The Day Is Yours, Yours Also the Night

Mom, who was a math whiz and helped me puzzle through story problems in high school geometry, met her match well before she ever tutored me. In fact, I was only five when she confronted this one: Two trains are driving toward Town C. A man boards the first train leaving Town A at 5 a.m. and traveling at 60 miles per hour. A woman and her son board the second train which leaves Town B at 7 a.m. and travels at 70 miles per hour. The distance between Town A and Town B is 455 miles and Town C lies exactly halfway between. What is the exact time that the woman and son will realize the man who was supposed to meet them has jumped another train and is not coming?

The answer, based on a cold January day spent in Chicago’s Union Station with my mother, is 5:30 p.m. Five hours and thirty-five minutes — that was exactly how long we waited for my father, an Indian biochemist whom my mother had married and helped put through Yale, before Mom cleared her throat, nodded to herself, and stood up, smoothing the wrinkles in her tea-length wool skirt and pulling down the hem of her cashmere sweater as she said, “Let’s find some supper, Sanjay. What do you say?”

I remember little about my father. Looking back is like looking through a fog. What I do remember is his scent — a mixture of sandalwood and tobacco, and I can recall as plain as if it had happened only yesterday picking bits of tobacco from his shirt front. He smoked his own hand-rolled cigarettes, he read voraciously, and he loved us poorly. After he stood us up at Union Station, I heard from him by letter only three times, the last being on my seventh birthday, a small note in his sharp and angular hand, wishing me a year of happiness and promising a visit soon. The card was postmarked from India. I never heard from him again. He became a mythic figure, a man I barely knew but whose absence took up a huge amount of space at our dinner table in the one-bedroom apartment in which I grew up.

I took on my mother’s surname, but my looks and first name I received from him. My mother used to call me her United Nations baby, but as I moved into my teen years, I just saw myself as an enigmatic anomaly — Sanjay O’Donnell, the brown-skinned Irishman more familiar with corned beef and cabbage than vindaloo. Truth be told, my first name and my appearance are the only things Indian about me. Everything else, from my affinity for soda bread and white pudding to my taste in music to what Mom calls my gift o’ gab, I received from her. Around middle school, I asked my friends and teachers to call me Jay, and the name has stuck. I identify as Irish so strongly that sometimes, walking past a plate glass window downtown, when I catch my reflection unwittingly, I am surprised at the man staring back at me. Who is he? I wonder.

He is the son of Patricia Madeline O’Donnell, the feisty erstwhile mathematician who moved into her middle-aged son’s home three months ago and who is calling from the kitchen at this moment.

“Where did you move the sugar?” she calls, her voice a study in irritation. The clatter of cabinet doors slapping shut rides the wake of her voice.

“Upper cabinet to the right of the sink, Mom,” I answer from my office. The commotion continues. I try to ignore it, but a moment later the sound of shattering glass pulls me from my seat.

In the kitchen, I find Mom, her left hip leaning against the counter, as she clutches the index finger on her left hand, from which blood drips and stipples the countertop around a shattered bone China teacup.

“What happened?” I ask as I pull a clean dishcloth from the drawer and take her hands to clean up the blood. She pulls back the injured hand and grabs the cloth from me with her good one.

“Why did you move the sugar?” she snaps.

“I didn’t move the sugar. I told you it was to the right of the sink. It’s where it has been for as long as I’ve lived here.”

“I couldn’t find the sugar. I was stretching up high in the cabinets because I couldn’t find the sugar, and I … I …” Her voice trails off, as confusion flashes in her eyes for just a moment, a hint of a moment really, before she squelches it in anger and adds, “I don’t know why you moved the sugar, Kamal.”

“Not Kamal, Mama,” I say, taking her hands again, holding them tight as she tries to pull away. “I’m Sanjay, your son. Kamal was your husband.” I almost add “my father,” but I don’t.

Her eyes search out mine from behind the fog. As the anger fades, her stiff shoulders soften and she stops pulling away from me. I turn over her left hand to see where she’s cut herself.

“It doesn’t look too bad, Mama. Just a bandage should take care of it.”

“Sanjay, honey, I’m sorry I broke your teacup,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper.

“The cup is nothing, Mama.”

“I couldn’t find the sugar. I looked to the left of the stove where we always kept it, and it wasn’t there. And then I checked the next cabinet and the next and still nothing, and I thought, maybe it got put on a high shelf where I can’t see it, and I stretched and … and I don’t know exactly what happened, but I must have been holding the cup, and it slipped and I tried to catch it and now it’s all ruined and …”

“The cup is nothing, Mama. Nothing. Let’s get you fixed up, and I’ll make you a nice cup of tea.”

I coax her down the hall to the bathroom to bandage her finger. Today is not the first time she has called me by my father’s name. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s six months ago, and since then she’s been like a boat that slipped its mooring: set adrift on the misty sea of time, she floats without sail or rudder, unsure when in time she is. From this haze, angry and disoriented, she frequently mistakes me for my father, whom she has never forgiven. This was the third time in a week she’d called me by his name.

In the bathroom, as I tend her finger with a cotton swab and some rubbing alcohol, I catch our reflection in the mirror. Though stooped a bit in the shoulders, she is still a tall woman, her hair gray, her eyes a piercing blue, her skin fair. When I touch the alcohol-soaked cotton ball to the cut finger, she winces, drawing her lips back to reveal a small chip in her front tooth which she broke as a child, holding a towel in her mouth and playing tug-of-war with her dog. Standing beside her, about the same height, I could be her negative image, my dark skin, hair, and eyes a foil to her features. I finish bandaging her finger and steal another glance at the mirror.

She catches my eyes in the reflection and says, “You look just like your father did 35 years ago.”

I stare at my own image, my wide brow and deep-set eyes, my nose like a hawk’s beak, and I think back to the pictures I’ve seen. I reply, “So you’ve told me, but I’m not him.”

We’ve had versions of this conversation since Mom moved in with me five months ago. She had set out to walk to the corner market a half block away, but the police found her on a park bench seven miles from her apartment, disoriented and unable to say how she’d gotten there. Two days later she moved in with me. It isn’t safe for her to live alone, and she has no money for long-term care. Plus, being a minister of the Word, I have flexible hours and can be around most of the time to keep an eye on her.

Already that first week in my house, she was calling me Kamal. I would gently correct her, and she’d apologize. At first the words would sting like an accusation, and I found myself after each encounter trying to figure out why. Part of it was the simmering resentment she still carried toward my father. She had been a promising mathematics student at the University of Chicago when she fell in love with Kamal Jha, a biochemist two years ahead of her in school. She dropped out of university to follow my father to Yale where he pursued his doctorate. She channeled her considerable gifts into being a helpmeet to him and, one year after their marriage, a mother to me. And then he left. That was on him, of course, but I was not so naive as to fail to recognize as a child already that I, the legacy of this broken marriage, also kept my mother from realizing her potential. She had a brilliant mind, but she had settled for simply processing tax returns for a small accounting firm. Once, when I was in the sixth grade doing my math homework at our Formica-topped kitchen table, she sat beside me, nursing a glass of red wine and watching me. After a few minutes she said, “Oh, Jay, aren’t numbers beautiful things? They’re dependable and constant and pure. You can count on them.” She smirked at her pun, but the sardonic smile faded from her lips with a heavy sigh and then a long draft from her wine before she pushed herself back from the table and disappeared into her bedroom for the rest of the night. I understood. The numbers didn’t work for her anymore; they’d lost their magic. And I was part of the failed equation.

So now, as a middle-aged adult, I felt guilt — my own, my father’s, what difference did it make? It lived in me, and when she called me Kamal, I felt it squirming in my chest like an animal trying to get out. I’d try to tamp it down, saying, “Not Kamal, Mama. I’m Jay, your son.” And she’d look at me, startled at her mistake, and apologize, always touching me lightly to show her affection. After five months, the exchange has begun to have the feel of ritual, a confession and assurance of pardon. But it is a broken liturgy because I don’t confess my feelings of guilt, nor does she forgive my father. Still, we continue doing it yet again this morning, standing before the bathroom mirror where I tell her again, “I’m not Kamal, Mama. I’m not like him.”

“No,” she says. She takes my face in her cool hands and turns my face toward hers, her face beatific as she blesses me. “You are not like him at all, Jay.”

Five weeks later, however, she cannot tell us apart. It is the middle of the night, and she has called me into her room three times already. Her bedroom is across the hall from mine, and I keep both bedroom doors open to hear her. She fell one night trying to navigate the bathroom, so I’ve told her that she must call me if she needs to use the toilet. She’s called me three times in the last hour, and each time we’ve gone through the trouble of getting her upright on the edge of her bed, slippers on her feet, down the hall and onto the toilet, only to have her sit for two minutes before chirping cheerily, “Well, I guess I was wrong. Sorry!”

After the third time, I am fuming. I’m not sure if she really thinks she has to go and has forgotten that she was just up or if she is playing games because she can’t sleep and she wants company. I decide to try to sleep in the chair in her room.

“What are you doing?” she asks when I sit.

“I’m just going to keep you company until you sleep, Mama. Can you do that? Can you go to sleep?”

“I’ll do my best,” she says, her voice still chipper, and I can feel waves of energy emanating from her. I know we will be talking together within minutes. Right on schedule, before I’ve even fully settled into the chair, pulling a blanket around my shoulder, her voice, suddenly accusatory, floats out of the darkness: “Why did you leave us?”

Such sudden mood shifts are common.

“What are you talking about, Mama? I’m right here.”

“We waited at the train station all afternoon, Kamal. Do you know how humiliating that was?” She sounds angry, but also so sad.

My lips begin to shape the familiar words, “Not Kamal, Mama,” but I stop myself. Why argue? Instead I say what I feel, what I’ve felt for the last 30 years: “I’m sorry.”

She barks a derisive laugh and says, “You’re sorry? It’s a bit late for that now, isn’t it?”

I stare across the dark room at her form silhouetted by the light of the alarm clock on her nightstand. She struggles to push herself up on her elbows, but her left arm gets tangled in her sheets and she collapses.

“Give me a hand, will you?” she commands. I take her under the shoulders and help scoot her back, propping her pillow against the headboard, and I return to my chair. We sit in the dark room, two faceless forms, one wrestling with his guilt, one with a ghost.

She says, “You could have told me you wanted to end our marriage, you know. That’s what normal people do. They don’t make an appointment to be picked up at a train station and then abscond to another country. They don’t leave their wife and their little boy waiting for someone who’s never coming. They don’t just vanish into thin air.”

I sit in the darkness, silent.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?”

“What would you have me say? I told you I was sorry.”

“I would have you explain yourself,” she says. She pulls the chain on the lamp on her nightstand, and a yellow pool of light spills out. We both blink as our eyes adjust, but then her gaze holds me firmly. “You say you’re sorry. Sorry for what?”

“Sorry for humiliating you at the train station. Sorry for being thoughtless and selfish. Sorry for running out on you. Sorry for everything.”

I struggle to find the words I believe my father owes her, the words she needs to hear.

She replies, “Sorry doesn’t change anything, does it? I could have been a mathematician if it weren’t for you. I gave up an academic career for you. I quit school to wait tables for minimum wage so you could finish your doctorate. I cooked your meals and washed your dirty clothes and gave you a son because I loved you. And you said you loved me. And then you left.”

She falls silent for a moment, then adds, “I was so young, so young. Life is a long and wearying march to endure when your dreams all die in your youth.”

The living room clock ticks loudly, marking the irretrievable passage of time as if to mock all hers that has been wasted. Tears gather in the corners of my eyes. Misery is drowning her, guilt me.

I tell her in a soft voice, “I don’t know what to say. I cannot undo the past. I am so sorry for the pain I’ve caused you. I am sorry for taking what I cannot give back. I am sorry for saddling you with a boy to raise on your own.”

These words, uttered on behalf of my father, are not his words at all, but mine. My regrets run as deep as her disappointments. They have for years, but never have I voiced them as clearly and succinctly as now. But confessing my sins in another man’s name does nothing to assuage my sense of guilt.

Jaw set like flint, my mother studies my face. It is such an odd thing to sit beneath a gaze that’s so intense yet that somehow looks right through you to a memory of someone else.

She wags her head slowly and says, “Well, you’re wrong about one thing. You may have stolen my youth and broken my heart. You may have forced me into an unrewarding career and days of weariness.” She thrusts a bony finger at me and her voice turns fierce. “But you didn’t saddle me with anything. That boy is the only good thing you left behind.”

I make no reply. The back of my neck is tingling, and I feel like I’m watching this unfold from outside my own body.

“You blew it, Kamal. Sanjay is such a good boy. A good man. The kind you could never dream of being. He is kind and generous and patient and thoughtful.”

“You’ve raised him well, Patricia,” I say, again speaking my feelings through this mask. “He would not be the man he is today if his mother had not been so strong and generous and self-sacrificing.”

She laughs derisively and says, “What would you know about self-sacrifice?”

“Nothing. I said you sacrificed, not me.”

“You know nothing. Any sacrifice we pour into those we love is no sacrifice at all. It is an investment in them, and seeing them flourish pays us back a thousand times over in joy. That’s what you are too stupid to understand. Whatever I gave up for you was sacrifice. It is lost time, lost hopes, lost dreams, and all for nothing. But anything I gave up for Sanjay … I can’t even think of anything I’ve given up for him.”

“Your career,” I counter.

“I gave that up for you, you ass. Raising Sanjay was hard work and a full-time job, but it was also the privilege of a lifetime. Watching him play Little League, make science fair projects, go on his first date, graduate college, get ordained — every one of these milestones was a reminder to me of how blessed I am. And you, you walked away from him. That, Kamal, is what I cannot forgive. Every child deserves to have a father present, but Sanjay didn’t have one, thanks to you.”

We sit in the silence, staring at one another. The clock ticks loudly from the living room. Finally, she sits forward, reaches behind her back to lay her pillow flat on the bed, and then eases back onto her elbows.

“Listen, Kamal, I’m glad you finally came home, but it’s too late. I want you to go, and I don’t want you to come back. Now I’m tired, and I’m going to sleep.”

With that she reaches a hand to pull the chain on her lamp, and the room goes black. The clock ticks. I return to my own bed and sleep better than I’ve slept in months.

The next morning things feel different to me. She is rested. I am rested. My step is lighter, and I find myself quoting Browning inside my head, “God’s in his heaven — all’s right with the world.”

I am not naive. Mom has dementia, and her bouts of anger, forgetfulness, and confusion will not disappear in the days ahead. I know that.

Still, I feel like she made peace with my father last night, through me. And in making her peace, she brought peace to my troubled soul. God moves in mysterious ways.

Today is Sunday, and I have to run to St. Mark’s to lead services. Mom will stay here, as has been our custom. She teeters nowadays, and my duties keep me too preoccupied to steady her. So instead I share the Eucharist with her at home, and we pray together.

This morning’s Psalm is 74, and it feels apropos. I read just a few verses to her:

The day is yours, and yours also the night;

you established the sun and moon.

It was you who set all the boundaries of the earth;

you made both summer and winter.

Do not hand over the life of your dove to wild beasts;

do not forget the lives of your afflicted people forever.

After scripture, her eyes alight, she takes the host and the wine from my hand. We eat and drink. Then I take her hands in mine, and over her bent head I recite this prayer: O God of our ancestors, God of our people, before whose face the human generations pass away: We thank you that in you we are kept safe forever, and the broken fragments of our history are gathered up in the redeeming act of your dear Son, remembered in this holy sacrament of bread and wine. Amen.

With the Amen, I squeeze her hands, but she remains bent in the posture of prayer. Finally she looks up, her face dismayed.

“What are you thinking about, Mama?”

The clock ticks as she gathers her thoughts, and when she speaks, her language is oracular.

“Fragments,” she says, her voice trembling with worry. “Shards of days sliding into the night. Nothing left but fragments. And I can’t hold them anymore.”

Her eyes fill with fear as they drift above my shoulder to stare at God knows what. She mumbles something I can’t make out, and her fingers grasp at empty air in front of her. She grows more agitated. I grab her wrists and hold them firmly until she settles.

“It’s okay, Mama,” I say. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

I touch her face with the same gentle touch with which she has always touched mine. When she finally looks into my eyes, I see recognition. For the moment, she’s back with me.

“It’s going to be okay, Mama,” I repeat. “Day or night, we are not alone. We are never alone. And if you can’t carry the pieces, I’ll carry them for you.”