One Saturday morning my mother and I crouched below the windows, one looking onto the gravel parking lot and the other onto a high, treacherous sidewalk between the buildings, watching Tommy McCabe stagger from his Dodge "Rambler" to the front door of his apartment building across the way.
Tommy had spent all of Friday night at the "Moose" Lodge and was just making his way home—lapsing in and out of consciousness—after my morning cartoons. My mother, smelling like Crest and Aqua Net, was absorbed by the scene. She had probably seen him pull into the parking lot from the kitchen window and had come into my bedroom for the best view.
Tommy was her lover.
One morning they had left her bedroom door open and as I walked past I saw him sprawled—sideways, naked, covered in dark hair—across her bed like a soldier wounded in battle, or an open book that had been tossed aside. It was the first time I had ever seen an adult male's penis, so unlike my own, and its scale and position atop his long torso did not make sense to me. He was vaguely frightening, like one of the bulbous, composited figures of de Chirico.
My mother's boyfriends were a permanent factor of my childhood, like glasses or tuna fish sandwiches, and there were many new names and awkward introductions—usually after I had returned from an entire summer spent at my grandmother's home. The ones who viewed my mother with any degree of seriousness were simply awful, and I can remember only two—oddly, both named Bill, like my father, and from an earlier period—who were any match for her handsomeness.
For in the 1960s and 70s, my mother was striking—tailored, confident, tall, slim but not thin, affable but always self-possessed—a look that seemed all her own. I have to think of Lee Remick or Angie Dickinson, but the chips don't entirely match the color in my memory.
Tommy McCabe was a break in the line of Brylcreemed, tie-tacked losers. He couldn't afford the restaurants and faux fur coats. He never held a job for long.
He called my mom "Red," sometimes shouting out to her—"Heyyyyy RED!"—like Stanley Kowalski, from outside our apartment windows late at night.
He was the entertainment wherever they went together, telling long, hilarious stories or doing imitations for my mother's friends—or just elaborating a game of Charades—from the top of a coffee table. He was in good shape, a sort of mix of Tom Jones and Joe Mannix. He was the warmest and most genuine of the adults I knew—the most successful in reaching out to me—and he was dangerously, clinically alcoholic.
One weekend he showed up at our apartment with guppies darting in a plastic bag of water, a fish tank, filters, rocks, a tank-top light, and a little selection of plastic vegetation and china accessories.
One of the pieces was a green china frog with black eyes and a large yellow belly on which, with a black marker, he wrote his name.
The tank was alive on weeknights as we watched TV, and its fluorescent world, bubbling in a dark corner of the dining room, was more than a little competition for "All in the Family" or Merv Griffin. The frog stood in the center, its hyperthyroid gaze always directed up toward the water's surface.
My mother said she would sit alone watching the tank, after I had gone to bed, her legs crossed over one another on the vinyl hassock, her psychedelic ashtray at her elbow, the ice cubes melted down to wafers in her Old Fashioned.
She had 32 years to go, after the teal remnant was lifted from the living room floor and we moved—with a new boyfriend—to a new apartment, in a different town. Like circus performers, an intransigence had marked our lives from the beginning, and she had never amassed more than could fill a single, medium-sized moving van. My squeaky rock maple bedroom furniture was borrowed from her first husband and returned when we moved.
Thus I developed, even as a small child, an absolute longing for the formality and stability of a traditional family. I dreamt of station wagons and collies, the Cub Scouts, and the four walls and green back yard of a real house.
What I couldn't know, what I was never told, is that my mother had—in the act of conceiving me—run from all of this, had simply put the keys in the ignition and driven away.
Years later she told me, "Mr. Campbell wanted me to wear white gloves."
It was the only thing she ever said, the only image she gave me, of her 13-year marriage, her life as a young housewife with three children.
Only once during my childhood did I see her miss a day of work. I had developed an especially bad earache and she brought an ironing board into my canary yellow corner bedroom and spent the day ironing her blouses and skirts.
My mother couldn't take Tommy seriously, and in a series of phone conversations that seemed to genuinely pain her—and finally an awkward shunning (he lived in the next building)—she was rid of him. The next new name proved to be the lucky one—a high school physics teacher with an intelligent restraint and confident manner ("Doesn't he look like Glen Campbell?")—and she married, at 45.
He beat her savagely and repeatedly, and my high school years progressed through frightening nights and ambulance trips in the early morning hours. Often my mother would crawl in bed beside me, foolishly hoping to avoid another of her husband's rages. Sometimes, I slept with a chef's knife under my pillow.
With Tommy's name long ago worn off, the china frog sits on my bathroom sink to this day. Many nights I look at it as I brush my teeth, my own head woozy from too much wine.
How complex a woman my mother must have been, how thoroughly she must have known herself, to make the choices she did—to understand the freedom and the transient but intense warmth of someone like Tommy McCabe.
The joy of being in the moment, without expectations or roles. Taking one's pleasure as it comes, from where it comes.
I wish I had known her better.
2 comments:
Your writing makes me feel every word. So good.
Thanks for reading Lesley!
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