CHRISTMAS PAST:'When we convened each Christmas - arriving by motorbike, car, plane or mail truck - my mother put us back together again in her typically unfussy way', writes Molly McCloskey
IN A LETTER to her mother in December of that year, my mother wrote: "I'll be happy to see 1975 go. God said 1976 will be better." It must have been the worst Christmas of her life, the evidence for this not only the circumstances prevailing at the time, but the fact that in her numerous volumes of photo albums, there is not a single picture of that holiday. In fact, there is not a single picture of the year we spent in that house.
The prevailing circumstances, in snapshot, were these. The eldest of her six children, still itching from the scabies he had picked up during his latest disappearance, was sitting on the kitchen floor, felled by a terrible bout of trembling in his leg - a side-effect of Haldol, the anti-psychotic he was on. In the living room, in front of the Christmas tree, her husband chatted to a neighbour - the woman with whom he was shortly to abscond. And in the office downstairs, from which my father had been trying, not very successfully, to sell timeshares, were my parents' financial records.
Their finances had not been as precarious since the early days of their marriage, but that precariousness had been of a different sort - infused with a post-war optimism and the energy and ignorance of youth.
This was different. They had a large family, now, and in the midst of the recession, my father had lost his job. It was now 18 months since he'd had steady work.
Nevertheless, my mother continued in the letters to her own mother to sound upbeat - at least about my brother's chances for recovery and my father's joblessness. "It's all part of life's little adventure," she wrote. And she would maintain this attitude right up to the time she told her parents about the divorce. In May of that year, just a month or so before the split, she wrote: "We are amazingly happy despite our little reverses. It will bring us out of the fairytale world and back to reality."
And indeed it did. By the following Christmas, the seven of us had reassembled for the holidays in a slightly downmarket end of our very upmarket town, in the house where we would spend our next 10 Christmases. Where a tightly sealed unit had been was now something open-ended, fluid and unpredictable.
In her poem A Hermit Thrush, Amy Clampitt describes existence as this "botched, cumbersome, much-mended, / not unsatisfactory thing". When I read the lines, years after we'd sold that house and scattered, I thought that my mother, back then, might have seen her family in something like those terms. In many ways, our lives - now lacking the authoritarian presence of my father - were more interesting, and the atmosphere around the house certainly became a more tolerant and free-wheeling one. My mother, with her brood of teenagers and twentysomethings, and without the ballast of a husband, was sometimes less like a parental figure than a fun-loving twentysomething herself.
But there was a kind of Humpty-Dumpty feel about us, a question of whether we would again cohere into something solid and reliable, or whether the sense of splintering would intensify. For we all seemed in some kind of transition then. The youngest of us were passing out of the age of innocence and into an age of secretiveness and intermittent delinquency. My older siblings, two of whom now lived 3,000 miles away, on the east coast, were embarking on their own, more complicated, forms of waywardness. No one seemed overly interested in getting a proper job, preferring hippie-ish things such as driving coast-to-coast in a converted mail truck. The eldest of us, whom my mother was trying to shepherd through the early years of schizophrenia, lived at our house.
But all was not lost, and all was not broken. For when we convened each Christmas - arriving by motorbike, car, plane or mail truck - my mother put us back together again, in her typically unfussy way. We spent the holidays playing Scrabble and gin rummy and chess. We gathered round the set and watched, along with much of the country, Sixty Minutesand Saturday Night Live. We went to midnight Mass, a service that perfectly combined the warm wholesomeness with which Mass infused us and the feel of participating in something slightly subversive. And every Christmas morning, we had a treasure hunt. My mother, out of whatever inspiration, had decided it would become a tradition, and she wrote us clues in rhyming couplet and hid them throughout the house.
Because everything intensifies over Christmas, especially forms of loneliness, she must have felt the absence of a partner during the holidays. But she dramatised nothing, including her own losses, and regarded whatever happened as a challenge, a lesson, life's little adventure. She exhibited not exactly a stiff upper lip but a thoughtful equanimity and a high-spirited resolve, qualities reflected in her musical repertoire, which included both Que sera, sera and fragments of the more harmlessly funky 1970s hits. Of one of her favourites, she could remember only a single line - Evr'budy was kung fu fi-i-tin! - which she always followed with the requisite Hungh! Kung Fu grunt.
All her married life she had been my father's helpmate, his cheerleader, his support. Now, in spite of the pain the divorce had caused her, my mother welcomed the new opportunities that single life afforded her. Through her job at the local newspaper, she met colourful and inspiring people, people whose company my father would not have been ready for or interested in. She met a woman her age who had back-packed through Europe with her children, she met artists and psychologists, a blind lawyer, a South African couple, a gay man. She met others recently divorced (in the 1970s, divorce was still a shock), and spent evenings with parents who also had mentally ill children.
She interviewed - then briefly dated - Walt Morey, the author of Gentle Ben, who lived on a 60-acre filbert ranch and who I wanted her to marry. (The man who really wanted to marry her during those years drove a Rolls Royce and gave her gifts of gold, but she knew she would end it the day he refused to stop and help someone who was stranded, in the rain, with a puncture.)
She had a little outreach programme, in which she invited lost souls, as she called them - the recently bereaved, the generally lonely, the guy who'd come to fix our dishwasher whose mother was dying of cancer - for Sunday dinners with our family. She ran for the Oregon State Legislature under the slogan "We Need Anita", winning the Democratic primary but losing in the general election. And, she continued to stage Christmases for us, ever and obviously grateful for what she had - her health, her children, her parents.
As the last of us grew up and moved away, and she herself moved back to the east coast, Christmas became a moveable feast. The most memorable of these she hosted in 1984 at the house of her own parents - Fanny and Tony - who were by then in their mid-eighties and growing senile. My mother had insisted on inviting to dinner Fanny's slightly mad older sister Alice, with whom Fanny tended to fight, and Alice's somewhat odd daughter Marilyn. My sister, who was introducing to the family for the first time the man she thought she might marry, was filled with foreboding.
Alice, upon arriving at the house, parked herself in a rocking chair and began drinking heavily and singing Christmas carols in a squeaky off-key voice. When my mother announced that it was time for us to sit down to dinner, Alice refused, saying, "I don't want to eat, I just want to drink." As she continued singing, Tony, normally a model of polite reserve, said, "You sound like a sick cow."
When we had all - minus Alice - begun to eat dinner, the phone rang downstairs and my mother left to answer it. In her absence, our thin veneer of civilisation began to disintegrate. Fanny started repeating, in a stage whisper and while nodding in Alice's direction, "I didn't realise she was this far gone." She also kept saying, "Nita, this is the best chicken ..." prompting Tony to reply, each time, "It isn't chicken, it's turkey." Fanny would then look to my mother for clarification, realise that she wasn't there, and say, "Where's Nita?" My mother was still on the phone (with, it turned out, her former mother-in-law).
My sister's boyfriend was laughing a lot, prompting Fanny to say, "I like him, he's always smiling." In the corner, Alice sang and drank, emerging from her reverie after Fanny's umpteenth, "I didn't realise she was so far gone," to counter, "Well, at least I know the difference between turkey and chicken." Alice then got up from her rocker and went into the hallway and stood by the top of the stairs, as though to call down to my mother. As she was rather unsteady on her legs, due to age and too many cocktails, we all happened to be watching her closely at the moment she pulled down her purple polyester pants and squatted slightly, preparing to relieve herself on the carpet. Her daughter rushed to grab her, then led her, her pants puddled around her ankles, through the small living room where we were eating. None of us said a word as the tiny dimpled bottom passed our table. My sister, in her worst imaginings, had not pictured this.
My mother is now in her eighties herself. She lives in Florida, with her beloved second husband, in what is called a continuing care or assisted living retirement community. It's like a cross between a cruise ship and an American college dormitory. There are all the activities one might expect - shuffleboard and bridge and Sew and Tell - but there is also a Great Books discussion series, rotating talks given by the residents on subjects such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a continuous succession of cocktail parties.
This year, my mother is acting in the annual Christmas skit. It's called Can This Marriage Be Saved?- an allusion to a column that ran in the Ladies Home Journal in the 1950s. Santa and Mrs Claus are having marital problems (Santa has had a one-night stand with a "hussy"), and my mother plays a friend who is trying to help Mrs Claus spice up her marriage. Her advice is that she wrap her naked self in cling film and greet Santa in the evening so attired. Retirement communities are not what they used to be.
My mother has three performances to get through before Christmas. Come Christmas day, she will go for her half-hour morning swim. She will have Christmas dinner with her husband's family. She will phone us, wherever we are, or we will phone her. Each of us will be visited by memories of Christmases past, of the years she took that botched and cumbersome thing that was our family - with its psychosis and its burgeoning addictions, all its myriad uncertainties and its "little reverses" - and made of it a safe, loving, and by no means unsatisfactory, place to be.
My sister and her husband will recall (they cannot help it) the Christmas Aunt Alice dropped her pants. What happened after Alice left the house was that my mother returned from downstairs and rejoined us at the table, oblivious to all that had transpired while she'd been on the phone. We finished our "chicken" without further incident. What my sister will remember, all these year later, is not so much that it was a Christmas my mother presided over, but how quickly things had fallen apart in her absence.
Molly McCloskey is the author of two collections of short stories and a novel. She is currently at work on a non-fiction narrative concerning schizophrenia and the family.