Paul II. One of my earliest memories is of my father teasing her over the claims that the priest had performed miracles and received the stigmata. When she took offense, he became angry and said, “If you want to believe that crap, fine. Don’t expect me to take any of it seriously.”
She poured the coffee, fetched a bottle of Irish whiskey from the cabinet, and splashed a generous measure into her cup. She offered the same for me and was surprised when I accepted. I’m not a big whiskey drinker but felt a sense of nourishment in that sip, something careless and down to earth. We were quiet for a while, which is the natural complement to the aromas of booze and coffee. She held her cup by the handle, propping the rim with the fingertips of her other hand. Her gray hair was pulled back into a bun, and her eyes were a little bloodshot, but she was alert and present. For a moment, she appeared to me not as a mother or a grieving widow but as a linkage. The funeral seemed a small detail in a whole chain of linkages, and I understood for the first time how, in not going, she’d attended it in a more significant way. Still, it was with a twinge of guilty feeling that I described to her the planting of the tree outside Bern.
“What kind of tree?”
“I think it was an elm. A friend arranged it with a local farmer, who let us plant it on the edge of his field on the Dentenberg. It was one of Dad’s favorite places to walk. There’s a little restaurant up there where he liked to stop for a beer.”
“Sounds nice.” The disdain was muted, but only slightly; another reminder of things she felt cut off from. I’d said too much. We sipped our toddies and watched the birds at the feeder outside the window. Funny, the things we feel cut off from, how they so often turn out to be just the things we at one time deliberately rejected. My mother always complained about the superficialities of being a Foreign Service spouse. She detested the clubs, the cocktail parties, the bubbly charity of the wives, the pompous husbands. My father disliked all those things, too, but he protected himself with an ironic and often malicious sense of humor. He was a recognizable type: the wry, smart guy, likable but a little intimidating and best kept at a distance. The Foreign Service is full of them, always a rung or two down from ambassador, bearing all the institutional scars and grudges. My mother says she is happy to have left all that behind, is happy with her quiet life. I’m not sure I believe her.
We went into the living room. She picked up her knitting, and I listened as she began reminiscing. “I remember once we were in Aachen, walking through the cathedral there, and all of a sudden your father tells me there’s something he needs to do and to meet him at the restaurant directly across from where we’d parked the car.” She shook her head. “Right out of the blue. He’s off. Just like that. I hadn’t even noticed there was a restaurant.”
“What did you do?”
“What could I do? I tried my best to enjoy the cathedral, then went to wait for him in the restaurant. I waited there for two hours!” She put her knitting down. “Can you believe it? Two hours! Then he comes in and plops himself down and says ‘I’m famished,’ as if there was nothing more normal in the world.”
“What did you say?”
“I got right up and left. Are you kidding? The last thing on earth I wanted to do was sit there for another minute with him and pretend everything was just fine.”
“Where was he all that time?”
“He said he had to call the office and afterward he’d done a little exploring and simply lost track of the time. Going home, he took one of his famous shortcuts that took us an hour and a half out of the way. We ended up stopping for dinner, anyway.”
I always feel oppressed by her reminiscences. It pains me to see her so completely stuck in the past. She doesn’t have to become a happy person, just live a little more fully in the present.
I stood up. “I’m going to have another toddy. Want one?”
“No, thank you.” She smiled to let me know that she was happy to indulge this sudden immoderation on my part, in spite of all the lectures I’d given her about drinking. I went to the kitchen and poured the remaining coffee into my cup, taking note of what there was of whiskey left in the bottle. It was not to keep tabs but just to know. One of the phantoms of alcoholic behavior is always to take notice as well as to be alert to all notice-taking.
“Did you ever meet a friend of Dad’s named Blake?” I asked, coming back into the living room.
“Blake?” She thought for a moment, knitting needles slowing. “Blake who?”
“I don’t know.” I sat down on the sofa, sipping the vaporous concoction. I tried to recall if any first names had been used, but couldn’t remember. “He turned up at the memorial service and came back to the apartment afterward. Uninvited, it turned out—and pretty obnoxious. Nicole couldn’t stand him. Claimed he was an old friend, met Dad in Laos.”
She put her knitting aside, shook her head, and frowned. “That can’t be. Dad was never in Laos.”
“I’m just telling you what he said.”
Her hands were folded in her lap. She stared down at them, the crease on her brow deepening. She can make herself look so angry when she becomes uncertain. It was hard to watch the Irish temper churning up. “No,” she said firmly. “It’s just not possible. He was never in Laos. I’d remember.”
“Well, maybe I got it wrong,” I said, wishing I hadn’t brought it up. “I was just curious to know if you’d heard of the guy. It’s not important.”
The glare in her eyes was familiar and troubling.
“Look, Mom. Forget it. It’s not important.”
“I’ll prove it, damn it,” she said, and marched off to the bedroom. It came on too suddenly to protest. I knew she had saved all his Vietnam letters. She’s offered to let me read them several times. I always decline. I settled back onto the sofa, resigned to going through the whole routine again. All these years of persisting in a worn-out relationship—not out of hope but out of hopelessness. It was too pathetic to think about, much less be shown the moldering evidence pulled from a dresser drawer.
She returned with an oversized manila envelope.
“I don’t want to look at them,” I said.
“Well, they’re here if you change your mind.” She put the envelope on the coffee table as if it were an extra helping of dessert I’d turned down. It was a provocation. The more indifferent I seem and the more she pretends not to be bothered in return, the more we prove to one another how deeply we both care. It’s an uncalm, interior caring that needs to be guarded and restrained.
I was a little drunk when I left a short time later. It was late afternoon. She’d asked me to return some books to the library for her. It was a routine request. She typically has half-a-dozen overdue books lying around at any given time. Although she lives in Bethesda, she often takes books from the library in Georgetown, where her friend Marge Noonan works. Marge is also a divorced Foreign Service wife. She and my mother had been cordial in the Foreign Service wife way back in Madras. They became friends years later, in the context of their divorces. My earliest memory of Marge is of her dressed as a heavily bejeweled Indian bride, chain-smoking Salem 100s at a costume party at our house on Adyar Club Gate Road.
It was rush hour. A steady stream of traffic was flowing out of the front gate of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. The agency’s motto is Know the Earth. Show the Way, which has always struck me as a peculiar variation of the Delphic injunction, Know thyself. I am also reminded of the lines from Rilke: Nirgends, Geliebte, wird Welt sein, als innen—Nowhere, beloved, will world be but within. To know the Earth is no simple proposition—but to be shown the way by a government agency? The inverse of the motto might be Know Thyself. Find the Way.
I drove down MacArthur Boulevard to Reservoir Road, feeling oddly mellow in the rush-hour twilight. It was more than just alcohol-induced well-being and had tinges of melancholy to give it ballast. There is a hidden traffic camera on MacArthur that has photographed me speeding