Daughter of the Queen of Sheba Read online

  On Christmas morning, the front door flung open with an "I'm here!" And she was. Exultant reverberations as we yodeled, whooped "I knew it." Running, cursing the pine needles pricking through our socks. My mother's head appeared first, covered with a little black felt flapper's cloche bristling with rhinestones. She peered around the door like a child. "It's me," she shouted, in gleeful certainty. "I've been gone exactly four days, four hours, and four minutes! Whoever thought I was dead, raise your right hands!"

  An elf, she hopped into the room making a star turn into the assemblage, delighted at her own entrance. She looked a bit like Liza Minnelli about to appear at the Kit Kat Klub. She had on a new pink velvet quilted jacket and slinky black leather pants, and she walked with a stage strut. She was thin, terribly thin, and her eyes were piercingly bright. Perhaps the rhinestones on her hat were glinting in her eyes.

  "Did you miss me?" she trilled. "Hey, girls, how do you like the house? Isn't it a superdoozer? Where's the party? Were you worried? I hope you had some fun while I was gone at least. It's wild, isn't it," she said, spinning her arms out and talking as if to birds or house pets, in singsong. "I brought the crazy house to us this time, girls, so I don't have to go there. La-di-da. Who made the kruns kuchen for breakfast? Don't tell me Mabel did. With lard instead of butter, I bet! Or squirrel fat. Dee-lish-ee-oso. Hey, Mabel, did Frank Sinatra call? I talked to him yesterday. Gosh, I've been so busy I've been almost out of my mind." She slapped her thighs at that joke, and her laugh, vaulted and shrill, made me want to pop her one right in the kisser.

  "This is my party house, girls, and you were all invited," my mother sang. "Only none of my friends came because I haven't got any friends. Not one in the whole wide world on the planet Earth," she said, more slowly. "And I worked so hard, hours and hours and hours. And then I cried and cried." Her jaw quavered and tears rimmed her eyes. This is the isolation of the lunatic. Can you hear those syllables in the distance where her language fractures and returns to you? Words are breaking on a barrier reef. She is the guest of honor at the party where no one will honor her, she has sunk below the surface and cannot understand the speech of those who are in the world above her. She is an exile, and when I look at her crying, I suffer her sense of solipsism, an iris of pain, opening and shutting.

  My mother's demented world had but one real being, herself, and even we children were shadows, touching her sometimes just enough for her to feel the pain that delusion embalmed. At such times, the mania slipped away for a moment and the truth of her existence left her shocked and reeling.

  "Am I dreaming?" she'd say, in horror. "What is happening to me? Why can't I wake up?" Then she'd slip off again.

  "But anyway," my mother continued, brightening, "you wouldn't believe how well my new business is going. International demand. I'm a millionaire already," she bragged, fanning out business cards she had undoubtedly collected in hotel lobbies and bars. I winced. Ever since her divorce from my stepfather six years before, my mother had been trying hard to invest her alimony wisely. But she was on a first-name basis with guys called Earl or Champ, guys whose names belonged on dog collars, who would tell her things like, "Dolores, are we not having fun? Isn't this life on the edge? I've got a limited real estate partnership here in a shopping mall in Omaha, and, Dolores, before it melts like butter in July, invest. You could make a killing." My mother studied their brochures, the butter melted, the reports of dividends were always good, and she bought. But what the Earls and Champs didn't see was how she spent her daytime hours—waiting tables, punching clocks, long drudging shifts with cloddish bosses just out of trade school who thought of an older woman employee as a piece of furniture. She'd been a night hotel clerk; a Mary Kay lady; a waitress in a theme restaurant, made to wear an abbreviated train conductor's outfit when she was past forty. This was not the life she'd dreamed of as a doctor's wife. And yet my mother tried hard to embrace her freedom. She had a million schemes for making money. In the late seventies she'd been a diet counselor at a weight loss clinic, but as the mania deepened had told a client that she looked like a walrus. The management laid her off. "And I bet that the gal did look like a hippo too," my grandmother had said loyally. "Everyone's envious of your mother's cute figure."

  Ah, well, to hell with it all, I thought. My mother pranced about the room like little Gloria Vanderbilt, happy at last. Oblivion has its comforts, and the miracle of plastic belied our penury that Christmas morning. A cornucopia of gifts and packages spilled from my mothers arms, rainbow colors, bows in the shapes of animals. She was Mother Christmas, and I prayed that I'd be able to find the receipts so I could take everything back to the stores. There was a Mont Blanc pen for my former stepfather, and a silver humidor from Dunhill of London for Alfred, complete with hand-rolled cigars that smelled as if you'd light them in a penthouse, thickly sweet and redolent of secrets. There were pinky finger signet rings, gold-plated, for my sisters and me, each of our first initials lovingly entwined with the last initial in Alfred's name. JP. KP. SP. The rings winked at me from their boxes, salaciously suggesting, Isn't this a gas? She was flat broke and because she'd had these useless rings engraved, there'd be no refund! I forgot to play along.

  "Can these go back?" I demanded loudly.

  "Go back where, Jack?" my mother asked. "They're gifts from Alfred, who probably got them in Switzerland on one of his travels. We've set a date—the wedding's in June. I do hope you'll all be able to take time out from your busy schedules to attend. I want us all to be such good friends. Mabel, you can be the flower girl!" she said to my grandmother, plunking a sticky bow on her gray wicket of hair.

  "And, Jack, you give the toast and butter!" my mother continued merrily. My grandmother swiveled her beribboned head toward my mother. After Mabel had reported my mother's delusions to me, she seemed to believe that she had no right to intervene, a belief my mother shared. Or maybe like the rest of us, Mabel couldn't wait to see what would happen next. Raise the curtain on the next act.

  It was Christmas. Easy enough to pour the coffee and don gifts of gold underwear over our blue jeans, ask Dolores the name of the hotel she intended to buy on St. Kitts. Easy enough to listen to my mother gabble about how she and Alfred the imaginary lover would honeymoon in Tahiti while Alfred the Christmas tree shed more needles and Mabel bit into one of the anchovy cookies.

  "Ain't so bad," she said, wiping her hand on her mouth.

  "Thanks," said Dolores, truly pleased. And then my mother swooned onto the sofa. I thought of Lear, the moors, the raveled sleeve of care knitted up by sleep. If sleep knits up care, then lunatics are in sleeveless chemises. My mothers eyes were like paint on a macabre mask, her penciled eyebrows like thunderbolts. Her lips moved. From her mouth came the fetid breath of someone whose body has begun to starve and feed on itself for nutrition. The skin sank below her cheekbones. I bent down and traced them with my fingers; they stuck out like small cliffs. Such good cheekbones, elemental ridges of rock. Combs in her hair, hair falling out from vitamin loss. I methodically went through her wallet, confiscating keys and credit cards and collecting receipts—good thing she was such a meticulous saver, I'd have no trouble returning most of the things—and found her tab from the only seriously expensive hotel in Milwaukee. No decent food, no drink, just desserts and manicures. And a plane ticket, one way to Las Vegas dated two days before, when the airport had been closed. Bless the snow.

  That evening, I toted up the damage of the past several months. The knife feint at my sister in November. Then there was my mother's faked car accident and her suicidal feelings just before she disappeared. Several ugly welts puckered the car. A good enough case to phone the county sheriff and mental hospital, to punch through the recorded messages to the incoming notetaker who would start the slow, desultory relay to fetch my mother. I made the call the next morning, the day after Christmas, idly snapping through the place cards for her imaginary party as if it were a full playing deck. My fingers searched for the Red Queen. I took the
cards with her name and my name, hers with a flower and mine with a maple leaf. I have kept them along with so many other things as souvenirs, an assortment of ephemera.

  By noon, a patrol car was outside the door. A deputy sheriff and a heavyset matron knocked on the door like undertakers. They were the plague wardens, bring out your dead. My mother sat primly on a stiff-backed chair beneath several just finished oil crayon pictures of imaginary rendezvous with Alfred. Alfreds face looked like a child's drawing of a turkey. And as always, there were several pictures of a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman. Who, I've never known. Dolores herself? Me, Mabel, Mary Baker Eddy? Deidre of the Sorrows, crying from a distant Irish shore, the captive taken against her will? My mother had taped the pictures on the wall. She looked at the sheriff's deputy, turning a full-wattage smile on him. Lipstick, like bits of velvet, stuck to her teeth.

  "My girls make up double whoppers sometimes," she told the deputy, grimacing at him, meaning it to be fetching. "Do you have children? You know how they invent? Well, my daughters are geniuses. I invented them, you know, my three little geniuses. And especially this big genius here." She shot me a look from the abattoir in her head.

  The deputy, with his laconic face, moved closer to her.

  "Hey, Scrooge, ya big lug, why don'tcha get a little Christmas spirit, for crying out loud?" My mother tried to pin a battery-operated Santa on the deputy, a Santa whose nose blinked when you pulled his chain. "I hope your wife likes it, buster," she said to him in Deidre's voice, deep and low. Then an octave higher: "Why don't you wear it to the bin? Maybe you'll get a better room if they think you're good for a few laughs."

  But the matron had my mother upstairs packing in no time. I would have thought her job the most unenviable in the world, except perhaps that it afforded her the pleasure of locking up pretentious kooks like my mother. This woman had a fullback's stance of alertness, and she wore a uniform that my mother described as dead-leaf brown. "You ought to brighten up with some electric pastels," my mother continued. "I'm a couture dress designer and a diet counselor. I could help you, even in your whalelike condition. You could wear hot pants and get the man you love!"

  So we got my mother ready. She packed her drawings of Alfred, her Bible with the pages painted over and religious medals sewn to the cover, and the Mary Baker Eddy reader with bobby pins marking the good phrases. She also insisted on taking her enormous topaz cocktail ring, which I correctly predicted someone would steal (surely not the matron?), and a large spray bottle of Estee Lauder's White Linen. She had on that morning a large, ebony crucifix with a silver Christ from our trip to Mexico in 1964, which she wore around her waist like a monk. Around her head, she tied a scarf, harem style, so that you could see nothing but her eyes. "I don't want any television cameras," my mother said.

  For a moment I actually believed I'd see reporters out in the snow, St. Bernards with Leicas. My mother submitted to handcuffs with a theatrical flourish. I felt as if I were sending an errant child to reform school for the crime of stealing a few apples. I knew the county hospital. It did not practice the subtler arts of the mental health profession—we could not afford them. Then there was my mother's resistance to consider. She would not voluntarily sign herself in anywhere. She distrusted all doctors, denied she was ill, until we came to rely on the most medieval of methods to shackle her back to sanity. Her fierce resistance complicated a proper diagnosis for decades. I think of restraints, straitjackets, endless notes, and my childlike mother. She was sitting up very straight in the patrol car, as though no child with such bearing could possibly be guilty of the crimes she was accused of. From the rear, she looked perhaps twelve, the age I had been the first time she made such a journey. Now it was I who was locking my mother up, and I wasn't even going along for the ride.

  The notetakers write in a flat hand and with flatter judgment, making pronouncements about the patients as they are checked in. "Patient admitted 12:10 pm, Dec. 26th, 1979. Patient's personal belongings include one topaz evening ring, a solitaire, one painted Bible, six hair combs, a Christian Science prayer book, various perfume vials and drawings." A few good evening clothes, in case the hospital served cocktails. "Patient, an undernourished 49-year-old female, says attendant has face like a badger and should bury it," the notes say. "Patient says she is member of the Milwaukee Mafia and will carry out pistol-whipping on all who wear masks over prying eyes."

  I want them selfishly, all her words, all these utterances that would seem so Lewis Carroll if only they belonged to him and not my mother. And yet I admire her pride. Her words are jumbled with Haldol and thickened with Thorazine. Her hallucinations gurgle into my ears, chugging through the surf of antipsychotic drugs. Her brain is a bubbling Molotov cocktail. When it explodes, my mother raves. After one hospitalization, she swears that she is put into a small, closed-front rubber room with only a drain in the floor for her bodily functions and a stinking mattress. "They beat me," she wrote. "They called their 'treatment' stupid craft projects." She spent thousands unsucessfully suing after that stay. Whatever the hospital care, however broad or clumsy in its approach, however overprescribed and inept the treatment, I seldom asked questions. I would tell myself that as long as she was locked away, she could sink no further, that we had all been in danger, that our faces were targets in her eyes and that there had been no other choice. Better to dose and even overdose and restrain her, and we'd pick up the pieces later. But on reading the reports from scattered handfuls of hospitalizations, from the consistent thrum of horror in my mother's reminiscences, I've come to realize that the torment begins as the sanity returns. In her delusions, my mother fancied above all else that she had dignity and power. She could fly beyond mortal realms to inhabit all the shining positions of influence that she lacked in the real world. In the hospital, layer upon layer of delusions were peeled back to reveal the designs of human vagary. To be only human caused fear, and doubt and mortality, and the dead weight of having run out of dreams.

  That night, after my mother had been taken to the hospital, I had the nightmare I have so often waked from as though someone had just walked through my heart, as if it were a jungle. My mother is lying at the bottom of a great deep well near crumbling Mayan ruins that could be those of Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán. She is lying where a high priest has thrown her. I see her submerged in clear green luminescent water, her hands outstretched like the carving of a little Madonna, beseeching. My mother is about twelve, and like me at that age she has long hair, so long that it weaves with the current and is as alive and sinuous as she is dead. Her waxen corpse looks nothing like either of us but portrays us both. When I dream this dream I know that I must save the girl, my mother, though she is already plainly dead, perhaps never even born, a pink fetus in a bell jar. Her eyes are closed and her skin is as translucent as an opal, and on the whole of her pale, milky body she wears only a necklace of heavy silver icons. I see the coral organs of her liver and heart sliding away underneath her crystalline skin. I am aware that if I can bring this girl to the surface of the water, then she will wake. I dive down toward the girl; I know she is my own flesh. I touch her ivory skin but can get no grip. I see the organs float like herbs in jars of oil. She is her own reliquary. My hands slip on wax skin; I can't move her. She is the weight of ages, a bone of the earth, a root from below. I awake, covered in sweat, head tossing on the pillow. I am awake, but in the darkness she lies at the bottom of the deep shining green well, faintly smiling and immortal. I am at the surface, peering down at her. My talisman.

  My mother was released after more than a month in the Menomenee County Hospital in late January 1980.I had no time to pay proper attention to her treatment. I was busy with the radio show seven days a week. Mabel said the hospital people reported that Dolores was no longer raving. And she wasn't. She was as docile as an altar girl in her servitude, whacked out on a chalice full of antipsychotics. We'd arranged to meet in Gimbels department store, where she had a new job in Junior Separates. She was desperate t
o get work to begin paying off the debts of illness and as usual had taken anything she could get. Before she saw me, I spotted her by the clothing racks. Her face was dead and white; the Thorazine had bloated her by a couple dozen pounds. Her flesh looked as if she'd been preserved in formaldehyde. Her swollen ankles called to mind my grandmother's, puffing out over flat soles. A customer was berating my mother, who waddled and lowered her head. She was not a queen but a beast of burden. She had turned old.

  "Christ," the customer bitched to my mother. "Can't you read the sizes? What country are you from? Do I look like I wear a size eight?" My mother was staring at the horrible clothing, clothing so ugly I knew she hated touching it. She was scratching absently at a nonexistent itch. She moved slowly to another rack, trying to find the customer's right size, her own bearings, the entrance where she'd come in. Trying to find out who she was. And it struck me as a more disturbing sight than when she had been ill.