History of My Reading: Bluebird of Nothingness

 

Flora Severini high school graduation photo 1938 from a local newspaper

In late January 1974 my father called me in Cambridge to say my mother was in the hospital again and I should come home as soon as I could.  I did.  She had passed the five -year mark that was supposed to indicate she was safe from cancer’s recurrence, but nevertheless it had returned.

 She was in a hospital in Pittsburgh for evaluation and treatment, but basically because of her alarming condition. I soon learned that when my father had called, he’d been told she might not last the night. When I got there, she was out of immediate danger but was being given morphine for her severe pain. When she was conscious she talked a great deal, at times abruptly and irrationally, so that I barely recognized her. But at other times she spoke more calmly, with such conviction that even her strangest insights were compelling. 

The one instance I recall was her insistence that there was an essential piece of information in the work of Christopher Morley, and that a certain high school classmate would know what it was.  She pleaded with me to search it out.  So even as I knew how crazy it was I found this classmate from Youngwood High School in the late 1930s and called her from a pay phone near the hospital.  Of course she didn’t know anything but that they had both liked Morley’s writing. 

Morley was a prolific and well-known American journalist, humorist, essayist, poet and novelist from the 1920s through the 40s.  I don’t recall my mother mentioning him before, but I now surmise that his 1939-1940 best-selling novel Kitty Foyle (later a popular dramatic film starring Ginger Rodgers) was something she would have read. It was about the trials of a young working class woman from a small town who joined the new generation of overworked and underpaid office workers, and had romantic—and tragic--misadventures in confronting the biases of the wealthy ruling class.   

Flora Severini, my mother, grew up in a small town in an immigrant family of modest means, graduated high school in 1938, and did some subsequent secretarial and clerical work, among other jobs before her marriage. (If she'd read this book then, she would have seen an early reference to a new expression: the "rat-race.")  But what she remembered in the hospital, if anything real, remained a mystery.

 After a few days she had improved enough that she was taken off morphine and given other medication for pain.  But the doctors also concluded that further treatment of the disease itself was useless. She was taken to Westmoreland Hospital in our hometown of Greensburg.  She had been employed by that hospital for more than a decade, beginning when I was around 11 years old.  She’d worked her way up from a night shift clerk to an administrator and head of her department.  Though she hadn’t worked there for several years due to her illness, she was known and loved there.

Flora's First Communion photo

 She was given a private room, the last at the end of a corridor on an upper floor.  Across from her room was a visitors’ lounge.  Much of the time our family had it to ourselves.  Only a few of us could be in my mother’s room at a time.  Besides myself, there was my father and my sisters, Kathy and Debbie, joined many times by Kathy’s six year old daughter Chrissy, Debbie’s boyfriend Jerry, Kathy’s boyfriend Chad.  My uncle Carl, Flora’s younger brother came often from his job in Pittsburgh or his home in Murrysville, and eventually her younger sister Antoinette, who taught school in Maryland, came for the duration. My grandmother was nearly always there. Other relatives who lived in the area dropped by, as did Flora’s friends, especially those who worked with her at the hospital.

 Though her pain meds were less intense, my mother struggled with their effects.  At times she was lucid but dreamy. Her bed faced a large window, and I remember one day when we watched fast moving clouds over Seton Hill College, high on a distant hill. The school was built around the last remnants of what had been the most elaborate dwelling in Greensburg, built by a wealthy industrialist.  According to Andrew Carnegie, it was where he saw his first private library as a young railroad employee, and was inspired to someday build his own.

 Seen from the south, the college now was a collection of massive stone and brick buildings, replete with spires and turrets. That day she said it reminded her of Wuthering Heights.  I said that when I was younger, and gazing out at it from the living room picture window in our house on a different hill, I used to imagine it as a castle, and associated it with Robin Hood.

 (In fact my mother and I had seen it from a much closer vantage point in our first home together in the late 40s, from an attic apartment on College Avenue, at the foot of that long hill.) 

Flora at 16.  On the back she'd
written "The Dreamer"

There were moments I found my mother’s dreamy talk, with its sudden associations, its quick and at times surreal changes and non sequiturs (she once referred to “the letter Pete”) much more comfortable than what I was seeing and hearing around me.  The daily incongruities, the grotesque contrasts, set to the cheerful inanities from the television; the strained conversations and hospital absurdities, were hard to take.  

But both the pain meds and the pain played havoc with her lucidity. She got to the point that she (briefly) refused to eat, because she said she didn’t want to wake up one more day and not know where she was. 

 For the roughly eight weeks I was there, I lived in the family home.  I’d been there in November and most recently at Christmas. For some reason I had recorded the meal my mother made me the night before I started back to Cambridge: a hot turkey sandwich, mashed potatoes and gravy, and corn--probably made from Christmas leftovers.  It would turn out to be the last meal she made me, out of many. 

I recently found the last letter she wrote me, and the last letter I wrote her, both from that early January after I'd returned to Cambridge. She was enjoying the parakeet named Nikki that someone evidently gave her for Christmas (I have no memory of this), keeping her company in her daytimes alone.  She wrote that it was wonderful having me home.  I wrote back that I enjoyed being there with her, and that I noticed and appreciated the extra efforts she made for me, even if I didn't always say so at the time.  I apparently knew she was seeing the doctor soon, and wrote I hope the holidays didn't tire her too much. It's good to have evidence now that we were on good terms then, and that her last Christmas and New Year's were good ones.  

Now back in Greensburg, I went to the hospital every day, sometimes with my father but often on my own.  It wasn’t far: I could see it—and had seen it most of my life—from that same picture window.  Our house was on a hill just outside the city limits, and the hospital was on the next hill within the city itself.  So now I often walked to the hospital, on very familiar streets.

 I walked down along the West Newton Road to Hamilton Avenue, facing the corner where, as the first-born child, I’d waited with my mother for the green Hamilton-Stanton bus to downtown.  As I crossed Hamilton, a few blocks to my right was the building where I’d first gone to school—it was called Sacred Heart then.  It had been built when my mother was a girl, living close by, though she was already going to the nearest public school.

 If I chose to walk on Hamilton along its upward slope, I passed houses where schoolmates had lived, and the church rectory.  Down an alley was the old church where I’d had my First Communion and Confirmation, and where I’d served Mass on many early weekday mornings as well as Sundays.  This was likely the first church my grandparents and my mother had attended in their New World.

  Near the crest of the hill at Pittsburgh Street was the house where some Severini relatives still lived.  In the 1920s it was where my grandparents and mother first lived in America.  Looking ahead to where Hamilton terminated, I could see the corner that once hosted a pizza place, where as a young adolescent I played the nickel jukebox and mourned the sudden early death of Buddy Holly. 

Pittsburgh St. approach to Westmoreland Hospital

Up the steep hill of Pittsburgh Street—again passing family homes of high school classmates—was the entrance of Westmoreland Hospital, where I’d been born. But it was now connected to a newer, taller building, and was at least twice the size in 1974 as it had been in 1946.

 Or if I wanted the shorter way I might come at it from behind by walking straight up West Newton St. toward downtown, as I had countless times, carrying a baseball glove or books to return to the library, or 25 cents for the Saturday afternoon movies plus a nickel for a box of Dots or Root Beer Barrels.  But this time I would cut across on side streets to the hospital parking lot.

 I was there at all hours and often walked home late at night, reacquainting myself with a sky full of stars that had been hidden from me in Cambridge. Or seeing those old streets from the other side of dawn.  I enjoyed these walks, especially returning home.  Even if the air was cold and damp it was better than the stale florescent blankness inside the hospital. Occasionally I would escape for a few minutes outside, just to feel the rare winter sun on my face, and be assured it was still there. 

 I kept irregular hours and slept in spurts or great chunks.  Once in mid-March after falling asleep just after midnight I awoke at 2 a.m. in the silent house, and looked out the picture window into the now snowy night.  Through snowflakes I saw the white street lights, the green light down at the crossroads, the lit dome of the Court House, the Cathedral obscured by snow and trees.  I saw a township truck with sand for the roads stuck on my street, its yellow light turning and its wheels whining.

Flora at the 1939 New York World's Fair

 At first I did get away from the hospital at times, to escape the threatening tedium and persistent overload, and absorbing some sense of Greensburg now, where the late 60s I had left behind were still making waves. I recall once being in an unfamiliar bar in a familiar oddly shaped building--when it was new, it was the hip new food place eatery on Otterman Street where my father took me for hot chocolate after my Confirmation.  Now it featured drinks and a live rock band, and I remember standing too close to a guitar speaker, the music burning through me.

 Later I couldn’t stray far from my mother’s room, but I recall once feeling so stir-crazy that I called my old friend Clayton and extracted him from his family dinner to sit with me in a restaurant near the hospital. Once I escaped by myself up to Pennsylvania Avenue to a movie theatre, but alerted the manager that I might get a phone call from the hospital, and I sat at the end of the aisle at the back.  I don’t remember what was playing. 

 By early March, some remaining Cambridge and Boston Phoenix friends had learned from my housemate where I was and why, and I got a few letters.  Housemate Andrea herself wrote about house matters but also gossip.  I got Phoenix and “poetry biz” gossip from Celia Gilbert, and Janet Maslin wrote about hosting Joni Mitchell when she was in Boston for a concert.  She even went bowling with her and her traveling entourage.  Joni’s team always won, she reported: she had been on her high school bowling team and she had skills.

 As this is ostensibly a series about my reading, it is worth recording that splayed on a plastic cushioned chair in the small narrow visitors lounge, or eating countless toasted cheese and other bland sandwiches and slurping endless weak coffees at the brown counter of the hospital snack and gift shop (“The Hospitality Shop”) for those eight weeks, I was probably reading something almost constantly, but I don’t recall what.

 I remember there wasn’t a lot of choice.  The lounge (according to one of the notebooks and scraps that have survived) had a scattering of old magazines—months’ old Time, years old Sports Illustrated.  The Hospitality Shop had little of interest on its publications racks: lots of women’s magazines (“Cancer Tests That Can Save Your Life,” and 29 Spring Hairdos, plus the latest on the Kennedys and the Nixons), rifle magazines and True Detectives, gothic novels and comic books, and books of crossword puzzles.  My father bought those.  He did dozens of them in that visitors’ lounge.

 There were books at home: a miscellany of my mother’s book club books, books I’d left behind and some acquired by my sister Kathy and left there.  Among my fugitives was probably a set of three F. Scott Fitzgerald novels-- a few quotes in a notebook suggests that I re-read Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night.

 The one book I associate with this time was a children’s book, but not from my own childhood (though, for example, the My Book House set was still there.)  It was a hardback with an orange cover of The New Treasure Seekers by E. Nesbit.  It was evidently bought used, probably by Kathy, possibly to read to Chrissy.  I’d never heard of Nesbit, but I was completely charmed by this book.  It was a very English set of childhood adventures in the late 19^th century.  The tales of the Bastable family are supposedly told by the eldest, Oswald, who suggests that when he grows up he hopes to be a pirate in his spare time. 

 Racial, ethnic and class attitudes of the times get a little squirmy now and then, though the children always have their hearts in the right place.  It’s very well written, and over the years I’ve acquired and read several more E. Nesbit children’s books.  When I first started reading the Harry Potter books, E. Nesbit was the first possible influence that came to mind, and I was pleased when J.K. Rowling said so. 

 This book did not remind me of my childhood, though I suppose you could say indirectly it did. It offered an alternative space, which I guess counts as escape. Still, as far as I recall, I did not seek or find inspiration or solace or anything profound in my reading in those weeks, partly I assume because those hours were characterized by the need to be vaguely alert amidst the tense boredom and exhaustion that mostly resulted in a persistent spaciness, with sharp moments that were emotional and yet complex and ambiguous, and very new to me.  I don’t know what this absence in my reading means.  I still don’t know what any of it meant.  I do recall that I guiltily experienced so much of it as grotesque.   

 In particular I did not read about death, though beyond poetry and philosophy there wasn’t much to read yet specifically about dealing with the situation we were in.  It was still something of a forbidden topic, which might help account for the fact that visitors didn’t really know what to say.

 Everyone knew my mother was dying, and no one said so—least of all to her. When the doctors in Pittsburgh told us but not her, I was angry.  My father followed the authority, the expert.  I somewhat self-righteously announced that if my mother ever asked me, I would tell her.

 Just after one of the doctor’s infrequent visits, probably in early March, she admitted that she almost asked him if she was ever getting out of this room, but was afraid of the answer.  So I kept quiet about it.

Flora in her back yard 1944

 When she was asleep or it was my turn to retreat to the lounge, I wrote letters (I specifically remember writing to Carol) and in notebooks. I noted the plethora of smoking in the hospital: smoke choking the few green plants; standing ashtrays full of butts under a No Smoking sign. Perhaps that’s what sent me to the public library, to look up stories on smoking in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, with an eye to eventually doing my own article.

 Generally we were a hapless and helpless lot.  We stood around, we sat around. The television in her room was a cynically cheerful counterpoint, though once I saw that it scared her—it was Nixon on the screen, and she was afraid of him.  Watergate was well underway, it had been for years; it was just five months or so from President Nixon’s resignation.

 Visitors came and went, most of them (like us) not really knowing what to say, struggling against the desire to get back to their lives, and the fear of facing sickness unto death.  I hadn’t yet read Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illych but by the time I did, this aspect of it would be familiar.  Years later, I taught this novella in an evening class with Margaret; the students were nurses from this very hospital.

 It struck me as hypocritical, but it was very human:the false optimism, both hollow and helpless,  with everyone playing the cheerfulness no one could actually feel: the bluebird of nothingness. It was a phrase I scribbled in my notebook at the time.

 When there were visitors in her more alert moments, I noticed my mother playing hostess, smoothing over any awkwardness with questions and conversation, calming their conflicting emotions and unease, their nervousness, their fear to get too close.

  We in the family who were there every day were so dependent on the nurses.  When one was bad, it led to alarm, anxiety and prolonged discussions of what to do.  Then she was replaced by an older nurse, who immediately took charge.  She was from “the sticks,” where she had a pet crow.  Her vocabulary and pronunciation said she lacked education and sophistication.  But she had a sure touch, physically and otherwise.  My mother told her she was worried that she couldn’t help with the family’s problems.  “You let them take care of their problems,” Gussie said, “and we’ll take care of yours.”

 Over the weeks, the pain and the fog got worse.  “A dream within a dream within a dream,” she said. When asked how the pain was, she didn’t know.  She couldn’t remember feeling it in the night.  Sometimes she couldn’t say how she felt at that moment.  She improvised, sometimes getting canny about her responses, and subtly suspicious, then sometimes abruptly frustrated because she wasn’t sure what she was being told and not told.  At times she wanted it to be over, and the next second she prayed that she could get up and walk.

 each breath was a cry

in that landscape of soft-edged

denial

but for now:

three merged

sighs of sleep

in the last hour

before dawn

and the next uncertain moment

  She found some escape.  She’d said that she’d been thinking about England, she didn’t know why. (I expect it was that view of Seton Hill.)  But it had an eerie feeling, she said.  Later she had times during several days when she believed that she was actually in England.  She had never been there but she named places she had perhaps seen in the movies or photographs or just read about, like Trafalgar Square.

Walt and Flora in 1945, year of their marriage

 Probably in mid March, my father’s father, my paternal grandfather Frank Kowinski, came to visit, and sat for some minutes at her bedside in his somber dark suit. In my life I’d seen him maybe a half dozen times outside of the home he shared with his daughter and her family in the “coal patch” town of United, the house where my father grew up, built by the United Coal Company. He probably still frequented the nearby Calumet Club, but otherwise, he seemed to spend most of his time alone in his basement.  

 Some time after he left my mother said, “When I saw that old man, I knew I had to be dying.  That’s the only thing that could get him here.”

 But it was also probably in mid-March that Debbie and her boyfriend Jerry talked to her alone, to tell her they were engaged to be married. 

 At times my mother still spoke from a different realm. I wrote down what she said to me late at night on Saturday, March 16.  At this remove I can only guess where I might have embellished a bit, but this is the essence of it, including most of the words:

 “One hundred years, one hundred years, one hundred years, to sleep, you’re sleepy, go ahead.  You’re sleepy, aren’t you?  Go ahead and sleep.  Go ahead and sleep.

It’s too late.  There. It’s gone.  It’s gone.  Now I want you to go.  Put on your coat and get your things and go away and forget.  Forget everything.  And then write it all down on paper, as something you have forgotten for a long time and then suddenly remembered.  Now don’t move.  Don’t get up or you will die.  Promise me, promise me that you’ll lie back, lie back and sleep and never get up.  And write it all down on paper, remember that your mother told you, think of other worlds…Now go, please, promise me that you’ll go now.”

 And yet soon she seemed much better. That week she even sat up in a chair for the first time in awhile.  We wondered at it, but the nurse cautioned us.  She’d seen this before, just ahead of the end.

  The room became more cheerful.  Debbie repositioned some of Chrissie’s painting high on the glass window of the door.  Near the bed was a ceramic goldfinch I’d purchased from the Hospitality Shop, when my mother wished for a bird to perch on the window ledge. It’s now on a shelf looking over my left shoulder.

 On Sunday, March 17, she sat up in bed and looked out on a bright day. She watched a clear blue sunny sky, and white clouds passing by slowly, slowly moving in one direction, some slowly breaking up, with pieces floating upward, and she listened to the wind blowing.

  Sunday evening she was visited by a priest and I believe made her confession, though I don’t remember being around at the time. By then she believed she was dying. Sunday night she had the whole family gathered around her and she said her final goodbye to everyone.  

 But when the moment was over, life resumed as if it hadn’t happened.  She asked for the television to be turned on.  It was a Peanuts special, which nobody watched.  She hadn’t been eating much, even with her mother and her children feeding her.  But now she ate one of the Girl Scout cookies someone had bought, a chocolate one.   Everyone else also had one, like a communion. Then she napped, and awoke to ask if the bills had been paid.

 Later she called me to her.  “ A long time ago, there was something I wanted to do.  I almost did it one night a long time ago, but I didn’t.  Everything sounds melodramatic coming out of this mouth, but now I guess it’s ok, I’m getting things straight in my mind bit by bit.  But today I did it, and I’m so glad.  I’m so glad I did it and it’s done.”

 “What did you do?”

 “I can’t tell you.  It was a little thing but it was the world and life and religion, you know.  I don’t know why I want to tell you these things but I do.  And now everything that I do, I’ll start and finish, start and finish, and the past is past, with nothing to do with the past.”

By then her sister Antoinette was there, my Aunt Toni, who my mother called Ant.  Once my mother was talking in spontaneous rhyme.  “She used to write poetry,” Ant said, and asked her, “Do you still write poetry?”  “Yes,” she said.  “Where is it? Where is your poetry?”  “Billy has it.”  I didn’t, or maybe I did.

 On the following Monday she was feeling worse.  “Something is wrong.  I don’t know what it is.  I try to get through but nobody understands.  I can’t tell what it is, because I don’t know what it is.”

 “I told you before, that I wanted to be pretty.  I didn’t want everyone to have to see me when I wasn’t pretty.  I’m sorry for that.  I wanted to make it easier.  But I couldn’t make it easier.”

 The last conversation I had with her was short and convoluted.  I don’t remember what it was about, something to do with how she was feeling at the moment, and finding the nurse. I don’t recall what I said.   But I do remember that she said: “If I trust anybody, I trust you.”  I still wonder if I earned that trust, or how.  But that’s the last conversation we had, and possibly the last words she spoke, except perhaps to the nurse.

 By then we knew the end was very close, and we were  there all the time, however bleary and nearly numb.  On Friday night, March 22, my aunt came into the visitors’ lounge and quietly told us all to come into the room.  When we got there my mother was breathing long throaty breaths.  I remember I was standing on her left side, at or near the head of the bed.  We stood without a word as she took those long heaving breaths until after an exhalation suddenly no inhalation came, just a long silence, a true absence of any sound.  Only my grandmother cried. None of the rest of us moved, we just looked down at my mother.  Eventually Aunt Toni standing across from me told us all we could touch her.

My mother and I making a snowman in front
of our first home together on College Ave.

 I certainly had been closer to my mother than I was with my father, and I once overheard him telling his father that I had taken her death harder than anyone.  I wasn’t aware of that at the time.  At this remove, I see myself then as a self-absorbed 27 year old, immersed in the world of contemporaries in the contemporary world, with only a vague sense of the past and an anxious purchase on the present, which was elsewhere.

 We had always written letters back and forth, talked on the phone as much as long distance rates permitted, and we talked when I visited home.  At the time I still felt, as I had since college, or perhaps since adolescence, that she and I inhabited different worlds. The whole generation gap thing didn’t help.  That distance and my defensiveness might well have faded in time. In any case, I felt the deprivation, the absence of her presence in subsequent years. I missed the conversations we might have had as we both got older, comparing memories and sharing observations.   She was only 54.

 But any process at that moment leading to any realization, even any real grief, had to be withheld, to first confront what to me were the bizarre protocols of the funeral, as they were in that time and place.   

 I was a relative innocent to these. This was only the second death in my close family.  Although I was home from college the summer my grandfather died, and I called some relatives to tell them, wrote his obituary for the newspaper and served as a pallbearer, that was the extent of my involvement with “the arrangements.” 

But now I suffered for the first time the (to me) absurd rituals: reviewing the long rows of coffins to select one, listening to discussions on the decision of a dress, of how to deal with relatives who felt snubbed, while privacy was suddenly gone as people trooped through the house with obscene amounts of food and solemn sentimentality.  The loud incongruity of it—which I experienced as indignity akin to cruelty—was too much for me. I erupted in violence against several innocent objects in the storage garage.

 I was particularly appalled by the so-called “viewing” at the funeral home.  My mother’s body and barely recognizable face in an open casket behind us and mostly ignored as the family stood in a placid line facing the other way to chat amiably with people we might not know well or hadn’t seen in years.  Even the nun who had most made my high school life miserable and who my mother despised, evidently showed up, although only Kathy saw her entrance, now habitless (thanks to those late 60s reforms.)  Even the Darvon or whatever I’d been given to take to cope with these hours didn’t insulate me, and I quietly sailed for the men’s room.  Whereupon, my sister said, the nun left in a huff. And the next day we did it again. 

I was however calm enough to appreciate the sincerity of the women from the hospital who had worked in my mother’s department, and who wanted us to know how much they admired her, how fair she was with everyone.  They wanted to tell their story.  Still, the venue freaked me out. 

We gathered for the funeral Mass at the relatively new St. Paul’s Church, just up to the next street from ours and across the Carbon Road.  The church had originally been designed to eventually become a gymnasium for the adjacent new school, but funds (and a large enough congregation) for a proper new church never materialized.  On this morning, before the service could begin and while the organist was played the preliminaries, a young altar boy in his cassock and surplus suddenly ran out to the altar and began crying “Fire!”  Eventually we saw wisps of smoke coming from the sacristy and cooler heads had everyone file out.

 Of the many people who attended, at this remove I remember only my cousins on my mother’s side. We stood around the parking lot and sat in cars as fire trucks arrived and departed, until we were told to go on to the Blessed Sacrament Cathedral, a large, tall gray stone building with turrets and spires, at the northern peak of Main Street in Greensburg.  The funeral would take place there.  Later the priest told the local newspaper that if this service hadn’t been scheduled, the fire at St. Paul’s might not have been discovered until much greater damage was done.  Meanwhile, my mother got a funeral Mass in the largest church in the county.    

 Shortly after the funeral I returned to Cambridge.  I would not be back to Greensburg for awhile, even missing the next Christmas.