This does not matter.
What matters is that I went to see my mother a few years after she had come to see me, she was dying in a hospital in Chicago, and I went to see her and she asked me to leave. So I left.
For a long—very long—time, I have believed that she loved me. But when my husband was ill, and then after he died, I have wondered if she did. I think this was because my love with David was so very present. And so I have grown somewhat constricted in my heart about my mother—at times.
My brother lives alone in the house we grew up in. My sister lives in a town nearby, and she and my brother and I met once not so many years ago, and we all agreed that my mother had not been quite right.
I speak to my siblings once a week on the telephone. But for many years we never spoke at all.
* * *
—
I tell myself my mother loved me. I think she did in whatever way was possible for her. As that lovely woman psychiatrist said once, “The Wish never dies.”
* * *
Catherine had taken up golf at the country club she joined after William’s father died. She played with the same group of women each week. And she taught William how to play golf, although when I met him at college he did not play golf, I mean I never saw him or heard him talk about playing golf. But when we moved back East he played golf with his mother, and the first time they went to play I thought it was like tennis and they would be back in an hour or two. They arrived back more than five hours later and I was so angry—where had they been? And they kind of laughed and said, Lucy, that’s how long golf takes.
* * *
—
That year—right before we got married—Catherine arranged for me to have a golf lesson. She took me to a shop at the country club and bought me a golf skirt, it was short and reddish, and she bought me golf shoes, and I felt so strange, I really felt so strange. And then the “pro,” as he was called, gave me a lesson, and I wanted to cry, I couldn’t stand it that much. But I kept trying to swing and I did not do too well, and when Catherine showed up to get me I think she must have seen my distress. Because I overheard her whisper to William when we went into the club to have lunch, “I think this has all been too much for her.”
* * *
—
My birthday was soon after, and Catherine asked me what I would like. I said I would like a gift certificate to a bookstore. The idea of going into a bookstore and buying a few books was unbelievably exciting for me. On my birthday she took me out to the garage and showed me a thing with golf clubs in it. Her face shone with light. “Happy birthday,” she said, clapping her hands together. “Your own golf set.”
* * *
—
I never once played golf.
* * *
—
But Estelle played golf; she and William played golf together in Montauk and also out in Larchmont, where Estelle’s mother lived. And even Joanne played, I remembered this as I sat watching the river a few days after we had all had dinner at William’s.
* * *
I checked on William about a week later and he said, “I’m okay,” and he said that Bridget had come to stay a few nights, and we hung up. I thought: Okay, I will not call him again; he had been slightly dismissive of me, I felt.
But a few weeks after that—it was almost the end of August by then—he called at night and he said that he was thinking about this woman, Lois Bubar, his half-sister, and whether or not he should contact her. So we talked about that; he said he wanted to reach out to her because time was running out and they were related to each other, but he didn’t want to because what if she hated him? She would certainly hate his mother. “I don’t know what to do, Lucy,” he said. Then he said, “Do the girls know about this?”
And I said, “I never told them, did you?”
And he said, “No, I just figured you would.”
And I said, “Well, I thought it was your thing to tell.”
“Okay,” he said.
He hung up.
* * *
—
Five minutes later he called back, and he said, “Lucy, will you go to Maine with me?”
I was surprised; I didn’t say anything.
“Come on,” William said. “Let’s just go up to Maine for a few days—next week. Let’s just do that, Lucy. We’ll go up and see what it looks like where this happened. I have the address of where Lois Bubar lives now, let’s just go look.”
“Just look?” I asked. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“I don’t either,” William said.