Looking Back

My mother, Elvena, the third of five children, four of them daughters, born to Julius and Clara Nilsestuen, was raised on the family farm in what is called the "coulee country" of western Wisconsin. A novel called The Grandmothers by Glenway Westcott, an extravagantly urbane and generous-minded aesthete who had been born in the same area a decade before my mother but quickly escaped to the more congenial surroundings of Paris, Park Avenue, and rural New Jersey, offers an affectionate account of the coulee region, a fact which demonstrates the principle that all kinds of people are born in all kinds of places, and on the whole, lead happier lives if they remember where they came from. Not far - more precisely, half-way down the length of a country road, across a wide plain, and up a winding stretch over a steep, mountainous hill, a distance of eight miles - from a small town named Arcadia, itself not all that far from the bustling metropolis of LaCrosse, my grandparents' farm consisted of a hundred and fifty acres embedded within a locale so comprehensively populated by the descendants of Norwegian immigrants that it was called "Norway Valley." Obviously in another time, that of the Twentieth Century's second decade, it might also have been in another country.

When my mother was born, her parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and all of the adults she encountered spoke Norwegian as well as English, and she and her siblings learned Norwegian side-by-side with English. My mother retained the traces of a Norwegian accent all her life. Her family's culture, values, diet, and mores were Norwegian, specifically those of mid-Nineteenth Century, rural Norway. (The name Nilsestuen means "Nils's little house," so deeply back-country that modern Norwegians grin when they hear it.) In winter, they travelled by horse-drawn sleigh, complete with sleigh-bells. Christmas began with a monumental house-cleaning and universal baths on Christmas eve, an hour of bell-tolling from the Lutheran church down the valley, the arrival of relatives in chiming sleighs, gift-giving and a reading from a Norwegian translation of Luke, then a Norwegian-language service the next day, and it continued until New Year's Day. They ate lutefisk, fried pork with cream gravy, bread with sour cream and sorghum, and, as a special treat, lefse, a flat, circular, pancake-like bread concocted on a wood-burning stove, then smeared with butter, sprinkled with sugar, and rolled up. (Lefse was meltingly delicious, I remember from childhood visits to the farm, but unless it is made on a wood-burning stove forget it, it's not the real thing, you might as well be eating cardboard.)

Despite the evocative bell-tolling, the version of religion passed along to my mother and her siblings was merciless, unforgiving, and apocalyptic. My uncle Gerhard, generally known as "Swede," wrote in his contribution to a collection of family reminiscences that "The Norwegian Lutheran God was not exactly a God of Love as I remember it." Sermons tended to focus on the Last Times, always terrifyingly close at hand. Swede felt that his Sunday School teacher, one Rönhovde, a forbidding character otherwise called "the Klökker," enjoyed detailing the horrors consequent upon the end of the world because he had intuited his pupil's fear before the prospect of this event. My mother once told me that now and again she dreamed of a great fire spreading across the sky, and that she knew these dreams originated in the sermons she had heard in her childhood. (Nightly, her brother used to pray for the arrival of dawn. She probably did, too.)

I allude to this background because every part of it was crucial to my relationship with my mother. Rural and small-town midwestern American Lutherans of Norwegian descent tend to share common traits as distinctive, in their own way as piquant, as those of second- and third-generation Italians raised in lower Manhattan or Brooklyn, but no Norwegian-American counterpart of Francis Ford Coppola or Martin Scorsese ever came along to dramatize those traits. Instead, Garrison Keillor, a rural Minnesotan equipped to describe people like the Nilsestuens and their multiple relatives by virtue of a background even more marginal than theirs, began one day to deliver lengthy, improvised-seeming monologues, funny, rhapsodic and surreal in about equal measure, during the course of a weekly radio broadcast of his own devise called "A Prairie Home Companion." Keillor's extended riffs depict Norwegian-American Lutherans under the unsparing but generally affectionate lens of close observation, and the ripe comedy of his reports is a direct product of their accuracy. "A Prairie Home Companion" demonstrates at least two great principles every time it is aired: that a responsive human being is capable of feeling tenderness and rage for the same object at the same time; and that comedy is almost always rooted in hostility.

Like the residents of Lake Woebegon, non-fictional Lutheran Norwegian-Americans avoid complaint, lamentation, rebellion and displays of sullenness in favor of steady, mild, ongoing acceptance, because they do not believe anyone but a fool ever imagined that life was supposed to be easy. They avoid introspection and self-analysis because they believe that kind of thing can only make you feel worse instead of better. They do not believe that anyone should ever suppose himself or herself superior to anyone else, because sooner or later someone else is going to notice, and then you'll look stuck-up. They believe that conversation is a tricky business riddled with hidden booby-traps and other opportunities to make yourself look foolish, and therefore should be confined to the vagaries of the weather, gossip about whomever happens not to be present, stoic accounts of recent ailments and tales of the grandchildren. They genuinely dislike, even recoil from, any display of powerfully-felt emotion, especially if the emotion in question should be of an affectionate nature. You know how you feel, so the last thing you have to do is talk about it, or, even worse, act like you're a big deal and put it on display. Act nice; be a good neighbor; cover your bases; do your job without grousing about it; don't expect too much; be grateful for whatever you have; remember that the world doesn't owe a living, that God barely knows you exist, that life is good because it is a grim struggle from beginning to end, and you'll be all right.

This point of view sounds much worse than it turns out to be in practice, and in fact it embodies a tremendous amount of common sense. I don't see why people shouldn't be polite to each other, do what they are supposed to do without grousing about it, and know enough to avoid putting on airs. Snobs and whiners really are second-rate human beings, unless of course they possess enough wit to irradiate their snobbishness with brilliant self-awareness and whine with gorgeous, luxuriant eloquence. No matter what your job is, composing minimalist string quartets, fielding grounders and making the throw to first, putting on an eyepatch and singing Wotan in one Ring cycle after another, teaching the third grade, solving Fermat's Theorem, winning stock-car races, writing disjunctive poems that almost one else will ever get or even read, delivering one-liners in comedy clubs, or delivering pizzas, the values taken for granted by the average Norwegian-Lutheran farmer would tend to raise your standards of performance. One thing I learned from my mother was that if you didn't work hard enough to do your job as well as possible, you were not actually doing it at all, you had already failed.

Nothing I have said negates the presence of ordinary human happiness. The collection of family reminiscences I mentioned earlier refers again and again to the pleasures and satisfactions my mother and her siblings experienced during their childhoods. They lived intensely, out there on that farm. They formed internecine alliances, they ran through the woods, told stories, sang, played games and endless pranks, climbed trees, skied down a home-made ski jump, marveled at the stiff collars and dress shirts of relatives visiting from LaCrosse. (Ruth, my mother's youngest sister and the baby of the family, wrote, "I could never understand why Shevlin liked coming to the farm so much. To me it seemed that anyone would surely rather be in a glamorous city with stores and sidewalks and ice cream parlors." Ruth eventually took off for Seattle.) My mother emerges from the family memoirs as an active, even adventurous child, the sort of girl that used to be called, as she was, a "tomboy." She loved riding and was in "seventh heaven" when a neighbor asked her and her brother, to whom she was devoted, to halter break a number of the Shetland ponies he raised. Later on, she and Swede saved up enough money to order U. S. Army saddles from the Montgomery Ward catalogue. My mother liked to remember the wild fun of dashing around bareback on an unbroken pony, also the different kind of pleasure afforded by saddling one of the farm horses, climbing aboard, and coaxing the enormous animal into a gallop.

Another time, she described the transcendent moment when, running, she felt her gears mesh as never before and realized that she had just learned really how to run. My brother John inherited this capacity from her - he could run like an antelope. Me, I hated running, and instead of transcendent moments I got stitches in my side, but I did eventually learn to walk without falling down or holding on to the furniture. (I learned the procedure twice, in fact, for reasons I will go into later.) After I discovered jazz and started spending every cent I had on records, my mother confided that at roughly my current age, thirteen, she, too, had been very interested in music, though in another way: she could not quite explain how it happened, but she had decided to become an opera singer, like Jenny Lind or Nellie Melba. This ambition must have come from some source other the strictly musical, because her family did not own a victrola, and although Atwater-Kent radios had appeared in neighboring farmhouses, her father refused to buy one on the grounds that he couldn't stand all the racket. Undaunted by never having heard a single aria, much less an entire opera, my mother invented her own and sang them to the receptive cows and horses until some more demanding listener, probably one of her sisters, informed her that she couldn't carry a tune and had a voice like a crow. It was the truth, and she knew it - her operatic career disappeared on the spot.

John may have inherited running, but I am proud to say that my mother's musical talent came down to me in undiminished form. In grade school, our music teacher told me to move my lips along with the other kids, but not to make any actual noise. I sang like a crow.

It took me a long time to get around to opera. I stumbled into an appreciation of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears while working in a record store during my last two years of college, but began filling the air around me with Wagner, Richard Strauss, Verdi, Lulu, Béatrice et Bénédict, A Village Romeo and Juliet, Pélleas et Mélisande, and Cleofide only after I had turned forty, by which time my mother had entered into the long vanishing act that was the last stage of her life and which endured, getting more and more horrific as it went along, until ___. One Sunday afternoon in 1988, my wife and I went to a recital at Alice Tully Hall by the great mezzo-soprano Christa Ludwig. Although I had cherished Christa Ludwig's singing for years, I had not consciously taken in her cousinely resemblance to my mother until she strode straight-backed and smiling onstage, halted three feet north of James Levine's keyboard, opened her mouth, and with perfect timing floated, in plangent, billowing voice, into her first song. "Does she remind you of anybody?" Susie whispered, but I was already in tears.

There she was, doing what she had wished to do, gloriously.For her last two years of high school, my mother moved into an apartment in Arcadia with Swede and Ruth. She began nurse's training at Lutheran Hospital in LaCrosse. Then she summoned all her courage and took the train to Milwaukee, a city as foreign to her as London or Paris, to complete her training and earn a degree from Mount Sinai Hospital. In Milwaukee, a fellow nursing student named Kathleen Marie Straub introduced Elvena, by then known as "Nels," to her brother Gordon, a good-looking athlete utterly unlike anyone she had ever known, and after that everything changed. Nels and Gordon, "Gordy," a Catholic from the raffish, in fact all-but surreal hamlet of Lone Rock and a creature imbued with more passion, fantasy, and recklessness than anyone from Norway Valley had ever imagined possible, flirted, dated, fell in love, married. They became Gordy and Nels, a lifelong couple. Gordy roistered and dreamed, translating every inch of life into his own point of view, Nels earned her R.N. and went to work. As I said, everything changed - my mother grew up. Spinning fantasies at every step, Gordy wandered through a succession of jobs, tried and failed to enlist in the Army (varicose veins), became a salesman. Nels starched her nurse's cap, ironed her uniform, and reported for eight-hour shifts at Mount Sinai. After meandering from one shabby apartment to another, they moved into the ground floor of a duplex on North 44th Street near Sherman Boulevard on Milwaukee's west side, then a Jewish neighborhood. According to my father, they never wasted any time thinking about children, but children came along anyhow, three of them, all boys, the first of which was me.

Nels never stopped working, and Gordy never stopped being himself. Neither one of them had any choice. My father moved from job to job and roistered, now and them remembering to include his wife in the after-hours fun; my mother held things together. Caroline and Rhoda, younger cousins of hers happy to escape the family farms, moved into the house on 44th Street to baby-sit while she was on duty at the hospital. I loved Caroline and Rhoda, they seemed like unusually playful adults to the three-year-old, four-year-old me, they were almost as good as my mother, and both of them adored my parents, in their eyes as sophisticated as William Powell and Myrna Loy. I'm sure that my father dazzled them. He was never less than charming to younger women. Now and then, I hope, he took the girls out and showed them off to his friends. He brought me with him a couple of times, and I remember the laughter, the bobbing faces, the haze of cigarette smoke surrounding my perch on the bar. My father had no problem including his children in situations where he knew he was going to have a good time. Gordon Straub, that remarkable piece of work, is not the focus here, but he cannot be ignored, because his combination of impulsivity, loyalty, sentimentality, outright irrationality, spectacular emotional violence, and brilliant, whimsical invention played so large a role in my relationship with my mother.

I hope sometime to be able to write about my father. It would be nice to do him justice.

Like combat soldiers and cops, nurses witness human behavior at its most naked and exposed on a daily basis, and their real feelings about the people with whom they come into contact recede behind a professional mask. Pretty quickly, a necessary amusement, a sort of gallows humor never shown to outsiders, begins to take hold. Every time they go to work, nurses deal with people who are frightened, wounded, fighting for their lives, and people who are dying. Good, responsible nurses, like my mother, retain their compassion and treat each new patient as an individual whose unique suffering deserves unique treatment, but without the professional detachment expressed in graveyard humor they would be lost, they wouldn't be able to function. The children of nurses grow up in an atmosphere responsive to illness but not especially sympathetic to it, and they learn not to expect much slack. Sniffles, headaches, low-grade fevers, minor aches and pains mean nothing, you go to school anyhow. When your fever reaches 103, 104 degrees, you can stay home, but your mother won't be there, because she has to get to her job. Measles, chicken pox, whooping cough, influenza, diseases that leave you limp as a dishrag, soaked with sweat, and prone to hallucinations, she has seen a thousand times before, in versions a thousand times worse than yours, so lie down, drink lots of fluids, enjoy your day off, and get better, because tomorrow you're going back to school. Experience has taught most nurses to regard most doctors with ironic suspicion and a cold, cold eye, so their children spend very little time in pediatrician's offices. There were times during my childhood when I nearly wished I were in the hospital, because there I would receive all of the care and attention my mother bestowed upon her patients. However, because I was not in the hospital, I could listen to her accounts of what went on there when she got home to change out of her uniform, pour herself a drink, drop into a chair, and light up a Kent. These tales were both comic and irate.

She was one kind of person at work, another kind of person at home. The tomboy, the breaker of ponies and builder of ski-jumps, had disappeared. My mother sailed though her workday with calm, professional expertise, and when she came home succumbed to anxiety and turned into a nervous wreck. Life had stranded her with three sons, a demanding occupation, and a colorful husband whose mother had taken care of every sort of household obligation and therefore expected her to do the same. The sons racketed squalling around the house, the husband was liable to come home late, come home in a boiling sulk caused by something he had overheard or imagined overhearing, come home blasted along with a couple of highly entertaining friends who were also blasted, and in the meantime she had to cook dinner and do the laundry. She was a resentful cook, and her meals showed it, a matter my father never quite managed to take in. As long as it was food, it was fine with him, his mind was entirely elsewhere, generally off contemplating that topic of unfailing satisfaction, his own splendor.

It is true that when my father was not tormented by self-doubt or undergoing one of his spells of pure craziness, he really did like to contemplate his all-round splendor, but I must add here that my mother loved him - Gordon Straub astonished her in a thousand ways. He made life funny, heart-breaking, dramatic. Boredom was not a problem. My mother learned how to deal with his multiple vagaries; he kept her on her toes, alert for the next wave of fantasy, ire, or ambition. What undermined her was the sheer, hard, unrecognized labor of holding down a job and doing all the housework for a family of four inconsiderate males. She had been raised with three sisters, and she missed the company of women. I think my mother always regretted that she never had a daughter. We were nothing but a noisy bunch of boys, my father included, and none of us understood anything, we were not at all like girls. In the chaos of the familial circus, my mother represented the only voice of reason, groundedness, useful common sense. Also, she was often the voice of pure grievance. During the nineteen-fifties, suburban wives and mothers, even those with full-time jobs, were unpaid domestic servants, except for the few slovens among them. My mother was not a sloven, she was a Norwegian. She did all the cleaning, dusting, and vacuuming, all the laundry, all the bed-making, all the straightening and picking up, and 95% of the shopping. My father's excursions through the grocery store tended to result in a great many bags crammed with peanut brittle, cookies, cocktail olives, doughnuts, and buttermilk. Maybe once a week, he decided to give her break and wash up after dinner, and once a month or so it occurred to him that my brothers and I were tall enough to reach into the sink. When ordered, we washed the dishes, but with sullen lack of grace. It wasn't our job, after all.

The voice of grievance was the sound of my mother talking to herself, sotto voce, as she hauled bundles of laundry back and forth from the basement, mopped the kitchen floor, or pushed the vacuum cleaner around the house. In a kind of stage whisper, she talked to herself nonstop, unreeling her complaints in an endless sentence devoid of punctuation or even breaks between the individual words.

WhatdotheythinkIamtheirservantwellI'mnottheirservantandIamsickandtiredofbeingtreated-likeoneit'shightimeTHEYdidsomeofthisworkoronedayI'mwalkingoutandnevercoming back....

You could hear it from two rooms away - you could practically hear it from the other side of the house. Even when you couldn't hear it, you knew it was going on, that endless, steaming sentence, looping around the house, trailing up and down the basement stairs, following my mother's resentful progress like a long, long ribbon. Her bitterness was too much for us, too scary. We didn't know how to address or cope with it, so we turned to stone and hoped it would pass. The stage-whisper monologue frightened us less than her rare outbursts, when she went over the edge and railed at us face-to-face. I am sick and tired of being treated like your SERVANT! All I do is go around cleaning up your MESSES! Listen to me, I've had it up to HERE! Certain stock phrases emerged over and over again: "one iota," as in, "I never get one iota of help from you ungrateful little shits," and, a great favorite, "twenty-seven times," as in, "Peter, I've told you twenty-seven times to hang up your shirts instead of throwing them on the floor, but do you pay one iota of attention?" I heard that one so often that I began paying at least half a dozen iotas of attention, and now I hang up my shirts and trousers before going to bed even on nights when I'm operating more or less on remote control. Once when were all fairly small, therefore particularly nauseating, she actually did make good on her threat and tossed some clothes into a suitcase, tore out of the house, and drove off. (You can take care of yourselves from now on, because I am SICK AND TIRED of doing it for you!) Too stunned to cry, we crawled into various corners and pretended to be statues for an hour or two, after which she returned. Over the next couple of days, we barely opened our mouths. Then we reverted to being ungrateful little shits, our natural condition.

The voice of reason, groundedness, and useful common sense was both more pervasive and more personal. My father's volatility and self-absorption, not to mention his unshakable assumption that disagreement equalled defiance, made our relationship difficult, but I always felt that my mother understood me, valued me for myself, and took pride in my accomplishments. There were times when she seemed able nearly to read my mind, which was enormously reassuring. In the dynamic of family life, she was my ally. Without an ally, I would have been lost. My father had been an athlete, and like most former athletes saw a participation in sports as a central element in the development of character. He had played football and basketball in high school, been a football player in college and played semi-professionally afterward. That he had always loved reading and had an instinctive gift for narrative, qualities I undoubtedly inherited from him, was merely personal, of no significance in his value-world. Reading and story-telling were essential to him but weightless when measured against sports. Somewhere inside him, I am sure, within a chamber he entered as seldom as possible, he imagined that these activities were tainted, suspect... well, effeminate.

Although there were times during my childhood when I really loved playing baseball, they tended to occur when my father was nowhere in sight. He cared too much, he tried too hard. When the five-year-old me failed to hit one of his soft, underhand pitches, he despaired. When I missed three in a row, disappointment soured him to the point where he wondered aloud if I were really his son. Long after the fantasy that I would grow up to play professional football - in other words, live out his still-vital dreams, for what are children but extensions of yourself? - should have yielded to obdurate reality, he continued to see me as a born tackle who was too lazy to accept his destiny. I had no idea what my destiny would turn out to be, or if I even had one, but I knew that football was not in the picture. I detested football. My high school, Milwaukee Country Day, was so underpopulated that every freshman and sophomore had to play on the JV team, and we who hypothetically had been born to play tackle strapped ourselves into our uniforms, slouched out onto the field, lined up on the frozen mud, and prayed that the quarterback was smart enough not call either of the two plays that sent the ball through our position. He was cooked if he did, because as born tackles our principle goal was the avoidance of injury. The quarterback, a nasty, arrogant louse anyhow, could look after himself.

Right from the start, from the moment I opened my eyes and took in the presence of billboards, road signs, labels, and headlines, I hungered for the written word. One of my clearest memories, from early childhood is of an overwhelming desire to understand print. I taught myself to read by memorizing comic books and "reading" them to other kids until the words locked into place, and after that I was off, I was insatiable. After an encounter with a moving automobile in my seventh year led to a couple of operations and a year out of school, I turned to reading even more intensely. Because my father had been addicted to Tom Swift and Edgar Rice Burroughs in his boyhood, he was happy to drive me weekly to the local libraries and let me check out the maximum number of books, six. I was a terrific student, and he liked that; it reflected well on him, it gave him something to brag about. Yet he did not think it was enough, especially for a son destined to play for the Green Bay Packers. In summers, I was supposed to charge outside and play games, not just sit around and read novels. He didn't get it. I was missing the boat, and I didn't seem to care. He vacillated between concern and irritation.

Every summer, our family drove up to Arcadia to spend a couple of weeks on the farm, and there, too, I failed him, at least to the extent that he noticed me. While my brothers racketed around with the male cousins of their age and made a stab at helping with the work, I never did anything but read the pile of books I had brought along and hang out in Swede's kitchen, gabbing with his daughters. If Ruth, by now divorced, happened to be visiting the farm, all I did was talk about books with her and her daughter Anne, whom I adored but everyone else found dangerously incomprehensible. (Ruth said, "If you ask Anne the same question three times, she'll give you three different answers, and you can't understand any of them." That was what I liked about her, along with her assumption that not only was there nothing wrong with me, I seemed on my way to somewhere pretty interesting.) My father feared that there was something wrong with me, some characterological flaw that would lead me deeply astray, if not ruin my life.

My mother worried about me, too, but she always trusted me to work things out in the end. Unlike my father, she knew that my encounter with the automobile and its lengthy aftermath had contributed an extra degree of darkness, of suppressed anger and unacknowledged fear, to my personality, and at my worst moments, times when I was behaving very badly, she suspended judgement and mutely shared my suffering, which was also mute, as thoroughly as she could.

For Norwegian Lutherans of her generation, as for her parents' generation, physical demonstrations of love took place in private, behind a closed door, and after my bothers and I advanced out of babyhood we were never hugged or kissed, except for the brief period when our father used to kiss us goodnight, and he told me later that kissing boys always made him feel creepy, so he stopped doing it. The only times I remember being hugged by my mother took place when I had alarmed her by doing something extraordinarily stupid. She was stiff, awkward, uncomfortable, twig-like. It was like being hugged by a maiden aunt who on the whole would rather not, like being hugged by a frightened bird. I was no better, I'm sure, but I was grateful for the gesture. My father sizzled away in the background, waiting to get rid of me.

The grounded, sane, never less than necessary voice of reasonable common sense came out on those rare occasions when no one else was in the room. She had been saving up some comment or bit of advice, and she looked you in the eye and got it off her chest. At those moments, the things she said could put a dozen different worries, problems, and fears to rest. She was giving you the truth, the real deal, and you knew it. This happened over and over, and I hardly remember anything my mother said at those times. What I do remember is the sense of becoming acquainted again with the real world, the one in which people's motives led to actual consequences. A haze of illusion and conjecture had been blown away. When I was fourteen or fifteen, she said to me, "Even if you don't like most of the people you meet, you should pretend you do and be friendly to them, because after a while you will like them, and your whole life will be better." She was right - I started acting as though I liked other people, quickly discovered that I really did, and my life improved. She worked the same earth-mother magic on my brothers. John once told me that at nine or ten he had begun to imagine that he was a Martian and everyone knew but him, and when he mentioned this to our mother, she instantly dispelled his fears by saying, "No, John, that's just crazy."

My mother knew all along that I was never going to be an athlete. The things about me that infuriated my father, my total disinterest in business; my sense that literature, music, and art were essential to a civilized life; my adolescent intellectual pretentions; my assumption that there somewhere existed a world beyond Milwaukee and my father's circle of concerns, and that this larger, more generous world was not only of tremendous interest to me, but also necessary to my psychic survival, appealed to my mother as much or more than they aroused her concern. Long after I had found my place in the world, my father, on a visit to New York, sat down in my living room, where he was surrounded by paintings, and said, "You know, I hate art. I don't why, I just hate it." (I know why, though - because he didn't know anything about art, he thought it diminished him.) My mother would have said, "I don't know much about art, but Peter knows what he likes." She understood that what was important to me would eventually let me find my path; she trusted me to find the way out that was also the way in.

In 1977, when Susie and I were coming to the end of our long residence in London, my father's letters began to report disturbing news about my mother. She was having peculiar medical problems her doctors could not diagnose. One night after dinner, she had collapsed outside a restaurant. There were periods when she seemed confused and could not remember what she had been doing or saying. My father put an optimistic gloss on these matters. He could not disguise his worry, but he assumed that everything would be fine in the end.

That summer, my parents spent a week at our house on Hillfield Avenue, N8, and for the most part my mother did appear to be fine. She took great pleasure in Susie's pregnancy, she planted a ring of pansies around the rose bush in our small front yard, she regarded her husband's occasional flights into outer space with her by then customary mixture of wariness and amusement. After serving for more than a decade as Alderman in Brookfield, our suburb, my father had run for Mayor and lost, a failure which led him to brood about taking a powder from the ungrateful place and moving somewhere nicer, where the citizens were not knaves. We drove through the Sussex countryside and lingered in pubs. My father teetered around the house on his troublesome knees and bare feet, sometimes getting confused about which floor the living room was on - "I'm looking for that room with the big, square furniture," he said to me - now and then letting a freshly-made drink fall from his hand to detonate on the tiles of the ground-floor hall. He seemed more disturbed than she.

One night when my mother and I sat up late in the kitchen, she said, "I'll never forget the first time I was sent out to spend a night in a patient's house. I was just out of nursing school, and the patient was an old woman who had been released from the hospital that day. She had a box of chocolates in her refrigerator." During the night, the old woman died. My mother was told to do nothing until morning. She could not sleep, and one by one, she ate all the chocolates. It was a charming story. Five minutes later, my mother looked at me, smiled, said, "I'll never forget the first time I was sent out to spend a night in a patient's house," and told the whole story all over again. Apart from that, she perspired more than I had ever seen her do before. By the early afternoons, a flushed red band crossed her face from cheek to cheek. There were times when she forgot what she had been talking about and fell silent. I had no idea what to make of these lapses, if they even were lapses. They become significant only in retrospect.

By the following summer, when Susie and I paid a visit to Wisconsin with our infant son, Benjamin, the damage could no longer be dismissed as a temporary aberration. Whatever was happening to my mother had accelerated, and its outward manifestations presented a persistent state of confusion and anxiety. Confined within that state, the mother I remembered surfaced only intermittently.

My father had abandoned knavish Brookfield to relocate himself and his wife in a small, "contemporary" house on Lake Halley, northwest of Milwaukee and close to Eau Claire. Eau Claire was in the coulee country and home to Rhoda and her sister Germaine, both of whom came for dinner on the second night of our visit to Lake Halley. Before we got there, I didn't know what to expect: my parents' letters had described a placid existence enlivened chiefly by the sightings of exotic waterfowl and other birds. According to them, their new life was working out perfectly well. It might have looked that way, too, if you happened to be an expert in the psychological mechanism known as denial. Surrounded by trees, the little house was attractive clean, functional, a sort of combination of a hunting lodge and a "hospitality suite" in a modern hotel. The back yard led to the water's edge and a short, sturdy pier where my parents liked to sit in the evenings.

Yet my mother seemed to exist in a mild but unassuagable panic without any specific referent. When sitting down, she often jittered, preoccupied with her own unease. Something had been left undone, some essential domestic task had been neglected, and the world would be under threat of ever-increasing disorder until the neglected task had been addressed. Finally, her sense of responsibility pulled her from her chair and sent her pacing through the house in search of the overlooked duty, the thing undone, the forgotten. The kitchen offered a wrinkled dishcloth and a couple of used napkins, the bedroom a single pair of socks my father had dropped into the hamper an hour before. My mother gathered up these few objects and, intent on taking care of business, hurried washing machine-wards. By our second day in the new house, I understood that she did this all the time. She trotted from one room to another, collected socks and dishcloths, and washed them in the washing machine, usually one by one. It was like watching a dog in a dog-run.

At other times, the compulsion to re-enact the rituals which once had evoked the voice of grievance abated, leaving a vaguer, more distracted but entirely recognizable version of her old self. She calmed down and joined in. Infant Ben delighted her - everything he did gave her pleasure. I will never cease to be grateful for that. During our stay, my mother prepared meals, conversed, joked, described her adaptation to Lake Halley. She knew why Gordy had sold up and moved out, and that they had landed near most of her relatives eased the grief of having lost the house in Brookfield. This grief was real, and the loss was profound. My mother may have filled that house with her endless sentence, but she had lived in it for better than two decades, and she both loved and missed it. My brothers and I, along with our wives, spent about a year attributing Nels's problems to the shock of having been abruptly torn from her familiar surroundings: clearly, she would have much preferred to remain in Brookfield and, but for her husband's wounded narcissism, would have done so for the rest of her life. Instead, she had been uprooted, drastically. In the absence of any other explanation, this one looked pretty good.

Rhoda and Germaine, my mother's younger cousins, arrived for dinner on the second night of our visit and yakked away in a manner I found wonderfully familiar, spinning off jokes and pungent comments on everything in sight. They were Gilbertsons, from my grandmother's side of the family, women blessed with a raucous wit, a lively capacity for enjoyment, unflagging warmth, and a sturdy sense of loyalty. Both of my parents had always meant a great deal to them, and before and after dinner, they took in their cousin's lapses into vagueness and travels around the dog-run, her deposits of single dish towels into the washing machine, without breaking stride. During a private moment later on in the evening, Rhoda and Germaine expressed their concern for my mother, whose deterioration they, too, supposed a product of the almost brutally sudden removal from Brookfield. This, of course, was not an opinion that could be aired in Gordy's presence. No one had any idea of what was actually going on. In any case, my father had chosen to ignore all signs to the contrary and act as though nothing, at least nothing of any significance, was wrong with his wife. He would maintain this position, which I am tempted to call a facade, for years to come, and he surrendered to reality only when the inexorable progress of my mother's disease gave him no other choice.Susie, baby Ben, and I went back to London and began the process of disentangling ourselves from England. My father wrote that disagreements with an unfriendly neighbor had soured him on Lake Halley, too bad but nothing serious, he and my mother were moving to a townhouse development in the little town of Hartland, closer to Milwaukee. (The "disagreements," I learned later, had been the product of Gordy's furious response to the neighbor's observation that Nels seemed to be losing her marbles.) In June of 1979, Susie and I swanned back to the United States on the QE2, for some reason rented a house in Westport, Connecticut, and, in a step even deeper into delusion, bought a big, lovely Victorian on two acres just up from Burying Hill Beach on Westport's Beachside Avenue, known locally as "the Gold Coast." Should you be wondering about the use of the word "delusion" in the previous sentence, a careful reading of the book I wrote on the third floor of that beautiful house, Floating Dragon, will clear things up, and that's all I'm going to say about Westport.