Hunching Homeward

His Mother’s Son

Who can remember the day they were born? Nobody. But Robert imagined it as a heavy moist fog, like being smothered in a wet gray blanket until it was thrown off and he emerged from an opaque nothingness into turmoil. Many years later when his mother lay dying in a convalescent home, a grayish room with hospital-like linoleum luminous in the fluorescent light and an ever-present aroma that, despite his knowing that it was disinfectant, the sopping blanket nightmares of his childhood came back. Most children seem to dream of falling only to awake in tumbling terror in the dark of night. He felt pressed under a blanket so laden with brackish water that it seemed saturated with runny cement. His dreams and terrors carried an alien stigma as if from someone else’s life.

His first recollection must have been when he was five, perhaps six. She sold cosmetics door-to-door in those days after divorcing his father. She would traipse in bundled against the North Dakota winter in a threadbare wool coat, her auburn hair and face covered with a scarf that left only her pale blue eyes peering out at the frigid world. By the time she removed her galoshes steam would be rising from moist fabric like human smoke. He felt secretly comforted that she worked so hard for his wellbeing and fearful that she might fail and plunge him into catastrophe. Several years later, perhaps 1939, a man and woman visited, and his mother said the man was his father with a second wife. That made no sense, but the man gave him two quarters, bounced him energetically on his knees, and also handed his mother bits of paper money before leaving, cigar smell lingering in Robert’s flannel shirt that lasted until another washing.

The next memories that seemed carved into his brainpan with a knife were the bad times with her second husband, the bulky man who was put into the VA mental hospital due to World War I disability. What stuck in Robert’s mind was the interrogation in a large office with wood paneling and leather chairs. He pictured his mother, and Dr. Dredland, a kindly man with flabby pale skin and reddish hair, and two other men who were deep-voiced and frightened him with stern glances. He listened to them without having to remember because nobody seemed terribly interested in him, unlike when called upon in school to recite gibberish. He was surprised when the thin serious man spoke his name, revealed a yellow-teeth smile, and said he needed to ask Robert a few questions.

Did he, Robert, know what this meeting was about? He shrugged, nervous, sensing the dreadful folds of a blanket closing around him. The man explained that they were interested in determining the fitness of Mr. Harold Brogan, his mother’s husband, to remain at home rather than go to the hospital. Did he understand that? He nodded, which was a lie, since Mr. Brogan had already left from home into the hospital, so what more could they talk about? Did Robert know what it meant to tell the truth? Once again he nodded, wondering what he’d done wrong that they had to ask him such a thing. Would he try really hard to answer true, they asked, and not lie about anything? He nodded with a look at his mother because the wet blanket itched his flesh, but she only smiled in her pinched-lip way.

The sober-faced man wanted to know if Mr. Brogan yelled and was angry in the house very often? Robert said yes, but his new father was gone most of the time on the job with the railroad. Of course, but when he came home, how did he behave? Robert did not reply, waiting for help. Did Mr. Brogan sometimes raise his voice to Robert’s mother? Yes. Did he grab her or in any way try to hurt her? The blanket, damp and clammy, descended around him from above like an oppressive drapery, covering his head and dripping warm moisture onto his face, hot, salty water that ran down his cheeks and brought stinging sniffles. He nodded and wiped at his eyes with both fists. How often did Mr. Brogan do such things? Lots of times, Robert said. Did Mr. Brogan ever strike or punch his mother? Uh huh. She sobbed in whispers, grasped a tissue, and wiped her eyes before blowing her nose with squeaky, bird-like sounds. The man puckered his lips as if sucking a gumdrop and gazed at his partner and Dr. Dredland.

For a few minutes the men talked to each other in quiet voices, Dr. Dredland explaining some things while Robert and his mother waited. His face had dried by then, but he had trouble breathing and gulped air in deep spasms. The second of the serious men clasped his hands and leaned across the desk closer to Robert. His voice came croaky like a frog’s; his tone sounded more serious than the other man. Did Robert remember the night when Mr. Brogan yelled and got really angry? Robert nodded, breathing deep with the memory. When was that? He didn’t know for sure. Well then, could he simply tell what happened? Robert felt so weighed down under the heavy blanket that he swallowed hard and held his breath as he remembered the shouting that had awakened him that awful night and made him scurry toward the lighted kitchen, bare feet chilled on the hardwood floor as his skin goose pimpled.

What did you see? the man asked him. Mr. Brogan, in pants and undershirt, waving his arms, yelling, slapping his mother, and waving something in her face as she tried to pull away. The room got terribly quiet as the two men, Dr. Dredland and his mother, stared at him. What did you do? Nothing. Nothing? He said he was too scared to do anything. Why was he afraid? He didn’t know. Was Mr. Brogan holding anything in his hand? Uh huh. What was it? A gun. You mean the revolver he used on his job? Uh huh. What was he doing with it? He was waving it around. That’s all? He was pointing it at his mother while she cried and said not to. What did Robert do then? He told them he started to cry. What happened after that? His mother got him a glass of water and put him back to bed.

Three years later, he and his mother were in California. The war was raging and she had married yet again, a high school sweetheart who was deferred from the military because he had an essential war job in the oil fields. But he drank a lot, and they fought, and his mother cried while Mr. Kalmer yelled. When Robert acted bad he got whipped with a thick leather belt, sometimes so hard that he couldn’t sit for a few days and had to sleep on his stomach. Those beatings stopped after Robert went to junior high school, but Mr. Kalmer still yelled at him and hit him when drinking whiskey. He stayed away from the house as much as he could.

Robert left home at seventeen to join the army and came back two years later after Mr. Kalmer had been killed in an automobile crash. His mother was once again on her own. When she took up with Burt Skedwell, Robert left home again to live near the Junior College. After she divorced Mr. Skedwell, Robert was summoned as a witness when the man sued his mother to get paid for work he had done around her house. Robert didn’t know what repairs the man had made but did his best to be truthful, admitting that the back bedroom addition wasn’t there the year before. His mother had to pay Mr. Skedwell money she thought he didn’t deserve.

Later in the 1950s she dated a lawyer who never seemed to have any clients and was usually working on some deal to negotiate the return of stolen travelers cheques or bank bonds with sleazy characters. Robert was at the house when police detectives came to ask his mother questions about Dave Rikard’s whereabouts and had he been in contact with her lately? She didn’t know much about anything, cried while she smoked, and Robert kept sneezing and coughing because cigarette smoke bothered his sinuses. It was remarkable that one officer, a swarthy man with light blonde hair and pearly black eyes, took to his mother. She was into her forties by then, but still vivacious with a come-hither manner that was totally unconscious and made her look years younger. They dated for a few months, but nothing came of it to Robert’s momentary relief because she later married Deeter ‘Doc’ Marshall, the used car salesman she had met while buying a pre-owned blue Cadillac convertible.

By then Robert had become completely disgusted with her carrying on and realized that his mother was engaged in a childish struggle to attain the good life which had eluded her since she had left high school. He discovered from his grandmother, that his mother had been royally spoiled by her father. Clothes and jewelry enabling her to party with the Minneapolis debutantes who had money to burn. But when she got out on her own during the 1930s with tough times in the country, there was no way she could even approach a decent living, let alone grandeur. Thus, she was constantly on the lookout for someone who could provide financial security, if not real luxury. It was, Robert told her during their frustrating, argumentative encounters, an unrealistic dream. She persisted in that pursuit of wealth, gambled on horses and lotteries, and got advice from fortunetellers.

Fate and the gods were against her. ‘Doc’ died in an auto accident on his drive back from a dealer convention in San Diego, an unfortunate collision with a moving van on a fog-shrouded highway. Most of what little estate he possessed had to go to the first wife and children. After, Mother worked at a variety of selling and clerical jobs until she met Russell Seward, a leather-faced retired carpenter. They married and bought a small, wood-frame white house in Glendale. But he also was a heavy drinker, which she disliked and claimed she hadn’t known about until after the marriage. She put up with it because Russell was quiet and didn’t cause her near the trouble she’d had with her other husbands. Robert stayed away.

When she had a fall in a hospital shower stall after another of her numerous operations-- varicose veins, appendectomy, hemorrhoids, hysterectomy--she was persuaded to sue by an ambitious attorney. Since Robert had been visiting her when the slip occurred, he found himself once more being asked questions about her life and circumstances. His testimony was gratuitous and not particularly helpful. She lost the case, owed attorney fees, and declared bankruptcy. By then the marriage to Russell had turned into bored disdain. They separated and divorced. She was once again alone as Robert lived his own life as best he could. She demanded occasional help of a financial or emotional nature, and eventually, after she retired on Social Security, went to stay with her brother in Portland.

That also did not work out. She smoked a lot, ate chocolates, and found she hated to keep house for a widower who had always been taken care of by his wife. What she most wanted, and desperately needed, was someone to take care of her without imposing on her independence and freedom. She moved into a senior apartment complex and fended for herself. It was the one time Robert remembered not worrying about her, but wondered when she would involve him in more of her problems or escapades. When she reached her eighties, things fell apart.

She had trouble managing her checking account and was in constant, futile arguments with the bank. She spent what little savings she had accumulated on fortunetellers, lotteries, costume jewelry, and commemorative plates, and sent checks to every bogus charity that asked for a contribution. When the dank climate finally affected her delicate lungs, it was necessary to arrange for her move to Los Angeles where he could look after her when she needed help. Her stubbornness made that exhausting. Although her health declined and she had surgery for lung cancer and kidney removal, she refused to stop smoking or eat wholesome meals. When she could no longer be alone and was placed in a convalescent home, her mind already a wandering juxtaposition of memories and fantasies, he found visits with her a tedious exercise in false recollections and demented sensibilities.

There were times when she thought Robert was her father, then her grandfather, sometimes her brother, and once in a while, her son. When he realized she would soon be gone leaving great, regrettable gaps in his life history that would never be filled, he asked about his childhood experiences and troubles. She evaded most questions or bewailed the hard times she’d lived through in the Great Depression.

Her happiest times, she said, were when she was in high school and could go to parties with the ‘swells’ as she called them, and also the first two years of the war when she had a good paying job and could carouse with the girls she worked with who were single or had husbands and boyfriends in the service. Her reminiscences were devoid of regret or remorse, recalling only the few good times that she felt had made her life worth living. Robert never did learn what she thought about everything she had put him through: stepfathers, numerous houses, apartments, two or three schools each year. When she breathed her last in a morphine-induced coma and the male nurse reported that she was ‘gone,’ Robert patted his mother’s silvery-thin hair and eased the soft gray blanket over her sad face. At last he truly sensed what it meant to be born again.

Chirkey

What rang in my ears was the laughter of fellow second graders. Mrs. Wildmon, our teacher, told us to stand and describe what we would be eating on Thanksgiving Day. When my turn arrived I said we’d have ‘chirkey’ stuffed with cornbread dressing. After the outburst of hilarity subsided, Mrs. Wildmon chuckled, Don’t you mean turkey?

I repeated, Chirkey.

No, she corrected me, "the word is turkey. You must use the right word."

I began to feel sick to my stomach, but swallowed hard, shook my head, and said in a dry quavering voice that for sure we were going to have stuffed chirkey. She became stern, gray eyes glassy slits, mouth tight as if slashed with a knife. She bade me sit, and then with that grim tone that made the class stop breathing, she said that we’d get back to the topic of Thanksgiving on Monday. We would each report in writing what we actually dined upon. She glared at me as the bell released us into our four day Thanksgiving vacation, and kids sniggered as I walked home through bitter cold.

It was 1939, and I knew in my boyhood way that times were bad. Mother and I lived in rented rooms. That’s why I attended different schools because we moved for reasons I never understood but made her cry so deep and long the only thing that calmed her was when I sat nearby sniffling in my own pitiful way.

She sold cosmetics door-to-door. That’s how she met widow Platte who lived in a house with a spare room. We moved there in October, which put me in a new school again. I told the truth in class when I said we were going to have chirkey because that’s what Mrs. Platte told me. I had watched her un-wrap two weird-looking feathered birds which she placed in a scalding pot even before plucking all the pin feathers off them.

Mom was late getting home for supper that night, weary from trudging through wet snow peddling her wares. Mrs. Platte sat her down near the stove and poured hot coffee. The scrawny birds lay pimpled and yellow on the plank counter. Mother said something about the old pullets looking fresh and ready to be stuffed, but Mrs. Platt hushed her with a wrinkle-faced look toward me, stated that it was chirkey. Mom sighed, tousled my hair, and went to wash up for supper. We had cheese macaroni, and bread pieces in milk sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar for dessert. I later on examined the ground up mound of chirkey on the counter--now unlike any bird I’d ever seen--and wondered if it was all a joke and I was being made a darned fool.

I wanted somebody to tell me the truth, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask. Mother drank coffee, smoked cigarettes while she and Mrs. Platte, whom she called Leni, talked about Mrs. Platte’s ne’er-do-well cousin coming for Thanksgiving. I didn’t sleep much that night, listening to a fierce Dakota gale pelting ice-beads against the storm window. At breakfast the kitchen was rich with an aroma from the oven. I tried to see what it was when Mrs. Platte basted the crusted brown object, but couldn’t because she blocked my view with her gingham and apron bulk.

Her cousin Roscoe, a scarecrow gangly guy with white thatches in his black hair that made it seem like he’d been splashed with paint arrived at noon. His tiny nose was beaked and his green eyes almost gold. For a man who was supposed to be worthless, he smiled a lot and related stories about his travels. We lounged on the parlor sofa while Mrs. Platte and Mother fussed in the kitchen. Roscoe talked about Texas, Nebraska and Iowa. It seemed he’d been just about everywhere and acted like a big shot. He wore faded jeans like mine, except baggy, while my let-out pair felt tight; his clodhopper shoes had thin, turned-up soles. He