By Susan Dwyer
The palliative care guy is the only one of my mother’s doctors to have acknowledged my presence at her bedside at Flinders University Hospital. It’s July 2005, and I’m back in Adelaide, South Australia, for the last bit of my mother’s life. It is only my second trip back since leaving for the United States in 1986.
“So, Jean,” Pal-Care Guy says, settling on the edge of my mother’s bed, “how are you feeling today?”
His shirt is peony pink beneath his white coat. He is handsome. I feel my mother respond, shifting like something small and feral stirring awake. At seventy-nine, she is still essentially a flirt.
“Fine. Maybe a little tired.” She beams. He smiles right back at her.
My mother is in a public ward, three beds to a side. Despite their all being occupied, an odd kind of privacy envelops the three of us. The other patients’ movements, their voices, the television sounds, all soften and retreat to the edges of my attention. I try to focus on the conversation my mother and this doctor are having, but nothing sticks, except when my mother lies to him about being a smoker.
“Never!” she insists. My sharp intake of breath alerts him to this solecism.
After a while, Pal-Care Guy stands up and moves to pull the thin curtains around my mother’s bed. He sits back down. And now there comes a truth.
“Jean, I know you’ve seen a lot of different doctors. And, at our last meeting, well, I’m afraid that we’ve come to the conclusion that there is nothing more we can do for you. The cancer has moved into both your lungs.”
I take hold of my mother’s left hand with its perfectly manicured nails. She breaks eye contact with the doctor; no amount of charm will help her now. She turns her head towards me, and it seems that her blue eyes have darkened almost to black. I have a vivid sensation that we are standing side by side at the edge of precipice, a cold, metallic wind blowing up from somewhere far below into our faces. I may never have been as close to my mother as I am in this moment.
My mother says nothing. Neither do I. Pal-Care Guy just sits with us. Eventually, he rises to leave. There are no platitudes. Just a single dedicated glance at the two of us, and he is gone, the curtains swishing back into place as if behind a ghost. My mother’s hand is warm and limp in mine.
Needing some daylight, I pull back the curtains around her bed and allow the bustle of the ward to reassert itself. On her back, hands by her sides now, my mother stares at the ceiling. Out of nowhere she says, “Well, I suppose I shall never go to the cinema again.”
“Let’s see,” I reply. It is the best I can do.
On the other side of the ward, catty-corner from my mother’s bed, is a woman from New Zealand called Myra. She’s had a stroke and while ambulatory, she can no longer string words together. I’ve winced to hear her frustrated interactions with the speech pathologist, thinking to myself, My god, what would I do if I lost my words? Myra looks across at us now. She slides out of her bed and walks towards my mother and me. “I’m so sorry, love,” she says, clear as day.
I sit with my mother until she drifts off to sleep, and then, as I have done day after long day, I wander the interior of the hospital. Corridors turn into identical corridors, phones ring at unpeopled nursing stations, meaningless pronouncements come over the PA system. With barely a smidgen of emotion, I wonder How long does she have? Will she die here?
By the time I get back, my mother is awake and alert. A nurse tells us that I can take my mother out on ‘day release’. She can spend some time at her flat, and, yes, even go to the movies. But my mother now has a different priority: she has already called Eddy and arranged to see him. Could I pick her up at the hospital early on Tuesday morning, take her to her flat, and come back later to fetch her for the trip back to the hospital?
“Of course, Mum. But I don’t want to see him. Mum. I mean it. Okay?”
***
When I arrive on Tuesday, my mother is dressed and fully made up, nasal cannula in place. A wheelchair is ready by her bed, and a nurse shows me how to switch out an empty oxygen tank for a full one. I help my mother into the chair, two blue tanks tucked into a sleeve at the back, and we make our way to the elevator. Five floors down and we are released into the almost empty lobby. I have parked my rental car in the swoop of a driveway in front of the hospital that gives it almost a hotel vibe. My mother is small, but maneuvering her into the passenger seat along with her oxygen tank is not easy. Another minor battle ensues between me and the chair as I try to collapse it and get it into the trunk.
We do this dance backwards when we arrive at her apartment block. There are five small units, each with its own tiny garden, made private by high brush fences. Inside, I help my mother from the wheelchair to her brown armchair, carefully positioning the oxygen tank to her right, next to a side table with the telephone and television remote. She sighs, drops her shoulders, and pats at the creamy crocheted mats that drape over the arms of the chair. I lean down to hug her.
“Now call me when he’s left and I’ll come and get you. When he’s left, okay?”
***
At around 4pm, my burner phone rings, “I’m ready,” my mother says.
“Yup, I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”
I approach my mother’s front door calling out, “Hi Mum, it’s me.” Before I can turn the handle, the door is opened and there is Eddy C., my mother’s lover of nearly forty years.
Eddy spreads his arms for a hug. I can only stand still, willing myself not to give him the satisfaction of the smile my conditioning is ready to paste on my face. Then I exhale into the deep resignation that my mother has never understood that her desires are not mine.
***
In 1967, with no job and no work experience, my mother left my father, taking my nine-year-old self and a few pieces of furniture. Within a few months, she was hired to clean Mr. and Mrs. C.’s house. They were wealthy American expats, and their home was a sprawling bungalow with five bedrooms, as many bathrooms, and a full-size lawn tennis court out back. All the doors had brass handles, which my mother would don white cotton gloves to clean. On Thursday afternoons, I would walk straight from school to meet her at the C.’s place, where, for ten cents, I groomed the family dog. If no one was home, I would sneak into the master suite, where Mrs. C. kept her collection of perfumes arranged on an onyx chessboard. My young nose began to learn what wealth and comfort smelled like.
I don’t know when the affair began, but I now connect it to when my mother took on the additional work of ironing Mr. C.’s shirts. The palest blue and whitest white, these shirts had a neat ESC embroidered above each left breast pocket. My mother ironed those shirts every weekend while I lay on the sofa, not two feet way, reading. I remember falling in love with Zola’s Germinal in that very spot during one hellishly hot summer. While my mother plied her steam iron, wearing only a sarong, sweat pouring down her face and neck and in between her breasts, I was deep down in a cold, dark French coal mine with Etienne Lantier and the Levaques.
Books made the smallness of our apartment bearable for me. There was just one bedroom and just one double bed. I sought out the most sophisticated books I could find, not then grasping that the feeling of superiority they gave me offset my shame having to share that one bed with my mother.
At some point, Mr. C. started to come over a couple of times a week while I was at school. He and my mother would drink and smoke, and fuck—in the only place I had to sleep. Often, they had company, another couple or another woman. My mother would have washed the sheets and made the bed by the time I got home, but the place still smelled far too adult for a barely pubescent girl.
***
And here is that same scene again, all these decades later. I allow Eddy the briefest contact, and push past him into the living room. I look over to my mother in her brown chair. She is smiling. She is drunk. The place reeks of cigarette smoke. The cannula and its tubing lie on the floor as telling as discarded lingerie.
Eddy is smiling, too, as he looks me up and down. He says how proud he and my mother are of me, of what I have made of myself. He asks after my American husband. I stand with my feet apart, hands deep in the front pockets of my jeans. I know my mother is watching me. I am stony and monosyllabic in the face of this parody of parenthood. I shall tell them nothing. Nothing.
When Eddy leaves, I rinse the glasses and empty the ashtrays. It’s when I pick up the last empty bottle that I’m surprised by a spark of something like admiration for my mother’s sexual agency. A quantum of kindness opens inside me. My mother may have had her last orgasm this very afternoon. How could I begrudge her that?
I lock up, get my mother back into the car and we drive to the hospital in silence. Honest conversation is not to be had. She will not acknowledge that she deliberately called me while Eddy was still with her. Her cheeks are flushed, and she stares dreamily out through the windscreen. She is breathing just fine without the tank. Well-fucked, I think. And, with each mile, an old rage threatens to wipe out any generous feelings I have toward her.
Since I’ve called ahead to my mother’s floor at the hospital, a nurse is ready to greet us as I pull up. I get the wheelchair from the back of the car, unfold it, and thrust it towards the nurse.
“Here you are. You deal with her,” I say, as if I’m handing off an exasperating toddler. My mother doesn’t notice. She allows herself to be taken care of. She does not thank me. I do not say goodnight.
I start up the car, open all the windows, and head out to the hospital’s ring road high above the flat expanse of the seaside Adelaide suburbs where I grew up. Darkness is falling. There are no other cars around. I sit for a while at a stop sign, watching the evening lights begin to twinkle below, all the way to the coast. I take a deep breath, and something bubbles up in my chest. Lucky Mum, I think, and laugh out loud.