The last few years of Mother’s life she cried every time she saw us. We thought it was hysterical, cruelly assuming that anyone so hard could never soften up. We laughed about it over coffee in the mornings, during holidays, while she was still asleep. She was theatrical in the last days, a beauty in her youth, spunky and fiery with ideas for us and Dad. Poor Dad. She practically ran him into the ground with expectations of his and our greatness that none of us ever achieved in her sight. Very clever of God to finally bestow upon her dye-resistant grey hair that no hair colour could cover and finally she gave up trying. She covered all of her mirrors with shawls and bed sheets so that she didn’t have to look at herself.
One day she was found at the bottom of the stairs lying in a crumpled heap. As she laid in the hospital clinging to life, we went to her house to begin to divide her belongings. It was a thing we wanted for so long, for her to die. Don’t misunderstand, we ever did actually verbalize those thoughts. You’ve seen the way most children separate themselves from the withering figures of their parents as if growing old was contagious?
My two brothers and I were not prepared for the secret we would discover at Mother’s house on Applegate Drive. I wanted the mahogany china cabinet brought home from a vacation in Virginia by my parents in the back of the pick-up truck in 1953. My older brother, the silver tea set and the grandfather clock. My youngest sibling carried a list made by his wife, who was, thank God, absentia.
When we pulled into the circle drive, there, on the porch, an old woman was tugging at one end of Mother’s china cabinet. Pushing the other end through the front door, was a morbidly obese young man I figured to be near my age, thirty-eight. Thieves! Feeling faint, I reached for a small vial of Xanax in my handbag, simultaneously dialing 911 on my cell phone. I hung up when I saw the china cabinet teeter-tottering, about to fall.
We jumped out of the car and ran to the aid of whom, we did not know. We found out within seconds when the young man said, "You must be Father’s other children."
"Other children?" I asked, as beads of perspiration broke out all over my body. We were holding the china cabinet almost in mid-air while we discussed who was who.
"I’m your brother that you never knew you had. My Mother and your Father had an affair. Now that your Mom is dying, we’ve come to get what he left us."
I dropped my end of the china cabinet and it crashed to the cement, breaking the leg. "Wait a minute!, " I yelled. But, it struck me all at once that all of this made sense. Deep down I had known and never let my conscious mind come to grips with it. Dad always spent one weekend away from home as long as I could remember. Mom was vague about where he was, except to say he was volunteering at the Church. Dad never said exactly what he did there. Maybe it was this family he was with. This Asian woman and her boy?
"I have a list," she said. She looked hard and mean, hardly someone my fantastic Father would have been interested in. It was then that the greatness of my Mother, Millie, struck me between the eyes like a sledgehammer. Not the greatness of my Father, whom I adored. Millie had kept this secret like forever, at least thirty-nine years. Never a word of bitterness. She took my Father his coffee at 5:30 a.m. every morning as long as I could remember. She was apparently resigned that this relationship had happened and that it was something she had to live with.
I looked at Bart and James, my brothers. Their eyes had opened at exactly the same time as mine. Like an "Ah-ha". I looked down and saw something these scavengers had somehow missed when they emptied the china cabinet. One of the angels from my Mom’s collection had been left in the cabinet and had slid up against the glass. It was her favourite ceramic one. One that Dad had given to her for Christmas one year.
"May I see that?" I asked, extending my hand towards "the list." When she handed it to me, I immediately recognized Dad’s handwriting.
"You can have what’s on the list. But, you can’t have my Mother’s angels," I said. I opened the door and retrieved the little pink ceramic angel and held it to my lips and made a shush sound much like a Mother would a baby. I could see Mother in my mind’s eye, holding her finger to her lips and whispering, "Don’t breathe a word of this to anyone."
"We’ll come back when you have finished. Just leave the key in the mailbox," I said, putting the angel in my purse, gently. We left and had coffee at the nearest restaurant. We didn’t want to know more. We didn’t want to know our new brother.
"Remember when Momma took us to the river to go fishing and fell in?" Bart asked.
"That wasn’t as funny as when she discovered our poodle was pee-ing on the new carpet behind the couch." I added.
Finally, James put forth his thoughts about Mom. "I hope my story books are still there when we get back to the house. She promised them to me."
"What am I? Chopped liver?" I said. We all looked at each other. Another "ah-ha" moment. Two in one day. That was one of Mom’s favorite phrases. "What am I? Chopped liver?" She said it when she felt left out, when one of us forgot her birthday or Mother’s Day. Yet, she said it as a joke. She would be left out now. She was dying.
An hour passed and the reminiscences continued. Finally, we felt that enough time had passed and we decided to return to the house. I grabbed the check and headed for the cashier, who was also our waitress. A man I assumed to be the cook had his back to me, scrawling on a small blackboard. He had already written "Today’s Lunch Special" at the top of the board. The waitress counted out my change to me.
The cook finished posting the lunch special just as she finished. It read: “CHOPPED LIVER with ONIONS, GRAVY, HOT ROLLS, SPINACH. $ 4.99”. Ah-Ha!
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
