Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

My mother was buried in a Jewish cemetery, a possible nod to my grandparents. In case you don’t know, the Jewish religion wants you to put an old rock on the grave of your loved ones. I never saw any reason to quibble with oddball ancient traditions as cheap as this one, so I went outside and wondered what kind of filthy rock my dead mother might want as a token of my devotion.

When we finally got to the cemetery, we couldn’t find the grave. The maze of gray stones confused us, but in the end we found her lying where she always was, between Martha Blackman, who had breathed in and out for a tedious ninety-eight years, and Joshua Wolf, whose heart had unfairly stopped beating at the age of twelve. We stared at a slab of stone with her name on it.

Astrid.

No last name, no date of birth nor date of death- just her name all alone on the headstone, speaking volumes of silence.

I tried to imagine what life would have been like with a mother around. I couldn’t picture it. The mother I mourned was an amalgam of manufactured remembrances, photographs of silent movie actresses, and the warm, loving image of the maternal archetype. She transmogrified constantly, a vision in constant motion.

Beside me, Dad was bouncing on his toes as if waiting for a game result. He stepped forward and brushed the star-shaped autumn leaves off the headstone.

I looked at him. I looked at his feet. “Hey!” I shouted.

He turned to me, startled, and snapped, “Don’t make sudden loud noises in a cemetery, you ghoul. You want me to die of fright?”

“Your feet!” I shouted, pointing at them. He lifted up the heels to inspect for dog shit.

“You’re standing on her!”

“No, I’m not.”

He was. He was standing right on top of my mother. Any fool could see it.

“You’re fucking standing on her grave! Get off!”

Dad smiled but didn’t do anything to make his feet move. I grabbed his arm and dragged him off to the side. That only made him laugh.

“Whoa. Relax, Jasper. She’s not in there.”

“What do you mean, she’s not in there?”

“She’s not buried there.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean there’s a coffin. Only it’s empty!”

“An empty coffin?”

“And you want to know the worst part? You still have to pay the same price as if there was actually a body inside! I guess I assumed it was done on weight, but apparently not.”

I looked at his cheerless face, aghast. He was shaking his head, mourning the loss of his money.

“WHERE THE FUCK’S MY MOTHER?”

Dad explained that she had died in Europe. He wouldn’t say much more about it. He had purchased the burial plot for my benefit, reasoning that a boy has the right to mourn his mother in the appropriate setting. Where else was he going to do it? At the movies?

Over the years, when the topic came up, Dad had told me nothing about her other than that she was dead and the dead can’t make you dinner. What I can’t believe now is how fully I’d repressed my curiosity. I suppose because he didn’t want to talk about it, Dad had convinced me that it was rude to go poking into finished lives. My mother was a topic he put on the high shelf, out of reach of questions. I had accepted this at face value, that under no circumstances did you ask about the destruction of someone who was supposed to be indestructible.

But now, suddenly, with the revelation that all along I’d been grieving over an empty hole, anger mutated into a burning curiosity. In the car on the way home from the cemetery, I told him that if I was old enough to mourn, at nine years old, I was old enough to know something about her.

“She was just this woman I saw for a little while,” Dad said.

“Just this woman? Weren’t you married?”

“Oh God, no. I’ve never even gone near an altar.”

“Well, did you, you know, love her?”

“I don’t know how to answer that question, Jasper. I really don’t know how.”

“Try.”

“No.”

Later that night, I heard the sound of hammering and went into the bathroom to see Dad putting up curtains on the bathroom mirror.

“What are you doing?”

“You’ll thank me for this one day,” he said.

“Dad, just tell me about her. What was she like?”

“Are you still harping on about that?”

“Yes.”

“That oughta do it.”

Dad finished hammering, put up the rod, and pulled the beige curtains across the mirror with a drawstring.

“Why do people need to look at themselves while they brush their teeth? Don’t they know where their teeth are?”

“Dad!”

“What? Christ! What do you want to know, factual information?”

“Was she Australian?”

“No, European.”

“From where, exactly?”

“I don’t know, exactly.”

“How can you not know?”

“Why are you so interested in your mother all of a sudden?”

“I don’t know, Dad. I guess I’m just sentimental.”

“Well, I’m not,” he said, showing me a familiar sight: his back.

Over the following months, I pushed and pressed and squeezed and, in dribs and drabs, managed to extract the following scant information: my mother was beautiful from certain angles, she was widely traveled, and she disliked having her photograph taken as much as most people dislike having their money taken. She spoke many languages fluently, was somewhere between twenty-six and thirty-five when she died, and though she had been called Astrid, it was probably not her real name.

“Oh, and she absolutely hated Eddie,” he said one day.

“She knew Eddie?”

“I met Eddie more or less at the same time.”

“In Paris?”

“Just out of Paris.”

“What were you doing just out of Paris?”

“You know. The usual. Walking around.”

Eddie, Dad’s best friend, was a thin Thai man with a sleazy mustache who always seemed to be smack bang in the middle of the prime of life and not a day over. When he stood next to my pale father, they looked less like friends and more like doctor and patient. It was clear now that I was going to have to interrogate Eddie about my mother. Finding him was the trouble. He made frequent and unexplained overseas trips, and I had no idea whether he went for business, pleasure, restlessness, genocide, or on a dare. Eddie had a way of being categorically unspecific- he would never go so far as to tell you, for example, that he was visiting relatives in the Chiang Mai province of Thailand, but if you pressed, he might admit that he had been “in Asia.”

I waited six months for Eddie to resurface. During that time I prepared a list of questions, running and rerunning the interview with him in my head, including his answers. I anticipated- wrongly, as it turned out- a lurid love story wherein my saintly mother martyred herself in a Romeo and Juliet-type scenario: I imagined that the doomed lovers had made a tragically romantic double suicide pact but Dad had pulled out at the last minute.

Finally one morning I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth with the curtains drawn when I heard Eddie’s syrupy voice calling out. “Marty! You here? Am I talking to an empty apartment?”

I ran into the living room.

“Here he is,” Eddie said, and as usual, before I could say “Please don’t,” he lifted the Nikon dangling from his neck and took my photo.

Eddie was a photography nut and couldn’t go five minutes without taking my photograph. He was a great multitasker: with one eye on the lens of his Nikon, he could smoke a cigarette, photograph us, and smooth down his hair at the same time. Although he said I photographed well, I couldn’t disprove him- he never showed us the results. I didn’t know if he ever developed the photos or not, or even if he had film in his camera. It was just another example of Eddie’s pathological mysteriousness. He never talked about himself. Never told you how things were in his day. You didn’t even know if he had a day. He was, body and soul, aloof.