1985

The phone rang at about two o'clock in the afternoon. My mother, my baby so,Will, and I had already eaten lunch although the food was cold by the time we finally decided that Daddy was not going to be joining us. Will and I had come for our weekly visit to see Mother and Daddy, and Daddy always loved that time with his grandson.

"That must be Daddy," I said as I reached for the phone. "Hello?"

"Let me speak to your mother."

"What's wrong, Daddy?"

"Let me speak to your mother."

"Are you okay?"

"I SAID LET ME SPEAK TO YOUR MOTHER!"

Bewildered, I handed the phone to Mother. "Daddy wants to speak to you."

Fear pinched the corners of  her eyes and her body stiffened. Mother looked at the cold black receiver as if it were some foreign object with which she was totally unfamiliar. Slowly she placed it to her ear but only breathed into it, stalling for one last second before hearing that her life story was about to be rewritten in a whole new context. "Hello."

Foreboding slowly draped a dark shadow across Mother's countenance as she listened to her husband's one phone call from jail.   In my memory it is more of an overall impression of a life deflating as she listened one word, one revelation, at a time to his shameful, horrifying news. First fear registered. I know because it was my first gut-wrenching reaction. What could Daddy be saying to Mother to cause her to turn so suddenly pale? Then her anger collided with her mounting premonition like the violent splashing of a mighty rushing waterfall as it beats down suddenly on the water below.

"I told you about this!" Steady - her voice was steady and dead.

All the blood in my body rushed to my head, clanging and pulsing like the sound of cymbals reverberating in my ears and making me deaf. Too many thoughts barrelled into each other, each clambering to be heard and none making sense. Bang! She was right about Daddy! Clang! Bang! He's in jail! It's his one phone call! And then the cymbals calling out the alarm just clapped together in one incessant roar as my heart pounded its fury into my ears, making my face turn scarlet and my hands go all clammy. I could barely hear my mother as she vowed to her husband that she would not pick him up from jail.

Mother slammed the receiver down and the noise of it restored me to the nightmare in progress. I was not breathing - or swallowing. Catatonic, I dared my eyes to look at my mother's face. She was looking out through the bay window in her kitchen, staring stony-eyed at the January garden that was stark and stripped, in this season, of its former signs of life. All the years and months and days of her life were now defined by a call from jail; the clarion announcing she had been a fool all these years, and now, in the winter of her life, there seemed to exist no sun or nourishment with which to recover all now lost.

Quietly, treading lightly on this quaking, tenuous moment, I asked: "Are you all right?" An infinitely ridiculous question, but it was all I could possibly make my mouth actually say.

"He was arrested in the park with the young man from the church...." It took her the length of the whole sentence to look my direction as if breaking her gaze with the garden would make time flow again, but this time toward an unthinkable, bottomless sadness. Becoming more fully aware of the ramifications of Daddy's transgression, Mother became more animated and indignant. "I told him about this! Remember, Kay? I warned him about this!"

She had warned him. I knew. I could not say it, though. I could not speak. The words I had heard were having a difficult time forming an idea in my head. They kept sliding off the surface of my brain.

Mother slowly lowered herself into a kitchen chair, bracing herself, hands on the table, as if she weighed several hundred pounds. "The police had seen him in the park with the boy before. So, today, when he pulled in, they watched him." Mother sighed so deeply then that I worried she would not draw in another breath. Words and ideas were colliding in her mind, too; for, to say the words meant to picture the act. The words gave birth to a scene so completely unregenerate as to be nearly unbearable. Her heart desperately wished that things unspoken could therefore be things not done.

"He and the boy were....were.." Her voice trailed off. She looked down at the floor.

"Mother, don't say it. You don't have to... I know what they were doing."

There were no tears. No watering the wound. Just profound, ineffable, silent grief. "I don't want to pick him up from jail," Mother said. " I don't ever want to see him again."

"I know, Mother." Inane response. Too stunned to think of more.

So, we both reached for the dirty lunch dishes. The whooshing of running water, the friendly clanking of plates, the clean smell of sudsy bubbles, all elements of a sudden need for ablution. With my son napping, we vacuumed, dusted, fluffed and mopped; straightened, re-straightened, windexed and bleached. We cleaned! We cleansed. We set straight what could be set straight.

Back to the matter at hand. A mess we could not fix. A man we were not capable of cleansing; a situation we could not set right if we tried for the rest of our lives. I wiped a wayward bang from my eyes with my bleach-scented hand and told my mother I would go get my father. "Mother, if he were our pet at the pound, someone would still have to pick him up. We cannot just leave him there. I don't have to bring him home, but I will go for him and take him somewhere."

I got my sleepy-eyed boy from the bedroom, changed his diaper, and got ready to head to the car. To my surprise, my mother was dressed and ready when I started toward the front door. Ever the lady, she had donned a fuchsia-colored shirt, pulled on a pair of dark pants, added earrings and lathered on pink lipstick. She always wore little heels - cleaned house like the mother in "Father Knows Best." Jaws set, heads up, hearts thumping, we followed our intuition to my automobile and somehow made the journey to jail.

About the drive there I remember nothing. Depended on emotional auto-pilot. Stomach cringing, mind swirling, will wavering, heart breaking, feet heavy and soul fearing, I led the way into the jail where our footsteps clunk-clunked too loudly on the shiny floors that led right up to the lawyer standing ready to greet us. Mother, as it turned out, had called him just before we left the house. Bless him. Had he not been right there, we both probably would have bolted and collapsed on the jailhouse steps.

Niceties may have been exchanged; some words of direction from the lawyer uttered. All is overshadowed in my memory by the sight of my broken, faltering father coming from his cell guided by two deputies, one on either side. Daddy's hands formed a vee in front of him, as he was still handcuffed. His head was down and his footfall heavy and slogging as if his shoes were filled with mud. When he neared us, shame threw Daddy's arms over his face and an involuntary wail exploded from his mouth emerging from some deep cavern of pain now discovered and afire. It was the sound of great, definitive sorrow; primal, gut-wrenching, unabashed.

"I loved him!" Daddy cried. "I loved him!"

And my mother stood there mocked. She had felt this journey into purgatory her duty to my father; he had with three words turned it into hell. "I loved him." And what of her?