Mother saw Sadie as wasting that last, working as hard as a beast of burden as a nurse in a hospital in New York City. Though now I know that Sadie can’t have been living the life of Riley, I wanted to move there and join her. What a smart girl.
My mother resented Sadie like a stepsister resenting Cinderella, but she was polite. She did her no social violence. Was always hospitable and gracious on Sadie’s visits, both as a point of pride and because my father would not have abided otherwise. Though he, too, a lawyer, thought Sadie’s work beneath her.
My devotion to both Phoebe and Sadie has remained constant over the decades. When I think of either, I also think of lofty mountain chains and cool delights.
The New York I moved to eventually was empty of Sadie, though I’ve since walked by St. Vincent’s, the hospital where she worked, I don’t know how many times. She died in the influenza epidemic of 1918.
Phoebe, deathless, simply faded from public consciousness like a once-popular song. Anthracite, needed to fight the Great War, was not to be used on railroads anymore. The world changed, and Phoebe disappeared forever: On time the trip ends without a slip
And Phoebe sadly takes her grip
Loath to alight, bows left and right,
“Good-bye, Dear Road of Anthracite.”
*
But I never forgot her. I didn’t want to be her, so much as to have her—to create her.
Sadie led me to Manhattan, but Phoebe led me to poetry, and to advertising. So enrapt was I at her entrancing rhymes that when the time came to apply for jobs, I rhymed my letters and my samples alike: To work for you
Is my fondest wish
Signed your ever-true
Lillian Boxfish
*
Fifteen inquiries. Five favorable replies. Including one by telegram from R.H. Macy’s. This was the one I chose: my first serious job in New York City. A job which in some ways saved my life, and in other ways ruined it. What a smart girl.
2
New Year’s Eve
The only man I ever birthed, though not the only one I mothered, is on the other end of the line, and he is giving me news that is sad and bad and that makes me jealous. Julia, my ex-husband’s second wife, has been hospitalized after a heart attack, her third. She will likely not survive. She is much younger than I—fifteen years if you go by my age as I’ve been lying about it forever, sixteen if you go by my age as I am pretty sure is correct. Either way, she is 68.
Either way, it is 1984, and she is with them, and I am alone on New Year’s Eve in New York City, and it’s too warm. I wish it were snowing, but gently, gently, like sugar falling on a great, gray cookie.
Unlike Julia, my health is and always has been—physically—impeccable.
“She was struggling in all this Maine snow, when there’s none in California,” says Johnny, says Gianino, my Little John, says my son, says Gian, as he asked to be called back in junior high school, when it occurred to him that he had the wherewithal. “She collapsed coming up the driveway after taking the kids to the library. It’s pretty grim this time, Ma.”
“Ma,” he calls me—incongruous, ugly—but I enjoy it. Max, my ex-husband, taught him that: the harsh monosyllable sounding working-class, hardly our income bracket. But that was part of what I loved about Max. The blue of his collar to the white of mine. I was not entirely un-maternal toward Max. Of course when, finally, I needed his unconditional support, he could not afford the same care to me.
“Dreadful,” I say. “I hope the ambulance didn’t founder getting out to Pin Point.”
Gian spends his time between semesters at Pin Point, the summer home Max and I bought in the thirties; perversely, he likes it in winter, too.
“No, they made it all right,” he says. “I’m at the hospital now. Claire’s mom took the train up from Boston to help out with the kids so I can stay here with Julia. The university’s not back in session until the third week of January, so this honestly couldn’t have happened at a better time.”
This announcement that Gian is calling from the hospital forces me to revise the image of him in my mind, an image I wasn’t even aware of until I knew it was wrong. I picture him now in an overly bright lounge among grim institutional furniture, murmuring into an oft-disinfected courtesy phone. He rests his free hand atop his shaggy head in his distracted fashion—the absentminded professor, father of three, black hair threaded with gray at the temples, forty-three years old next month—and that imagined gesture recalls another, from what seems like yesterday: Gian placing a flat palm on the crown of his skull to measure his height against his bedroom wall.
The line goes quiet: He’s stopped talking, and I realize I’d stopped listening. “How are the kids taking it?” I ask. I picture the three as last I saw them, the day after Christmas, bundled up like ornaments in red and green coats, and boarding the train north. I want to know how they will react when I die.