When Women Were Dragons(71)
“Does our room look the same?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
She pinched her lips together. “Then I don’t want to see it.”
“You don’t have to, Bea.”
Beatrice looked around. Everything was dingier than it was before. And uglier. I never realized how much care my mother had put into the house, how much of herself was in every bit of it, but the loss of her in this space was palpable.
Beatrice and I walked home in the snow, pulling the weight of my mother’s memories behind us.
[From The Daily Cardinal, November 19, 1963]
UNIVERSITY CLINIC RAIDED
BY FEDERAL AUTHORITIES
Administration officials at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, campus remained tight-lipped on Monday regarding the weekend raid of the Student Health Center. Witnesses report seeing several vans arrive on the street, as dozens of federal officers and a handful of state law enforcement agents entered the building early Saturday morning.
The clinic had been under fire of late for distributing information to students that was outside the purview of the clinic’s mission statement, and had been cited by the state in recent years for various charges of indecency, vulgarity, unlicensed medical practice, and libel. The clinic fought each state action, and all have been either overturned by the courts or withdrawn. Saturday’s action appears to be an escalation, as well as an apparent coordination of state and federal prosecutors.
Reporters requested comments from the representative of the governor’s office, the state health department, the Dane County Sheriff’s Department, and the regional offices of the FBI and the U.S. Marshals, and none have responded as of press time. The spokesman for the chief of the Madison Police Department, however, did issue the following statement: “Let this be a message to anyone else who wants to set up a temporary, illegal medical unit, these so-called ‘clinics for the curious.’ Stop what you’re doing. We’re onto you. And we’re willing to prosecute every last one of you before you corrupt another unsuspecting young person.”
28.
It took a long time, but slowly, I made my way through my mother’s things. I ironed each dress, reshaped each hat, set the stockings outside. I soaked the gloves and hand washed each scarf. I spent hours each night examining my mother’s knotwork, the mathematics of each twist and whorl, the logic underpinning the progression of those concentric loops. The knotwork showed up in her hand-tied laces, in the complicated interwoven eyelet patterns that she had stitched in a decorative spray on the side of her skirts, or the devilishly intricate braiding that she did on her waistbands and belts. There was a meaning, I was sure, to my mother’s obsession with knots, a sincere belief at the core of it. But for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it was.
I found her notebook with her diagrams and equations, and her stack of books with her scrawled annotations. Even then, my mother seemed to be gathering evidence to support a hypothesis that she never wrote down. I did not know her rationale. I did not know her point of view. My mother was as sphinxlike as ever. All I knew was that it was beautiful. All of it was so, so beautiful. Her loss was a chasm in my life, a hole in the universe where my mother should be.
Slowly, I either wrapped each piece in tissue paper and hung it at the back of the closet, or I set it out to be eventually sold. I found nearly enough winter gear in the boxes marked “Alexandra,” and what we still needed, I was able to buy from the proceeds of selling some of my mother’s more elegant dresses at the local consignment shop.
We were fine for now. I couldn’t think about how we would manage in the future, which remained impossible to imagine or plan for. All we could do was leap.
My father’s phone calls had all but ceased, and I didn’t hear from him until late December. The only thing he gave us was our monthly allowance and silence. I was glad at first, but after a while, it just felt strange. I hadn’t expected to miss him. I called my father’s house more than a few times, but no one ever answered.
He called four days before Christmas. He could barely say hello, he was coughing so hard.
“Dad?” I said to the explosive hacking on the other end. “Is that you?”
“Of course it is,” my father barked. “Who else do you have calling you on this phone that I pay for?” He coughed again. “Actually, that’s not a bad question. Who do you have calling? I don’t want you taking advantage of this situation to make terrible choices and humiliate your family.”
“It’s nice to hear from you too,” I said drily. “Every time I call the house, no one answers. Is everything okay?” I tried to keep any hint of petulance out of my voice. I tried to hide the yawning need inside me, so enormous it threatened to swallow the whole earth. He’d told me I wouldn’t be alone. He lied.
“What kind of question is that? Of course everything is okay. Why the hell wouldn’t it be?” He made several loud swallowing sounds. I hoped it was water for his cough, but I knew it likely was not.
Beatrice played outside, building forts in the snow with the neighborhood children. She had homework to do and her grades were slipping, but I didn’t have the heart to call her back in.
Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Do you have any plans for Christmas, Dad? Will we be seeing you?” I don’t know why I even asked. We never saw him.