Backpay / Payback

by Hugh Fox

Mama Dreadful, 94, Baby Sam, 62, on his liver cancer deathbed, she comes in still in high heels, a little wobbley, but with all the forever-young surgery she’s had, her face as wrinkled as the inside of an oyster shell, no more.

“What are you doing here? Who told you about ...”

“I’ve got my ways.”

“You pay someone to keep an eye on me?”

“Three eyes, four eyes, five eyes ...”

Nurse Sarah coming in.

“I don’t think he really can / should be ‘disturbed’ this way, Madame. Perhaps it’s better for you to ...”

Very thin, an obvious diet-maniac, her private world totally in control, and all the world she touched around her.

“He emerged from here!” says Mom, spreading her legs the best she can, pointing to her groin.

“That’s what I mean,” says Nurse Sarah, obviously pleased by Mom’s indelicate stance, “but, okay, stay for a while ... a while ... while ... so be it.”

And she was gone as Mom sat down again and crossed her perfect much-surgerized legs.

“Always attacking your mother, your parents. Lord knows what you said to her about my pretentions viz a viz my wanting to be an actress and ending up as a frustrated housewife,  your father’s law practice, him a frustrated gypsy guitarist, as if an Irisher couldn’t play guitar.”

She gets up and begins to try to dance, sing, click her fingers, but not quite making it.

“You look like a horror film about Egyptian mummies coming back to life,” he laughs and she stops, stands over him as if she’s going to hit him, then sits sadly down.

“I’m super-old and super-depressed, miss your father and his cigarettes that always made me laugh, miss you, the grandkids scattered all over the world, hardly kids any more, my great-grandkids, my secretarial jobs, top drawer, Ms. Zip Shorthand, everything kind of replaced by high tech these days,” starting to cry, taking a handkerchief out of her purse, of course it had to be lace-edged, antique-ish old lace, mummyish, easy to imagine her in her coffin and then some.

“Listen ...”

“I don’t wanna listen, maybe it’s time for me to go, I’ve got my own death to worry about.”

“Please,” a please right out of the catacombs, the bottom of the Moby Dick tomb sea, the tombs of Rimbaud and Debussy, remembering that cemetery he saw on his first trip to Paris, right in the middle of town, like the Who’s Who of French literature, all buried right next to ech other, “Please.”

And she reluctantly but defintively-predestinatedly sit-collapses back down imagining he’s talking to her from his casket or come back to haunt her nightmares.

“I just wanted to thank you for my childhood / kinderheit, the piano lessons, the violin lessons,  how-to-write-music lessons, getting me involved with the All Children’s Grand Opera group, I mean singing in Carmen at age 10 on the stage at the Metropolitan Opera House with Sir Thomas Beecham conducting, Gladys Swarthout as Carmen, the trips to Europe, the French teacher, whoever had it the way I did, it turned my whole life into a combination of Brahms, Picasso, and ... you know what I mean?”

“And ...?”

“You know, feeling like Debussy was an old friend, going out with Le Petite Fille Avec Les Chevaux de Lins.”

“What?”

“The Maid with the Flaxen Hair. You remember, that English girl I went out with when I was in college ... Claudia ...”

“You should have married her instead of ...”

Which he ignores. His marriage to the Inca Princess, Carmen, which never worked out.

“But you know what I mean, feeling like Nadie Boulanger was my sister.”

“Na-what?”

“Great French composer, studied with Fauré, died when she was twenty-four, love her piano work, that’s all she wrote for was piano, but, you know, I’ll be driving out in the country, WKAR on, from the university, Beethoven, Brahms ... I almost said William Carlos Williams. Senile dementia. Das Lied von der Erde. A little Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier ... and it’s like being with old friends, or going through the Louvre or the Chicago Art Institute, my old friends Monet and Renoir, Pissarro ...”

“You mean Picasso.”

“Pissarro, the French Impressionist, landscapes that look like Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and I wouldn’t have had any of that without you. You and my dad sculpted me into everything I am.”

“Well, you know, you were crippled.”

“But when I was cured ... it’s been such a great life, my Peruvian angel and then the Kansas Corn-on-the-Cob, and the Brazilian Persimmon ...”

“Too many wives, too many kids.”

“Only three each.”

“Three, three, four ...”

“Well, I wanted it to sound more symmetrical.”

“Nothing in life’s ...”

She stops, tries to finish, doesn’t make it, lies back, shuts her eyes.

Is she breathing or has she stopped?

“But I’m the one who’s supposed to be dying....”

He tries to get up, stumbles, pulls out half his tubes, face down (hard!) on the floor, stops breathing, eyes unmovingly open, death-stare.

She opens her eyes, waits, with some facility and agility reaches down and puts her hand on his head, chest, he’s cooling off, no breathing, wonders if she should call someone, at least he’s out of his misery, one thing she always hates to see is longterm useless suffering, put the dogs “to sleep,” as they’d say, years, years back, maybe she should call the hospital people ... no, they’ll find out soon enough and she doesn’t want to hear about funerals, goodbyes, the departing one can’t hear, straightens up, some knee pain, but she still goes to fitness class every morning, there are people in the Andes who live to a hundred and twenty plus ... with difficulty bends down and kisses the top of his head ... ça sufit! / basta! And then she quietly walks down the hall toward the elevator hoping for zero encounters with anyone who knows who she is.