To accept his acceptance.

Rosalind MacEnulty.

An American Requiem.

ONE.

SUMMER 2009.

Emmy and I are in Carolina Beach to stay for a night at a rented condo with my niece, Sharen, her husband, son, and mother, Camille, and Camille's husband. Camille is Jo's first wife. I had not spent any significant amount of time with Camille since I'd lived for a year with her and Jo when I was fifteen. Yet I still feel great affection for her.

"Mom's not much of a cook," Emmy explains to the group as we sit around the gla.s.s table noshing on snacks.

"Except for pancakes," I tell them.

"That's right. She makes great pancakes."

"And you know who I learned how to make pancakes from?" I ask. Then I nod over at Camille. Camille and I share a glance. She seems pleased that her brief stint as my stand-in mother has left a mark.

Camille knows that I've been taking care of my mom for a while. Her mother lived with them up until about a year ago when they finally moved her to a nursing home; she died there last May.

Later, as we stand on the balcony and watch the Atlantic knit itself upon the sh.o.r.e, Camille says, "It wasn't until my mother died that I realized I had finally relinquished that role-the daughter role. For years I was constantly tethered, afraid to go anywhere without my cell phone, constantly on the alert for the next emergency."

She could easily be describing my life.

FALL 2004.

I go to see my mother every day at the Oaks. I take her out often. My social life, which wasn't too active to begin with, dries up completely. If I'm not taking Emmy to choir or some school function then I am with my mother, playing Scrabble or just driving her somewhere so she can be out.

But G.o.d she complains.

"The food in this place is awful. They put the sandwich on the same plate with the fruit c.o.c.ktail and the bread gets soaked. It's terrible. The quality of the food is so cheap. It's practically inedible."

The lunch when I first visited the place to check it out was pretty good, but soon after she moves in, some corporation in California buys the place and slashes the budget. Somebody's getting rich, but it's not the people who work here.

"This is the Republican vision for the world," I tell her.

She also complains about her fellow inmates. At the dinner table, one woman can only talk about her dead husband. Another woman, younger than most of the rest, has had a stroke, cries all the time, and rails against the family who has "dumped" her in this place. Someone else enlivens the mealtime conversations with accounts of her bowel movements. The worst thing for my mother is when they use double negatives. She's a grammar sn.o.b.

Once when I am out of town for a day, Hank and Emmy go to visit my mom. Hank later reports that she was down in the parlor vociferously complaining that the other residents wouldn't shut up about their insipid grandchildren while he and Emmy grinned and hoped that all the hearing aids in the vicinity were broken.

My mother likes the staff, but seeing how they are treated by the distant corporate ent.i.ty infuriates her. They fire people for no apparent reason. They expect part-timers to work full time but don't pay them for the work or give them benefits.

Meanwhile the cost of her room is about four hundred dollars a month more than her Social Security check. I'm wondering how we're going to cover that, since my income is so sporadic. On top of everything, Mom's Steinway is supposed to arrive, but the transport date keeps getting postponed.

She's been there about six weeks when I take her out with me to do some errands. As we pull into the parking lot of her new "home," she chokes back a sob that slices me open.

"It's just so depressing," she says. "They're all so old and sick."

I want to scream out in frustration. I want to stab myself in the brain. I have tried so hard to make things right for her, to make her happy. I don't know what else to do.

We walk into the building, she slowly on her walker and me forcing myself to take small slow steps. Inside the main room, a volunteer is playing a game with some of the residents to keep their minds stimulated.

"What language would a Hispanic person speak besides English?"

As we wait for the elevator, I listen to see if anyone has the answer. Silence. Mom is right. She doesn't belong here.

A few nights later my mother says, "I don't think I need a.s.sisted living. What about one of those independent living places?"

We are only now learning about the different categories of places: independent living, a.s.sisted living, nursing homes, memory care units. But just thinking of moving her again exhausts me, makes me long for a padded cell and a Valium drip. Besides, she's made a couple of friends at this place. Her new friends are both smokers and she sits outside with them on the smoking porch, like the bad kids who skip cla.s.s in high school and make snide remarks about all the other kids.

As I'm hoping Mom will settle in, I'm also hoping Emmy will adjust to her new school. Every day at three thirty I pull into the pickup line at the school, my dented 1999 Taurus wagon like an elephant in a line of jaguars. Everyone else drives a Volvo, a Beemer, a Benz, a Jag, a Suburban, or an Escalade. I'll see my girl sitting off by herself or with the one other girl who, it turns out, did come from her old school.

"How did it go?" I ask when she plops down in the seat with her enormous book bag in her lap. She shrugs. A fairly large group of kids from her middle school went to the other private school down the street. She's wishing desperately she had chosen differently. In fact, the other girl is already lobbying her parents. Please, dear child, I'm thinking, don't ask me to try to transfer you. I'm getting used to doing the impossible but that one seems a bit too daunting.

Two days after my mother's plea to move, I emerge from yoga cla.s.s at the Y-the one thing I insist on doing for myself-and pick up a magazine for senior living. I find an ad for an independent living place called the Landings just a ten-minute drive from my house. And the price for an apartment is actually four hundred dollars less than my mother's Social Security check.

The next day, Mom and I go to look at the place. Instead of the small room she has in a.s.sisted living, she would have a small twobedroom apartment with a kitchen. Of course, there aren't any med-techs on staff, and if you fall, you're on your own. There's a big difference between independent and a.s.sisted living. At the Landings, they only serve one meal a day and not even that on weekends, but Mom is still able to prepare some meals for herself, and I can bring dinner or take her out on weekends. The clincher is that the living room is just large enough to comfortably fit the piano, which is supposed to arrive on Tuesday.

We write a check that day.

TWO.

OCTOBER 2004.

I learn very quickly that the management at the Landings is not dissimilar to some of the more coldhearted fascists who ran the women's correctional inst.i.tution where I spent eleven months of my wayward youth. The main dame in charge is a tall blond with Doberman-white teeth and high heels that could puncture an old man's jugular if he got in her way.

"We just love our seniors," she says.

What happens is this: I need a truck for two reasons. The first reason is that I'm going to Tallaha.s.see to retrieve a bed for my daughter. Emmy's G.o.dmother, Kitty, who died of breast cancer back in 2001, wanted Emmy to have her gorgeous antique fourposter bed. But I had never been able to figure out a way to get the bed up to Charlotte, so it was getting dusty in Kitty's mother's garage. About this time I come up with a plan. I will ride down to Tallaha.s.see with a friend who happens to be going there for a conference. I will rent a truck, pick up the bed, bring the bed to Charlotte, unload the bed, take the truck to the a.s.sisted-living place, load up my mother's things, take them over to the Landings, unload the truck again, and then deposit it at a U-Haul place in Charlotte, all for the weekend rate. It's brilliant!

I didn't, however, check my horoscope for the weekend, which probably read: "People hate you, and they're going to let you know it."

The ride to Tallaha.s.see is uneventful. I get dropped off at Kitty's mother's red-brick ranch house. I go around back past the garden, where Kitty used to grow fresh mint, to the back door, which is the way I always went to Kitty's mama's house. Kitty had her own house a few blocks away, but we spent a lot of time over here. Kitty loved her mother, a feisty Democrat who had a fierce reputation among her former high school English students.

But Cathy, Kitty's mother, is not the one who answers the door. Instead Kitty's sister looks at me through the screen. I stand on the steps, holding my little overnight bag like a hobo looking for a little hospitality.

"What do you want?" she asks.

"Is Cathy here?" I ask.

"She's not available. What do you want?"

"I'm here for the bed."

"Now? You want the bed now?"

"Well, yeah."

"I can't believe this."

After an extremely unpleasant exchange, I get the idea that Kitty's sister is angry because I've left the bed in the garage for three years. It's not that it's taken up all that much s.p.a.ce-it's only a headboard and a footboard. But somehow this minor imposition has evolved into a major transgression. Kitty's sister insists that I get Kitty's executor to oversee the transfer of the bed from the garage into the truck, which I still haven't picked up yet.

Fortunately, Cathy comes out and rescues me. We hop into her pickup truck with Kitty's precious poodle-the irrepressible Mythos-and go run some errands. Cathy has the softest, gentlest Southern voice. It's like someone drawing you a warm bath on a chilly day. We go get some lunch and some gas for Cathy's truck, and I think about Kitty and wish she were with us today. How much lighter and less alone in the world I might feel.

Cathy drops me off at the rental place where I pick up a truck; Kitty's executor comes over and with a roll of her eyes, signs a piece of paper and then helps me load the bed. Then I complete the eight-hour drive in the truck with the bed. I get home, unload the bed, and drive immediately over to my mother's place to start getting her things out of there. I'm loading up clothes, books, lamps, small pieces of furniture, boxes of music, including the old black requiem folders, and the Clavinova, which weighs as much as a brick outhouse. I do it by myself and with the help of a maintenance guy when I can find one.

Sunday afternoon I drive over to the Landings with the truck full of goods. I go to the front desk and ask them for the key to my mother's apartment. The piano has already arrived and is in the apartment. I've given the people a deposit, but apparently we haven't signed the lease yet.

"I'm sorry," the woman at the front desk says, "you can't go in there until you sign the lease."

"But . . .but our piano is already in there. And I've paid a deposit."

The woman at the front desk makes a phone call to her boss lady at home. I'm standing in this lobby, sweating from the September heat, beat up from an eight-hour drive in a bouncy truck the day before, muscles aching from packing and loading, toting barges and lifting bales. And they tell me, no, I cannot unload that truck today. I will have to wait until tomorrow. At that moment, I realize I am going to hate these people. And nothing changes my mind.

THREE.

WINTER 2005.

As 2004 slides into 2005, I'm still earning a catch-as-catch-can living, and, at the same time, trying to keep my mother on an even emotional keel. I decide to offer a creative writing cla.s.s to a few people who've been asking for one, and I bring my mother along to get her out of her apartment and around younger people. She's not used to her social set being limited to the upper decades and so this is a welcome change for her.

The group meets one evening a week. I a.s.sign writing exercises, and then we share what we've written. Then we write some more. Mother loves coming to the group. She's working on a musical but mostly in the cla.s.s she writes memories from her life. The others in the group enjoy hearing them. In the meantime I'm learning new facts about her life, especially her childhood.

She explains that she was not named after the famous actress Rosalind Russell, who was in fact only eleven years old when my mother was born. Rather, she was named after one of her mother's friends, Rosalind Brown Simons, an accomplished pianist who had studied in London. Skipper gave my mother piano lessons until she was five years old, at which time her instruction was turned over to Rosalind Brown Simons. When the Great Depression hit, the family could no longer afford piano lessons. But by that time my mother had learned enough that she could practice and learn new pieces on her own.

"The Depression didn't stop me," she said.

While in high school, my mother was offered both an art and a music scholarship to Yale. It wasn't a difficult decision. She chose the music scholarship.

"One of my best memories is when the dean told me that Paul Hindemith said I was the most talented student in the whole school," she said. "I never forgot it."

Hindemith, apparently, liked to play with electric trains.

"All kinds of people-Einstein, for example-would come play with his trains. Since they were all geniuses, it was very elaborate and you had to know what you were doing to keep the train on the tracks. It was an extraordinary place."

Sometimes I resent the fact that my mother left New England or at least didn't take us back there after she divorced my father. My cousins still live there and get together for holidays. I wonder how different my life might have been. And yet, I do love Florida where I grew up. Even now I yearn for it and steadily plot a course out of my landlocked life, back to the swamps, rivers, and lakes of that endangered place.

My mother's depression stalks her like a big-game hunter in her apartment at the Landings. The doors to the outside are too heavy for her to lift, and the management is too cheap to get those automatic door openers for handicapped people. She feels trapped inside and she becomes alternately morose and frantic. Sometimes I come over and take her out in the car just to look at something besides the ivory walls. She loves the way the clouds bunch up on the horizon and turn psychedelic at sunset. Other times we'll just go outside, sit on a wooden bench, and watch the sun set over the water treatment plant just down the road. Charlotte has lovely skies, and bare black trees where you can occasionally catch a fleeting glimpse of deer. During these times we talk. When you spend a lifetime getting to know someone, you think there is nothing left, but she still has stories.

One day she explained that Skipper, which is what we had always called my grandmother, was not known as Skipper when my mother was a child. She was called "Mrs. Field."

"I thought it was awful never to be called by your first name," my mother mused. "It's like she was anonymous."

Mrs. Field was the consummate "lady" in spite of her Girl Scouting. Being a lady didn't mean girlie, prissy, or even sn.o.bbish. It was a certain way of carrying oneself. It meant being kind, courteous, and dignified. Skipper's mother, Gammie, on the other hand, took her 'ladyness' to an extreme.

"She would never be caught carrying her own parcels. And she wouldn't be caught playing cards on Sunday, especially since she always managed to slide them under the couch if company came," Mother said with a laugh.

Shortly after ice-cream cones came into vogue in 1904, Skipper played a not-so-ladylike joke on an insufferable relative by explaining that you ate an ice-cream cone from the bottom up.

The thing my mother never mentioned until I finally asked about it (and I wouldn't have known to ask if not for my cousin Roy) was that Skipper had had a boyfriend.

"Oh, yes, he was my organ teacher," my mother said. "But she was only doing it to get even."

"How old were you?" I asked.

"Oh, about eleven."

"And she was still married to Lewis?"

"Yes," she said. Lewis, like my own father, was a philanderer, indulging in adulterous affairs without a qualm, and an alcoholic who once showed up at a fancy social function in Washington without his trousers on.

"One time a little girl asked me if my father was Colonel Field. When I said yes, she responded, 'Oooooh,'" my mother said, laughing. "His reputation was that bad."

"Really? I thought you meant she was impressed."

"No," Mother said. "Everyone knew about him."

My mother remembers overhearing her father on the phone, fixing a trial.

"Don't worry. I know that judge. We'll take care of it," he said.

That was how she learned how the system worked. He was an influential man, a skillful attorney who became a judge at a young age. According to my mother, the world turned a blind eye to his behavior. Or most of the world did. Eventually, after his divorce from Skipper, he was strong-armed into marrying one of his mistresses, the sister of his mafioso chauffeur. Or so the story goes.

One of her worst memories involves watching a boy drown. It was a summer day, and people had gathered at the river to swim and picnic. The little boy's leg got caught in the lock under the bridge.

"The horrible thing is that there was a carpenter there who said he could break the mechanism, but the firemen wouldn't let him do it," she told me.