May 15, 1944 the front page of the New York Times carried a
brief dispatch from the war in Europe. It told the story of an American B-17,
on a bombing run over Laon, France, that was struck by a bomb accidentally
released by another American plane flying in formation above it. The bomb
wedged in the tail of the Flying Fortress, killing the tail gunner, but didn’t
explode. “Although the plane was almost unmanageable,” the dispatch read, “the
crew stayed with the ship.” Terrified the bomb would detonate during what
promised to be a bumpy landing, the four surviving crewmen tried in vain to
dislodge it while the pilot, Lieutenant Burdette “Buddy” Williams, guided the
wounded plane back to its base in England. The bomb was still in the tail when
he touched down.
For their actions, the
entire crew was awarded the Soldier’s Medal for Valor. Sixty years later, I’m
sitting here, typing these words, staring at Buddy Williams’s medal. It wound
up with me after my mother, Leona Goldblatt, who once was Leona Williams, died
last December.
It was Buddy--not my
father--who was the great love of my mom’s life.
She mentioned Buddy to me
for the first time twenty years ago, five years after my father’s death.
Details came in drips and drabs at first. The fact that she even had a first
husband. The fact that he was a
hard-drinking, motorcycle riding daredevil pilot. The fact that she
divorced him after the war because of his boozing. The fact that she remarried
him several years later when he sobered up. The fact that she divorced him
again when he fell off the wagon.
Then, over the last few
years, she began to open up. She talked about the time Buddy buckled her into
the front seat of an open cockpit crop duster, handed her a pair of oversized
aviator goggles, and took her on a series of barrel rolls--as she screamed
herself hoarse with only the seatbelt holding her in the plane. She talked
about the time, during the war, when she and another pilot’s wife drove from
Ohio to Florida to follow their husbands . . . managing the entire distance,
despite fuel rationing, by flirting with gas station attendants. “Just flirting,” she added.
So I knew some of the
stories. But I had no tangible
evidence of her life with Buddy until I flew down to Florida at the end of
November, after Mom entered a hospice. She was 80, dying from acute emphysema
and from a ventral hernia which had swollen her abdomen out like a cantaloupe
and necessitated, in the last year of her life, her wearing maternity pants. By
the time I got to her bedside, she was doped up and sleeping sixteen hours at a
stretch. Whenever she came to, she’d ask my sister Gail or one of my nieces for
a sip of water, or a taste of cherry Jello--which she’d acknowledge afterwards
with an exaggerated “Ahhhh.” The skin of her arms, from her elbows to her
fingertips, had turned purplish black, and she’d sometimes stare at her hands,
as if trying to decide if they were really hers; other times, she had just
enough strength to clasp our hands if we slid them underneath her palms.
Gail and I alternated
vigils, so she never woke up alone. That turned out to be both a blessing and a
curse. The Wednesday night after I arrived, as Gail was dozing off in a folding
chair, Mom suddenly sprang up from her bed, pulled off her oxygen mask,
unhooked her catheter, and began putting on her street clothes. She tapped Gail
on the shoulder to tell her she was leaving. “I’ve got to get out of here,” she
explained. Gail squinted up at her and thought she was dreaming; Mom hadn’t had
enough strength to sit upright for a week, but now she was pacing back and
forth across the hospice room, searching for her purse. When the reality of
what she was watching sank in, Gail jumped up and hugged her for several
minutes, until the fit passed, then laid her back down on the bed. Then she
curled up beside her until Mom fell back asleep--after which Gail wept until
morning.
My worst moment came
Friday afternoon, a couple of days later. The head nurse, a tall thin black
woman with the weariest, wisest eyes I’d ever seen, mentioned that dying
patients were often listening even when they seemed fast asleep; she suggested
talking to Mom about heaven, about re-uniting with her loved ones. It sounded
like a good idea, or at least a nothing-to-lose idea; at minimum, it would
break the monotony of watching her sleep. So I told her a story she loved to
tell me, her earliest memory; I tried to tell it to her the way she did, with
the details she used to dwell on: Do you
remember that drive through the Ozarks, back in the summer of ’28? How your
daddy pulled over by the roadside watermelon stand, how you and Sophie and
Tillie and Bertha and Herman and Pete waited in the back of the Willis Knight
while he bought that great big watermelon? Do you remember the jump seat you
were sitting on, how you loved to feel the bumps in the road? Then came the
moment your momma said it was all right to get out, and the six of you poured
out of that back door and onto the grassy bank next to the stream. Do you
remember that? How cool the grass was after the heat of the ride? How your
momma handed out the turkey sandwiches she’d made back home in Shreveport? Do
you remember the watermelon, the way your daddy tied a rope around it and sank
it into the stream to chill, the way he carved it up after lunch with that long
knife of his? You always said that was the best you ever ate . . .
As I finished the story,
my mom began to smile. Her eyes were sliding back and forth beneath her
eyelids. She was back there, beside that stream, eating that watermelon. So I
counted the experiment a success and began to regale her with more stories from
her childhood, back when she was Little Lonie Meyer, the tiny terror of
Louisiana Avenue. Falling out of a tree house in her backyard, slinging stones
at bumblebees and then dashing for cover, setting fire, accidentally, to the
family garage. (She swore that she wasn't smoking!) Every story I could recall,
every detail of every story, I told her. How, when she was six years old,
playing Cowboys and Indians, waving a wooden arrow, patting her open mouth and
yelling woo, woo, woo, she tripped
and fell--and wound up with the arrow broken off in her throat. How, when she
was eight, playing Cops and Robbers, she tried to arrest an older male cousin;
how, when he wouldn't go quietly to their make-believe jail, she ran back into
the house, grabbed her b.b. gun, marched back outside, and shot him in the leg.
Towards the end, however,
the expression on her face changed. I didn’t notice it at first; I was too
involved in the storytelling. But then she let out a low moan that ran through
me like an electric current. She was rolling her head side to side on pillow,
clutching at the bed sheet with her blackened fingers. Then, suddenly, she
cried out, “Momma!”
“What the matter, Mom?”
“Oh no oh no oh no . . .”
I jumped up from the
chair. “Is something wrong? Are you in pain?”
“Help me!” she cried.
“Please, Momma, help me!” She was thrashing back and forth now. I held her by
the shoulders. I could feel her weakened muscles working against my grip.
“You’re in Florida, Mom,”
I said, with as much force as I could manage without raising my voice. “It’s
Mark. I’m right here. You’re okay.”
“Please, Momma!” she
screamed, with tears rolling down her face. “Please help me, Momma!”
I ran out of the room and
sprinted towards the nurses’ station at the end of the corridor. Three nurses,
including the head nurse, were chatting behind the desk as I drew near. I
yelled at them, “She’s in pain!”
“Your mother?” the head
nurse asked.
“Help me,” I gasped.
“She’s suffering.”
The head nurse rushed out
from behind the desk and followed me back to the room. By the time we got
there, Mom was curled up in a fetal position, sobbing. The nurse checked her
vital signs, then held the back of her hand to her brow.
“It’s all right,” she
said. “She’s just hallucinating.”
“She was crying out for
her mother.”
“That happens sometimes.
It’s the Demerol.”
“You told me to talk to
her about her family.”
“It’s not as bad as you
think,” she said. “It’s worse on you than on her.”
With that, she left the
room. I sat down again beside the bed and, for the next hour, listened to my
mother cry out for her mother. It was the longest hour I’ve ever lived. The
terror in her voice, the reservoir of mortal dread I’d accidentally opened
within her, the guilt of that hour I’ll carry with me to my grave.
My guts were still
churning at sunset when Gail showed up for the night shift with unsettling
news; she couldn’t find a record of the funeral arrangements for which Mom had
prepaid two decades earlier. It was a point of pride with my mom; she’d shelled
out thousands of dollars in the rush and confusion after my father died. “You
and Gail won’t have to pay a penny
when I go,” she would say, apropos of nothing, at least once per visit.
“What about the funeral
home?” I asked Gail. “They must have records.”
But she had called them.
They had no records. Neither did the cemetery itself--even though my mom and I
had stepped over her pre-engraved headstone whenever we visited my dad’s grave.
Hers was right next to his, which read Morris
Goldblatt 1911-1979. Hers read Leona
Goldblatt 1923- The last date, I now knew, would be 2003. But I needed to
turn up that funeral contract among her papers--or else we’d be back at square
one when she died.
The job was nightmarish.
My mother was a pack rat; I found grocery coupons from the 1980s, a warranty
for black and white television purchased at Masters Department Store in
Flushing, Queens in 1971, and every report card my sister and I ever brought
home . . . and that was just in the top left drawer of her dresser. There was
no rhyme or reason to it. Slips of note paper with phone numbers but no name
were mixed with un-cancelled postage stamps that she’d cut from the envelopes
on which they’d been glued and embossed invitations to weddings in which both
the bride and groom were long deceased. I found a half dozen loose buttons,
three yellow thimbles and a bent belt buckle.
I was at it for three
hours when I came across a scrap book I’d never seen before. It was from her life
with Buddy. Anxious for a distraction, I began to page through it. Among the
matchbooks, crushed flowers and old photos, I found the yellowed Times front
page and the war medal. Proof of a life more adventurous, dramatic, more (no
use denying it) romantic than my own.
I sat on the floor of her
condominium with that scrap book on my lap for half the night. I’d had enough
of my mother dying. I wanted to think about her living, about her young and
pretty and in love with a drunken flyboy. If that meant I had to pay again for
her pre-paid funeral, so be it. I was done looking for that contract. I phoned
Gail at the hospice and told her.
The next morning, however,
as I was about to leave for the day shift, my niece Melissa drove up in her red
pickup truck and pulled into the guest parking space in front of the
condominium. She had her younger sister Jessica with her. Gail had dispatched
them to take up the search for the missing contract. Looking at the two of
them, twenty-one and seventeen years old, as they hopped out of that red truck,
flush with life, flush with expectations, certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt,
that between the two of them they’d find that damn contract, I realized I was
looking at my mom’s spirit, her undying legacy, her donation to the planet.
When I showed up for my
turn at the hospice, Gail was waiting for me outside the door to my mom’s room.
She was smiling at me in an indecipherable way. I smiled back at her and said,
“What is it?”
She didn’t answer but slid
open the door. Mom was sitting up in bed, talking to the head nurse as she
switched bags on the IV drip connected to her arm. She glanced up as I walked
into the room and said, in a lucid but slurred southern drawl, “You’re looking
thin, boy.”
I laughed. “So are you.”
“Ain’t that the truth!”
As awful as Friday had
been, Saturday afternoon turned out to be one of the great graces of my life.
My mom’s favorite sport was football. She lived for it, devoted her weekends to
it each fall and winter, and thought she knew more about it than anyone else.
That Saturday, Mom and I watched one last college game together. I don’t recall
which teams were playing--she kept insisting that one of them was her beloved
LSU Tigers, though it wasn’t. She even made an attempt, after one team scored,
to lift both her arms and signal a touchdown. During halftime, Melissa and
Jessica showed up at the hospice. Melissa was waving a manila envelope at me as
she walked into the room--the funeral contract. They gave their grandmother
long hugs, and then the three of us sat around her bed and watched the rest of
the game.
After it ended, my mom
clapped her hands with great satisfaction and said, “So I guess LSU’s got a
team this year.”
“I guess so, Mom.”
For the record: LSU won
the national championship that year.
There’s an expression in
football which goes: You don’t want to
leave anything on the field. What it means is that, whether you win or
lose, you don’t want to come off the playing field after the game ends
wondering if there was something else you could’ve done. You don’t want to be
sitting in the locker room afterwards thinking, I should’ve tried this or If
only I’d have thought of that . . .
Well, my mom didn’t leave
anything on the field.
It’s what I said in her
eulogy the following week.
