 quietly slide off the bar stool and onto the floor and end up
having my stomach pumped at Mercy Hospital. It's the nineteenth anniversary of
my mother's death.
I sit quietly and think about my mom. It's funny how memory erodes. If all I
had to work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother
would be faded and soft, with a few sharp moments standing out. When I was
five I heard her sing Lulu at the Lyric Opera. I remember Dad, sitting next to me,
smiling up at Mom at the end of the first act with utter exhilaration. I remember
sitting with Mom at Orchestra Hall, watching Dad play Beethoven under Boulez.
I remember being allowed to come into the living room during a party my
parents were giving and reciting Blake's Tyger, Tyger burning bright to the guests,
complete with growling noises; I was four, and when I was done my mother
swept me up and kissed me and everyone applauded. She was wearing dark
lipstick and I insisted on going to bed with her lip prints on my cheek. I
remember her sitting on a bench in Warren Park while my dad pushed me on a
swing, and she bobbed close and far, close and far.
One of the best and most painful things about time traveling has been the
opportunity to see my mother alive. I have even spoken to her a few times; little
things like "Lousy weather today, isn't it?" I give her my seat on the El, follow
her in the supermarket, watch her sing. I hang around outside the apartment my
father still lives in, and watch the two of them, sometimes with my infant self,
take walks, eat in restaurants, go to the movies. It's the '60s, and they are elegant,
young, brilliant musicians with all the world before them. They are happy as
larks, they shine with their luck, their joy. When we run across each other they
wave; they think I am someone who lives in the neighborhood, someone who
takes a lot of walks, someone who gets his hair cut oddly and seems to
mysteriously ebb and flow in age. I once heard my father wonder if I was a cancer
patient. It still amazes me that Dad has never realized that this man lurking
around the early years of their marriage was his son.
I see how my mother is with me. Now she is pregnant, now they bring me
home from the hospital, now she takes me to the park in a baby carriage and sits
memorizing scores, singing softly with small hand gestures to me, making faces
and shaking toys at me. Now we walk hand in hand and admire the squirrels, the
cars, the pigeons, anything that moves. She wears cloth coats and loafers with
Capri pants. She is dark-haired with a dramatic face, a full mouth, wide eyes,
short hair; she looks Italian but actually she's Jewish. My mom wears lipstick, eye
liner, mascara, blush, and eyebrow pencil to go to the dry cleaner's. Dad is much
as he always is, tall, spare, a quiet dresser, a wearer of hats. The difference is his
face. He is deeply content. They touch each other often, hold hands, walk in
unison. At the beach the three of us wear matching sunglasses and I have a
ridiculous blue hat. We all lie in the sun slathered in baby oil. We drink Rum
and Coke, and Hawaiian Punch.
My mother's star is rising. She studies with Jehan Meek, with Mary Delacroix,
and they carefully guide her along the paths of fame; she sings a number of small
but gemlike roles, attracting the ears of Louis Behaire at the Lyric. She
understudies Linea Waverleigh's Aida. Then she is chosen to sing Carmen. Other
companies take notice, and soon we are traveling around the world. She records
Schubert for Decca, Verdi and Weill for EMI, and we go to London, to Paris, to
Berlin, to New York. I remember only an endless series of hotel rooms and
airplanes. Her performance at Lincoln Center is on television; I watch it with
Gram and Gramps in Muncie. I am six years old and I hardly believe that it's my
mom, there in black and white on the small screen. She is singing Madama
Butterfly.
They make plans to move to Vienna after the end of the Lyric's '69 -'70 season.
Dad auditions at the Philharmonic. Whenever the phone rings it's Uncle Ish,
Mom's manager, or someone from a record label.
I hear the door at the top of the stairs open and clap shut and then slowly
descending footsteps. Clare knocks quietly four times and I remove the
straight-backed chair from under the doorknob. There's still snow in her hair and
her cheeks are red. She is seventeen years old. Clare throws her arms around me
and hugs me excitedly. "Merry Christmas, Henry!" she says. "It's so great you're
here!" I kiss her on the cheek; her cheer and bustle have scattered my thoughts
but my sense of sadness and loss remains. I run my hands over her hair and come
away with a small handful of snow that melts immediately.
"What's wrong?" Clare takes in the untouched food, my uncheerful demeanor.
"You're sulking because there's no mayo?"
"Hey. Hush." I sit down on the broken old La-Z-Boy and Clare squeezes in
beside me. I put my arm around her shoulders. She puts her hand on my inner
thigh. I remove it, and hold it. Her hand is cold. "Have I ever told you about my
mom?"
"No." Clare is all ears; she's always eager for any bits of autobiography I let
drop. As the dates on the List grow few and our two years of separation loom
large, Clare is secretly convinced she can find me in real time if I would only dole
out a few facts. Of course, she can't, because I won't, and she doesn't.
We each eat a cookie. "Okay. Once upon a time, I had a mom. I had a dad, too,
and they were very deeply in love. And they had me. And we were all pretty
happy. And both of them were really terrific at their jobs, and my mother,
especially, was great at what she did, and we used to travel all over, seeing the
hotel rooms of the world. So it was almost Christmas-"
"What year?"
"The year I was six. It was the morning of Christmas Eve, and my dad was in
Vienna because we were going to move there soon and he was finding us an
apartment. So the idea was that Dad would fly into the airport and Mom and I
would drive out and pick him up and we would all continue on to Grandma's
house for the holidays.
"It was a gray, snowy morning and the streets were covered in sheets of ice
that hadn't been salted yet. Mom was a nervous driver. She hated expressways,
hated driving to the airport, and had only agreed to do this because it made a lot
of sense. We got up early, and she packed the car. I was wearing a winter coat, a
knit hat, boots, jeans, a pullover sweater, underwear, wool socks that were kind
of tight, and mittens. She was dressed entirely in black, which was more unusual
then than it is now."
Clare drinks some of the milk directly from the carton. She leaves a
cinnamon-colored lipstick print. "What kind of car?"
"It was a white '62 Ford Fairlane."
"What's that?"
"Look it up. It was built like a tank. It had fins. My parents loved it- it had a
lot of history for them.
"So we got in the car. I sat in the front passenger seat, we both wore our
seatbelts. And we drove. The weather was absolutely awful. It was hard to see,
and the defrost in that car wasn't the greatest. We went through this maze of
residential streets, and then we got on the expressway. It was after rush hour, but
traffic was a mess because of the weather and the holiday So we were moving
maybe fifteen, twenty miles an hour. My mother stayed in the right-hand lane,
probably because she didn't want to change lanes without being able to see very
well and because we weren't going to be on the expressway very long before we
exited for the airport.
"We were behind a truck, well behind it, giving it plenty of room up there. As
we passed an entrance a small car, a red Corvette, actually, got on behind us. The
Corvette, which was being driven by a dentist who was only slightly inebriated,
at 10:30 a.m., got on just a bit too quickly, and was unable to slow down soon
enough because of the ice on the road, and hit our car. And in ordinary weather
conditions, the Corvette would have been mangled and the indestructible Ford
Fairlane would have had a bent fender and it wouldn't have been that big of a
deal.
"But the weather was bad, the roads were slick, so the shove from the Corvette
sent our car accelerating forward just as traffic slowed down. The truck ahead of
us was barely moving. My mother was pumping the brakes but nothing was
happening.
"We hit the truck practically in slow motion, or so it seemed to me. In
actuality we were going about forty. The truck was an open pickup truck full of
scrap metal. When we hit it, a large sheet of steel flew off the back of the truck,
came through our windshield, and decapitated my mother."
Clare has her eyes closed. "No."
"It's true."
"But you were right there-you were too short!"
"No, that wasn't it, the steel embedded in my seat right where my forehead
should have been. I have a scar where it started to cut my forehead." I show
Clare. "It got my hat. The police couldn't figure it out. All my clothes were in the
car, on the seat and the floor, and I was found stark naked by the side of the
road."
"You time traveled."
"Yes. I time traveled." We are silent for a moment. "It was only the second
time it ever happened to me. I had no idea what was going on. I was watching us
plow into this truck, and then I was in the hospital. In fact, I was pretty much
unhurt, just in shock."
"How.. .why do you think it happened?"
"Stress-pure fear. I think my body did the only trick it could."
Clare turns her face to mine, sad and excited. "So..."
"So. Mom died, and I didn't. The front end of the Ford crumpled up, the
steering column went through Mom's chest, her head went through the now
empty windshield and into the back of the truck, there was an unbelievable amount
of blood. The guy in the Corvette was unscathed. The truck driver got out of his
truck to see what hit him, saw Mom, fainted on the road and was run over by a
