What We Have

In the year of that space basketball, Sputnik, one of the first two telephone numbers I learned to dial was that of my mother's sister, Ellen, who lived on Bluff Street. The other was that of my father's clothing store. Both numbers remained the same for more than forty years. I see the black rotary phone on which I learned to dial those numbers beside the large bed in my parents' room.

It is late spring 1996, when I visit my aunt Ellie. We do errands together within a few blocks' circumference - she has a spare key made at the key shop on Belle Street, I get a new watch band at Hudson's Jewelry on Piasa, we eat at a small downtown sandwich shop. As we step from the curb to my car, I notice how light her hand feels on my forearm.

Back in her living room, we sit on the floral print couch, looking at pictures of her seventy-fifth birthday party at the Knights of Columbus hall the previous autumn, when she says it, matter-of-factly, "I have to write down the names of people in these pictures so that when I'm gone Carrie will know who they are," and inside I flinch. Carrie is her five-year-old great-granddaughter.

Recently a friend said to me, "When I look at my mother and think that she will die someday, it almost takes my breath away. I can't believe it, and I don't know how I'll bear it."

Now my aunt's words almost take my breath away. People have, of course, been dying for a long time. But not my people. Not the people who raised me.

I pick up another album and look at Ellen's straightforward gaze from her ninth grade newspaper picture, the caption announcing that she has been chosen class prefect at Marquette High. I turn to another picture of her, at nineteen, and she leans over to observe, "Nary a line in that face."

On the next page is a 1961 brochure for Olin Vocational School, where Ellen trained to be a licensed practical nurse at the age of thirty-nine. Her picture on the brochure cover could be that of a twenty-nine-year-old. Her hair was dark then, although now it has been white for years. "That's a beautiful picture of you."

"It is good," she agrees.

It has been ten years since Ellen sold the Bluff Street house and chose another brick street, Prospect; she bought a condo in a lovely, old yellow brick building within a mile of Bluff and kept the same phone number. Half a block down, her hill intersects State Street; across this intersection is Saints Peter and Paul Church, made from area limestone, and also known as Cathedral. There Ellen attends mass most mornings and plays bridge Thursday afternoons.

In the evening light, which is gentle, I walk up the hill where Prospect meets limestone bluff and curves down Summit Street, another hill, parallel to that broad diluvial cut of the Mississippi River, stretching before me. The cottony stuff of cottonwoods floats through the air and covers the bricks. Ellen has gone to a church supper, and I am on my way to dinner with her son, Alan, and his wife, Sherri, who live on Summit. Sherri fries catfish for us to eat on the side porch surrounded by trees, with a stretch of river through the green. As we sit down, I ask if she likes early retirement.

"I love it," she says, brushing wisps of reddish bangs from her forehead with the back of one hand. The evening is a little warm but pleasant. "I love the trips we've made to the Serengeti, and I love what I do close to home. Yesterday I rode my bike down the River Road; today I washed windows. People ask me if I get bored. Hell no, I'm not bored. I was bored at McDonnell-Douglas all those years. You know what I was as a secretary there? VP of SLJ, Vice President of Shitty Little Jobs that those executives were supposed to do and didn't want to. They knew I had the ability, so they dumped them on me until I got real good at saying, Sorry, I'd love to help you, but I just can't work it in. It's a wonder my first marriage and that job didn't make me hate all men forever."

Alan, whose full beard is gray, interjects, "Sherri is the only woman in America who couldn't wait to get older. Happiest woman I ever saw the day she turned fifty-five."

"It's true," she says. "I always said the one good thing about that job is it makes you glad to get old." She begins talking about her family reunion in Oklahoma a few weeks earlier. "I'll tell you, it was hard seeing those old people who were such an important part of my life when I was growing up, especially my aunt, an English teacher, this unconventional woman who'd speak her mind on anything. I'd spend a couple weeks with her each summer. Now she's just out of it - hardly a clue what's going on around her. Not that she seems unhappy - just out of it. When I drove away, there were two uncles and my aunt, all in their nineties, standing on the porch waving. As soon as I got out of their sight, I started to cry because I won't see them in this life again."

That night I sleep in the twin bed next to my aunt's. She warns me that she snores, but I fall asleep to the sound of her even breathing. In the morning I wake to the sound of her movements as she dresses for eight o'clock mass.

"There's coffee on, and fruit salad in the fridge," she tells me. "When I get back, I'll make some coffee cake."

I get up as she leaves and pour a cup of coffee. In her hallway, I stop before two large black-and-white photographs framed in dark wood. On the right are Mary Byrne Gavin and Patrick Gavin, my maternal great-grandparents about whom I know little. Patrick Gavin came to this country from County Mayo, Ireland, perhaps to build railroads at a time when a railroad company would pay a worker's five-dollar fare from New York to Chicago.

Mary Byrne Gavin gazes back at me from the photograph, somewhat solemnly, although not unhappily, a full-figured woman in a full dress, her hair parted in the middle and pulled back, a bit severely. She stands next to Patrick, who, wearing a dark suit, is seated in a straight-backed chair, and her hand rests on his shoulder. His gaze is similar to hers, somewhat solemn, but not discontented. Being photographed was, I suppose, a momentous occasion. They look young, maybe thirty.

In the photograph on the left, two of their children, my maternal grandmother, Katherine Gavin, and her brother, Tom, stand side by side. They are smiling slightly, with direct gazes similar to those of their parents. She was nineteen, and he was a little older when this photo was taken in St. Paul, where he had gone to work and urged her to follow. Ellie tells me Tom helped my grandmother through business school there, but then she was called home to Jersey County to care for a sick family member. A farm girl herself, instead of becoming a career woman in St. Paul, she married a farmer, helped run a farm, and raised nine children.

I stare at the faces in these photographs before staring into the bathroom mirror, which reminds me that my own face is beginning to look slightly battered in middle age. I smear on makeup, my cultural concession and an attempt to shore up any remaining traces of waning nubility. As my father's mother used to say, "Powder an' paint'll make ya whatcha ain't."

When my aunt returns from mass and makes her mother's sour cream coffee cake, she will tell me this secret again. "Don't use store-bought sour cream, or you'll ruin the texture. They do something to that sour cream that makes the cake too heavy. Get whipping cream, and mix a little vinegar in it to sour it. Then it's more like the sour cream we had on the farm."

She has given this advice before, but I don't mind hearing it again. I like hearing it again. Then maybe she'll ask me if she's ever told me about moving to California with my mother during the war or about the time she took a dying friend home to England, or some other story, which I may or may not have already heard. I'll tell her either that I haven't heard it or that I want to hear it again, and as she makes her mother's coffee cake, she'll tell a story.

Well, I made friends with Evelyn when we were both nurses at the hospital, and even after I left there we stayed friends. I did private duty nursing at night and real estate by day after your uncle died. My broker didn't like it much that I had two jobs, but I said "I don't tell you what to do between eleven p.m. and seven a.m., and I don't expect you to tell me what to do during those hours."

Anyway, 1973 was some year. You remember - Mom died, your Aunt Marie died, and Ann got married. Then there was Evelyn. The poor woman came home one day and found her husband dead of a heart attack, and next thing we knew, she had cancer.

She'd been a war bride, hadn't seen her family or her country since just after the war, and she wanted to go home. The plan was for her son to go with her, but he was just a high-school kid, and a few days before they were supposed to leave, she got so bad, we knew he couldn't take her alone.

Well, I said, she'll go to England if I have to take her myself. Then I said, that's it, I have to take her myself. Why not? There were a lot of reasons why not. Money, two of my kids still in college, my jobs, no time to get ready. But I went down to your dad's store and said, "I need to borrow money to go to England in three days. I have a house closing at the end of the month, and I'll pay you back then." He just went across the street to the bank and got me the money.

Then I went to Evelyn's doctor. "Doc, she's so bad, I just don't know how we're going to do it." "Well Elle," he said, "I'll tell you how. We're going to give her some blood, and then we're going to fly her across the pond."

He figured once she got there, she'd just stay, but he didn't know Evelyn like I did. I knew she had no intention of staying - she would have thought of that as burdening her family with her death.

I had to fly to Chicago fast to get a passport. There wasn't any other way to get it in time, but I explained why I needed it, and everyone was wonderful, the airline people, the passport people, everyone. A cousin met me at O'Hare, took me to get the passport, and rushed me back to O'Hare.

Next day, we were on a plane from St. Louis to London. The skycap who helped us wouldn't even take a tip. He said, "I just want to do something for this woman."

When we landed at Heathrow, I saw Evelyn's family - somehow I knew who they were. I had her in a wheelchair, and I saw how they had to turn away for a second to pull themselves together, she was so changed. She didn't see that, but I did.

They wanted me to stay with them, but I said no, they needed time together alone. I went sightseeing on my own, which I didn't mind at all. At the end of the week, when we left, they insisted on picking up my hotel bill. She didn't last long after we got back here, but that was a blessing really.

My house closed at the end of the month, and I took the money I owed your dad down to the store. I'll tell you, that man's been a good friend to me. I walked in with the money, and he looked at me and said, "Ellie, you are one hell of a woman."

As my aunt speaks of my father, the possibility of a day, shortly after her death, that I will stand in his garage - my stepmother weeping beside me, as we look at the carefully arranged tools he can no longer use - does not even cross my mind. After Ellie tells the story, I'll ask her to write it down for me. She'll probably say all right and then not get around to it. While the coffee cake bakes, we'll hang new white eyelet curtains at the large, ceiling-high windows in her spare room, from which I can see Cathedral and on down State Street to the Mississippi. Meanwhile, I emerge from smearing makeup on my face to stare into the framed faces of Mary, Patrick, Tom, and Katherine Gavin, as if they could give me answers.

It is 1998, just before Thanksgiving, when my telephone rings shortly before midnight. Ellie's familiar number - the one I memorized over forty years ago - appears on my caller ID , and my heart pounds. My aunt tells me that my mother, who recently moved home from Costa Rica, had a stroke a few hours earlier. She is quick to reassure me that my mom has started to think and speak more clearly already. Another aunt is spending the night with her at the hospital, and Ellie will be there to take over first thing in the morning.

Although it is the middle of the night, I call a friend and ask him to pray, to help me be less afraid. During the hours before I finally fall asleep, every time fear starts to overtake me, I say, Thank you for my mother's sisters.

Ellie is at the hospital by eight when I call. The uncharacteristically fragile, halting sound of my mother's voice leaves me undone. I have been trying to call my brother, whose phone has been busy for an hour. It finally rings; his machine answers. "I know you're there," I wail. "You've been on your stupid computer. Our mother's in the hospital. You call me. I want to go home."

A minute later he calls. "Honey, I had the stereo cranked up while I was shaving and didn't hear the phone." We decide that I will cancel classes and leave Nebraska for Illinois. My brother and son will leave Colorado as soon as my son finishes taking an exam.

I pack and race across Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri on a mild November day. It is dark when I cross the Clark Bridge shortly after eight, but as always when I see the lights across the Mississippi and then enter Illinois, the knots begin to leave my stomach. I pull up in front of the familiar brick of Memorial Hospital and before eight-thirty am in the room where one of my aunts is leaving my mother's bedside.

Propped against her pillow, white hair fanning out, my mother complains that everyone is overreacting. The hospital staff is kind but overprotective. Oxygen is a useless annoyance. The iv is worse than annoying. Her hospital gown is uncomfortable, the liquid diet, inedible. What will it take for these doctors to see that there is no reason to detain her here any longer?

I assure her of my confidence that she will wear them down, and they'll spring her soon. After leaving the hospital, I go to the large gray frame house with blue trim in which she rents the upstairs. When my brother and son - slender, strong, wiry, curly-haired men - walk through my mother's front door, I am overwhelmed with relief and love, so I sit down and cry while my brother observes that our mom's recovery is "astounding the pundits."

When my mother has returned home from the hospital, when my brother and son have returned to Colorado, when I should have left already for Nebraska and can put off leaving no longer, Ellie calls. She tells me to stop by on my way out of town and pick up the sour cream coffee cake she's made for me. It is a warm fall, and although most of the trees are bare, they stretch against a blue sky.

In 2001 I am in Illinois again when Ellie's kids invite me to join them for her Mother's Day dinner. My own mother has moved to Denver, near my brother. Ellie's hearing is very bad now, and although I worry about how much of the conversation she's catching, if she's feeling included, my memories of this evening will be happy, returning to me like an impressionist painting: amber-peach dots of evening light through leaf-dappled windows on the restaurant's brick interior, my cousins, their spouses, their mother around a long table, conversing. Ted's hair, like Alan's, is gray, and like Sherri, he is enjoying early retirement, especially being with his grandchildren; Cathy, the elementary teacher, is on her union negotiating team and getting ready to go into negotiations; Alan and Sherri are talking of vacation plans before Sherri launches into a story about having become addicted, in early middle age, to Pac-Man. "I played it so much, I injured my elbow. I had to go to a support group to stop." Cathy and I are not laughing quite too hard to ask how Sherri found the support group.

"My best friend told me about it."

Cathy is ready to follow up. "How did she know about it?"

"She went too. We became addicted together and then went to the support group together."

By now, everyone is laughing, and the peach-gold evening light is perfect, deepening the copper in Sherri's short hair, heightening her color, her smile, her radiance. We look happy. After this dinner, I do not return to Illinois for a year, and then I return for Sherri's funeral.

If late 2001 and early 2002 seem blurred for me, some events stand out in sharp relief. The impossible perfection of the Nebraska morning of September 11, how sharp and clear the air, the blue and green of sky and trees, the purple sage growing on campus. I try to teach, but televisions are on in every classroom, including mine, where we watch the World Trade Center towers crumple again and again until I cannot stand it one more time. I send everyone away, go up to my office, and lean against a file cabinet where Lynn Golten finds me sobbing when she comes to meet me for our lunch that I've forgotten.

"I don't want you to cry." Lynn pauses, her brown eyes widen, she is pulling her dark hair into a pony tail as she talks. "I'll tell you a secret to make you happy." I stop crying, she sees she's got my attention, and continues, "I'm going to have a baby."

"You do make me happy, Lynn." Then I put my head down on the file cabinet and cry a little more.

September is also the month that Ellie falls one night, breaking a hip. She lies on the kitchen floor until found by a friend the next morning. My mother, father, and Ellie share the same early October birthday, but this year it is not a happy birthday for Ellie. In late October while she is recuperating, Ted calls to tell me her children have broken the news to her that they see no alternative to assisted living; it is not safe for Ellie to return to her condo after she leaves rehab.

In the nightmare blur of November, Ted calls again, this time to say Sherri has been diagnosed with cancer and is expected to live less than a year. Somewhere in this blur, I call Sherri. Later, I remember little of our conversation except that somehow she made me laugh, that it was she who ended up comforting me.

By spring, Ellie's children have moved her into assisted living. After more than forty-five years, her telephone number has changed. I visit my mother in Denver where she has an independent-living apartment but will soon need more assistance. Ellie's behavior, described to me by Ted, sounds like my mom's. Both practically refuse to leave their apartments or to interact with anyone other than their children. Just as my mother ignores her doctor's instructions to exercise regularly to maintain and rebuild strength, Ellie ignores her doctor's instructions to exercise with her walker. Both make demands of their adult children for a level of attention they certainly did not give to their own parents in old age, demands that we are unable to meet, and then perhaps more alarmingly, they stop making demands. Although occasionally, to my great relief, their spirits lift, my fiercely independent mother and aunt seem to have become women I hardly know.

It is May when Ted calls to tell me that Sherri has died at home very early that morning, that her husband, brother, stepson, and one of her two daughters were with her. The funeral will not be for a few days. There is time for me to get home. Another semester is ending, and I can get final grades done when I return. I probably won't be back before Lynn's baby arrives and call to wish her well before leaving.

I look to the curving Mississippi, sun on water, from the plane window. It is a frantic time in my friend Midge's semester, which does not end as early as mine, but she picks me up from the St. Louis airport, her car's back seat covered with final papers to be graded, takes me to the funeral in Illinois, and back to her house outside St. Louis. I remember how black her hair used to be. It is mostly gray now, still pretty, pulled back from her face. Her steadying presence calms me as it has many times for more than two decades. Crowds usually overwhelm me, even when they're made up largely of my own relatives, and the funeral is no exception. I find the service somewhat comforting but remember little of it.

Mostly what I remember of the day is spring light through trees outside the funeral home and the evening woods surrounding Midge's house.

The following evening, Cathy and I take Ellie to dinner at a place that has fish she likes. I hold the door while Cathy helps maneuver her mom's walker before we settle into a green booth. I have eaten here many times, and the place fills with snapshots of childhood and adolescent memory for me.

Returning to the present, I compliment Cathy on her short blond curls. She says her hair was getting white enough that she decided to go blond like her mom did in middle age. The comment gets a smile from Ellie who does not smile easily these days. I watch Cathy patiently draw her out over dinner. When we take Ellie back to her apartment, I am pleased with its large windows, framed by trees and light. Ellie says she's tired, but we start asking questions, convince her to let us tape her telling the story of how she met her husband.

I had just graduated from Marquette High, and I went to the Grand Theater to interview for a job as a cashier. While the manager interviewed me, I noticed this assistant manager pretending to read a newspaper, but he kept looking over the paper at me. Every time he saw me looking at him, he looked back down at the paper.

For a few minutes, Ellie sounds almost like her old self, and Cathy teases her. "Well, Dad was probably the reason you got the job."

When it is time to say good-bye and hug her, I am struck that my aunt is so tiny. As Cathy and I leave, I stop for a second in the front hall of the new apartment with the new phone number. In that second, I stare into the framed faces of Mary, Patrick, Tom, and Katherine Gavin, as if they could give me answers.

Lynn's baby arrives just before I return to Lincoln. It is a drought-hot day when I walk through her front door. She is sitting on the couch, hair pulled back, the baby in her arms. I look down at him. I am not someone who usually falls in love with babies, but he is a big, brown-eyed baby, like my son and granddaughter were, and like them, he is so beautiful, tears spring to my eyes as I look into his. He has lots of dark hair. "Hello, little boy," I say, "you're a hirsute individual." I sit down beside Lynn, and she puts him in my arms. He tries to focus on me, but at the sound of his mother's voice, he turns his gaze toward her. "Look what a smart baby you have. Look how he's tracking you with his eyes at only a week old."

"Yeah," she says, "I guess once in a while he has to do something other than sleep, eat, or poop."

In a gesture that may be as old as the human race, a gesture so old it is a cliché, I put my finger in his small fist. I feel him grip and hang on.

That night Sherri appears in my dream, happy, lovely, vibrant as when I last saw her, her presence so strong that when she says she's come to let me know she's fine, I believe her even after I awaken. It is an odd dream, not only because it's unlike any other I've had but also because, although my affection for Sherri was strong, we did not keep in close touch. When her ashes are scattered on the Serengeti, which she loved, I am not there but at a cemetery in Omaha.

Lynn's grandmother has died. The day of her funeral is very hot. I stand at the canopy's edge, on the line of sun and shade. I step forward a bit, into more shade, as the service begins.

The rabbi tells of this woman's journey from Russia to Ellis Island to Omaha ninety-five years ago. I listen to his voice as I look across cemetery rows of collective memory mirrored in stones with stars of David. Above them, the trees are very green. The rabbi says that we have memory and its stories as a way of defeating death, that ultimately death fails because it must yield to memory.

In another year the rabbi's words return to me, as I see the Mississippi from the plane; as Midge takes me from the airport to the nursing home where Ted, Alan, and Cathy are with their mother; as I tell my aunt she is in my heart always while, emaciated almost unrecognizably, too frail to speak, she squeezes my hand and looks into my eyes - her one unchanged feature, those hazel eyes. I hold his words as I tell my parents of Ellie's passing, as I write her eulogy, as fall scenes of my Illinois hometown pass the limo window, as I put my hand for an instant against the warmth of sun on Cathedral limestone, against the fear that the passing of this generation may be the passing of the center that binds our extended family together, against the fear that my son's children will never know this family or even see this place, against news of subdivision of my grandparents' farm - long since sold to other owners. So through memory perhaps we learn to bear the unbearable.

I enter Cathedral surrounded by the murmur of family voices and later walk to Alan's from the church - past Ellie's condo, up the hill where Prospect meets the bluff and curves down Summit, parallel to that broad diluvial cut of the Mississippi. At the top of the hill, Ted stands, turned away from me, an arm stretched across the shoulders of his blond eight-year-old grandson, as they look over the river. In the instant before I join them, I close my eyes to see the Serengeti where I have never been and probably will never go. There, scattered ash is feathery, lighter than air, although I am told actual human ash is not like that at all. Copper in the gold light of scrub and grasslands, a Laughing Dove rises with ash etched in iridescent gray-blue on the winged edges of her ethereal flight.

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