The Summer Without Men

Whichever it was, Private Gardener had vanished during or just after the Second World War, and his widow or divorcée had acquired a teaching degree and become a grade school art teacher. “Crooked and deaf, but not dumb,” she had said emphatically upon our first meeting. “Don’t hesitate to visit. I like the company. It’s three-two-oh-four. Repeat after me, three-two-oh-four.”
    The five were all readers and met for a book club with a few other women once a month, a gathering that had, I gleaned from various sources, a somewhat competitive edge to it. During the time my mother had lived in Rolling Meadows, any number of characters in the theater of her everyday life had left the stage for “Care,” never to return. My mother told me frankly that once a person left the premises, she vanished into “a black hole.” Grief was minimal. The Five lived in a ferocious present because unlike the young, who entertain their finality in a remote, philosophical way, these women knew that death was not abstract.
    *   *   *
     
    Had it been possible to keep my ugly disintegration from my mother, I would have done it, but when one family member is hauled off and locked up in the bin, the others surge forth with their concern and pity. What I had wanted terribly to hide from Mama I was able freely to show my sister, Beatrice. She received the news and, two days after my admission to the South Unit, hopped a plane to New York. I didn’t see them open the glass doors for her. My attention must have wandered for an instant because I had been waiting and watching for her arrival. I think she spotted me right away because I looked up when I heard the determined clicking of her high heels she marched toward me, sat down on the oddly slippery sofa in the common area, and put her arms around me. As soon as I felt her fingers squeeze my arms, the choking dryness of the antipsychotic cocoon I had been living in broke to pieces, and I sobbed loudly. Bea rocked me and stroked my head. Mia, she said, my Mia. By the time Daisy returned for a second visit, I was sane. The ruin had been at least partially rebuilt, and I did not wail in front of her.
    Crying jags, howling, screeches, and laughter for no reason were not at all uncommon on the Unit and mostly passed unnoticed. Insanity is a state of profound self-absorption. An extreme effort is required just to keep track of one’s self, and the turn toward wellness happens the moment a bit of the world is allowed back in, when a person or thing passes through the gate. Bea’s face. My sister’s face.
    My breakdown pained Bea, but I was afraid it would kill my mother. It didn’t.
    *   *   *
     
    Sitting across from her in the small apartment, I had the thought that my mother was a place for me as well as a person. The Victorian family house on the corner of Moon Street where my parents had lived for over forty years, with its spacious parlor rooms and warren of bedrooms upstairs, had been sold after my father’s death, and when I walked past it, the loss pained me as if I were still a child who couldn’t make sense of some upstart occupying her old haunts. But it was my mother herself whom I had come home to. There is no living without a ground, without a sense of space that is not only external but internal—mental loci. For me, madness had been suspension. When Boris abruptly took his body and his voice away, I began to float. One day, he blurted out his wish for a pause, and that was all. No doubt he had meditated on his decision, but I had had no part in his deliberations. A man goes out for cigarettes and never returns. A man tells his wife he is taking a stroll and doesn’t come home for dinner—ever again. One day in winter the man just up and left. Boris had not articulated his unhappiness, had never told me he didn’t want me. It just came over him. Who were these men? After I had pieced myself together with “professional help,” I returned to older, more reliable territory, to the Land of M.
    It was true that Mama’s world had shrunk, and she had shrunk with it. She ate too little, I thought. When left to her own devices, she assembled large plates of raw carrots and peppers and cucumbers with perhaps one tiny piece of fish or ham or cheese. For years the woman had cooked and baked enough for armies and stored the foodstuffs in a gigantic freezer in the basement. She had sewn our dresses, mended our wool stockings, shined copper and brass until it