It was 10:50 p.m.
and I peddled my exercise bike in front of the TV. House Hunters International occupied my brain so I could peddle for the full forty minutes. The phone rang. The black box announcing
caller ID blinked onto the TV screen. Private number.
“It’s late,” I
said out loud. “Who’s calling?” I jumped off my seat, ran to the phone, and
grabbed the handset just before it went to voice mail.
“Hello?”
“It’s Paul,” the
voice said.
I was confused.
Paul? Who?
“My mother, you
know, she talked to you on the phone. She died. She had medical problems.”
His mother died?
Was it someone from the neighborhood, letting me, the HOA president, know of
someone’s death? Was it someone from work or someone I had known in Syracuse? Was
it the wrong number? Then I knew. My cousin Maria died.
I said, “I’m so
very sorry.” Then I repeated it three more times. Shock rendered me
verbally challenged. I could tell he wanted to get off the phone. He wasn’t
comfortable. “Will you promise to call me with the details of the funeral? We
can’t make it out, but I’d like to know.”
“Yes, uh,
good-bye,” he said as he hung up.
I went upstairs,
knocked on the man room door, pushed it open, and looked at Ronald sitting in
the dark at his computer with his headphones on.
“Maria is dead,” I
said.
When his sister
Sylvia died, I said the same thing. “Sylvia is dead.” I repeated it when his
nephew Yancy committed suicide. “Yancy is dead.” I can’t think of any other way
to deliver such a message. He delivered the passing of his grandmother,
cousin, sister-in-law, and uncle in much softer words.
The day after
Maria died, we each had messages on our cell phones when we got out of the
movie. Ronald’s father was at the hospital. I felt a surge of fear. “What
else?” I asked myself. “Doesn’t all bad news happen in threes?” I tiptoed
through the next few hours waiting for more bad news but my father-in-law was
sent home with instructions to call his doctor.
I always knew I
had two cousins in California, but I didn’t KNOW them. My family has a legacy
of estrangement, and my father’s brother Danny was estranged from the family
just as my father was estranged on and off in his life, just as I’ve been
estranged from my family and Ronald has been estranged from his family.
My father and his
brother committed the ultimate sin, but I was never sure what the sin was
exactly. Either it was that they had each married non-Italians or it was simply
that they had married at all, as none of the other siblings did. Well, Lenny
did. He got a woman pregnant and married her, but the marriage was annulled
shortly after it began, and no one spoke of the woman or the son she bore ever
again.
My father stayed physically
close by the family, remaining in Albany, and taking his lashes as they were handed
out. Danny moved across the country and left no forwarding address. When my
grandfather died, Aunt Josephine called directory assistance to locate
Danny to let him know.
After her father
died, Aunt Josephine took a trip to California to meet Danny and his family.
She came back with stories. She lambasted Danny’s wife and said she was a
spender and she vacuumed in the nude. She was a terrible person, she emphasized
over and over, and as I listened, a young teen with waist-length hair, wire rimmed
glasses, hip-hugger bell bottoms, and midriff tops, I added a parentheses at
the conclusion of the sentence each time she said it: (like your mother). She
lambasted my mother, too, carrying on the family legacy of insularity.
Estrangement hung
like heavy, dusty drapes around our lives. No one ever thought to take the damn
things down, toss them out, and replace them with something that let the light
in.
First my father
died, then another brother Jimmy died just three months later, then my mother
(read about my mother’s passing in
Shadesof Blue), and then Danny’s wife. After Danny’s wife died, Aunt Josephine
stayed in touch with Danny more regularly. Danny flew to Albany each July, the only month he considered
the place warm enough, to visit for a week. One year I suggested Ronald, Cara,
Mackenzie, and I drive to Albany and spend the day so we could meet Uncle
Danny, but Aunt Josephine didn't think it would be a good idea.
I wondered if she
thought our interracial relationship might be too shocking. Yet Danny’s grandchildren
were half Mexican.
Two more brothers
died, Rocco and Lenny. I attended Rocco’s funeral, but Ronald didn’t come.
Lenny was loud and brash just prior to the funeral Mass. He suggested my
brother Rocco, named the same as the uncle who had just passed, was not dressed
appropriately to be a pallbearer. It had to do with his beard and his
hat and his faded corduroy jacket with the patches on the elbows. But there
were only three pallbearers as it was, so Lenny had to relent. At a lunch after
the graveside service, he looked at me across the table and demanded, “Which
one are you?”
“I’m Dianne,” I
answered. He didn’t know us by name because he referred to us as “the retards”
when we were growing up, as in “if you didn’t have that wife and all the
retards, you’d be doing fine.” He was the uncle who married but had the
marriage annulled, and I am certain he did not keep tabs on his son or pay any
support.
Some years later I
attended Lenny’s funeral, too. The only attendees were my biker brother Andy
dressed in his leather Harley Davidson vest, Andy’s second wife, two of his
biker friends, dressed much the same as my brother and recruited to be pallbearers,
Aunt Josephine, my black husband Ronald, dressed “appropriately” in a suit to
be pallbearer number four, and me.
I leaned over and quietly
said to Ronald, “See? God has a sense of humor.”
I met my cousin
Maria by phone when Aunt Josephine died. I was the executor of Aunt Josephine’s
estate, which was ironic because many years before my mother had told me that
Aunt Josephine had cut me out of her will. It was during my first estrangement
from my family and had to do with the fact that Ronald was black.
I had begun
speaking to Uncle Danny a couple of months earlier to let him know that Aunt
Josephine had a stroke and had lain on her floor for four days before I called
her and then called 911 when she didn’t answer. After my initial call, I called
him about once a week to update him on her progress.
Danny and I had
some nice conversations. But one time he told me he had cancer, something he
had not told Aunt Josephine because he didn’t want to upset her. His voice was
mellow, each word chosen carefully. He was nothing like Lenny who had demanded
to know which one I was years before at Uncle Rocco’s funeral. My brother Andy
recently told me that Danny, whom he met during one of those July visits to
Albany, looked like Lenny but acted more like Rocco, quiet and reserved.
One day I called Danny
to check on him, and Maria answered the phone. I was on my way home from work,
and we talked the whole way, and then some more as I sat in the driveway. She
complained about taking care of her father, and how tired she was. I told her I
wished there was something I could do, and she told me to come out and spend a
few weeks taking care of him so she could have a break.
“I work,” I said.
She didn’t. I don’t think she ever did. Aunt Josephine was good at character
assassination, and she had assassinated Maria’s character many times over. Her
character flaws included drugs, obesity, theft, and older Mexican men.
In the year or so
before her stroke, Aunt Josephine brought up her will on occasion during our
weekly calls, and I never wanted to talk about it. Years before when she claimed to have cut me out of it if I
didn’t break up with Ronald, I chose him over inheritance so I really didn’t
have much interest. Rather I liked speaking to her about some of everything
like bad drivers and criminals and how no one had respect any more. I didn’t
want to think about her dying. I’d already seen too many people die, and I have
abandonment issues, so every time someone dies I take it personally.
Besides I told her
the Church was the right and good heir of her money, but she was having none of
it. She wanted to know what I thought about setting up a trust fund for Maria.
She didn’t think she could handle getting so much money at once. After all, she
reminded me, she had stolen credit cards and jewelry from her father’s
apartment. I still didn’t want to talk about it, and I had no concern with what
Maria might do with her inheritance, so I changed the subject and told her how
some stupid guy had cut me off on the way to work.
After I talked to
Maria about her father that time she began to call me regularly.
“She’s not high
functioning,” I told my sister when my sister and I were still speaking to one
another.
Then Danny died
just as my aunt’s will went into probate. Aunt Josephine thought she had fixed
Maria’s problem about money by naming Danny as the heir to her portion, but she
didn’t account for family dynamics and legacies. When my father died, my Uncle
Jimmy, his brother, died just three months later. My mother passed eighteen
months after my father’s death. Uncle Danny copied his brother Jimmy and died
three months after Aunt Josephine died. There are some strong emotions roiling
around in estranged families and dramatic events cause other equally dramatic
events to occur.
Maria was her
father’s sole heir. Her brother Danny had died in the ‘80s of AIDS. Aunt
Josephine had been sure to tell me that his “girlfriend” took care of him at
the end of his life.
“I don’t think he
was a homosexual,” she said, using the girlfriend as proof. Maybe she forgot
that she told me how his mother gushed over him that first time Aunt Josephine
went out there to visit, how mother and son stood at the closet together
picking out dresses to wear, and how his mother had more in common with him
than she did with Maria.
“Maybe,” I said.
There were legal
issues to resolve since Uncle Danny died while the will was in probate. Maria had
trouble understanding the paperwork.
I encouraged her to hire an attorney out there. She went to a legal aid
establishment instead, not like a non-profit legal aid, but a for profit that
was purposely established in a poor neighborhood. I tried to call the woman
assisting her a couple of times, and I found out she was not an attorney and
did not know what she was doing.
“I can’t pay more
money than I’m getting to get this done,” Maria said. She was ready to give up.
I asked my
attorney to find and hire an attorney to help her. He said he would take the
cost out of her portion of the inheritance. She got the letter from the hired attorney
that stated his fee. She blew up. She yelled at me on the phone. She wanted to
just return any money coming to her. I started laughing.
“Calm down,” I
said. “You misread the letter. You aren’t getting two thousand. That’s what the
attorney is getting. You are getting almost forty thousand.”
She laughed, too. Later,
when I paid out the estate and sent her the check, she called to tell me she
used some of the money to purchase a plot at Forest Lawn and a pre-paid
funeral. I didn’t want to talk about that either. It let me know she was
thinking about dying.
Instead we talked
about a lot other things, like movies and our kids and my husband Ronald. She
called Ronald “Whiney” but she never judged him for suffering from depression,
like a lot of family members did. She would tell me to hand him the phone and
she’d talk to him for an hour or more about stuff, anything that popped into
their heads. Ronald always felt better after the phone calls, especially when she
threatened to come to North Carolina and kick his ass.
She started
sending us stuff, too. I discovered Maria had made one of the afghans I had
taken from Aunt Josephine’s house when I was clearing it out to sell it. I told
her how much Ronald loved it; how he wrapped it around him when he was on his
computer in the man room. She asked me what my favorite color is, and soon a
beautiful red afghan was delivered to my doorstep.
Then other boxes
arrived. One was filled with toys for my dog Ru. After that he recognized the
pre-paid USPS boxes addressed to “The Haggins” (she never spelled our name
correctly), and he would run around them and bark, because he was sure they
were for him.
Once two boxes
arrived, and when I pushed them into the house from the porch, I heard the
contents knocking around. I opened the boxes and found piles of broken Hallmark
kitsch. They had been holiday
decorations like pumpkins and Santa Claus statues, but she had not used any
excelsior. She had just piled them into the boxes. Cara claimed some of the
pieces to use as props in a play she had written and was just about to perform.
It was about found pieces in a junkyard and the stories they told. The rest
went in the trash, but I made sure to call Maria and thank her.
She sent knitted,
fingerless gloves in black for Ronald and red for me. Each time I return to
Syracuse in the fall or winter, I throw one or two pairs into my suitcase.
There were six in each color, and I wonder what I will do when I have gone
through all of them. Maybe I will have to use the many pairs of knitted
slippers she sent.
Another day a box
of sixty knitted squares arrived. They were all different colors and patterns.
Mackenzie sewed them together, with the patience she has for such activities,
and she and Cara used the resulting quilt in one of their performances titled Eve at the River.
There were
handmade rugs of Easter Lilies and Cardinals, the backs rubberized in thick,
swirled patterns as if someone had used a palm to spread the goop on them. She
mailed five boxes of DVDs. She sent baby blankets for future grandchildren, stuffed
animals for every holiday, and a scary, blond, and blue-eyed doll. The stuffed animals line the dresser
top in the guest room. I had hopes she would visit one day.
I let Mackenzie
pick through the DVDs and take what she wanted, and I kept the rest for a while;
then threw them out. The doll sat on the kitchen island for a few days. I
couldn’t bring myself to throw it out. Ru was convinced it was for him. He
tried his best to reach the counter so he could abscond it. When I moved it to
the shelf in the coat closet, he sat vigil for a week, plotting and planning
his way to stealing it. He was sure it contained a squeaker like his other
toys, and he was in search and destroy mode. Every once in a while the doll
catches his eye when I am in the closet to grab a coat or take out the vacuum,
and he still has plans for it.
My siblings, Andy
and Peggy, and I helped Aunt Josephine clean out Uncle Lenny’s house, then we and
Ronald cleaned out Aunt Josephine’s house. At Uncle Lenny’s house, every time I
thought Aunt Josephine wasn’t looking, I told Andy to take as much stuff as
possible to the trash pile. We knew that everything she kept would someday have
to be sorted through again. And so it was.
Not only did she
have Uncle Lenny’s stuff, she also had sixty years worth of kitsch in her
house. We threw a lot of it out. I gave all the religious statues – the Infants
of Prague, Mary Mother of Jesus, and some other saints – to a friend. I gave
the set of Italian record albums from the 1940s to the healing priest who
visited my aunt at the nursing home. I let the attorney take a set of pots that
his daughter-in-law wanted to use in her classroom. Some of Andy’s friends helped, and I let them choose things
to take. I only kept a few things for memory including a pale green glass dish circa
1930s. It probably cost a dime when it was new.
I sent Maria a
package with a pair of diamond earrings that belonged to her mother. The
receipt for the resetting of the diamonds was folded into the tiny box I found
them in, and it had her mother’s name and address on it. I’m not sure how they
came into Aunt Josephine’s possession. Maybe Danny wanted to make sure they
were safe since Maria allegedly stole and sold some other pieces of her
mother’s jewelry.
Another time I
sent her photographs of Ronald, Cara, Mackenzie and me. Then I sent her some
knitting books. I also mailed her a photo album with the pictures Aunt
Josephine took on her first visit to California. Maria was about fourteen at
the time.
“I look like our
grandmother,” she said as we discussed the photographs. I tried to picture her
as a woman in her fifties. Neither one of us knew our grandmother. She had died
several years before we were born. I had seen photographs of her. I called her
the Queen of Hearts, the character from Alice
in Wonderland. She looked mean even if she was only 4’10”.
She and my mother
didn’t get along. She cursed my mother in Italian every time she saw her. My mother asked an Italian friend what
the curse meant, and her friend told her it translated as “I hope you burst.”
The next time my grandmother leveled it at her, my mother looked right into her
eyes (a definite downward stare) and said in English, “And I hope you burst,
too, all over your goddamned new carpet.”
I found my
grandmother’s death certificate as I cleaned out Aunt Josephine’s house. It
stated cause of death as a brain aneurysm.
Maria had
cataracts and knitting became difficult for her, so the packages stopped coming
a few years ago. She was nearly blind. I wondered what was happening when
things arrived with dropped stitches and messy backings. It took almost two
years for Medicaid to approve the surgery for just one eye. She waited and
waited for her other eye to be approved, but she would die before the surgery
was ever scheduled.
Maria had two
boys, now grown men, named Peter and Paul. I guess the old Mexican was their
father, and he had died long before she and I began talking. I don’t know if Maria
went to Church, but she was religious. I imagined if she had more boys, she
would have continued to name them after the Apostles. Matthew, Luke, Mark and
John, maybe Judas, though I can’t imagine the fate awaiting that child. I can’t remember the rest. I am
estranged from the Catholic Church, too.
I arranged to give
confession before Aunt Josephine’s funeral Mass. I knew how much she wanted me
back in the Church, and I loved the times when I was visiting and we walked
down her block together to the Church she had attended for sixty years to go to
Mass. Organized religion scares me in the way it attempts to control, but I’ve
always found Mass very comforting.
In the room where
the priest put on his vestments, I gave my confession. We did not sit in booths
with our vision obstructed by screens and darkness. We sat in chairs facing one
another out in the open. I started crying as soon as I uttered, “Bless me
Father for I have sinned.”
I was embarrassed
that I hadn’t given confession in thirty-five years, and that he could look
into my eyes and know if I were lying or telling the truth. And I was angry
that Aunt Josephine had abandoned me.
I partook of the
Body of Christ during Holy Communion but refused the Blood of Christ. They
didn’t let parishioners partake of the wine back when I went to Church as a
child, and I was shocked they allowed it in 2005, especially for an estranged
Catholic like me.
The priest and the
attorney convinced me to try St. Lucy’s Church in Syracuse. They were hoping
I’d wander back into the fold. I went one Sunday with a friend. The Church,
situated right in the middle of the housing projects Ronald grew up in, was a
progressive Church. Everyone was welcome to partake in Holy Communion. I didn’t
go up, and I never went back.
For the next few
years I donated money at Christmas to the school at Aunt Josephine’s Church in
memoriam.
Maria stopped
calling me sometime late in 2010. I didn’t receive a Christmas card from her. I
started calling her instead of her calling me. I left increasingly urgent voice
messages wondering what happened to her. I beseeched her sons that if they were
checking her messages would they please call me and let me know if she was
okay.
Finally, just as I
began searching the Los Angeles obits, she called me from the hospital, her
voice weak, her spirit deflated. She had sepsis, at least that is what I
surmised, as she had not the words to describe her illness, and had almost
died. I asked to speak directly to her son Paul (I’ve never spoken to Peter;
never heard him in the background as I had heard Paul countless times) because
he had told her I wouldn’t know who he was if he called me, so he didn’t. I
asked him to please call me in the future anytime his mother couldn’t. He
promised he would.
I remembered that
as I ran names through my head trying to think who was telling me his mother
was dead. I blamed it on the “private number” caller ID. I was furious at
myself for not recognizing him immediately. I decided I was not high
functioning.
The next day I
wondered if I had been as good a friend as Maria had been to me. I burned with
regret. I cried. Ronald assured me that she would not have received her
inheritance without my determined effort. Cara thought I had been a very good
friend indeed. Mackenzie felt sorry I had lost my cousin.
I’m still
wondering if I even know how to be a good friend.
Paul called to
tell me the details of the funeral. It sounds small and simple. I asked him how
he was doing, and he said he was okay. I asked him his last name. I didn’t know
it. He spelled it for me. Then I asked him if he planned to keep his mother’s
PO box and he said, yes.
I don’t know if I
can be a friend to Paul, but I know I’m going to try to be a good second cousin.
All else gets lost in the kitsch of our lives, and that’s how estrangement
happens.
Paul called me
again today, hours before I was going to post this on my blog page. He was
confused and angry with the cemetery staff. He wasn’t sure what he needed to do
to get everything straightened out.
I asked him if his brother was helping him, and he said he had spoken to
him once since Maria’s death, but he didn’t want to rely on him or call him
again. I surmised they are estranged.
He asked if I would
help him. I said, yes.
