The Living End A Memoir of Forgetting and Forgiving

by Leleux, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780312621247
• ISBN10: 0312621248
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-01-17
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Summary

In a memoir filled with heartbreaking oneliners and unforgettable family stories, Robert Leleux relates what is lost and found in a life with Alzheimer's. When Leleux's grandmother, JoAnn, began exhibiting signs of Alzheimer's, she'd been estranged from her daughter, the flamboyant star of Leleux's The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy, for decades. As her disease progressed, JoAnn lost a great deal of her memories and herself, but she also forgot her old wounds and anger. She became a happier person who was finally able to reach out to her daughter in what became a strangely lifeaffirming experience, an unexpected blessing that gave a family a second chance. With Leleux's unique talent for capturing the humor in the most awful of circumstances, The Living End is a glowing tribute to a welllived life, and to the way a disease can awaken an urgent desire for love and forgiveness. Told with sparkling wit and warmth, The Living End will resonate with families coping with Alzheimer's, and any reader looking for hope and inspiration.

Author Biography

ROBERT LELEUX teaches creative writing in the New York city schools.  His nonfiction pieces have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Texas Observer, and elsewhere.  He lives with his husband, Michael Leleux, in Manhattan.

Table of Contents

"The Living End is Robert Leleux's exceptionally moving

memoir about his beloved grandmother and his heroic caring for her as

she slipped into the grip of Alzheimer’s. The book is at times

hilarious, tender, and heartbreaking--further proof that Mr.

Leleux is ripening into one of the best prose stylists in

America." --Pat Conroy

"Robert Leleux sets off on a journey that will be familiar to many Baby Boomers - watching a beloved elder painfully slipping away - but his version of the tale is singularly bittersweet, funny, and empathetic.  It's a rare thing to find a memoir of illness that can be described as cheerful, but this one is that - and much more."- Mark Childress, author of Georgia Bottoms and Crazy in Alabama

"Robert Leleux's hilarious and poignant memoir of his fractured family takes an unexpected, wholly satisfying turn at the end: as lives ebb, memories fail, and long-withheld loves emerge." --John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and The City of Falling Angels

 “Not many people are able to find a silver lining in Alzheimer's, and few writers are gifted enough to make you see it and believe it.  Leleux relates his family's story with love, humor, and hope.”--Margo Howard, "Dear Margo" columnist

"What immediately came to mind on reading "The Living End" was that is was very much like a modern day retelling of Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis, one of my favorite books of all time. I laughed, I cried, I lived this story and am a better person for it!

You will never forgive me if you don't read this book and you will never forget the author, Robert Leleux either. Leleux reminds us that the magic of our relatively short time on earth, only exists in a world of forgetting and forgiveness! I believe that Auntie Mame herself would have put her STAMP OF APPROVAL on this book as I have too!"--Kathy L. Patrick, Founder of The Pulpwood Queens Book Clubs

“This spare, extraordinary book by turns splits the sides and breaks the heart, but it is the healing vibration of laughter you're left with -- what comes when one sees existence whole and luminous, and with it the daunting logic of human love.”-Honor Moore, Author of The Bishop's Daughter

"In a wonderfully engaging heart-of-the-matter voice, Robert Leleux chronicles his chic Texas grandmother's descent into the gloom of Alzheimer's.  He is circumspect in recording the many indignities the disease brings and equally faithful to praise the joys of a happy marriage, of good wigs and zinger punch lines.  Leleux's writing is as bright and elegant as one of his grandmother's hats, his love of family and faith in their enduring strength a rare and refreshing thing." --Janis Owens, author of The Schooling of Claybird Catts

"Robert Leleux tickles his way to triumph yet again. With his trademark wit and colorful southern charm, The Living End transforms Alzheimer's from a disease associated with loss into a blessing of myriad gain."--Josh Kilmer-Purcell, author of I Am Not Myself These Days and The Bucolic Plague

"The Living End is as funny as it is heartfelt.  Robert Leleux is among the great emerging talents of his generation; I'm bowled over by the beauty of his writing."—Sarah Bird, author of The Yokota Officers Club and The Gap Year

"The Living End is terrific! I could not stop reading this family journey of loss, hope and redemption. With humor and poignancy, Robert Leleux does a magical job of capturing the beautiful and often complex relationship between grandparent and grandchild."--Michael Morris, author of Slow Way Home

"A fascinating Southern tale of an estranged mother and daughter — and the unlikely fate that brings them together. Affably narrated by Robert Leleux, a man who loved both women, The Living End is a touching reminder that, ultimately, we are not defined by our memories. But our commitments to dwelling on the past and resentments can keep us from becoming the person we want to be. Even for those we love the most."--Neil White, author of In the Sanctuary of Outcasts

 

Excerpts

ONE

The Measure of Her Powers
 

On the last Tuesday of June 2004—one of those sweltering days of high summer when the Texas air and the Texas people hang thick and limp as wet velvet, and the sting of the heat and the temperature itself both seem as impossible as snow—I hopped the first plane from New York to Houston and beat my grandmother JoAnn to the hospital. I remember that morning plainly because it was the last time I saw JoAnn as I’d always known her. I remember the sleeveless red summer dress that she, always so effortlessly slim, wore when she entered the hospital; and the novel I’d brought but couldn’t manage to read; and the battered, caramel leather briefcase my grandfather Alfred carried, stuffed with almost fifty years of his wife’s medical history. His executive instincts hadn’t relaxed in retirement: He believed in being prepared. Nothing, however, could have prepared us for the following few days.
Once JoAnn had been readied for surgery, Alfred and I sat with her in a stale, curtained-off stall in a wide and featureless hallway, waiting for the nurses to wheel her away to the operating room. JoAnn’s small body, which had looked lissome in her light summer dress, suddenly seemed fragile in her hospital gown, packed away like bone china in tissue paper. Propped up on her mechanical bed, thinly veiled from a row of identical beds by white muslin, she was already floating aloft on a cloud of anesthetic. So much so that by the time I sat beside her, her honey-colored hair falling softly on stiff, crackly pillows, she’d already begun raving about the people on the other side of the curtain.
If the good Lord Jesus had chosen those unlucky folks with an eye toward irritating my grandmother, he could not have done a better job. They were poor; they were loud; they had lamentable facial hair. It was, to JoAnn’s way of seeing things, a trifecta of wretchedness that she could not be expected to overlook under the best of circumstances. These were not the best of circumstances.
In some silent, spotlit corner of her heart, I believe that JoAnn had been relishing the thought of this moment, thisTerms of Endearmentmoment, the moment just before being wheeled away on her gurney. She had, I imagine, expected this to develop into a fraught, turgid scene, an eleven o’clock number, her own starring turn. From a certain perspective, it was a rare opportunity. After all, in a whole lifetime of Oscar-worthy performances, how many actual gurneys can a lady expect to get?
Another turgid scene, however, competed for our attention. “Robert,” JoAnn began, in an artfully wan, parched little voice, “I want you to always remember just how much I love—”
“Aww, now, Mama. You ain’t got nothin’ to worry about!” A little man, whose wiry, wasted frame I could see through the curtain, began softly screaming to his sobbing bride.
“I’m terribly sorry,” I was forced to say to JoAnn, “but would you mind repeating that?”
“Alfred,” she started again a few moments later, a bit more powerfully than before. “I don’t want you to feel guilty if I d—”
“Do ya hear what I’m telling ya, Mama?”the man, noticeably louder than before, began to howl.
“Forgive me, darlin’,” my grandfather said to his wife, “could you run that past me one more time?”
No matter how hard we tried, it was impossible not to be distracted by that wee, shrieking man, JoAnn’s new peer and rival, who seemed to be taking such obvious pleasure in his own performance. The situation resembled that of two dueling opera divas, who, finding themselves booked into adjacent rehearsal halls, decide to belt the other out of the audible range. Mere moments before, JoAnn had sounded hoarse and weary. But now, warmed by the spirit of competition, she began shouting like a saloon keeper in a shoot-’em-up Western. “Would you look atthem!” she hollered, gesturing toward the curtain. “How dotheyalways find me? Why is it alwaysthem? He’s as hairless as a Mexican dog, and she’s Moby Dick with a beard! No matter where you go, it’s the same. He’s a Chihuahua and she’s the Bearded Lady!”
According to my grandparents, the Texas proletariat was composed almost entirely of whiskerless, whisker-thin men and woolly, well-upholstered women. It was a frequent subject of their conversations. “Look, Sonny,” my grandfather had told me when I was a small boy, pointing toward one of these Jack Spratt couples on the street, “the poor man wants heat in the winter and shade in the summertime.”
Of course, I was appalled by JoAnn’s remarks, but they seemed to be accepted as a challenge by the man behind the curtain. “Cain’t ya hear me, Mama? Cain’t you hear me tawking to you?”With every repetition, his voice rose in pitch and emphasis, until finally, his falsetto seemed actually to lift him off the floor and JoAnn from her bed.
Waving her arms with a mad flourish—like Tosca, like the Valkyries, like Maria Callas in anything—JoAnn sang out triumphantly, while attempting to rap on the muslin. “CAN SHE HEAR YOU? EVERYBODY HEARS YOU! MAMA HEARS YOU! I HEAR YOU! BUT GUESS WHAT, OLIVE OYL? NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR YOU!”
A low, mortified murmuring began on the other side of the curtain. For a moment, I couldn’t tell if JoAnn had vanquished her opposition or if it was merely regrouping. Either way, it was never wise to underestimate little men like the Chihuahua. Some of them possess surprising stamina. I eyed the curtain anxiously. For a moment we sat waiting and listening. And then, through the muslin, there came a low, defeated wheeze, like a punctured balloon.
“Can you believe that things like this can happen in America? And that you and I have to listen to it? A little GRACE AND BEAUTY? YOU KNOW? A LITTLE EFFING GRACE!” JoAnn continued to rant, her strength and volume decreasing, until she finally wound down like an outraged top, collapsing onto her pillow, mumbling all but incoherently, “I can’t believe. We actually. Have to listen … Just a little effing grace.” Then she was off to dreamland.
I was accustomed to being scandalized by my grandmother. JoAnn was a marvelous person. She was not, however, a peppy, “Hi!” person. She didn’t care about being nice. “Screw nice!” she often told me. That was the sort of advice my grandmother gave. “Screw nice” and “Get a little meaner every day.”
She told me these things because I am (sadly) one of those In-Between People, morally speaking. I’m one of those people who isn’t naturally virtuous but who aspires to be—a person who practically never recycles but feels guilty about it; someone who sails right past homeless people on my way to Starbucks but feels guilty about that, too. Hypocrites, I think we’re called. I don’t volunteer enough. I don’t read the newspaper enough. I’m not prone to frequent, spontaneous little combustions of random generosity enough. I’m simply a guilty-feeling person whose guilt does not alter his behavior. Whereas JoAnn was not a hypocrite, and she never felt guilty. For this reason, she was one of my life’s most refreshing presences. She lived in a post-guilt world that I loved to visit but couldn’t quite manage to live in. “Why are you so mopey?” she’d asked me over the telephone a few months earlier, while I was trying (and failing) to cook chicken and dumplings.
“Mali,” I’d feebly answered.
“Who’s Molly?” JoAnn asked.
“A country in Africa. I just read a blog about it. The suffering.”
“Jesus!”JoAnn answered. “Wait till you get to be my age, with the cold breath of death blowing down your neck. Then let’s see how much time you spend thinking about Misty or Maisy or Polly or whatever the hell it is! How many times do I have to tell you, darling, that it’s never too late to become a worse person?”
One of the things JoAnn and I did share, however, was a personality that gathered steam in the evening hours. We belong to the variety of person made for dinner parties, a type that reaches its zenith of energy and intellect around the time the second course is served. We almost always telephoned each other after sundown, sometimes talking for hours—she from her chintz-upholstered bedroom at our family farm in Tennessee, and I from my apartment in New York City—relaying news and sharing all our latest jokes and outrages. The previous evening, though, she’d made her nightly phone call with news of an unexpected nature.
“Hello, darling,” she’d said. From that first “darling,” I knew there was trouble afoot. “I’m afraid I need to talk to you about something serious.” She was phoning from a hotel room in Houston, the city we both called home, even though neither of us had lived there for years. And I was attempting to fry chicken in my mattress-sized kitchen. “Not having fun?” I asked, trying to hold on to the receiver through the greasy bread crumbs that coated my fingers. I’d been waiting to hear JoAnn’s updates on her annual return to her old stomping grounds. For the past several months, as I’d battered and fried my way through the Paula Deen cookbook, I’d listened as she’d devised rendezvous with all her best girlfriends and epic lunches at all her favorite restaurants. I’d been steadily apprised of my grandmother’s military-style checklists of proposed shopping expeditions. I couldn’t wait to hear all about her trip, even if I did burn the chicken.
“Well, it’s not a day of beauty at Elizabeth Arden, if you know what I mean,” JoAnn said, as though she were still exhaling the cigarettes she’d given up years ago.
“No, I don’t.… Why don’t you tell me what’s happened.”
“It seems I have to have this surgery.”
I leaned against the counter, still grasping the Crisco. “What?”
“Now, it’s no big deal. The doctor swears up and down I’ve got nothing to worry about. Only … I know I’d feel better about the whole thing ifyouwere here. Darling, would you mind terribly flying down? Tomorrow morning? It’s an awful lot to ask, but—”
“I’ll be there,” I interrupted. Because, aside from adoring JoAnn, my relationship with both my grandparents tended, for reasons both sad and happy, to be that of a son’s instead of a grandson’s. Neither of them had spoken to their only child, my mother, for many years. I was their only grandchild, and loved them dearly. Even if they didoftenmake me want to fry myself in a pan of Crisco. “I’m happy to come,” I said. “But what’s going on? What kind of surgery is this?”
“Yes, well. I’ll let Alfred tell you about that.”
It was typical of JoAnn to avoid broaching an awful truth. Within the distribution of labor in my grandparents’ lifelong marriage, bad news resided firmly within Alfred’s sphere. Though, in many ways, JoAnn was the most “self-actualized” of women, and my grandparents’ marriage was an absolute model of absolute partnership, JoAnn enjoyed indulging in the privileges of her petticoats when it came to letting Alfred play the heavy. In reality, she had all the retiring delicacy of a teamster. But she cherished a filigreed conception of herself as a handkerchief-fluttering belle in need of a gentleman’s chivalry. This was a fiction that thrilled my grandfather, as it bolstered his own romantic notion of himself as a sort of Southern Sir Walter Raleigh. While, in principle, I tended to roll my eyes at the whole objectionable setup, as a grandson, I had to admit it was pretty sweet.
JoAnn and Alfred taught me many things about love and fidelity. But one of the most important things was that the story of a marriage—by which I mean the mythology a couple creates about who they are as a couple—eventually becomes, to a degree, the reality of a marriage. We are, largely, whom we pretend to be, at least in love, the part of life most amenable to pleasing self-delusion. JoAnn and Alfred taught me that allowing a spouse to foster romantic notions about themselves (“I was the fastest quarterback in the state”; “I was the most beautiful girl at school”) is an important part of a happy marriage. Which is why JoAnn was so ideally suited for matrimony. She possessed a real knack for fostering romantic notions. Nothing was ever quite so good, or quite so bad, as she made it out to be.
So I wasn’t exactly shocked when JoAnn said she would pass the phone to Alfred when it came time to talk about her surgery. In hindsight, I also believe she had some sense of foreboding—a passing psychic twinge about this surgery. A feeling of foreboding was characteristic of JoAnn. She was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, mostly because she’d had an epically lousy childhood (even before it was cliché) and was well aware of the perils of high hopes. But I also wonder if, this time, she couldn’t help hearing some far-off, existential version of that xylophone they play at the opera to signal that intermission is over.
It’s easy to lend false meaning to the past, to assign plot points in memory where they never existed in life. But here’s what I can say for certain: JoAnn loved me very much. She often wanted me beside her during doctor appointments. And she seemed particularly eager to have me with her for that operation.
Maybe the only reason I feel this way is because I know how cheap JoAnn was. Yet she didn’t bat an eye at my charging the exorbitant cost of my last-minute airfare on her American Express card. In fact, she insisted on it. So considering the price of that ticket, she must have heard for whom the bell tolled.
*   *   *
“Here’s your grandfather,” JoAnn told me, passing the phone to Alfred while I tried very hard to keep the lard-laden telephone receiver from spurting out of my hand like lathered soap.
“SONNY?” bellowed Alfred, who, in looks and temperament, resembles the top-hatted man on the Monopoly board—bullish, with a white handlebar mustache and a contempt for modernity that began with the invention of the cotton gin and included the push-button phone.
“What’s going on down there?” I asked.
“YOUR GRANDMOTHER’S HAVING A BIT OF FEMALE TROUBLE. WE’LL BE NEEDING YOU IN HOUSTON TOMORROW.”
“Sure, sure,” I answered, noting (not for the first time) that Alfred had a bad habit of phrasing requests like marching orders. “I already told JoAnn I’d be there.”
“I’D THINK IT WOULD BE A RELIEF AFTER NEW YORK CITY,” he said, pronouncing “New York City” in his usual manner, as though it were raw sewage.
“I’m happy to come,” I said.
“BY GOD, I HATE THAT CITY.”
“I know,” I said.
“I’D RATHER BE HORSEWHIPPED THAN SET FOOT IN THAT CESSPOOL.”
“I understand,” I said. (Though just for the record, when my grandparents came to New York, they stayed at the Plaza and dined at Lutèce. Not exactlyMean Streets,if you catch my drift.)
“OR SHOT THROUGH THE EYES.”
“Yes, but—”
“I’D RATHER BE SHOT WITH A RIFLE RIGHT THROUGH THE EYES.”
“But when you say ‘female trouble,’ what do you—”
“THE SURGICAL HOSPITAL. ELEVEN A.M. TOMORROW,” he said. Then he hung up.
Maybe it seems extraordinary that I was willing to hop on a cross-country flight at little more than a moment’s notice in order to comfort my grandmother, even if she was paying for it. But I’m Southern, and Southern men are predisposed to mama worship. Also, I’m a writer, and we’re predisposed to unemployment; that summer, I was working on my first book and only too pleased to avail myself of any chance to escape blank paper. And, for as long as I could remember, my grandmother’s health had reminded me of one of those undetonated bombs under the sidewalks after the London Blitz. Beneath the paces of her life, I feared, the lupus and hepatitis C she’d contracted decades earlier from a contaminated blood transfusion were always lurking.
Part of loving JoAnn meant stepping lightly through the dicey terrain of her illnesses. It meant taking her at her word when she complained of her health, even if she did have a tendency to vamp the scene. Because JoAnn couldCamilleit up with the best of them—posing limply on a recamier with one lily-white hand poised on her brow, just so, like some consumptive out of a nineteenth-century novel. She had a marked tendency toward hypochondria, and yet I knew she was genuinely ill. I’d accompanied her to scores of doctors. I’d seen her blood work—her antinuclear antibody tests, and malaise panels, and recombinant immunoblot assay tests, and other hideously named methods her doctors had of keeping tabs on her diseases. I’d picked up her prescriptions from the pharmacy and cared for her during bad spells. So while I might have smiled to myself once or twice about the pleasure JoAnn seemed to derive from all the attention her illnesses won her, I also lived with the very real fear that her health could explode any minute.
After Alfred hung up on me, I spent a fitful, sleepless night worrying about my precious, impossible grandmother. As a child, I thought JoAnn carried the sun in a golden cup and the moon in a silver bag. I continued thinking this as an adult, despite my firsthand knowledge of her devastating tongue. Ladling out abuse is one of the privileges typically accorded Southern ladies of a certain age, but JoAnn took this rather far. She got away with it because she was funny (“mascara-streaming-down-your-cheeks funny,” in the words of my godmother), but also because she never seemed entirely well, and the constant threat of illness gave her license.
Certainly, JoAnn had never shown much forbearance in her relationship with my mother. Their chronic conflict had suspended my relationship with JoAnn, repeatedly, throughout my early childhood. For a couple of years—roughly from the ages of four until six—they’d agreed to stop fighting for “the baby’s sake.” During that enchanted, enchanting time my grandmother became a regular presence in my life. But then, inevitably, JoAnn had another idiotic, completely unnecessary fight with her daughter, and I didn’t see her for the next ten years, give or take, until I was sixteen and my father left my mother for a pregnant jockey. (We’re from Texas.)
At that point, my mother had what might gracefully be termed a “mental break,” and we became nouveau poor. So when I found myself in need of at least one stable adult, I took it upon myself to call JoAnn. “Well, hasn’t your life just gone from quail eggs on toast to shit on a shovel?” she surmised correctly, after I’d filled her in on the dissolution of my family life. This dissolution included Mother taking to drink. (We’re Irish.) And it also included Mother shaving her head, and then Krazy Gluing plastic hair to her bald scalp. But I digress.
I turned seventeen, and Mother moved to California in order to become a tragic blonde and marry her second Mr. Wonderful. At this point, JoAnn and I picked up where we’d left off when I was six years old. She always seemed a trifle frail and unwell, but we never let that stop us from spending hours chatting on the telephone and tootling about Houston in her butter-yellow Cadillac.
At the time, Alfred was segueing into retirement from the oil business. He’d stopped working full-time and had become a freelance consultant, advising overseas oil-field developments. So for several years, my grandparents moved back and forth between Houston and our family farm outside Nashville, where they eventually settled permanently in the late nineties, once Alfred found even contract employment too tiresome. Then, in the fall of 1999, I moved to New York City to go to college. By the time I did, JoAnn, from her lacquered hair to her Italian pumps, had reclaimed the exalted status she’d held when I was very young. I thought she was the very pink of perfection, all the more precious to me, I suppose, because I was always so keenly aware of the possibility of losing her.
*   *   *
This is all to say that my grandmother’s terrible behavior in the hospital, especially given the heavy drugs she’d been administered, wasn’t surprising. Alfred, on the other hand, gazed on adoringly at his wife, which wasn’t surprising, either. He’d been gazing on adoringly at JoAnn since about 1937, when he first laid eyes on her. He was ten; she was seven. JoAnn Peacock had just moved to Bryan, Texas, and, with her little sister, Peggy, was hanging upside down from the branch of a pecan tree. Alfred saw JoAnn’s panties before he saw her face, because upside down her skirts and petticoats hung so low that only the braided ends of her pigtails peeked out from beneath them. It made JoAnn look like a flower being hung to dry.
Like any Southern gentleman, Alfred introduced himself before explaining that he was organizing the New Confederate Army (I know, I know) and asking JoAnn if she wanted to be a private.
“What’s a private?” JoAnn asked.
“A kind of soldier.”
“And what kind of a soldier are you?” she asked, pulling up her dress in order to square him in the eye.
“I’m a general,” he said.
“Good,” she replied. “Then I’ll be a general, too.”
“A girl can’t be a general.”
“Then who needs your stinking army?” she responded, again dropping the hem of her skirt. Alfred started to walk away. But after walking a few feet, he turned back and, succumbing to her charms for the first of countless times, he yelled into JoAnn’s panties, “Fine, then! Be a general!”
“Fine,” she answered. “And Peggy can be a private.”
Isn’t that just the sweetest, most politically disturbing story you’ve ever heard? Ever since that day under the pecan tree, Alfred had been painting the roses red, which is how I privately referred to his moony, pie-eyed devotion to JoAnn, because the way he adored her always reminded me of the Red Queen’s courtiers inAlice in Wonderland.
Since 1937, Alfred has adjusted the truth to convenience his beloved wife. When JoAnn lied and said she had a college degree, Alfred said admiringly, “I’m so proud of your grandmother for finishing her college degree.” When JoAnn told people who complimented her store-bought jewelry, “These jewels have been in my family for generations,” Alfred cooed lovingly, “Didn’t JoAnn’s family pass down some beautiful jewels?” While nobody could really blame him for going along with these garden-variety fibs told largely for the sake of my grandmother’s overweening vanity, Alfred went along with some whoppers, too.
Such as: JoAnn got pregnant with my mother just a couple of months before her little sister, Peggy (retired private of the New Confederate Army), got pregnant with her oldest daughter. Now, my grandmother and her sister had been raised largely by their aunt Kathleen, nicknamed Teen. Peggy adored Aunt Teen, and JoAnn loathed her. Peggy had intended to name her daughter Kathleen, but just to spite her sister, JoAnn snatched the name away from her by giving birth first. My mother always hated the name Kathleen, changed it to Jessica when she was in the eighth grade, and resented terribly the fact that JoAnn had usedhername as a weapon against her sister.
But, at some point, after my mother changed her name to Jessica, JoAnn started insisting she hadnotnamed my mother after Aunt Teen. She claimed, moreover, that she hadn’t named my mother at all. She began telling everybody that Alfred had named my mother after a character in his favorite poem, which was (are you ready for this?) “The Ballad of Boh da Thone,” by Rudyard Kipling.
There are two things about this story that I find incredible. First, that my grandmother must have spent months on her hands and knees, combing through library shelves and card catalogs, trawling through anthologies, searching for some poem,any poemwith the word “Kathleen” in it, so that she could assign it to her husband as his favorite.
Second, I find it incredible that, like JoAnn’s college diploma and family jewels, Alfred whistled right along with “The Ballad of Boh da Thone” in order to make his wife happy. And he was convincing. Poignant, even. “When I suspected we were to have a little girl,” Alfred would recite, like a windup toy, “I told JoAnn, ‘We must name her after the child in my favorite poem, Rudyard Kipling’s immortal “Ballad of Boh da Thone.” We must name her Kathleen.’ And JoAnn agreed.” For years, I bought this performance hook, line, and sinker. I was convinced that my mother had misunderstood the origins of her birth name. Until I found my mother’s baby book, buried in a steamer trunk, in which JoAnn had written, “Baby’s Name: Kathleen—after my Aunt Kathleen.”
So much for the immortal “Boh da Thone.”
Alfred loved his wife so much that if reality didn’t please her, he’d find something better. It was almost pathological, but it was also endearing, the way this otherwise irascible man was happy to see the world through his wife’s eyes, thrilled to consider her every phrase an epigram. JoAnn was often hilarious, but even if she hadn’t said anything particularly funny, Alfred remembered that she had.
“Wasn’t that hilarious?” he asked me that awful morning at the hospital, positively beaming at his wife, who was positively drooling on her pillow. “Now, I ask you? Isn’t your grandmother just the funniest lady? ‘Olive Oyl!’ Heh, heh, heh. We’ll have to remember that one,” he said, attempting to rap on the curtain himself now. “Nobody wants to hear from you, Olive Oyl!” he shouted. “Heh, heh, heh.”
“Very amusing,” I said distractedly, as my worried mind had turned to JoAnn’s surgery. It was, as such things go, a minor procedure—to the extent that any procedure performed on a woman of ill health in her mid-seventies can be considered minor. My grandmother had gotten breast implants in the late sixties. At some point the implants had ruptured, and the leaked silicon was thought to be straining her weakened immune system, posing a further threat to her already compromised liver. This was the “female trouble” to which Alfred had furtively referred over the phone. This was the condition my grandmother considered too gruesome to discuss, although Lord only knows why, since I’d known all of this for almost two years. I’d already accompanied her on perhaps half a dozen doctor visits where her ruptured breast implants, and the possibility of having them removed, were discussed. I’d scissored articles on the subject out of newspapers and medical journals, and mailed them to her. But for some reason (and probably just because it made a better story), JoAnn had preferred to couch the news in cloak and dagger, and Alfred had followed suit. It seemed unnecessarily dramatic. But then, everything about that surgery seemed unnecessarily dramatic. The timing, for instance. I understood the medical reason for having her breast implants removed, but who has a surgery in the middle of a vacation?
No medical necessity seemed to exist requiring the immediate removal of her implants. In fact, there seemed no reason at all not to wait until she returned to Nashville and could consult her regular physicians. Nothing, except the urging of a country club Houston G.P. whose silver hair and silver tongue seemed on loan from daytime television. Apparently, during some recent office visit of which I’d been uninformed, he’d convinced JoAnn of the pressing need to have those implants out. Quite likely he made a dramatic appeal, the drama of which JoAnn appreciated very much. This matinee idol of an M.D. had persuaded JoAnn that though this surgery would be fairly gruesome, and perhaps (at least for a woman of her generation) a tad embarrassing to discuss, it boasted a brisk recovery time. “You’ll be yourself again in no time,” he’d assured her, with the bright Houston sunshine glinting off his beautiful, blameless hair.

 
Copyright © 2012 by Robert Leleux