Toby museum

Laurie
Toby museum
Starbucks, April 24, 2008

Eight weeks before my mother dies, she’s admitted to the hospital with mysterious bleeding. Bladder cancer is suspected, but I don’t believe she has it. I think she’ll return to her apartment, that I’ll see her again, that she’ll meet Richard, even if she has no idea who we are. She doesn't have cancer, it turns out. She dies at home in her bed, approaching ninety-three.

“She’s gone,” Ellen says on the phone, driving to Toby’s apartment. Primrose arrived after Maureen, another aide, called to say she couldn’t arouse Toby from sleep. After her stroke, she learned she had fibrosis of the lung, which is incurable and untreatable. It was supposed to have finished her a long time ago, and finally it did. According to the coroner, she suffocated in her own fluids.

Richard speaks about two types of museums. The kind like Noah’s Ark that aim to exhibit samples of everything that exists, such as The Museum of Natural History in New York. And memory palaces: idiosyncratic collections commemorating local history you find in any small town. Or apartment.

I sleep in Toby's bed for three weeks, organizing her things. When Ellen and I learn that her furniture has value—a lamp, for instance, is designed by Gino Sarfatti—I vote to auction it, including a small table I’ve thought of keeping—preferring capital that floats. Toby wore a deco diamond ring on her left pinky that I would follow as her hand swept this way and that. “You’ll have it when I’m dead,” she would say, smiling, unable to imagine her extinction, same as everybody. I didn’t understand why she was wearing it in the hospital. I thought it might give her comfort so I didn’t remove it for safe keeping. When it was stolen, I felt like fainting, realizing I’d fallen for the same old con.

I make my way through Toby’s freezer, cooking chicken pieces that look like arthritic fingers. I pack up a set of black, silver-rimmed plates, service for twelve, never used. Outside, my mother still skitters along 58th Street, still stands in front of the Plaza Hotel on the red carpet secured with brass rivets, still chats with the doorman while scanning the distance for the dot that is me. She’s worried I’ve been abducted by aliens. I should be so lucky.

My mother wouldn't have cared about the garbage bags stuffed with her clothes, still in plastic from the cleaners though some with stains, and her chipped, everyday plates with the autumn leaf design worn faint. I throw away a dozen pairs of Easy Spirit shoes, character style, with a strap across the instep. She wouldn't have minded looking into the wilderness of her closets and drawers, awaiting their next pilgrims. I see her at the dining table with the harlequin inlays, above her the modernist chandelier, a burst of twelve tulip fixtures selected by Julie Stein, the interior decorator she trotted behind in the late 1950’s when our summer cottage was converted into an all-year-round house. Toby is bent over a book resting on a stand, a conservative talk show blasting from the radio.

Eight months before she dies, she’s admitted to St. Luke’s Hospital after a psychiatrist deems her in crisis. The aim is to get her started on a new mood stabilizer—the previous ones having failed. Otherwise, her aides can’t stay on the job. My sister is fed up with Toby, who is screaming pretty much all the time. Ellen is disowning her mother with the freedom of the loved child. But Toby touches me and reminds me of Al Swearingen, the sympathetic monster at the center of the HBO series Deadwood, who also reminds me of myself. Played by British actor Ian McShane, his dark eyes ringed with pain, he is always stealing himself for the next brutality he is going to unleash on his world, as if his savagery is against his will, as if his cruelty is a tyrant driving the obliging but reluctant servant that is also him to carry out his deeds.

I call my mother on her 92nd birthday, and she sounds groggy but there. “I disappointed you by not giving you money and by calling Richard ‘a poor slob.’”

“Why did you say that?”

“I didn’t mean anything. I say the same things about my son-in-law.”

“You’ve known Mark for forty years. You’ve never even met Richard.”

“Yes, you’re right.”

She seems in a place where she can see herself more clearly, even as she slips away.

In Arizona, Richard and I stand on our patio and watch lightning fracture the black sky. Pollack flings of furious beauty skip across the night, and the darkness shudders like a body waking from the dead. I squeal with each illumination, night becoming day in a confusion of the natural order. “Everything gets rubbed,” Richard says, looking up at the crackling night.

I propose we write about the concept of the muse, a marble thought that’s been tumbling in my head. A professor friend has been teaching my work and has referred to Toby as my muse. At first I shove the idea away, but it takes root and I see that every piece I have written about longing—and isn’t everything we write about love or something hurting what we love?—starts with an ache for my mother. It has the shape of shadow moving over desert mountains, across giant saguaro cacti with their arms outstretched, across higgledy-piggeldy rocks, some red colored, some blackened and inscribed. It is a blank sky—like a brain before it’s marked with impressions.