Texas Pages

And he did. They did. The whole high-tech array of surgical, medical, therapeutic systems revved into high gear.

But this time I don't try to save her. I look at the doctor, by now my accomplice, and I say Oh yes when he says You understand...this is it, eager to prove myself no trouble, a maker of no fuss. Not something she could be accused of. "I get the feeling your mother doesn't...like me," he confided a year ago, this mild man of good will and even better bedside manner. "I walk in the room and she scowls. As if she hates me."

You got that right. I experience a surge of perverse pride at her capacity to alienate those with power over her, the self-immolating integrity of her fury. Her essential unfairness, throwing guilt like a girl, underhand. For her, no such thing as an innocent bystander. Cross her path and the poisoned dart springs from the quiver of her heart. The look. Narrowed eyes, pinched disdainful mouth, brilliant mime of venomous dislike. I know it well, doctor. "You goodie two shoes," she spit out once when I was cleaning her apartment, mopping up cigarette ash around her chair. She didn't bother to disguise her contempt for me as a non-smoker-obviously, I didn't know how to enjoy life.

But that sour face of her elderly fury keeps disappearing just as she is disappearing. Even this latest face, the one propped on the hospital pillow, the hieratic visage that seems polished and will soon be an object, even this one is hard to keep in focus. I'm sitting here, holding her hand, but it's the ardent face from 1936 that keeps appearing, the face in the photograph placed on the shelf above the piano all the years of my girlhood and beyond. Heart-shaped with high cheekbones and eyes set wonderfully wide, it is the face of a romantic lead.

Not because she was beautiful -- she wasn't beautiful. She was seriously pretty, the way Scott Fitzgerald described the real heartbreakers. The slightly dazzled eyes (she refused to wear her glasses) looked out with a shyness clearly feigned. That was the entrancing part-you could tell she wasn't really shy. She was happy. And a little startled by it. She couldn't keep the happiness of her body-and-soul off her face. Neither could my father -- because of course he's standing next to her. Though not yet my father, not yet her husband.

Both of them look directly at the camera, standing by a cottonwood tree on a sandy bank of the Mississippi. Springtime from the look of the tree, site of a picnic, no doubt. She leans her trim self in a stylish slouch, just touching his lean body. A claim being made. She's happy and he looks -- proud. They both have a slightly abashed shyness stamped on their faces. Good-lookers. They're stepping into their future, he in an open-neck shirt, she in jodhpurs and a little leather jacket. It's their first picture together.

I stared at it all my girlhood as if at a problem to be solved -- who are these people? -- while I tooled my way through a Chopin mazurka, a Bach prelude, under the erotic glory of two kids crazy in love who gazed at me from another planet, not the one we inhabited together -- Mother, Dad, Peter, me -- in our bungalow on Linwood Ave.

(Used by permission of Harcourt Books.)