The Afterlife: A Memoir

PART VII

One night when I was ten, in the year before we left town and moved to the farm at the bottom of the mountains, a man carrying a gun knocked on the front door of our house on Lewis Mountain Road, in Charlottesville. My father answered — he’ d been waiting for this visit — and the armed man, a literature professor, my father’s friend and colleague at the university, said hello. My father and mother had until that moment been fighting. It was a bad fight. My father thanked the man for coming and invited him in. The gun, as I remember, was a long-barreled revolver holstered on a coiled western-style gun belt that the man held in one hand. The gun hung at his side, down near his knees. He walked into the house, carrying the gun, and my father closed the door. I watched from above, from the dark landing at the top of the hallway stairs, and could see, looking down between the banister’s white railings, my father and his friend as they crossed the entryway into the living room, where the man said, “Hello, Lou.”

“Hello,” my mother said to him. He placed the gun belt on the coffee table beside her chair. Did my father mix our guest a cocktail? I had not yet learned to measure, over the course of a night, the predictive correlation, in my parents’ lives, between drinks and fights, though I’d become accustomed, during the years when my mother and father had been divorced — when she, my sister, and I lived in our one-story brick house on Eighth Street, in Tallahassee, Florida — to seeing my mother with her bourbon on the rocks.

We’d been a family of an incomplete sort, the three of us in that house, the house across the street from the church with its rusting steeple detached and laid on the ground. In my memory, the churchyard grass was patchy and weedy — not brazenly wild in the manner of a yard surrounding a derelict house, but unkempt. Was the church lacking funds for its own upkeep? Was that why the steeple lay abandoned on the ground?

On the other hand, I can remember that the churchyard was, in fact, tidy and well tended. The borders of the walkway leading from the street to the church doors were, it seems to me now—can seem to me now — neatly trimmed. Maybe weeds and tall grass grew only around the perimeter of the steeple itself, inside the narrow zone that could not safely or easily be reached by lawnmowers and edging tools. On Sunday mornings, a nicely dressed congregation gathered on the church’s mowed front lawn, and later, during the service, their singing could be heard coming from inside the building. It is possible that the weeds in my memory grew not in the pretty churchyard but on the vacant square of land adjacent to it, the roughed-up, improvised neighborhood playground on the other side of the recumbent steeple.

Then again, wasn’t the church itself as badly in need of paint as its amputated top? What sort of people went to that church, anyway? I was eight years old, then nine, and I climbed on their steeple, ran its length, jumped from it, and tumbled in the weedy, or, possibly, lush grass. The steeple was like the peeling hull of a boat that had years before been dragged inland and stripped of its teak and brass. Nowadays, I expect that I might find it there in the churchyard, were I to visit our old house in Tallahassee. Of course, this is unlikely. Almost forty years have passed since we left that town. I have not returned, and neither has my sister. In the late 1970s, our mother went back as a student, commuting from Miami in order to complete the work required for her doctorate. I do not remember her ever speaking about the house or the church or the steeple. And so, unlike other places where we lived either with or without our father, places which, for one reason or another, I have revisited — Sarasota, Miami, Charlottesville — that place, with its giant trees hung with Spanish moss, its smells of pine, its sand roads near the center of town, and its nearby lakes and slow-moving black rivers, exists for me with the power of a fantasy.

In this fantasy, a man not my father comes to visit my mother and take her to dinner and a movie. When he arrives for their date, two Chihuahuas leap from the passenger side of his car, tear across the yard, and chase our cat. Who is this man? Why is he here? What about our father in Virginia, to whom I write postcards saying, “Dear Dad, I am fine. How are you?” and which receive replies that read as pleas: Can’t I tell him something about my life? Won’t I tell my father what I am doing?

What am I doing? I am lying awake at night, sped up on amphetamines, fighting to breathe. I am playing the Beatles’ “Day Tripper” on pretend drums, with my friend John Covington faking guitar. I am trying to get the courage to leap from the high diving board at the Florida State University pool, and I am riding my red bicycle. I practice gymnastics with the Tallahassee Tumbling Tots, though I fail to progress past a cartwheel. I like a blond girl named Susan in my third-grade class, but she moves away. For years I will dream of finding her. Alone in my room, I build model ships and airplanes, impatiently spreading paint across the hulls, guns and fuselages after the models have been built, because I can’t wait to see them finished. I want my chair, my desk, the walls of my room painted orange, but it never happens. A fireman, his wife, and their son live in the house next door to us, and the son’s band, The Other Side, practices in their garage, and I go over and sit on a speaker. The room smells like burning electrical wiring. One after another, the band’s brothers and friends disappear into Vietnam. I am a Cub Scout. Our black-haired den mother lets us scouts hurl water balloons off the roof of her house at pedestrians walking by on the far side of a tall hedge. She has a son we never see, though we hear him playing a horn in an upstairs room. Down in the yard, we goof off and tackle each other, messing up our blue uniforms. One day, the Cub Scout powers-that-be fire our den mother, and soon I am standing in a treeless, suburban backyard learning slipknots, or sitting at a kitchen table painting candy canes onto a coffee cup for my mother. I know in my heart that something is wrong. I want my father to come back to us for good, instead of once each month. I am a No-Neck Monster in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the university theater. A sign on a bathroom door backstage forbids flushing the toilet during showtime, yet I manage to flush in spite of this, and the sound fills the theater. The following year, when I play Young Macduff, my picture is in the paper, accompanying a notice about the production. In the caption I am “little Donnie Antrim.” The photographer has asked me to scream, but I am too self-conscious to scream for the camera, yet try to fake mortal agony anyway, and so it appears in the newspaper that a freckled boy is laughing the laugh of the insane while a dagger is sunk into his back. Many years later, in New York, I will meet the man who played Macbeth. He is appearing as the monster in a downtown production of Frankenstein. He tells me that Lady Macduff is alive and well and living in Massachusetts.

Back in the fantasy, however, my sister and I are riding in the car with our parents. Our father has driven down from Virginia for one of my parents’ hostile weekends, and we have been visiting grandparents in Sarasota. Before returning to Tallahassee, we stop in Clearwater. At an aunt’s house, Terry and I get a surprise. The aunt, who can’t keep a secret, asks us how we feel about our parents’ decision to remarry. Are we excited? Are we happy? This is wondrous news to us, and we jump up and down and run around our aunt’s kitchen table and tug on our parents’ clothes and shout up at their faces, “Are you? Are you getting married? Are you?”

It is not long before we are in the black Beetle again, driving westward into the land of truck stops, alligator-filled lakes, and horse farms. In Gainesville, we park in front of the Episcopal church that we attended before our parents ended their marriage. After our parents and the pastor meet privately in his office, we enact a brief rehearsal. Then we do the real thing. We walk as a family down the aisle of the empty church. My sister carries a bouquet, and I, wearing short pants, bear the rings. It is my job to hand over the gold band that my father will put on my mother’s hand.

I remember my anxiety, that day in the chapel. I was waiting for my cue. I knew that my parents’ rings were in my pocket, but was afraid nonetheless that I would fail in my mission. Would I reach into my pants pocket and find that I had lost the rings? Would I drop one on the floor? And might it roll away beneath a pew and disappear?

But wait. Were the rings in my pocket, or were they sitting on a pillow, a velvet pillow that I carried like a serving tray? Or were they in a box — a box in my pocket? Or was one ring in one pocket and one in another? Whose ring was in which pocket? I have a memory of a voice — my father’s? — saying to me, “Be careful not to lose those.” Where in the church could I have lost my parents’ rings, though, that they would not be found?

We packed up the little house in Tallahassee. A moving van carried away our things. Before leaving for Virginia, I walked across the street and, standing in the grass beside the church steeple, wept over the friends I would never see again. We put Zelda Fitzgerald, our cat, in a cage in the backseat of the car, then climbed in ourselves and drove across the state line into southern Georgia and on from there through the successive landscapes that marked the stages of the journey north. We went through the Georgia pine stands, around broad, man-made lakes, and across red hills. We continued through the Carolinas, through fields planted with corn and tobacco, past neglected, rotting barns whose painted roofs advertised pecans and fireworks. Whenever my sister or I saw, looking out the car windows into the distant west, a big range of hills, we imagined that we had come to the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Blue Ridge belonged to our father’s world.

In Charlottesville, we unloaded into a house on Lewis Mountain Road, down the way from Memorial Gym and the university tennis courts. The house was not big. It was painted white, with a front door that I want to remember as red but which was probably also white. We had a narrow yard that sloped uphill in back; there was room to throw a ball, but not enough space to play a game. In the basement were broken walls partitioning unlit places that smelled as if they might open onto passageways running beneath the streets and houses, down into the earth. Above the basement, the kitchen was off-white and cozy, smaller than the kitchen at Fiddler’s Green, where we would move the following year. Every time we relocated — and we did so every year or two, as if life were a steeplechase through rented houses — we would go into the new rooms and paint the walls and uncrate the books and dust off the flower vases and sort the silverware and hang the pictures and roll out the rugs in a matter of days, as if in a hurry to produce a home that might be an improvement on the one that had come before, and in which we could forget or at least put in the past the unhappiness that had come before, knowing that once the chairs were arranged in the new living room and the beds in the new bedrooms had been made, it would come again.

A number of years before she died, my mother told me that soon after her second marriage to my father, she realized that the woman with whom he’d had his affair was still a presence. She told me that after we moved from Tallahassee to Charlottesville, she, my mother, had sometimes been greeted, during social gatherings at the homes of my father’s Virginia colleagues and friends, with questioning looks, as if the people she met were uncertain about whether she was really his wife.

Her rival was a poet who lived in a distant state. Several times, after I’d finished college and moved to New York, I came across a poem or group of poems by her. Standing in a magazine shop or a bookstore, I searched the lines for images, for a voice, that might connect me, however tenuously, to my parents in their youth. One day, I discovered a letter she’d written to my father. The letter was from a time when I was little. It was pressed between the pages of a paperback copy of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I’d stolen the book from my father’s shelves before leaving home for boarding school, and I’d subsequently carried it to college and, from there, to New York. How had I never before seen this letter? Had I not read the play? I found the letter in the book in the 1980s, when I was living on the Upper East Side. I remember that I refused myself permission to open the envelope and look inside. The letter hadn’t been written to me; it didn’t belong to me; it wasn’t meant for me. Reading it would be unethical, maybe even immoral. Weeks went by — or months, it seems to me now — while I maintained a furtive attachment to its forbidden, unknown contents, which I absurdly hoped might offer me a bit of insight into my family’s history. I regarded the writer, who had played such a significant part in our troubles, as a kind of outcast relative. Could a piece of her lost mail help me understand what had happened to my mother and father?

I read the letter. I remember that it was nighttime. I was sitting on the sofa in my tiny apartment’s tiny living room. I opened Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, took out the envelope, extracted and unfolded the pages inside, and began. I recall a passage describing a new green dress that the writer had worn to a party. Both dress and party were described in teasing, playful, overtly erotic language, language that makes clear her desire for my father’s adoration and jealousy. I felt guilty and embarrassed. Maybe I had expected the letter to contain literary chat of a sort that I imagine my father wishing he could share with my mother, a reference to, say, French poetry or new directions in criticism. I folded the love letter, stowed it back between the pages of the book, and replaced the book with the other novels and plays stacked in crooked piles underneath the platform sleeping loft in my bedroom. Twenty years and a half-dozen apartments later, I don’t know where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern has got to.

Most all of my mother’s stories — the angry tales she told me, before and after she got sober — about her life with my father contained, I think, a notion of self-improvement as a process of gathering insights into other people: if we name the faults of those who have hurt us, we will be shielded from pain; if we can collect evidence to justify our anger, we will overcome shame; if we pity our betrayers, we will not have been betrayed, mishandled, misunderstood, or left abandoned. But what happens when the ordeal of abandonment is — as I think it was for my mother, and for me with her — life itself?

Near the very end, in the years immediately before she was diagnosed with cancer, and even after she’d begun radiation, my mother dreamed that she and I would go on a trip together, a journey of sorts, the two of us in a car, touring the countryside, stopping at inns. She proposed this many times. “Would that be nice, Don?” she might ask, after naming a region — the Florida Keys or some wild stretch of the Pacific Northwest — in which we might travel around, talk about art, and get to know each other better.

“That might be nice,” I would say to her. My mother wanted to go on a honeymoon with me.

“Will you think about it?”

“Sure.”

“We could go in the fall.”

“This fall?”

“Is that too soon?”

“I don’t know. Can we talk about it when the time is closer? It’s hard to see that far ahead.”

“Oh. Well, I know you have a lot to think about.”

“I guess I do.” Unhappily, I would imagine checking into a rural bed-and-breakfast or a surf-side cabana with my dying mother, who would humiliate me. She’d talk loudly at the dinner table, and treat the waiter poorly. I could picture myself glancing to the left and the right, wanting to hide or, failing that, apologize to everyone we met.

Whenever I imagine such a trip, I am inclined to remember one that we did take, in 1982 or 1983, when she was struggling to get sober. We’d met at her parents’ house in Black Mountain. At the end of our stay, I loaded her suitcase and mine into her station wagon, and we started the drive to Florida, where I would spend a few more days before returning to New York. We drove south through the mountains. Halfway home, in St. Augustine, we stopped for dinner. I remember that we parked the car in front of a white house, a Florida bungalow built, probably, in the 1930s or ‘40s. It featured louvered windows, a stone porch with a painted ceiling, and a flowering tree in the yard.

The sun was in the west. Sea smells were in the air. “Look at that pretty house, Don. I’ve always liked it here so much. I’d love to live in a house like that,” I remember her saying.

We stood and looked at the house. Then we walked down the street to a local restaurant, a fish house. After dinner, we walked past the little house again, got in the car, and drove south. The ocean was to the left. The sun had almost set. We passed a few hotels, then a long stretch of deserted beach. I stopped the car, got out, and walked across the sand. I left my mother in the car by the roadside. The surf was high, as I remember. I took off my shirt, rolled up my pants, and waded in. After my swim I dried off as well as I could, got back in the driver’s seat, and drove through the night.

But where was I? North Carolina? Georgia? Florida? New York? Or back in the house on Lewis Mountain Road in Charlottesville? Or the farmhouse we rented in 1968, after we left Lewis Mountain Road?

The farm’s grounds were surrounded by fields full of cows, and the front yard rolled downhill to a rocky creek. Out back, at the top of a hill, was a white barn filled with hay bales. If you walked up the drive past the barn, then down the other side of the hill, you came to a pond. On the pond’s far bank, beneath overhanging branches, stood the remains of a mill. The pond was brackish and not good for swimming. One afternoon, I watched a gang of boys from a family squatting in the ruins of an old house across the road march in a line up our driveway. There were five or six of them. They carried fishing poles made of sticks. I followed the line of boys, stopping to watch them from behind a fence at the top of the hill near the barn. They were gathered on the pond’s small, rotting dock. In a short time, they hauled in three or four dozen perch. A boy would bait his hook with kernels of canned yellow corn, drop his line, and immediately bring up a fish, which he would lower, flopping on the hook, to the planks of the dock. Another boy, an older brother, would stomp on the fish’s head. The dock was stained with blood, and the sun was setting behind the mountains, and I was twelve years old, and it occurred to me that God was feeding these children, but that He didn’t have to feed me, because my family could buy food. We had clothes, books, and a fire in the fireplace. Every night during the cold months I collected wood for our fire from the woodpile behind the garage.

One autumn night when my father was away on a trip, I went out back for logs and boards, and found a dying bird. I called to my mother, who came out and stood in her nightgown in the cold. The bird’s wings were broken, and its eyes looked terrified. Should I kill it? We owned a rifle, and I proposed to my mother that I might shoot the dying bird. I’d already shot and killed, on another chilly day, a snake that I’d found crossing the front yard. There’d been no reason to kill this snake, but I’d done it anyway, using a BB gun. I’d told myself that the snake was dangerous, and I’d chased it around trees and boxwood bushes and the elevated stepping-stone left from the days when Fiddler’s Green’s inhabitants kept horses. Later that night, the minister of the Episcopal church in Greenwood, a family friend, stopped by for a visit, and, when he got out of his car, I ran to him, crying, “Look! Look!” and he lowered his head and peered down at the snake’s body coiled inside a paper bag, and, as he looked, my pride turned to shame.

Should I now destroy the injured bird? Here was a chance to redeem myself, to kill humanely, in the spirit in which a farmer might, not pointlessly but with compassion. It was an opportunity to be a man in my mother’s eyes. She gave me permission to get the rifle from the upstairs closet. I made sure the rifle was loaded, then walked back down the stairs, through the kitchen, past the giant old Southern Coop freezer on the back porch, and out to the yard, where I shot the bird, I guess. I don’t remember shooting it. Maybe I waited in the dark for the bird to pass away on its own. Or maybe I never got the gun at all. Maybe my mother and I found a cardboard box and, using a folded towel as a cushion, made a bed for the bird, a bed like those we made for our cats to lie on when they gave birth to litters. Did my mother and I carry the bird inside the house full of cats and kittens? Or maybe the bird was gone when I returned to where it had lain on the ground. Had it hobbled away to die? I remember my mother’s face. She looked at me as if she understood that I was trying to understand something. She was willing to see me kill the bird. But did I? And if I did, was she standing beside me when I pulled the trigger?

In 1970, my father left the University of Virginia for a job in Miami. We packed up the farm and headed back to Florida. I was twelve, going on thirteen, and Terry was eleven, going on twelve, and the shift from old Virginia to new Miami was, for the two of us, even at our ages, especially at our ages, unsettling. What was this flat, hot, paved-over place, this place made, as it looked to me upon first arriving in the early 1970s, entirely of one-story houses, crowded freeways, and shopping centers?

In Miami, all our houses were different and the same. Two came with swimming pools. One was noisy from a nearby road, and another was surrounded by trees and bushes — that was the Bauhaus-style house — and another had a cathedral ceiling. These latter two were next door to each other, their properties joined by a path leading through the brambles and vines. When the lease on the Bauhaus-style house was up, we sorted the pots and the pans, rolled the rugs and folded the linens, boxed my mother’s fabrics and her sewing machines, my father’s library. Like four refugees ducking beneath branches and stepping over roots, we carried the lot, one armload per trip, from the old place to the new.

But what about the man with the gun? He sat down in the living room in Charlottesville, placed the gun, in its holster, on the coffee table around which he and my parents were gathered, and, in a steady voice, began to speak. He was a goodlooking man, I remember, a popular teacher and something of a power in the English department. His voice was deep. He had come to calm my mother and father. The gun, I should say, was there to calm them. The man did not know, and my parents did not know, that I was watching from the dark landing at the top of the stairs.

My sister watched with me. Didn’t she? We crouched together on the landing. And did she follow me down the stairs, across the front hallway, and through the open doorway to the living room? I remember hearing the man tell my parents that they could annihilate each other; though, if this was their choice, one or the other of them might as well pick up the gun — there it was in plain view on the table, next to their drinks — and complete their work of fighting to the death. I came down the stairs in my blue pajamas and stood among the adults. I can still hear, in my memory of that night, her voice, and I hear my father’s; I hear them speaking together:

“Don, go back to bed. It’s past your bedtime. Everything’s all right. Run to bed, Don. Off you go.”

Did I get a kiss goodnight? I retreated to my room and lay awake, trembling. Would she kill him? Would he kill her? If the killing took place after the man with the gun had gone home, how would it be done? With a knife taken from a drawer? Where would the killing take place? In the kitchen? In their bedroom? Would there be blood? Would there be screaming, then silence? And would silence feel like relief? Would she go to jail for murder? Would he go to jail for murder? Could I be called to testify in a court of law? How would I testify? Who would be guilty? Who would be innocent? Would my sister and I tell the same story? What story would we tell? Would I tell the truth? What might the truth look like? Would I know the difference between right and wrong? Would someone come and take my mother away? Would someone take my father away? Would my sister and I become orphans? Would we be alone forever after?

In 1981, the year I left college and moved to New York, twelve years after my father’s Virginia colleague had come to our house with a gun, my mother was taken to Mercy Hospital in South Miami. She was admitted, my father told me, for alcoholic hepatitis. She was held at Mercy for a few days, not many, until she was considered sufficiently detoxified, hydrated, rested, and nourished, and, after that, she was discharged, and a short time later my father had to drive her to the hospital again, and the process was repeated, and, a while after that, she went back again. Then, quite abruptly — or not at all abruptly, considering the long progress of decades — my parents’ marriage was over for good.

Over the next two years, my mother would be forced to attempt sobriety or die. These were the years when her father, then in his seventies, and I, in my early twenties, created our adult friendship. It was one of those friendships that are sometimes available between the nonconsecutive generations in broken, unhappy families.

I was a teenager when my grandfather retired from his job as a junior high school principal in Sarasota. He and my grandmother sold their large, Spanish-style house on Wisteria Street and moved into a cramped and unattractive condominium, which they hated. After that, circumstances allowed them to become regular visitors to the western Smoky Mountains around Asheville, just east of that part of the world from which they had originally come, and, in 1977, the summer I graduated from boarding school in Virginia, they retired from their retirement and bought a derelict bungalow on Third Street in Black Mountain, intending to restore it and, eventually, move in. Would I like to join them, to spend my summer before college working on an old house? Yes, I would be happy to come to North Carolina and work on the house.

And yet, once in Black Mountain, I had a tendency to abandon my grandparents to their painstaking and methodical, stooped-over, Presbyterian labors; each day, I fled the house in order to drive aimlessly over mountain roads that passed by indigent farms and even more indigent churches. I had no concept of work. What was wrong with me? When would my life begin? Looking back on that time, I have an impression of myself performing a kind of fitful, mild-mannered revolt against — what? Anhedonia? Boredom? My family? Or it was a protest against southern Protestantism in general, which I associated with prohibitions and taboos in a variety of forms, expressed negatively in the self-destructive or work-obsessed temperaments of, it seemed to me then, everyone I knew. But protests against the denial of pleasure bring no pleasure. In the spirit of someone with nowhere else to go, I turned the car around and returned to the house on Third Street, picked up steel wool or a rag, and found something to scrub.

The day came when we got around to the windows. These were painted shut and badly warped. There was no question of replacing them; they would be removed, their panes razored clean, the frames stripped with fine sandpaper, or, if too profoundly rotten, disassembled and rebuilt. This was heartbreakingly deliberate work. I remember windows pulled out, holes in the house. Inside the casements lay dust and dirt, dead animals’ tiny skeletons, the windows’ rusted pulley wheels and ancient counterweights, canvas sacks stuffed with lead shot and tied off, their ropes broken. I remember my grandfather’s old man’s hands worrying the wood, delicately touching, like a blind man reading, the surfaces of things; it was slow work that he seemed determined to make slower, as if work of any sort were equivalent to an act of obstinacy. My grandmother’s style was all harshness and haste — she attacked her chores. And I remained lazy and sarcastic; the screen door was always slamming behind me. Nonetheless I was attracted by my grandfather’s patience, by the care he took with this broken house. It wasn’t that I suddenly understood the value in a job well done. Far from it. It was that for a moment — a romantic moment destined to resonate and grow in magnitude over the years — I hoped (and this may have been a fantasy that I wanted to have about the man) that my grandfather had something to pass on to me, to teach me. And I imagined (because it did not occur to me to ask him) that what he had to teach me concerned the beauty in labor that is invisible to others, work that seems superfluous but isn’t, and that no one except the worker will see or even necessarily appreciate. The windows, when they went back in, slid up and down at a touch.

Fifteen years later, when my grandfather was nearing ninety, in the days right before he began having his heart attacks, and long after he and I had been brought together by my mother’s hospitalizations, we took drives together along the roads that led over the mountains, rambling, all-day excursions that infuriated my grandmother, who feared for his health. We’d stop on the shoulder in a hollow or a narrow valley, and my grandfather would get out of the car, unzip his trousers, and urinate; a frequent need for this was caused by his heart medication. Always, he drove. Bourbon, I suspected, was stashed in the tire well in the trunk — his guilty, exciting secret. At some point along the way, generally when we were far from home, out past Hendersonville, he might say, “Have I shown you the new stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway that goes around Grandfather Mountain without touching the mountainside?” or, “You’ve never seen the Carl Sandburg house, have you, Don?”

“No, I haven’t,” I’d say, and he’d turn the car around, and off we’d go to our new destination.

Today, I cannot recall those outings without thinking back to the early 1980s, when he and I took turns caring for my mother. I do not know, can’t say, how many hospitalizations she endured — four? five? — on her way to sobriety, or how frequently she quit drinking for a week or a month, attended a series of AA meetings held in smoke-filled rooms, and then went out and picked up a glass. During these years, my grandfather and I became adept at hearing, in her voice on the telephone, the specific sounds — a softly rising inflection, like a plea uttered by a child, ending a whispered sentence; or a barely audible sigh — that told us she might be feeling defeated and hopeless.

“Your grandmother and I think we ought to drive down to Miami and spend some time with your mother,” he might say to me during one of our conversations.

Or, if my grandparents had recently done service, I might say to him, “Mom’s coming out of the hospital at the end of the month. Why don’t I fly down and pick her up and take her home?”

Or my grandfather might say, “Don, your mother is going to come to North Carolina for a week. She needs a rest.”

If my mother were on her way to Black Mountain, I might head south myself, and the four of us, three generations, would come together for a brief spell as a family.

Would it be wrong to remember those as happy times? Is it perverse to imagine, to believe, that she, in her struggle to live, in her nearly dying, took care of us?

Of all the stories from that era in my mother’s life — the era in which I found myself perpetually on call, waiting for bad or good news from Florida or from North Carolina — one stands out. This is the story of the time she came closest to drinking herself to death.

In the spring of 1983, she finished a monthlong detoxification at South Miami Hospital, in Coral Gables. The patients on the ward were diverse. One was an emaciated man with a long beard. He’d spent his life in the Everglades drinking whiskey. Another, a Cuban man with an enormous belly who’d worked as a baggage handler at the airport, had, each day on the job, while loading and unloading suitcases from conveyer belts and motorized carts, drunk two to three cases of beer. I remember my mother telling me that he had a wife and baby. There was a young blond guy who’d made and lost a fortune as a cocaine dealer; until entering the hospital, he’d carried thousands of dollars in his pockets. And I remember an aeronautical engineer who’d retired to the Florida Keys. According to my mother, he later piloted a plane of his own design into the Gulf of Mexico.

But that’s not the story I mean to tell. The story I’m thinking of begins on a Saturday night in New York. I was with friends at the Madison Pub, a bar on the Upper East Side. It was early, still light out. We’d ordered a round of drinks — I was nursing a Manhattan, of all things — and it crossed my mind to call my mother and see how she was getting on. There was a pay phone at the rear of the bar. I excused myself, went back, and dialed her number. It was a collect call. Her phone rang a dozen times before the operator broke in and suggested that I try later. I rejoined my friends but could not enjoy myself. Eventually I went home to my apartment, where I called her again. The phone rang and rang. I’m not sure why I did not assume — it would have been logical — that she was out for the evening. Why did I let the phone ring? I was right, though. She picked up.

I waited for her voice.

“Mom? Are you there? Mom?”

After a long moment, she made a crying noise. The receiver clattered — did she drop it? — and the line disconnected. It was a few minutes past eight o’clock. I called my grandfather in Black Mountain and explained to him that I had to go to Miami.

“Tonight,” I said.

At that time in my life I could not have considered any possibility but going to her, yet could not have afforded plane fare without his help. He promised that he would have a ticket waiting at La Guardia airport. I phoned my mother again, and her answering machine picked up. After the beep, I cried, “I’m coming, Mom!” I threw some shirts in a suitcase, locked the apartment behind me, and ran down the stairs, out of the building, and into the street, where I collided with a taxi. I bounced off its side as it rolled to a stop, and a rear tire almost ran over my foot. I jumped into the back and asked to be taken to the airport as fast as possible. The driver turned and asked, “Hey, are you all right?” and I panted, “I’m fine, I’m fine.” I rolled down the window and took deep breaths of air. At the airport, I ran to the counter of the airline my grandfather always used. The ticket was waiting. At the gate, the flight was boarding. We took off shortly after ten, and, sometime around one o’clock, the plane landed in Miami. I waited for my suitcase to appear on the baggage carousel, then went to the taxi stand, got a taxi, and gave the driver my mother’s address. As I remember things now, she was living in an apartment that I had never before visited. But is this right? Surely, on earlier trips, I had stayed with her in the very place that I was now speeding toward. Have my memories converged to make some new, universal memory? The taxi headed south, then west. After thirty minutes, we stopped at a newly built duplex townhouse, one in a series of identical two-story buildings on a numbered street in a nondescript neighborhood. I paid the driver, grabbed my luggage, and started up the walkway. The lights were on in my mother’s house, and the front door was hanging open. Strange. Had she heard my voice when, earlier in the night, I called to her through her phone answering machine? Had she left the door open for me? Near the entryway stood a couple of empty wine bottles. They looked as if they’d been set out for the milkman. Bottles lay on their sides on the living-room floor. More stood on the kitchen counters. I stood in the brightly lit living room, calling, “Mom? Mom?” It was two in the morning and the house smelled awful. The kitty litter had not been changed, and my mother’s white cat, Flora, had shat on the carpet. “Mom?” I called, and heard movement overhead, a footstep.

She was at the top of the stairs.

I saw her feet. Then I saw the hem of her nightgown. She came down one step at a time. Little by little, she appeared. She held the bannister. She lowered herself halfway down the stairs and, with both feet on one step, and with her hands gripping the railing, turned to peer out over the living room.

She looked to the left and the right, and up and down, slowly. “Mom, it’s me,” I said, but she did not seem to hear.

“Mom?”

“Who?” she whispered.

As my mother aged, and particularly during the period when she was sick with cancer, I would grow accustomed to seeing her frightened, or helpless, or frail; she could look, at times, like a stranger to me. That night, I had the feeling that she was, even as she stood on the stairs, dying. What did she see, looking at me? She did not see me. I don’t remember how many times I said, “It’s me, Mom,” before she turned and, tugging with her arms against the bannister, went back up the stairs. It was as if my arrival had been part of her dreams, or as if she’d heard a noise, come down to investigate, and found nothing. After a moment, I heard her walking overhead. I followed her up the steps.

She was lying in bed, shivering. I pulled the sheet and bedspread over her. Beginning with her hands, one, then the other, I re-created, from memory, the massage she’d given me when I was a boy in Tallahassee and I’d had my asthma attacks. She had come into my room and whispered, “Easy, honey. You’re going to be all right. I’m here.” She would massage my back, my arms, and my hands, pressing her thumbs into my palms, then kneading her way up my arms to my shoulders. She pounded my shoulder blades and my back, in order to loosen the congestion blocking my lungs. Before she finished, she would retrace her movements and hold my hands in hers once more. I remember feeling that she was squeezing the fear right out of me, pushing my distress down my arms and out my fingertips; and I remember that my panic would subside when she held me, and, as the asthma pills took effect, and even as my breathing remained difficult, I could close my eyes and sleep.

That night in Miami, her hands were clenched — I had to pry them open — and she was sweating. Her skin, her unwashed nightgown, the damp sheets on the bed, the room itself, smelled of alcohol and nicotine. I rubbed her neck and shoulders, and lightly pressed the heels of my hands against her back. Later in the night she became aware of who I was, and, in a few quiet words, let me know that she’d been hallucinating. Dragons and other monsters flew at her from the corners of her bedroom. I remember looking around, trying to picture her visions. What would it be like to watch black serpents crawl from behind a chair or a dresser? I sat beside her on the bed and whispered to her that I wouldn’t let the monsters hurt her.

Sometime after four, she slept. I got up, turned off the light, and closed the bedroom door. No, I must have left the door open a tiny bit, just in case. I went downstairs and cleaned the dishes she’d left in the sink and on the counters. I changed the cat litter and put new food and fresh water in the bowls on the kitchen floor. I gathered bottles and threw them in the trash. There were over twenty. She’d had them delivered.

I stayed a week. She remained in bed for much of it. I went to a store and bought food. She sat against the pillows, and I fed her soup, soft-boiled eggs, and canned peas and corn. She refused a trip to the hospital or the doctor. Instead, when she was able, near the end of my trip, after she’d recovered enough strength, she got in her car and took herself back to Alcoholics Anonymous.

During the two decades since then, I have often thought of my mother in terms of diseases and symptoms. Ever since she’d been a girl in Tennessee, her life had been marked by illness. Illness defined her relationship with her own mother, whom she outlived by only a year, and, sadly, illness defined her relationship with me. That she was, throughout my childhood, sick, the nightly victim of a terrifying Jekyll-and-Hyde transmutation, I learned to take for granted, even as her grandest symptoms, having become in the eyes of her family more or less expectable, even normative, seemed almost to vanish inside the stormy routines of her, and our, everyday life.

In recent years I have noted how surviving children can find themselves reappraising their mothers and fathers, who might appear braver, stronger, and more beneficent in death than in life; and maybe it is true that, as time goes on, and we, their children, survive and lament their passing, we nonetheless continue in the hope that we will one day truly know our parents, as they will know us.

Near her life’s close, I lost the fortitude, the ability, the heart to be with my mother. For a time, I referred to her, in thought and in conversation with others, not as my mother but as Louanne. Her parents had sometimes called her by this name, but my father and my parents’ circle of friends always knew her simply as Lou. In thinking of her as Louanne, I pretended to an objectivity of perspective that I did not, nor will ever, possess, and, in doing so, I pretended to myself that the coming loss of her would not hurt, and that in the absence of suffering I would go forward, a free man.

A week after I flew by night to watch her descend, in delirium tremens, the staircase in her Miami duplex, I went into her study, where she kept sewing supplies, files holding papers that she’d accumulated during her years of teaching, and her typewriter. In an hour, she would drive me to the airport, and I would return to New York. I sat at the typewriter and wrote her a note. It was brief. I told her that I loved her, and that others loved her, and that we who loved her wanted her to live. I hoped she’d make it. I left the note scrolled in the typewriter. Many years later, she told me that she’d put it in a safe place and kept it. She never drank again.

Five years have passed since her death. I’m not sure whether I can say, now, what her Christian name means to me. She was my mother. Her ashes have yet to be scattered. They remain, to this day, in a box in a closet at my sister’s house. Maybe before long Terry will fly with them to Charlotte, North Carolina, where, at the airport, I’ll meet her. We’ll join up at the car-rental desk, get a car, put our mother’s ashes in the backseat and our suitcases in the trunk, and head to Bridges, in Shelby, for barbecue, then continue west toward the Smoky Mountains. We’ll drive past Chimney Rock, around Lake Lure, up past Old Fort, and down into Black Mountain, where we’ll stay a night or two at the Monte Vista, the hotel that was our base when our mother was dying. I’d like to sit on the Monte Vista’s porch one more time and gaze out at the mountains known locally as the Seven Sisters, before getting up and continuing on highways bordered with kudzu and corn, gas stations and pecan emporia, horse farms and flood canals, office parks and ocean resorts, straight through South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, all the way to the Keys, to Islamorada, where, on the Atlantic side of the island, there is a beachfront lodge that my mother loved. I hope to go there, take the ashes out of the car, and, with my sister beside me, walk to the water with them.