Getting It Right.

O'Sullivan, Vincent

I KNEW ALICE, MY MOTHER, was dying, which could well begin a much longer story than this. But the shorter version is about as much as I can bear. So I begin with her telephoning only a week after her last call, which was quite unlike her. She was not one really for "keeping in touch." Emails of course would have been as unnatural to her as smoke signals, although my brother Tommy had bought her a computer more than a year before. In the usual run of things, she wrote to me once in three weeks or a month, in her rather lovely flowing script on squares of plain linen paper. Croxley Bond, which she once had bought in bulk and never ran short of. When our father was still with us he wrote less often, on hotel paper he saved from when they traveled. He put a line through the embossed name, the Grand Plaza in Hong Kong, the Rembrandt in London, the way authors score a stroke through their names on the title page of a book they have been asked to sign. This meant his letters carried a whiff of the exotic, even when they were not. But then Dad, as the family liked to say, was the romantic. He was the one who sang carols at Christmas, and when he went to the opera, which he said he did not really like, he was the one who left with tears in his eyes, although Alice understood the music and read up on the story before going to see it.

When I answered the phone the dog was barking like crazy at the new people next door. I said, "I'll have to get him, sorry." By the time I'd dragged him inside and shut him in the conservatory I thought she would have hung up. But she was still there when I came back. She said, "Is he all right then?" A strange thing to ask about a dog that was behaving badly.

Alice came to stay with us for a few days the next week. I worried about Chelsea with her moods and her swearing and her walking around the house in her underwear, her navel stud glinting as the light caught it, so the school trip to Melbourne did us all a favor. "You might as well live with a nun" she had said once before about her grandmother. Not her narrow mindedness--Alice was never that--but her frugality, her not needing to chatter for its own sake, was more than a teenager could take. But Chelsea wrote a card that she said she would leave in her room. "Love you, Gran," it said, with little stars stuck over it and shiny gold specks sprinkled across the glue stick where she had written her name. "If that doesn't grab her," she said, "just tell me sometime what does, OK?"

I'd hoped that Roger would be at home when she visited. But as he said, quite reasonably, "Every third week, you know how it goes, hon." With the new Taupo branch not quite in its stride he needed to keep a close eye. The young chap down there was sharp and put in the hours, but an older head, Roger explained, it would come with time, but you couldn't assume. Just a pity it was that week. I know he meant it too, as he and Alice rather hit it off. Cryptic crosswords, for one thing. He could never get over how she knocked them off so quickly. As he teased her with language he knew she detested, he complimented her that she was in the top bracket crossword-wise. And at least for the brief holidays she spent with us, she seemed quite happy to sit with him watching sport. "I draw the line at darts, mind," she told him. She even had--I have Roger's word for it--intelligent opinions about rugby, although her grasp of rules was shaky. She liked this winger, disliked that, wouldn't trust the little Australian halfback as far as she could throw him. The one time in her life, I suppose, she bought the Women's Weekly was for its cover story of an All Black whose child was dying of leukemia. She said, "The man's such a decent soul he'll never get over it. He thinks all this public attention helps and then he'll find out that it doesn't." Roger told me she had written a letter to the man and his wife, which surprised me as much as anything I ever knew about her.

She traveled so lightly, my mother. I met her as she came through the gateway, where we half embraced and touched cheeks. Her skin was so soft, and she must have been to the hairdresser's the day before. Her hair was fluffed to disguise the thinness since her treatment. My cheek brushed against it as we drew apart. We've always been a family to indicate feelings, without too much carrying on. Her right hand had not let go of the handle she grasped, one of those suitcases you drew along, yet still compact enough to get by as cabin baggage. When I said the claim area was a little further along, and lightly touched her arm to direct her, she said "It's only a few days. As if I'd need more than this." She turned and smiled up at me as the escalator lowered her head level with my chest. Her frank smile, lovelier because it was a rarity. I would give anything for a photograph of her like that. How envious I am when I see the photo albums piled at a friend's house, or hear of the way some families stash away images on their computers. We had never collected that many snaps anyway, and those we had were lost years before Dad died. He and Alice were on a trip overseas. And almost unbelievable, the next bit. When the house burned down completely in a couple of hours, when the investigator brutally told Tommy you might as well have an empty house gift-wrapped when an arsonist had been working the suburb for a year, they decided what was the point in rushing back home, why miss the Colosseum and the rest of it to see a few charred sticks and a scorched section, now the damage was done? By the time they arrived back the bulldozer had been in and the new grass planted and the land ready to be built on again, although the lingering stench of ash was still there months later, when the framework of the new house stood against the sky.

I had said to her on her last visit, "It's such a pity there are no photos of the family"

She reminded me, "Your father never took that many anyway.''

I said it was not many that was important, it's the fact that there are none.

"Well, that fire," she said offhandedly, not taking what I meant.

"Not even one photo of you and Dad together. Seeing you didn't bother even when you were away."

Her eyes held mine with their striking Scandinavian blueness that had men running all over the place, so the story goes, when she was young. She said, "People look at photos properly what? Once every few years? Your own memories do more than that."

I smiled but was exasperated as I told her, "For heaven's sake, Alice." I had called her by her first name like that since I was a teenager. Some people thought it a sign of intimacy between us, which it was not at all. A kind of fencing off rather, if you think about it.

"Sentimentality," she said, not leaving the matter of photographs alone.

I said, "I hope I don't get as blase about things as you are." But it was impossible to provoke her. So we sat as we had so many times, so many years, seemingly at ease and close, yet each of us knowing how much closer and easier we might have been. She went on, conceding, "People feel things in different ways." Too intelligent not to know she sheltered behind a cliche, as I did myself, although mine was compliant silence. Until I said, to change tack, "Chelsea's eyes must have come from you, have you noticed that? I never really thought it before but now that she's grown up ..."

"There," my mother laughed, "why worry about photos then?"

I knew for several years that my father pursued an affair with a woman who worked at the school office. "Pursued"--how odd, now that I consider it, to use such a genteel phrase for his cheating on my mother. "Had a relationship with" is how Tommy still puts it. That amuses me, a bohemian and a homosexual refusing out of deference to his dad to say "bonking" or "having it off" or "feeding her a length," phrases he will fling about of anyone else! Roger of course can be quite cruel about that. He says he understands perfectly his brother-in-law's delicatesse. Once an arse-bandit starts calling a spade a spade, even his own father's, he'd have such a gob load of filth he'd never be able to swill the wines he pays an arm and a leg for. Roger in fact has few moral scruples about anything. It simply irks him that Tommy splashes his pink dollars about as a married man cannot. I try to say a successful artist naturally has more to come and go on than running CD stores, even if one does it well as Roger so obviously does. My noting the obvious seems to spur him on. Have I ever looked at who swans about at his openings, he asks, les garcons du vernissage, have I? Aston Martins. Beamers. Ever seen a rich pansy arrive in a Toyota? I tell him, "I don't think that's a real French expression." But then we laugh together. We don't allow Tommy to come between us. We are good mates, make no mistake, Roger and I.

The woman's name was Beatrice. Dad's bit on the side. On her previous visit I had raised it with Alice for the first time. It was almost perverse, I suppose, to do so, knowing it was so long ago it could hardly matter to her, yet I should have let it lie. It was the second morning she was with us. The sun flooded the kitchen table, the marmalade glowed as if it were lit inside like a lamp, and she picked at a piece of toast without really eating much at all. I asked, "Did you know about Beatrice? From the start, I mean?"

"But of course," she said. "And Dad knew I knew." She answered me so directly I knew I should not have asked. But she left it exactly there. I admired her for that, even as I knew that it was putting me in my place. For she must have known I wanted more from her than that. I was entitled to know more. She would have known as well my less declared reason for asking, my hope that now, this late in the day, we might talk frankly together. About anything. She must have known but felt no compulsion to oblige me. We speak of the past as another country. Yet what about one's parents? She said nothing more of that even more distant place I longed to hear about.

What I know--how meager it now seems--is that my parents met at a church social soon after the war, although both were too young to have been overseas. Neither Alice nor Dad was religious, any more than they were against people believing. Churchgoing just didn't, to use one of Dad's favorite expressions, "add up." Each of them had gone to the social with someone else, but they danced with each other, and met later that same week. They were married a few months later. "The war had rather distorted one's sense of pace." Tommy and I were born in less than three years. My father quickly became a senior teacher and my mother was trained to teach as well, although she preferred to stay at home, as most women then did, to be with her children. Tommy sometimes teased her, "Tough-minded as you like but definitely not a feminist are you, Ma?" It was Dad, as she said, who carried the flag. She meant in later years, when even in winter on Lambton Quay he would don a knitted beanie and shake a tin for any women's group that asked him to lend a hand. "I was belted and so was my mother," he used to say. "I know what I'm collecting for." Once his fingers swelled with chilblains from standing out with his tin. Most of us hadn't heard of chilblains for years.

Alice encouraged him and said how she admired his social conscience, but preferred as she aged to do little apart from voting Labour once every three years, and reading in between. She said, "I'm too healthy to play sport and frankly everything apart from reading bores me." She said it in her rather bemused offhand way, so those she said it to thought she was not as serious as she was. She managed to read through libraries while she did all a woman of her generation also did to keep her house shiny as a pin and her family contented. And she was quietly sardonic. Above the fridge in the kitchen hung a framed, beautifully embroidered cloth she picked up at a garage sale, with a sentence in German declaring that "Cleanliness Is the House's Jewel." She liked to explain--although very few quite got her point--that she believed it had been brought back by a soldier after the war, a souvenir from a bombed house. Yet what did it mean, Tommy used to wonder, having a thing like that on the wall? Did she want people to think she was a moron?

I think my father was disappointed, once Tommy and I were at secondary school and so in any real sense off our mother's hands, that she showed no interest whatever in taking up the teaching she had been trained for and then put aside to rear us. Knowing she had to say something, she said, "I'm too out of touch." I remember it being broached several times. Dad slowly stroked the side of his face over and over, a curious, disciplined gesture that told those who knew him well that he was on the verge of anger. He told Alice, "It needn't be at my school. That goes without saying." She was puzzled that he might think that could be the reason. "I'd happily work with, Des," she said, "Supposing I wanted to work."

"They simply sail past each other," my brother used to say, "and they think they've had a conversation."

In fact, Alice was left a little money by an aunt in Port Adelaide, which allowed her the luxury to make a choice. As she said, "Comfortable, that darling middle-class word!" She and my father--another point when Roger wants to score--never lost their zeal for socialism, so I suppose that remark too falls under "sardonic." One year I remember she read almost everything written by Graham Greene. She said, "It's all so deplorable you just have to believe in it!" She explained, as she came to the last of the novels, "I could pass an exam on slippery theology let alone squalid love." My father, who usually was the kindest person you could imagine, once hinted to me that she gave herself up to enthusiasms like that because nothing in "real life," as he called it, actually interested her, which is why books mattered so much. Tommy took the argument even further. He said Alice couldn't really be happy. If you had her temperament and were as intelligent as our mother, you knew life was a void and that's that.

Roger, though, thought Tommy and I talked up a problem that wasn't a problem at all. "Most people wouldn't work if they didn't have to. I know I wouldn't. She's the sanest of us all and that's what we can't cope with." As for Alice's bland reluctance to talk intimately of anything, about that Roger simply said, "Why do we resent it so much when someone insists on being private?"

Well, whatever the spring one wanted to source her back to, my mother, in that unsatisfactory phrase, was "her own person." She could be kind, and was amusing, but we did not easily forgive her that elusive core she so guarded as her own. Roger may even be right. There was no great mystery to it, we just don't care much for those who live on their own terms. By the time Tommy was gay beyond concealing, and my husband was my first and almost my only lover, Dad had taken up with the vulgar woman who did the accounts at his school. "Vulgar" was my way, my brother's way, to dismiss her good humor, her high, spontaneous laugh, her frilled blouses, the little diamantes at the side of her winged sunglasses. She just too blatantly declared that life, for all its ups and downs, was a bit of a hoot, that "gather ye rosebuds" or whatever was as close as we're likely to get to wisdom, even in a school whose headmaster put on the hard word. They made no great effort, my father and Mrs. Beatrice Nesbitt, to conceal their closeness. The lovers believed their partners, both quiet, self-sufficient people, were not the kind in any case to be irreversibly hurt. Tommy told me much later, after Dad had died, that Beatrice's husband was an old hand, you could say, at a male sauna in Victoria Street that had to be closed down. But none of this explains my mother, as I want her to be explained.

Had I sensibly thought about it, I would not have asked an even closer question this last time she came to stay. The evening before we had watched a Fred Astaire movie on Sky. While Alice was with us I was always on the lookout for something to kill time. I flicked through the TV Guide and remembered how she liked old musicals, which the rest of us used to think rather a joke. As the dancers swirled and cavorted she sat in the too-big armchair, leaning forward a little, her hands joined on her lap. "I had no idea you got films like this on television." But by the end of the movie, as elegant coattails flared out and the tall handsome woman stepped so beautifully beneath her billowing dress, Alice had slumped into the cushions behind her, her mouth opened, an old exhausted woman. What I still so regret asking was at breakfast the next morning.

Already I had done with her several of the things Roger and I knew she enjoyed. I drove her through the park where at this time of year the long grass on the side of the hill was the color of straw, and against the blue sky the gray glinting olive trees, two colors in one when the wind turned them, made you think of another country. We parked for ten minutes on the rim of a volcanic crater and watched the business of the harbor, although as Alice said, in her day it had been the North Shore ferries, distant and small as toys, she had so liked to watch. She said the outline of the big buildings in the central city were like a clutch of up-ended knives. She at once apologized for being so fanciful. "What a nonsensical thing to say!" Then another morning we drove to the tearooms in the Rose Gardens, with bed after bed of brilliant blooms, although half of them, as she said, were more than a touch blowsy, didn't I think? But each day by early afternoon she would need to lie down. "Too old for playing at tourists," as she went off to the settee in the conservatory, then read in the lounge after she had slept, read until the news came on at six o'clock.

I'd have given anything, especially as I think of it now, for us to have sat together at the kitchen table, confided as mothers and daughters are meant to do. If one of my friends called in she would chat for ten minutes and then say, "I'll let you two get on with it. You don't want an old crone hanging about." My friends of course fell for her, smiling as she quietly moved off. As she read one hand moved absently in the dog's gray, shaggy fur. It too trailed after her, content to lie there for as long as she wanted.

It was like this each time--the three times--that she came in the two years since Dad died. Roger said after the last visit, when I was in tears, "Some people are simply like that. It doesn't mean you don't matter to her."

"Your mother can't be private!" And I insisted rather stupidly, "She's no different with me than she is with anyone else."

He was patient, missing the point completely. He repeated, "If you just accept the way she is perhaps there isn't a problem?"

Roger once asked me a strange question. He said, "Did Alice ever tell you about sex?" He then said, as if to cover the oddness of it, "I mean, my father never did."

"When I was twelve. She gave me a book and talked to me about what was in it. She couldn't have done it more efficiently, more kindly, if I was a pupil and she was paid to instruct me."

"Perhaps that's the way it should be," my husband said. "No big deal, I mean."

"No shattering of innocence?"

"Ignorance," Roger laughed. "Better to use the correct words."

I said, smiling back at him, "She made love sound a bit like a Meccano set."

"But she did say 'love'?"

"She said it, I think, but not the way it should have been said." Yet I knew as I recounted this to Roger that it was not quite that way, and why I told it like this was something I could not explain. She made clear to me what I had half guessed anyway. She spoke carefully, considerately. She had not given me a book. I didn't say to Roger that soon before our talk, Alice's and mine, I saw my father in his headmaster's office with his hand on Mrs. Nesbitt's breast. She was sitting at the typewriter and he was standing behind her. Her hands were moving over the keys, I could hear the machine's clacking as I opened the door, and he stood behind her with one hand across her shoulder, feeling her. It was a strange memory. My father's hand seemed so large. I thought at first he must be wearing a padded glove, and Mrs. Nesbitt's breast, so it struck me then, was pitiably small, why did he bother? Yet I knew exactly what they wanted to do, that this could not possibly be all that their behavior, their secrecy, arrived at. When Alice later talked to me and ever after I invented the detail of her giving me the book which did not exist, I resented her for telling me at all, for confirming what she must have known they did.

Four days is a long time to fill in with someone you feel ill at ease with, no matter how much you love her. My mother was always polite and grateful but, I felt, not especially interested in anything we did. When we stopped in Princes Street to look at the floral clock that I thought might amuse her--that kind of civic silliness usually did--she said, "Begonias are detestable really, aren't they?" I knew what she meant. Those cramped speckled leaves, the nothing pinkness of their flowers that made me think of children's toothpaste. Yet it irritated me, her saying that. The begonias were not my fault. And when we had driven up the ridged hill to its sudden scooped-out cone and scatter of loose rocks, the day turned suddenly dull, rain pocked at the windscreen, and Alice asked me, "Is this where that unfortunate man drove over with his children?" That too irritated me. I said, "That was the hill over there." I pointed through the veil of rain thickening towards us. "I can't see it," she said, "with this Auckland weather."

On the way home she asked me to stop at the dairy at the end of the road. I said I'd pop in to get whatever it was she wanted. No, she insisted, humor me. She moved slowly from the car to the shop, and as slowly walked back. She carried a plastic bag with two tubs of ice cream. I said we had stacks of it at home, she need not have bothered. A fact she ignored as she said, with a kind of embarrassed frankness,"! just had this craving." I thought of when I was seven or eight, when Dad had brought home pineapple ice cream as a treat. Tommy ploughed through his as though it were the last he would ever taste. When I was halfway through mine I edged the plate aside because I did not like pineapple, and said, "That was marvelous, Daddy." My mother said, "But you haven't finished." She said, "Daddy will think you don't like it." Then five minutes later I was sick as I ran from the table to the bathroom. I knew something had been proved, yet whatever it was, I scarcely understood. I watched Alice slowly moving back towards the car, then easing the plastic bag down beside her feet after she closed the door, before she told me about her "craving." How I disliked her using that word too. I thought how is it that something that sears into you as a child, someone else who should remember so casually forgets?

I said to her next morning, "I know you are here this time, Mummy, because you're dying. So why can't we talk?" I don't know what she thought when at last someone compelled her to speak out. And so I watched her, a frail, declining woman, as she turned her cup several times on its saucer. She then looked up, not at me but through the window beyond me, at the gently sloping lawn that Roger kept as smooth as his own cheek. ("If a blade of grass is out of place it's like a fish bone in my throat.")

She watched beyond me for so long that I thought, this time I have gone too far. This time I have hurt her. Then she looked at me directly. She said, I'm taking so long, I'm sorry, because there isn't any answer I can give you that will satisfy you." Her thin hands--more twigs than hands, I thought, with a kind of shame at how glibly comparisons like that jump at one--were round her cup, as though she hoped to draw in its warmth. She began again. She said, "I'm not here because I want to be. Next to not dying at all, I'd prefer to do it the way a cat does. Just slope off quietly" Smiling, knowing I suppose that what she said was ridiculous. Yet insisting, "You know I don't like fuss at anytime and I like it less even now. Which is why I've not told you outright, although I know that I owe it to you. So I'm glad we've had our talk. I'll go back home and everything's very clear. There'll be fuss I suppose, but I hope not too much of it." Her hand left the side of the cup and was warm as it ran along my forearm. When she said "fuss" for the second time, it was apparent that it meant her death,

and everything that surrounds it: family, regret, fear, goodbye, all trimmed back to four letters that attempted to contain them. I took her hand and thought how much larger, clumsier my fingers seemed as they closed over hers. I thought, not of Alice only, but in a broader, general way, that human beings ought not to be like this, that dying was too vast a tract to cross alone, and yet we have no choice.

I said, "Of course, I'll come back with you."

"There's months yet," she said. "Leave it a few weeks and then come down. That's what I'd really like." She said there were things to sort out, not many but a few, so to come down then. "It will be Easter, the weather's always nice." She made me promise that for the moment I would not mention it to Roger. "It's a dreadful thing to say, but even the kindest people can't always help." I thought of the tugs we had seen yesterday on the harbor. They were too far off to be anything but tiny shapes, so I must have been remembering something from when the family sometimes walked down the waterfront and Tommy and I were children. We watched the thick buffers on the tugs that were like rubbery lips, that made it safe to nudge against other boats, cushioning both against each other. Her hand stayed resting on my arm.

A fortnight later Roger was down at Taupo again, checking out the new mall. He rang to say he would take another day, he couldn't be this close to the lake and turn down the chance to go fishing--well, could he, hon? He is so matter-of-fact about fishing, that is when I know that he lies. Yet we enjoy being together. He still amuses me with his stories about his partners, his employees, his incisive phrases that set them up like ninepins and then good-humoredly knock down. To laugh together after twenty-odd years of marriage isn't a bad platform for getting on. He is generous and people like him, he's as outgoing I sometimes say as I'm indoors, you'll know what I mean when I say like the figures on those Swiss clocks? But I knew he meant it when he said he'd definitely come with me to see Alice at Easter, he said he'd make sure that Chelsea came too. But before Roger was home from his fishing she died, as they say, "like that." I could almost hear the neighbor's fingers snap as she told me on the phone. Yes, the neighbor said, while she was watching telly.

"She loathed television," I said, "except the news."

"That's why I mention it," said Jo Kavanagh from next door. "We saw the light through the curtains just after it got dark, that's why we went across. We both said it wasn't like her." I could see Jo's sandpapery skin, her throat flushed above the girlie collars she had worn for as long as I had known her, since Dad and Alice moved down there for the sun.

She said, "I'm sorry I'm the one who had to ring."

I put down the phone and went into Chelsea's room. She was lying on her bed, turning the pages of a brochure that advertised cheap rates for Fijian resorts. Her father had told her it was beyond him, how anyone could take advantage of a hijacked democracy so underpaid Fijians could cut up your pineapple for you. Although he smiled as he teased her and she told him back, "Fuck off, will you, Dad?" As I now opened the door she said without looking up, "This is unbelievable you know, this deal?" her hand patting the page in front of her. "I've got to let Trish know about this one."

I said, "That was Tauranga. Alice has passed on."

Chelsea swung her legs from the bed and looked down for a moment as she flexed her toes. Then she held my eye and said, "She didn't even open that card I left her, know that?"

And then I was beating her. Not slapping her but actually beating, my closed fists flailing down on her, pummeling, wanting her to cry out. She drew up her knees and crawled close against the wall, her body folded small to get away from me. A rage I had never known in my life came over me, a wave, I kept thinking, a wave so high of anger and regret that it had nowhere to go but here, Chelsea was the beach where it broke and threw us both aside. "She did, she did, she did!" my words too hammering down on her in a gasping rush that appalled me and that I was unable to stop, as she writhed and began pushing against me, her raised foot catching my hip and thrusting me back against the windowsill. My anger gone as quickly as it had struck, a sense of exhaustion flooding me to fill where it had drained.

My daughter pushed past me to wrench at the drawer of her dressing table. She threw the pink envelope onto the bed. "You can see it," she screamed at me, "even you can see it isn't opened!" I picked up the envelope and turned it and ran after her from the room. I called to her as she pelted down the stairs, but my words were lost in the same garbled sobbing that disgusted me, as if they foamed from a person I despised. "It was me, darling," I was trying to tell her, "I forgot. I forgot. I just forgot to give it to her." I stood now at the top of the stairs. A string of saliva had leaped across my cheek. But the front door slammed and in the silence I slipped to my knees and held in each hand one of the round wooden supports of the balustrade above the hall. I was like a prisoner against the bars of her cell. I kept saying in the same catching sobs, "My darling!" I knelt there for five minutes, perhaps longer. I heard steps and a key scratching for the lock in the front door, Chelsea coming back. But the door opened and Roger stepped inside. He glanced up at me, God knows what I must have looked like. His hand jangled his keys that were on a key ring I had given him years ago, the coat of arms of a city where once we spent a week in Italy. From the bedroom window the sea had been blue beyond belief. He placed the keys on the hook inside the front door and put down his briefcase against the hall table. He then walked through into the living room and closed the door. I leaned my forehead on the cool white wood of the railing. I began again to repeat the words as though I was unable to stop, but quietly, you would not have heard them from the bottom of the stairs. Not sure even which of the three, which of the four of us, I meant.