Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

And maybe he would not. All I felt at the moment was a simple curiosity to see which it would be and a need to get beyond the phone call that was so great it almost felt like labor, like childbirth.

Amy answered Pom’s private line.

“Oh, Merritt. Well, the prodigal wife at last,” she chortled merrily, or with what passed, with Amy, for merriment. “Was it Doctor you wanted? I’ll take a message, Doctor’s in a meeting until—”

“Get him, Amy,” I said. “Now.”

There was a long pause, and I heard her dialing Pom, and then his voice. “Merritt,” he said.

It was his voice, of course, but it sounded so flat and without affect that for a moment I thought Amy must have connected me with another office.

“Pom?” I said witlessly.

“Yes.”

“I’ve been trying to reach you. I left a number—”

“I got it, Met. I just didn’t call it.”

I knew then that he was still very angry with me, and that this conversation would have no good ending. But there was something else under his voice, a frailty or injury of some sort, that I had never heard before. Alarm flooded me, and pity, and the old, helpless love that Pom in trouble always called out. Could Mommee after all…

“I sincerely hope that you’re calling from the airport, Merritt,” he said, and the pity and love receded, along with most of the alarm. If Mommee had come to serious harm he would not resort to sarcasm.

“No.”

“Ah,” he said, and waited.

“Pom, I wanted to tell you that we’re going to spend another week in California,” I said, speaking rapidly and, I hoped, firmly. “Laura’s friend has offered us his lodge in the Santa Cruz mountains, south of San Francisco, and Glynn’s friends Marcie and Jessica are visiting Marcie’s father over in Palo Alto, and it’s very close to the lodge, and I’ve always wanted Glynn to see the redwood country, and so much has happened that I need to be still and sort it all out—”

“A lot has happened indeed,” he said. His tone was still level.

I could put it off no longer.

“Mommee…is Mommee all right?”

“No, Merritt, Mommee is out of her mind and as of tonight she’s out of the one decent place that would take her on short notice, and since you will be visiting the redwood country for another week I have no idea on God’s earth what will happen to her now. That’s how Mommee is.”

Guilt leaped and anger flared higher. Pity was still there.

“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it. “I know she isn’t easy. Do you want to tell me?”

“Would it get you home?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, then, no. I don’t think I’ll bother. Oh, hell, Merritt, it’s just that…I went to see her this morning before work and she didn’t know who I was. She didn’t know me, Merritt. She’s been so traumatized by all this bouncing around, and all the unfamiliar people, that she’s gone into this kind of crazy fugue state; nobody can reach her. And they won’t keep her there—”

“Where’s there?”

“Lenox Meadows. That high-rise place in Brookhaven, the one all the Buckhead old people go to. I called Bob Scully, the director, a couple of days ago and as a favor to me they took her right in, and if I do say so myself it’s a nice place. It has everything, even a sunroom that’s been fixed up exactly like the one at the Cloister, you know, where the birdcages are? A lot of the people there are confused, and they think they’re back at Sea Island when they see it, and they settle right down.…Anyway, it seemed like the perfect solution. All sorts of services and frills: a hair styling salon and a pool and sauna and a nice restaurant and a private limo to shopping and the symphony and the arts center, you know…but it upset her so to be away from her family and her room that she just sort of flipped out, and she got into the sunroom and opened the birds’ cages and let them all out, and then at dinner she threw soup at the waitress. So I’ve got to move her by tonight. I was counting on you to bring her home this afternoon, Merritt. Now I don’t know what I’m going to do. My God, she actually thought I was going to hurt her! She didn’t know me—”

“Pom, I’m sorry. But you must see that Mommee’s gone beyond home care now. The sooner you can get her into a place that specializes in Alzheimer’s and senility, the better off she’ll be. Not we’ll be, Pom, she’ll be. You don’t need me to do that. I couldn’t admit her, anyway. You’d have to authorize it—”

“I don’t know any places like that,” he said, sounding lost and querulous.

Annoyance and the old pity warred in me; annoyance, for the moment, won.

“Pom, you’ve got a five-page list of places like that in your office right this minute. The social worker has it; I’ve seen it. Your office sends people there every day of the week; it’s part of the outreach and resources program, or whatever you call it. All you’ve got to do is pick up a phone. You don’t even have to do it; Amy would love to do it for you. You know good and well that if this Lenox Meadows place would take her immediately as a favor to you, any one of those places will. You’ve supported them for ages. You could have her in a nice room by the end of the workday. Amy would pick her up and take her, I’ll bet, if you sent a nurse along. Or maybe the limo could take her…”

There was a long silence. In it I had a picture of Mommee, roaring and careening around in the back of a huge limo, tiny finches darting in an agitated cloud about her head. At the wheel was Jesus. When he decanted her tenderly from the limo he would say, “You tell Orion O’Neill Jesus say ’allo, hah?” I thought for one desperate moment I was going to burst into idiot laughter.

“I’m not going to put my mother in one of those places,” Pom said, and the picture dissolved.

“Only poor people, huh?” I said in exasperation. “Pom, Mommee is way, way past noticing where she is. She isn’t going to know a new place from her old room. She isn’t going to know you from a…a turnip. The reason she doesn’t recognize you isn’t that she’s upset and traumatized or that you’ve hurt her, it’s that she has Alzheimer’s disease and that’s what eventually happens to people who have it. You’re a doctor, you know that. You see it every day. She isn’t going to get better if you bring her back home and we try again to look after her, and suddenly recognize you, and embrace you, and get back to normal. It doesn’t happen like that. You’re putting off the day she gets the kind of care that really can help her, and you’re condemning Glynn and me to another season in hell in the bargain. Without Ina I couldn’t manage it five minutes. Even with Ina, I couldn’t do the Mommee thing anymore. It’s killing our daughter. She’s so much better out here; you’d love seeing how well she is, and oh, Pom, so many wonderful things have happened to her, and she’s so anxious to tell you about them, and good things are coming up for Laura, too—”

“How nice,” he said coldly, “that you’re all having such a good time.”

“Pom, do you want your wife and daughter to be miserable? Is that it? How would that help things?” I said. My voice was trembling. Why couldn’t I get through to him? What would it take? Whatever, I obviously was not going to be able to do it over long distance, not when he was still torn with anger at us and terror and pity for his mother.

But I was past helping him there.

“There’s another reason, too,” I said. “Laura’s got sort of a problem. I think it can be settled in a week, and I feel sure I can help her work it out if I have some quiet time alone with her. But she’s not in very good shape right now, and I’m the only one who can—”