What we remember

Her husband attends her faithfully, but of that attention, she may not be at all aware. On Sundays he walks her down every hallway and into every corner of the Home. Each new walk brings her into a world in which she appears to have no real interest. 

The look on her face doesn't change. What there is of her thin white hair is cut short, wetted a bit, and parted rigorously. When you meet her and her husband, her eyes remain fixed.  

Thirty years ago, she sat around a table in a writing class for adults. The goal was to get each of them to write something memoir-ish, some little story from each of their pasts to pack into an anthology of memories. Maybe ten people reaching senior-hood, each of them capable of the kind of reflections they were themselves very interested in recording, each of them confident that their earlier years contained stories others would love. 

Today, her husband pushes her wheelchair. He's smiling when you meet them. Some days when we visit, the simple grace of that smile seems almost a sunrise. Her face is emotionless, but his lights up when he greets you. I don't believe he ever spent a moment of married life not in love with her. Even today, he shines. 

Thirty years ago, a story she remembered is one I've never forgotten, a story she didn't write out for the class. She told me that she had written it down somewhere else, but that her mother's story was not for publication. Her mother's story is the one I've not forgotten. 

When her mother had a baby, her father, a farmer, hired a local girl to come in and take care of his wife's traditional chores--cooking and cleaning, washing and ironing, "keeping house," as most people say. Having a hired girl for a time was not cause to make tongues wag. It was mid-Depression, and the few extra quarters a girl could make "working out" in some big farm family went into her own family's otherwise empty piggy bank.

But her father had sex with the hired girl, she said, and, soon enough her mother found out as much--how, I don't know. That story she told the class morning, but it wasn't the story she wanted to write in the anthology. 

And there was more. All through her mother's life, forever after, to her daughters, her mother had continually bad-mouthed her father, belittled him so much so that she claimed she grew up in a family where love between her parents was virtually non-existent. That story was private.

She claimed that, growing up, she and her sisters simply took up their mother's attitude, found it difficult to love their father, despite his having accepted the derision he so frequently endured. She told us that late in life, when her mother became an invalid in a wheelchair, he attended her faithfully, even constructed an elaborate hanging chair so the two of them could sit together at the family table. 

But suddenly her father died before her mother, and when he did she was almost totally broken. Only then, she said, only when her father was gone, did her mother tell her daughters the whole story, what had happened so many years before. It all came out in a storm of grief and guilt, a fusillade of tears from a soul so long fortressed that what emptied at that moment tore into the lives of her daughters, a pure and horrifying confession that begged their forgiveness for what she'd done to them, poisoned them so wretchedly against him for so many, many years. She told her daughters that her inability to forgive him, her husband and their father, had made her a far greater sinner.

An amazing story. 

"But what were we to do with that?" she asked us. "What were we to do?" 

That's the story I remember whenever I see her husband pushing her in the wheelchair down the long hallways of the Home. 

They must have cried together, don't you think?--mother and daughters. The girls must have cried at their mother's tears and at their own.

Today, her husband attends her faithfully, but I'm not at all sure she knows he's there. 

Still, I can't help think that if all of that poison was not part of her childhood, her life would have been dramatically different. Somehow. "Unto the third and fourth generation," the Bible says. Chilling.

I know very little about her own life. What I know is that once upon a time, she enrolled in a little writing class for adults, penned a story for an anthology I ran off on a Xerox machine, something I lost years ago, contributed a story I've long ago forgotten. It's the story she told that stays with me. 

As it had to have stayed with her. 

Today, maybe, in her senility, it's gone. 

Maybe. But it's not disappeared altogether.