When my father calls me at my apartment in New York to tell me my mother has died, I prepare to make the trip again. It’s not a surprise to either of us. I had just been down there. She’d been hospitalized: pneumonia. She was bleeding internally as well; in the hospital they discovered she had severe diverticulitis. But she got better. Her lungs cleared and the bleeding stopped, so we moved her to a convalescent home with neatly clipped lawns and tightly trimmed hedges. I flew back to the city on a Tuesday. She died the following Friday morning.

“Gideon,” my father’s voice on the phone says, “I’m afraid I’ve got bad news,” and of course I know what it is.

“When?” I ask. I can hear him breathing, over all those miles. I can hear the high faint whistle of his hearing aid.

“This morning. She was eighty-eight years old. She lived a good life.”

For a long time, I say nothing at all.

***

On the flight to Birmingham and the drive down to Hammond in my rental, I keep recalling a similar trip ten years before, when I had come down for my sister Celeste’s funeral. I hadn’t been back to visit but once since then, only one Christmas. I used as an excuse my extended stay in Cassis, in Provence, where I was working on a new play, but I was back in New York from time to time and it was difficult to keep that a secret.

“Tom Whitfield’s mother called and said you were back in the country last week,” my mother whined by transatlantic wire. Tom and I grew up together in Hammond, and he lived two buildings down on West End in Manhattan. “You didn’t even call. Why don’t you ever come home?”

“Because I don’t want to see him,” I said.

“Oh, Gideon,” she sighed. “Whatever am I going to do with you two?”

My mother still pretended my father and I were having a silly argument, just something between “the boys.” She knew better, of course. In her deepest heart, she knew, just as I did, that my father had murdered my sister, just as certainly as if he himself had wielded the razor Celeste used to slash her wrists. He would not let her live.

My younger sister was mentally deficient, “mildly retarded” it was called back in the late forties when she was diagnosed. I was four years older, eight or nine when we found out, and though my parents whispered a lot between themselves, and though neither of them ever sat me down and explained it to me, I knew.  I knew it from the way they acted, knew that our family had somehow been disgraced, that there was now something in our midst of which we should all be ashamed.

My father was a war hero. He was wounded in the South Pacific, at Peleliu. He lost his left hand, blown off at the wrist by a land mine. When he came home he wore on the end of his arm a strange chrome contraption like a hook with pincers. He strutted around town, holding the device above his head, proud of the sacrifice he had made, and he talked all the time about how his great grandfather had lost a leg at the Battle of Franklin up in Tennessee. He made speeches at the patriotic rallies at the Elks’ Club. But at night I heard him cursing and crying. I heard their voices in their bedroom, murmuring heatedly, sometimes raging, and I was frightened of him. I heard my mother crying, and I heard what sounded like my father hitting her. Sometimes she had marks on her face that she covered with makeup.

By the time the war was over, my father had developed political aspirations. He never talked to me about them, but I overheard him tell my mother on more than one occasion that he would someday be governor of Alabama. He started with the office of mayor of Hammond, which he won. Easily. The Westlake family had been in Hammond for four generations, counting me and Celeste, and we lived in one of the biggest, whitest houses in town. My father also owned a great many acres of land, practically a whole county, which he and his younger brother  —  killed in action in Europe during the Battle of the Bulge — had inherited from their father, my grandfather. Though my father claimed that the family had come out of the depression “land poor,” by the end of World War II — during which he had sold timber off thousands of acres — he had made quite a bit of money again, though how much I have no idea.

Celeste was a beautiful little girl, with a chubby body and soft brown eyes. She was bald until she was almost two, then her hair came out curly and dark, like our mother’s. Her face was like a miniature of Mother’s: high cheekbones, a narrow, pointed nose, and full, lush lips. But she never ran around like other children, and she played slowly with her dolls, very deliberately, her movements hesitating and calculated. She did not like to be read to, grew bored very quickly. A few years passed and Celeste did not begin to talk.

My mother had three years of college at a state normal school, where she had been studying to be an elementary school teacher when she dropped out to marry my father. She insisted they have Celeste tested.

“She won’t be able to learn,” she said, “we can’t put her in school.”

“No, I don’t want to hear it,” my father said, “there ain’t a damn thing wrong with her. She’s slow, that’s all.”

“That’s right. Call it what you will. But she  -  “

“No! Not another word about it.”

Finally she convinced him, but my mother had to take Celeste all the way to Atlanta to get her tested. My father would not hear of Tuscaloosa, nor even Birmingham, for fear that someone would find out. “In my position, I can’t be havin folks knowin I’ve got a daughter that some fool doctor calls a retardate. All right?”

“For God’s sakes, Franklin,” my mother pled, “she’s your daughter!”

“How the hell do I know that for sure? The only thing we know for sure is that she’s your daughter!”

“Oh, go to hell,” my mother said. The air crackled between them. Never in my young life had I seen such hatred as I saw in my father’s eyes, but it wouldn’t be the last time I’d see it. I could see how unhappy they were, and it terrified me. I heard his false hand clicking, like scissors snapping. It was a nervous habit, something he did when he was tense or anxious. It became a warning sign to me. Clinka, clinka, clinka.

“Do whatever the hell you want to do,” he said to my mother. “Just keep it under wraps and don’t bother me with it.” He glanced over at me. “What the hell are you lookin at?” he asked sharply.

“Nothin.” I ran out of the room before he could take a step toward me.

***

 

My father was something of a learned man, too, having attended that same state normal school before he dropped out to find a job in that bleak fading depression year of 1937. “I had to have some cash money,” he often said in later years, “you can’t eat dirt, no matter how black and rich it is or how much you have of it!” He went to work for his Uncle Ronald, as night manager of a small tourist court on the edge of Hammond. He was a voracious reader, especially of anything about the Civil War. He could sit in the little office and read all night. He read biographies of all the major figures in the war. He read the classics, and histories. He read contemporary novels and volumes of poetry, whatever he could get his hands on. There was quite a large collection of dusty books scattered around in our rambling old family home, an eclectic assembly of almost everything, from the Hardy Boys to Greek drama, from Forever Amber to David Copperfield, from Don Quixote to Gone With the Wind. My father claimed to have read Gone With the Wind sixteen times. I never doubted it. He carried a copy of it throughout his war experiences. He kept that particular book, with its warped cover and wrinkled pages, in a locked drawer of his desk.

One of the biggest quarrels we had when I was in high school was when I came home one day and told him that I thought Gone With the Wind was a piece of commercial trash. I was only repeating what my English teacher had said, but my father became so angry he turned crimson. He was a big man, heavy-set, strong and powerful, and he struck me across the face and knocked me half-way across the room.

***

 

Junior high school was a traumatic experience for me, a sudden plunge into a culture I had not known even existed. My father had sent me for the first six grades to a school called Northside Progressive Academy. It was run by a shriveled little woman named Miss Julia Whitfield (a great aunt of my friend Tom, who has also escaped to Manhattan), and it was part grammar school and part military academy. The boys wore uniforms: gray wool ones modeled on those of the Old Confederacy. And we had military drill every day. The girls wore regular school dresses, except on Fridays, when they wore crinoline dresses with long hoop skirts and wide brimmed straw hats. After the boys had marched in formation the three blocks to the statue of the rebel soldier in the downtown park and had laid a wreath and sung “Dixie,” we returned to the house and had a dance, with old fashioned reels and waltzes, Miss Julia banging away on an old upright piano.

And on those Fridays, as part of the ritual, after opening the day by singing “The Bonnie Blue Flag” on the sun-porch, we paid a visit to Miss Julia’s mother, an ancient old woman propped up in a huge four poster bed with yellowing linen. We held hands down the long dark hallways of what Miss Julia called her “cottage,” gathered around the bed, and the old woman peered silently down at us. We all had learned that she was the widow of a Confederate officer; we knew the story by heart. Captain James Taylor Whitfield, who commanded the 9th Alabama Rifles at Gettysburg, had been severely wounded in that battle, so that when he returned to Hammond after the war he had walked with a pronounced limp, dragging his useless left foot behind him. He was an attorney, a bachelor, remaining one for many years until he married young Serena Simmons from Spring Hill when she was only sixteen. He was in his eighties when Miss Julia was born. It was hard for us to believe the old woman we saw every Friday morning had ever been sixteen.

***

 

As I sat with my mother in the hospital during her last illness, I thought of all the years that had passed and were gone. I thought of Miss Julia’s mother, the way she had looked fifty five years ago. In the pictures in our well-worn old photograph albums, my mother as a young woman was a flapper, happy and mischievous. Her hair was thick and dark, her eyes dusky in the old sepia prints with their checkered borders. She looked as though she loved posing, sometimes mugging at the camera, barely able to suppress a laugh. There is a picture of her as a baby, maybe a year old, when she had won a Most Beautiful Baby Contest at the Choctaw County Fair.  

In the hospital she was wasted, worn down. She had always been a private person, even prissy, and she was now robbed of all her dignity. She didn’t seem to care anymore how she looked. I knew that even up to the beginning of this sickness she had had my father take her every week, him struggling to get the wheelchair out of the trunk of their Oldsmobile, to the hairdresser she’d been frequenting for years. Decades, I suppose. When I came home that one Christmas, as she sat in the den in her wheelchair reading or watching television, her hair was always perfectly coiffed, even though it was thinning so much on top her pink scalp glowed through.

“Do you want me to get Martha to come out here and fix your hair?” I asked her, and she shook her head no without opening her eyes. (The next time Martha would fix her hair would be in the funeral home, and though I didn’t really know that then, I think my mother did.)

She had her lucid moments, but they were growing fewer and farther apart. Once she fixed me with her gaze and said, “You need to forgive him. You need to pity him.”

“Can you do both?” I quipped and she frowned at me. She looked off out the window, at her view of the roof of another part of the hospital, a huge heating unit. I was later relieved it wasn’t the last thing she saw in life.

“I am serious,” she said. Her voice was weak, and it was an effort for her to speak.

“I’m sorry, Mother,” I said.

“His life has been disappointment.” Though my father had persisted, his political career was stymied. He never went beyond mayor of Hammond. He ran several times for the state legislature and twice for lieutenant governor, losing every time.

***

 

 

During my mother’s final illness, my father didn’t come to the hospital while I was there. He sat at home, in a darkened den.

“It’s too much of a reminder,” he said to me when I got back to the house.

I thought about that for a moment, and then I asked,

“Of what?” I thought he might possibly be referring to my sister’s death, her funeral.

He looked at me, his eyes piercing. He sat with both arms resting on the arms of the recliner, a book turned face down and draped over his knee. His metal claw glowed dully in the light that spilled in from the kitchen. He would not get one of the new, more natural prostheses, just as he would not consider surgery for his fading hearing. He would not spend the money. He wore black horn-rim glasses that he had worn for thirty years, having new lenses put in when his vision changed.

“A reminder of my own mortality,” he said. He said it as though I were completely stupid to ask.

He was two years younger than my mother. Eighty-six. He was still in pretty good shape, though he walked with a limp because he had broken his leg just above the ankle almost eight years before and it had never healed properly. He had slipped off a ladder when he was trying to trim some saplings in the yard.

“He thinks he can do anything with that hook,” my mother said, “always has.”

He offered me a drink, just as he had always done. It was a test. Always, all during my sixteen years of sobriety, he would still ask me if I wanted a drink. Part of him had never accepted the fact that I was an alcoholic, in much the same way he never accepted that Celeste was retarded. It was as though he were confident that God would never do anything like that to him, that it must be some mistake, that there was no conceivable way his two offspring could be that flawed, that maimed. I offered to fix him one  -  a bourbon and water, nothing else, ever  -  but he grunted and pushed himself up and shuffled into the kitchen. I heard him rummaging around in the cabinet. He returned to the room and sat back down with a sigh, holding the drink  -  dark, three ice cubes  -  in his right hand.  

***

 

 

Sixteen years ago I had wound up in the psycho ward at Bellevue, with bars on the windows. That was where they put drunks in those days. A friend had found me in my apartment, in a near coma, badly in need of detoxing. When they transferred me to the treatment center out in White Plains, where I was to spend the next thirty-four days, my father was skeptical. “You’re no more an alcoholic than I am,” he said on the phone, “they’re just after your money.” When I asked him and Mother to come up for family week, as my significant others, and to even bring Celeste, he laughed. “That’s a lot of bullshit, Gideon. Just be a man. Have some will power. Know when to put the stopper in the bottle. That’s all you gotta do.” He had refused to come, and he wouldn’t allow Mother to come, either. I don’t think they ever told Celeste, who by then never came out of her room on the third floor of the big house. He had had the top floor remodeled for her, and I used to make him angry by referring to it as the attic.

“Typical southern family,” I said one day, “keep our freak in the attic!”

“You shut your goddam mouth,” he shouted, “don’t you ever let me hear you refer to your sister as a freak again!” When I laughed, he threw his drink in my face.

***

 

He reached up and switched on the reading lamp. He picked up the book he’d been reading and opened it. He turned the pages with his hook. His forehead wrinkled, the tip of his tongue protruded from the corner of his mouth.

“What are you reading?” I asked, and he turned the book’s cover toward me.

I could have guessed. It was The Collected Poems of Donald Davidson. His favorite poet. I knew what was coming next. He squinted at the page, pulled it closer to his face. He read aloud: “...the God of your fathers is a just and merciful God.” He was reading his favorite poem, “Lee in the Mountains.” He looked up at me then for a moment. His eyes went back to the page and he read along in silence for a few moments. Then, aloud again, “Never forsaking, never denying His children and His children’s children forever, Unto all generations of the faithful heart.” His voice quaked. He lay his head back when he was finished. He sighed and closed his eyes.

He looked then like a very old man, antiquated and gray, the years like ashen tarnishes on his wrinkling face.

***

 

While I was subjected to Northside Progressive Academy, from which I never recovered, Celeste received no schooling at all. My father refused to let Celeste leave the house for most of her life. There was a short period, when she was twelve or thirteen, when she would ride her bicycle downtown to the picture show on Saturdays. I had already embarked on my young manhood of drunken, spinning nights, prolonged bouts of heavy drinking. I should have known then that I was alcoholic. I did know then, but it took another twenty years of hopelessness and desperation and a final splattering against a rock-hard bottom to rip the shrouds of denial from my eyes. I loved my sister very much. I had always been protective of her, taking care of her when we played out after supper during long summer dusks, carrying her home when the playing-doctor games started in someone’s playhouse.

One Saturday afternoon, Celeste stood on the street in front of the theater, crying. She had been taunted by some high school boys, and when she’d come out after the double feature the front tire on her bike was flat. I happened by about then. I had been drinking beer with some friends all day. When I spotted my sister I knew immediately what had happened, and when I asked her who she told me. I went in after them, followed by my two friends who were just as drunk as I was. We got into a tremendous fight right there in the theater, and we wound up in jail. I lost several teeth and have worn a misshapen nose all these years since. 

My father, of course, was mayor of the town at the time. He was horrified and scandalized. He took away my car, an old Plymouth that I’d bought with money from my job sacking groceries at the A & P. He not only confiscated it, he sold it, and pocketed the money himself. I was not allowed to go out on weekends for months, and Celeste was never allowed to go to the movies again.

“I won’t have my children actin like white trash!” he said.

I have no way of knowing for sure, but I suspect that Celeste never left that third floor after that. All her meals were carried up to her on a tray. I would come home from time to time from the university, or from Houston, then Denver, then finally New York, and she would let me come up and visit her. She was pale and freckled, her eyes faded. She was terribly thin and her hands shook.

“I have to tell somebody about this,” I said to her. “The police. Maybe that preacher at the church he goes to. He’s keeping you prisoner!”

“No!” she would say and begin to cry. “Please don’t! No! I’m scared of him!”

“What does he do to you?”

“Nothin! Nothin! I never see him. I haven’t seen him for a million years.”

“Does Mother come up here?”

“Yes. Mama comes up here.”

Then she would stare at the floor, refusing to answer any more of my questions. She would not look me in the eye.

***

 

 

“She’s happy enough,” my mother protested.

“Happy?!” I blurted. “How can you say she’s happy?”

“She doesn’t know any better.”

“Are you sure he doesn’t keep her chained to the bed?”

“Gideon, stop it.” My mother looked off out the window. “We live with what God gave us, Gideon. We make the best of it.” I knew there was no point in saying anything else.

I could have saved Celeste. But I didn’t. And I live with that fact every day. I think of it first thing when I awake, and it is the last thing on my mind when I finally fall asleep. I could have tried harder to break through my mother’s denial. I could have spirited Celeste away in the night and carried her north with me, put her in a special school, given her a life. But I didn’t have the courage to face my father. In the early years I was too drunk to do it, and after my treatment I was too busy tending to my own sobriety to have time for her. I knew that if I drank I would die and if I went home and became too involved with my family I would drink. In a way, I’m just as guilty as my father for what happened. And my mother. She sat by and watched it happen. She sat by and watched all our lives happen, the way mothers do.

***

 

I was rehearsing a new play at a tiny theater on Bank Street in Greenwich Village when the call came about Celeste’s suicide. My mother traced me down at the theater by calling Tom Whitfield, after she kept getting my machine.

“She’s dead, Gideon,” my mother said, sobbing into the phone, “she killed herself.”

“W...who?” I stammered. But I knew.

“Your sister! Oh, she’s dead!”

“She... killed herself?” I felt as though the floor of the dusty lobby had disappeared and left me hanging there, dangling from the phone. It was like a surprise blow to the kidneys from behind, a heavy stick swung against the backs of my knees. I had never thought of Celeste dying, never even contemplated it. I couldn’t quite grasp it. It seemed unreal, maybe a part of my play. As though something intangible and unsaid on the stage had spilled out and surrounded me.

So I flew to Birmingham and rented a car and drove to Hammond. It was a long trip that day, a perfectly clear and warm April day. The hills and ridges south of Tuscaloosa were splashed with dogwood and redbud. Everything was springing to life.

Except for Celeste. I drove straight to the funeral home. Bobby Simms, the mortician, an old friend from high school, showed me the stitches on the insides of her wrists. She looked beautiful and serene, still. I was too stunned and shocked to cry. “She bled to death,” Bobby said.   Yes, I thought, she bled. All of her life she bled. There were three huge sprays of flowers beside her coffin, white and yellow roses and mums and lilies. I knew my father had put them there. Celeste wore a green dress with long sleeves, lace at the cuffs, hiding the stitches.

I get the two funerals confused in my mind now. My mother was alive at one, nowhere evident at the second, except hidden away inside the dark-stained cherry-wood coffin, identical to the first, with its blanket of the same red roses. There is the same preacher, rotund and too young. The church is the same Presbyterian one I was dragged to as a child, except that now it is a part of the ultra-conservative branch, which I’m sure pleases my father. He probably led the secession. Only my father and I and my first cousin Miriam  -  daughter of my long dead uncle, my father’s brother--sit on the folding chairs before the raw, open grave.

I’m sure there were people in Hammond who had no idea Franklin Westlake had a daughter until she died and had to be buried in the family plot in Riverside Cemetery. It would be whispered about and explained to them that she “was peculiar,” she “was not right.” Her stone, in the corner of the plot, still looks brand new when my mother is buried. It reads: Celeste Land Westlake, March 4,1942  -  April 17, 1990. There is a stone angel-child on the marker, sitting, her flat blank eyes focused somewhere off toward the river, toward some world not this one at all.

***

 

Before I fly back to New York, he wants me to drive him over to Lauderdale County, Mississippi, to visit the old Westlake Family Cemetery. I agree to it because I know that when I leave this time I am never coming back.

The Oldsmobile seems huge after the rental car. We take back roads. He slouches on the seat beside me, his prosthesis propped on the dash as though to stop himself if I should hit something. He has had many of the devices over the years, but always of the same type; they were different shapes and sizes as they became more refined and improved. As a child, I thought he was Captain Hook. He was the insane murderer in the stories that teenagers told, the one who left his hook on the door handle of the lovers parked near the river.

“Turn right up here, boy,” he says.

“When are you gonna stop callin me ‘boy?’” I ask.

“When I’m dead.”

We cross into Mississippi. It is not far now. Near the old Westlake Cemetery is a Civil War Cemetery, with hundreds of graves in perfect rows, marked by simple white wooden crosses. You come upon it suddenly, with no warning, right out in the middle of nowhere. The graves are almost evenly divided between Union and Rebel soldiers, most of whom were wounded at the battle of Shiloh in Tennessee and brought to a field hospital in nearby Daleville.

“Stop here,” my father says.

He walks out among the graves. The grass is thick, neatly clipped. The white crosses stretch away toward a tree-line in the distance. The cemetery is manicured, well kept, and I note from a sign that it is cared for by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Meridian, MS Chapter. I think of Miss Julia, her mother.

My father stands with his head bowed, and I know he is praying. I can only imagine what is in his mind, what he must be saying to his own concept of God. I have never seen him mourn, never seen him cry. I know nothing of what he thinks about anything. When he is back in the car we drive the half mile to the red clay hill where our ancestors are buried. Scrawny cedars and patches of Johnson grass and crab-grass dot the hillside. There is a sagging old iron fence, rusted, the gate long gone.

My father heads straight to the crest of the hill, his limp like a stagger, his hook glittering in the sunshine. I scramble up the rutted dirt road after him. Yellow butterflies dart about on the sparse areas of grass, fat bumblebees float lazily in the hot, moist air. He stops at a row of gravestones, gray and lichen-splotched, the oldest ones. He leans against the tallest of the stones and looks out over the valley to the west.

I come up to him and stand beside him. We can see the Civil War Cemetery, the row upon row of crosses that look tiny from here. Rolling Mississippi pastureland stretches away to the horizon; a creek with water oaks and willows and plum bushes lining its banks curves and bends through the pastures. From here we can see the old Westlake home place, marked by two lone magnolias, where the big house stood before it burned back in the thirties. There is a new house near it, long and low, ranch-style. Miriam’s house. Mt. Zion Church, like a child’s doll-church, gleaming white in the sunshine against the intense green of deep woods behind it, sits at the end of its gravel road.

I look at the stone my father leans against. Nathaniel Westlake, it reads. Born North Carolina, August, 1789, Died Mississippi, December, 1841.

“Your great, great grandfather,” I say, “my great, great great grandfather.” I have heard him point that out to me a thousand times. But this time his eyes seem locked on the horizon, the far distance, as though he does not hear me. I hear a crow back in the woods, the aimless chattering of a squirrel.

I look at another gravestone: Iva Ward Westlake, Beloved Wife, 1800-1851. These two, from whom both my father and I had sprung. And Celeste, too, I think, and Celeste, too.

I start walking then, along the ridge of the hill. After a while I stop and stand looking around me, at the thick woods, the hickory and oak and cottonwood trees, the kudzu that crowds the drooping fence. The green is fierce, the day now hot, the high sun like an unmuted spotlight. I can see my father still standing there against the stone, gazing serenely off across the Mississippi countryside. I think then of his hand, what was left of it decaying and returning to the earth of a distant island in the Pacific. I think of his great grandfather’s leg, amputated in that field hospital in Middle Tennessee, likely without anesthetic, and buried there, left there, in a mass grave with the limbs of others, of strangers and brothers.

The lush green earth stretches away in all directions, as far as I can see. The gravestones all around me lean at odd angles, many of the graves sunken, the names and dates obscured, washed away by the generations and the seasons. I stand still, unmoving, for a long time. I watch a gray-brown hawk circling over a field. Its glide, on outstretched wings, is smooth and delicate. It is graceful and beautiful. Then, like a sudden shaft of new sunlight it slashes toward the ground, toward its prey, and disappears from my view.