung up the phone, then made my way out of the living room and down the hall, passing the dimly lit bathroom and the little extra room that, before too long, would be packed and spilling over with uncrated marble-top bureaus, rolled and folded-over rugs, and carefully wrapped and boxed smaller items saved from my grandparents’ house out on McCoy Cove Road, and, from my mother’s house, old artworks and an Art Nouveau lamp and a stained-glass vase and an ivory brooch — all the various belongings that I could not part with, yet which I fear I will never learn to live with. I made my way down the hall, as I was saying, to the bedroom, where R., my girlfriend at that time, waited under the sheets. I got in bed beside her, and, after I’d cried a long time, she and I made love, and, at some point in the day, I got out of bed and phoned the airlines and packed a suitcase, and, early the next morning, I was off.

My first stop was the Charlotte airport. I called my father in Miami from a pay phone in the commuter-flight terminal. I told him how things were, and he told me how sorry he was, and then we were silent. I remember waiting for him to say something more. Or was my father waiting for me? He and my mother had, after all, been high school sweethearts. Not long ago, while sorting through a box of family photographs, I found a picture cut from a Sarasota newspaper.

“Panhellenic members lived it up this week, when they had a holiday dance at Tropicana,” the caption begins. My future parents, home on vacation from college, sit across a table from another couple. It’s the mid-fifties, and my mother has on black evening gloves; her hands rest on a table draped with a plain white tablecloth. She wears a sleeveless, backless white dress fastened at the throat with a choker made from darker fabric — it appears in the picture, though it is impossible to tell, for sure, that the choker closes with a brooch. Her hair is pulled out of the way in a hairdo that is difficult to see in detail. She wears costume pearl earrings of a sort that I remember her putting on for parties when I was a boy. Smiling, she gazes down and away from her future husband, who, sitting beside her — from the camera’s point of view, my father is more or less behind her — and wearing a dark jacket, a narrow, tightly knotted tie, and a white pocket square, leans in close with one elbow propped on the table. His open hand rests near her bare arm. But he does not appear to be touching her. Instead, he is staring at her face in profile. Frankly, uninhibitedly, he appraises her. And my mother-to-be, aware of his eyes on her, aware of being seen by him (and by the camera) — is an alluringly beautiful, coy young woman. Unless I am mistaken, she is in love.

That day on the telephone in the Charlotte airport, I listened as my father described Hurricane Floyd, at that moment racing toward Miami. Floyd was expected to make landfall with greater force than 1992’s Andrew, which had ripped apart entire districts of the city. My father was preparing his house for Floyd. He and his wife had, at that time, two old, sick cats. My father doted on the cats. He told me that he and my stepmother planned to wait out the storm with their pets in a barricaded bedroom closet.

“What?”

My father and his wife were professors at a Miami university. Surely the campus would offer better protection than their house. True, my father told me. Unfortunately, the shelters would not admit animals. I thought about what he was telling me, and then shouted, “Dad, if you want to use your body to shield your cats from a force-five hurricane, I can’t help you! My mother is dying! She’s dying!”

I slammed down the phone, showed my boarding pass at the gate, and marched onto the plane to Asheville. I was breathing heavily, and perspiring. My father’s love for his animals had undone me — and what had I done but angrily show my own powerlessness?

One way that I have for years maintained a relative powerlessness is by neglecting to keep a valid driver’s license. I let my Florida license, the one I’d had throughout college, expire after several years in New York, and learned to rely on public and commercial transportation, like a European. My sister would be joining me in two days; she could rent a car. During the flight, I stared from the airplane window at the Smokies below. It was a clear, hot day in September. The plane, bouncing on wind currents, was headed into the sun. After landing, all alone with the driver in an enormous van I’d hired to take me from the airport to the hospital, I watched the day’s light fading behind a western ridge of the same green mountains I’d seen from the air.

At Mission — St. Joseph’s Hospital, it took me a while to find my mother’s room. I lost my sense of direction and rode up and down in elevators. The old people I came across in the halls looked neither beautiful nor youthful. Quite a few were gasping for air in the rooms on the hall that led to my mother’s, which, thanks to her lung infection, was stickered with brightly colored quarantine notices.

I knocked lightly, opened the door, and peeked in. She was propped up in bed. “Mom?”

“Don?”

I put down my suitcase, walked across the room, leaned over, and, cautious of the tubes and hoses connecting her to pieces of equipment, hugged her.

“How’re you feeling?”

“Not great.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry, Don. Was your trip all right? I’m glad you’re here. Thank you for coming,” she said. After that we made an effort, for a while, to talk as if nothing out of the ordinary were taking place — the way people in crises will, I suppose — and suddenly she asked, “Don, are you going to dedicate your next book to me?”

My first had been dedicated to her parents, the second to my father and his brother, my uncle Eldridge, who’d died in 1992. The third, about some misbehaving psychoanalysts in a nameless city, was scheduled to appear in early 2000.

I was trapped. Obviously, she was next in line. But I didn’t particularly want to dedicate — certainly not on demand, as it seemed to me in that moment — a book to my mother. I stood in her hospital room and said:

“Well …”

“No?”

“What I mean to say is that the new book isn’t — it isn’t appropriate for dedicating. I’ve decided not to dedicate it.” What?

“Oh. Will you dedicate one to me sometime?”

“Of course,” I promised, and, desperately, went on, “It has to be the right book. Do you know what I mean? Mom?”

“I don’t. I don’t know, Don. I’m going to die.”

“Oh, Mom.”

A nurse entered the room and tried to talk to my mother about home care. My mother thought this pointless, because she had determined on her own that the cancer had spread to her brain. She hoped to move directly from the hospital to one of the Hospice facilities known as Solace houses, meant for people in the last stages of illness. I remember that my mother’s silver-haired GP stopped by on his evening rounds, but stayed only briefly. I’d booked a night at Asheville’s most expensive hotel, far on the other side of town. I had thought that I might, in some unaffordable place far removed from the circumstances defining reality, feel — what? Protected? I told my mother that I’d see her early the next day, called a taxi (which took a long time coming), and, when I arrived at the resort, found the dining rooms closed. I trekked past empty ballrooms and conference halls, and, after several wrong turns, located my room, where I stayed awake until dawn picking at room-service food, watching television, and wishing that I could open the sealed-shut windows.

The windows faced a construction project. The hotel was building a new wing. All of a sudden, the sun was up and the day’s work with heavy equipment had begun. I got out of bed and drank coffee, cup after cup. I’d arranged to meet a lawyer my mother had retained for a lawsuit she’d brought against the previous owner of her house, the real estate agent who’d handled the sale, and a Black Mountain oil-company owner. Shortly after moving in, in 1997, she’d smelled fumes. The heating-oil tank in her basement had been leaking into the topsoil. Without a clean bill of health from the EPA, her house — paid for in cash — would be worthless. A suit for damages had dragged on for more than a year, and my mother had made enemies in Black Mountain. I ran downstairs to meet the lawyer, already behind in his day’s schedule. He offered to take me to the hospital, and talk along the way. Driving through Asheville, he told me not to worry about the oil underneath the house. He told me that he admired my mother, whom he saw as a courageous person. He asked me if I’d ever married.

“I haven’t.”

“No? Why not? You ought to try it,” he said, and went on to describe his happiness in his second marriage, which had gathered the children from his and his wife’s first marriages together in one family.

At the hospital, my mother complained that her GP had not visited that day. One of the nurses thought he might be in the emergency room. I went downstairs and entered the maze of corridors leading to the ER. When I got there, I saw, through the doors to the ward, my mother’s doctor. I pushed open the swinging doors, marched past nurses, and asked him if I might speak with him. He put down his clipboard and we chatted — as if getting to know each other — and he told me, “There’s nothing we can do about your mother’s cancer in the long run, but we can give her time, and she needn’t suffer.”

“I understand.”

“Talk to her about radiation. She’s a good lady.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I promised. On my way to see her, though, I had the thought that I might prefer her gone sooner rather than later. When my grandmother died, my mother had proclaimed that, unburdened of lifelong parental constraints, she would be free at last to move to the San Juan Islands, a place she’d never visited, but which she understood to be a secret garden for women artists. Now I was having my own fantasy about the freedom to pursue happiness. All I had to do, I thought, was respect her rejection of medical interventions, and she would die by Christmas from fevers that would make her delirious.

When I got to her room, though, I told her that her doctors were not conspiring to harm her. “They’re doctors, Mom. They took an oath.” And I begged, “Try radiation?”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Will you? Please?”

“I said I’d think about it.”

A Hospice worker appeared, and my mother said, “It’s in my brain! I feel the cancer in my brain!”

The woman said, “You can’t usually feel it like that,” and turned to me and said that someone would need to be at my mother’s house the next morning. A hospital bed, an air compressor and hoses, and portable tanks were scheduled for early delivery.

I could get a lift to Black Mountain, it turned out, from a friend of my mother’s who worked near the hospital.

“I have to go get things ready, Mom. They’re kicking you out of here in a few days.”

She squeezed my hand, laughed, and coughed. “Go ahead, Don.”

On the drive, my mother’s friend told me about her grown son, whom she had not seen for many years because he refused to visit her. I nodded my head sympathetically and stared out the window at the kudzu strangling the life out of trees and plants beside the highway.

“I don’t know whether your mother has told you her theories about your family. I guess she hasn’t,” the friend said.

“What does she believe?”

“Your mother thinks her father wasn’t her father. There was another man in your grandmother’s life.”

“Jesus.”

“Why would your mother say that?”

“I don’t know. What do you guess? As her friend.”

“We’re not close anymore,” the friend said, and commented on my mother’s flair for working people against each other. “It’s hard to be close to someone who gets people mad at each other.”

We were nearing the Monte Vista Hotel, on Main Street. I had to check in, watch the television for reports on Hurricane Floyd, call R. in New York and rant into the telephone, try later to sleep, wake up at a reasonable hour, and meet the oxygen truck at my mother’s house a few blocks away. If time remained before my sister arrived, I might, in the early afternoon, visit the estate lawyer (who was not, I should say, the lawyer working on the oil-spill suit) handling my grandmother’s — and, soon, my mother’s — last will and testament. In the event, I did what I needed to do (including standing on the Monte Vista lawn sometime after midnight, praying to my grandfather’s spirit for any kind of guidance he — it? — could give), and, at the lawyer’s office, in a brick house on a quiet street, I was handed a pair of sweetheart wills signed by my grandfather and grandmother in the early eighties, the second of which — my grandmother’s, already in probate — left all their worldly goods to my mother.

My grandfather did not leave behind great wealth. Like many in his generation, he had been distrustful of the stock market. Yet he’d been frugal, and had saved enough to help his family when needs arose. Before he died, he told us his intention to draw up a will that would disperse whatever remained, after his and my grandmother’s deaths, among my sister, me, and our mother. He told us he wanted to do this out of consideration that his grandchildren were now, like his daughter, adults.

“That’s not the will. That’s not the will,” I said over and over to the confused lawyer.

And later that day, when my sister arrived in the car she’d rented at the Charlotte, North Carolina, airport, I said, practically as she was opening the car door and stepping out, “Mom fucked us.”

“What?”

“She took in a 1983 will! She grabbed an old will out of the file! Leaving everything to her!”

We set up a labor routine that followed old-fashioned gender lines. My sister occupied our mother’s house, phoning nursing agencies and scheduling interviews. I commandeered the hotel bar as a base from which to contact doctors, lawyers, and the woman in charge of the money-market accounts. I saw my mother as a suicide and a cheat who would steal her children’s birthright, and I hated her, with her brain-cancer dreams and her banishment of her father, without whom she must have felt orphaned and alone, as did I — a fact that I savagely demonstrated the evening my sister and I drove west on Interstate 40 to the hospital, where we packed our mother’s suitcase, put her shoes on her feet, and rolled her in her wheelchair past the nurses’ station, into and out of the elevator, across the hospital’s expansive lobby, and into the Appalachian night.

We helped her into the rental car’s front passenger seat. I recall that I tilted back the seat for her comfort. I loaded the oxygen and her suitcase into the back, then climbed into the car. I was sitting, as I remember, behind my mother, and could see, passing through the space separating the front seats, the clear tubing connecting her nostrils to the squat green tank propped beside me like some strange new addition to the family.

“How are you doing, Mom?” my sister and I asked. “How are you feeling?”

“Okay, kids.”

Terry started the car. We began the drive. I couldn’t resist. Addressing the back of my mother’s head, I said, “Mom, do you remember what Granddaddy told us about his will? Right before he died?”

“What are you asking me? I just got out of the hospital! I’m sick, Don! I’m sick! Can’t you let me have some peace?”

“Don! Stop!” This from my sister.

I leaned back in my seat. I’d made our mother cry. We rode home to the sounds of her sobbing and coughing. Later, at the house, she got in her bed and announced that she wanted Terry to keep her company for the night. I had to go to the hotel.

The next day and the day after that, I manned the hotel bar phone. No one I spoke with had heard of another will. I opened the yellow pages and read the names of Asheville attorneys. I was determined to catch my mother in what I was certain was a deliberate deceit. How could she? How dare she? I told myself that I wanted to get to the bottom of the matter. I was curious. That was all. Had there been another will? Where was it? Had my grandfather mentioned another lawyer?

Hurricane Floyd had by this time changed course and spun away from the Florida coast. The danger to my father and his wife had passed. At least there was that. But what about the toxic spill beneath my mother’s house? What about the Environmental Protection Agency? What about radiation therapy? Would my mother accept radiation? Would she consider a nursing home? Which nursing home?

In the afternoons, I cleared my papers from the bar and walked down the hill to the house. Had you been a resident of one of the homes in that part of town — one of the stone bungalows whose porches, in my memory of them, were painted durable green or brown shades that echoed the colors of the forested mountains in the near distance; or one of the bigger houses whose more spacious porches were decorated with comfortable chairs positioned to give a view of the lawn — and had you been sitting out front or standing at a window, you might have seen a man stalking past, wearing lace-up moccasins without socks, khaki shorts held up by a narrow belt, and a white dress shirt, tucked in. He probably would have had his hands shoved into his pockets, and his head might have been lowered, eyes glaring at the road ahead. Would you have imagined that this anxious man was plotting to bring down shame and maybe even the law on his own mother, who, at that moment, was lying on her back in huge discomfort, possibly imagining dying, or imagining smoking and drinking, or trying, with help from her pills, to lose consciousness and sleep for an hour or two, while in the kitchen her daughter made a few last phone calls of her own, penciled check marks beside things-to-do notes on a yellow pad, and boiled water for tea?

“You look like your father,” my mother said to me one afternoon when I came in the house. She was correct. The shorts-and-shirt outfit I was wearing was pretty much a copy of his summer uniform.

It had been a long time since my father had left my mother for good, and for years I’d listened to her criticisms of him. Yet I recall that once, when she was just beginning her new life in North Carolina (before death began waiting, as it were, around the corner), I asked her to tell me about the time when they’d first separated, and she surprised me. I know that her discovery of his love affair, early in their marriage, must certainly have wrecked some part of her confidence in herself as a sexually compelling woman, a confidence that she never, I think, regained, and that her drinking, by incrementally destroying her body and undermining her feelings of well-being and clarity of mind, helped to obliterate further.

And yet in spite of what I know, or think I know, today, it is also true that my memories of my parents’ early bad times are obscure to me. I see, for instance, an edge of olive-green carpet on a wood floor, and blue-spined paperback books, old Pelican editions, lining a low shelf. I hear a Miles Davis record, Porgy and Bess, playing in the background. The place is Gainesville, and I am six, and, looking up, I see the back door of our house. The kitchen is empty; curtains fall across black windowpanes. It is night, the shouting has stopped, and the door is open: someone has left.

Thirty-five years later, I asked my mother to fill in a few gaps. In calling forth her memories of her life with him, or of her life alone with two small children, I risked her anger at me — at me—as if I were my father, and she were delivering the last word on our marriage.

Instead, she told me about the music and art he’d introduced her to, and about the poetry they’d read, and about the wild parties they’d thrown for their friends at the University of Florida, Butler and Charlie and Conrad and Maud and others whose faces still appear from time to time in my thoughts. As my mother spoke about her young marriage, the muscles around her mouth loosened, and her eyes grew soft. Her gaze, which rested directly on me, seemed to become clear — her memories felt good to her — and, exhaling smoke from her cigarette, she smiled.

Three years later, after she’d told me that I looked like my father, I stood in her Black Mountain living room, her sick bay, and, peering down at my feet and bare legs, at my shirt coming untucked from my shorts, said, “I guess you’re right, Mom. I do look like Dad.”

“That’s all right, Don,” I remember her saying. And I answered, “I hope so, because there’s not a lot I can do about it.”

But what about the will? Looking back it can seem to me that the existence or nonexistence of my grandfather’s will is important less as a substantive question in its own right, more as a quandary, unanswerable, mysterious. In remaining mysterious, the will became — and becomes — a source of power, the power, in this case, to enact betrayal and deprivation. My mother had betrayed the memory of her father. Was she now, in her abandonment of her children, giving us permission to betray her? Was she inviting us, one last time, to fight and be punished? Who would disappoint whom, and who could suffer with the most grace? And who, in the war between a mother and her children, a war of shame, could ever set things right?

A few days before my sister and I left Black Mountain, I sat on a stool at the empty hotel bar, and, as I’d done before, opened the yellow pages to Attorneys. This time I saw, as if it had been listed only that afternoon, a name that struck me. Maybe my grandfather had mentioned it once. I picked up the phone and dialed the number, and a receptionist answered and connected me to the lawyer, who, when asked if he’d known my grandfather, Don Self, acknowledged that he had. Had they worked together? Yes, he told me, they’d worked together. In order to preserve client confidentiality he could not speak about the particulars of their business. However, in an approximate way, the lawyer ratified my suspicions: My grandfather had wanted a trust for his daughter and grandchildren to be provided through his will. But then he’d died.

What to do? It was not a matter that could be safely discussed with my mother. I remember watching her sit up in bed. First, she had to reach out with a hand and clear the plastic air hose from the mattress, so as not to crush it beneath her. Next, working from an inclined, sideways position, she lowered her legs off the bed — leverage — and, using her full strength, shoved herself upright. She hunched forward and supported herself with weak arms, her hands placed beside her knees on the edge of the bed’s high mattress, her feet, blue from her poor circulation, hanging down like a child’s. She was still coughing, of course. I remember that she would look around the room with a fogged, faintly wary expression on her face, as if she did not quite understand where she was, or whether the locals were friendly. Merlin, her black cat, whom she believed to be a direct reincarnation of the Arthurian necromancer, would sometimes be curled beside her, and she might speak to him in the cooing voice she used when conversing with cats, even those she didn’t know. I remember that the house smelled like ash, though my mother had stopped smoking. Everything — rugs, curtains, bedspreads, tasseled chair cushions, Merlin — remained smoke-permeated. It drove my sister crazy. I remember holding Terry in my arms when, one afternoon, standing outside in the scratchy, untended yard behind the house, she broke down because our mother had become argumentative over the nurses who’d come that day for interviews. Terry and I piled in the car and escaped west toward Asheville, then up the Blue Ridge Parkway in the direction of Mount Mitchell, which I’d climbed on my bicycle when I was in my twenties. Now, crossing from slope to slope, rounding the parkway’s elegantly graded bends in the road, I could occasionally see, looking from the car’s rolled-down windows, tiny squares and rectangles in silver and white and black and red — barn and farmhouse roofs dotting the valleys below. As we ascended, the air temperature dropped, and we passed through clouds that had settled in the mountaintop hollows. I leaned back in the passenger seat, watching for hawks in the sky, and my sister told me about her family’s boat trips on Puget Sound, about her children’s schools, and about her painting — still lifes and landscapes, mainly. Listening to her talk about her life, I was reminded of car rides across the mountains with my grandfather.

I do not, however, remember what day it was — the end of Terry’s and my stay in North Carolina was close — or the hour (a memory of sunlight falling through my mother’s living-room windowpanes, illuminating dust in the air and a section of far wall, makes a picture of afternoon becoming evening), when, after opening her eyes and finding me near, my mom whispered:

“Don, I know we need to talk about things.”

That is what I remember her saying. Maybe she said something slightly different. But it was clear what she was referring to. Everything was clear. I nodded my head.

She called, “Merlin, come here, Merlin.”

“Merlin!” I said.

The cat leapt from the floor to the bed. “There you are. How’s my Merlin?” said my mother.

I scratched his back, and he lowered his chin and raised his tail, and his fur shedded away in tufts.

The day before Terry and I left North Carolina, we drove into Asheville and shopped for fresh fruit and vegetables. The grocery store had decent fish, and I bought sole. My sister and I had finally set in place the health-care and legal provisions required for our mother’s care. We’d scored a victory of sorts. Our mother had suggested a willingness to consider radiation. It looked as if the oil spilled beneath her house would be cleaned up after all. Terry and I loaded the car with supplies, and, on our way home to Black Mountain, we listened to a radio show playing field recordings of Appalachian music — old, plaintive ballads describing betrayal, repentance, redemption, loss in love, alcoholism, and conversations with the devil. These days, it is not merely the subject matter, familiar and disturbing, that makes this music of Tennessee and the Carolinas difficult for me to bear. Rather, it is something heard in the singing, that discernibly nasal, heavily accented, prayerful quality of voice — the voice of the region in which my mother and her family had been born — that can cause me to reach out and shut the music off. That day with my sister, I listened with something like joy. I cannot speak for Terry, but I believe that she, too, heard, rising up from the hissing, popping shellac, the cadences and the rhythms and the slightly downward-falling inflections that occur, in milder form, in our own voices.

We got back to the house and unloaded the groceries into the kitchen. It was a gorgeous, bright day on its way to ending. As on previous days, I was wearing my version of my father’s clothes. Our mother was dressed and moving about. I offered to cook. Dinner was simple. There was the fish, simmered in a pan on top of the stove. There was asparagus. Rice. A salad. Glasses filled with iced tea. While I made dinner, my mother and my sister sat at the old, dinged-up wooden table that had been, during the years when Terry and I were growing up, our family’s dining-room table. This table had been bought by my father and the woman for whom, back when Terry and I were five and six years old, he had left my mother. Now it was here.

And in my mother’s living room, stored in a plastic urn inside a cardboard box, our grandmother’s ashes rested on a shelf.

What I am trying to say is that, in a way, we were pretty much all present, in one form or another, in my mother’s house that night — all of us except our mother’s father.

But then he got invited, too. My mother invited him. I remember this with clarity, because it was astonishing to hear, astonishing, as well, to wonder, as I have over the years since, about the truth regarding her father’s will, though I realize that I will probably never know the truth, and must only imagine my mother in the days immediately following her own mother’s death, my mother sick and with the incipient awareness, surely, of the severity of her illness. I see her collecting my grandmother’s ashes from the undertaker, bringing the ashes home and placing them on the shelf, maybe only then pulling the old paperwork from a box or a file, and making her way up the hill to the lawyer’s office in town. I wonder, imagining such scenes, what had led me so deliberately to pursue, in my thoughts and in my actions, the idea of my mother as a thief, when, just as likely, she was no thief, merely a woman who was sick and alone and scared and grieving, hoping for a better life, one that was not ever going to come, not in this world.

That evening at the dinner table, my mother said, “I remember. I remember. There was another lawyer. Granddaddy said that there was a lawyer in Asheville.”

I recall that the sun was setting. The light outside the partly curtained window above the kitchen sink, the window facing west, with a view of trees, had been growing dark. I turned and looked at my mother. Maybe I was holding a spatula or the pan of cooking fish.

She went on, “What was his name? What was it?” Then she pronounced the name. It was the name of the man with whom I’d spoken a day or two before, whose phone number I’d got out of the phone book, the man my grandfather had contacted about a trust.

She said, “Kids, I’m going to make things right. I’m going to make things right.”

At that point dinner was ready. I plated up, and we gathered around the table, just the three of us — or the six of us, or however many of us were, in body or in spirit, present in that room — and, as I recall, someone said about the fish, “This is good,” and I said a silent prayer that my mother would get well and not die, not ever die, and the next day my sister and I got in the rental car and fastened our seat belts and headed up the hill toward the highway. We drove east across the mountains. Near Lake Lure, we stopped at a roadside stand, where I bought sourwood honey in a mason jar that I tossed into my suitcase. We continued out of the mountains, up and down the foothills, and through rolling farmland toward Charlotte. At the airport, Terry and I dropped off the car and boarded a courtesy bus that took us to the terminal. I checked my suitcase, and, when the time came, she and I walked off down the long concourses leading to our different gates. My sister went one way and I went another.

That night when I got to my apartment I discovered that the honey jar had been smashed to pieces during the flight. Honey and shattered glass were everywhere.