A Necessary End Read online

  A Necessary End

  Nick Taylor

  For Mom and Dad, of course;

  For Harley Jones, who was also a good son;

  And for my nephew, Doug Tudanger, his parents, and the rest of my new family.

  Contents

  • 1983

  • 1984

  • 1985

  • 1986

  • 1987

  • 1988

  • 1989

  • 1990

  • 1991

  Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

  It seems to me most strange that men should fear;

  Seeing that death, a necessary end,

  Will come when it will come.

  —from Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare

  1983

  My mother wrote her own obituary, and my father’s, too. I opened one of her letters in May of 1983 expecting the usual news of friends and family, the weather and what she’d been reading lately. Instead, I read: “Clare Unger Taylor died…” A space followed, implying that I should add the circumstances. The notice continued with a modest, straightforward description of her life, a gentle life of mild accomplishment. She had done the same with my father: “John Puleston Wotton (Jack) Taylor died…”

  They died within months of each other some time later, and I took the obituaries out and added what was needed and sent them to the papers she had listed. Still later, I scattered my parents’ ashes on the sea. But I return often to the time those obituaries introduced, for what I learned of death and life, and continuity, the unending flow of one into the other. It was a period of eight years.

  My parents were then in their mid-seventies. My mother was short in stature and nearsighted, and sweet-tempered despite the appearance of a pugnacious chin that quivered when she set her jaw. She had a university degree, from Michigan, and had worked as a reporter, but the thing she was most proud of, other than me and helping to start two libraries, was that she was the first woman who dared to wear pants in the stuffy expatriate community of the small Mexican town where they lived in retirement for several years. “Jocotepec has never been the same,” she liked to say. I always thought my mother was born before her time. My father, on the other hand, was born too late. He was a Victorian at heart, in love with order, blind to his own quirks but quick to censure others. He was compact and sinewy, bawdy and ill-tempered. He could roar with laughter and the next minute turn to fierce, protective anger. He worked as a land surveyor and a draftsman, but I considered his true calling the delicate wood-block prints he made and the sailboat he built from plans he drew himself. I was thirty-seven. I was their only child.

  They lived that year in a small town, Waynesville, that lies between the Smoky Mountains and the Blue Ridge in western North Carolina. They had lived there when I was born and moved several times, always to return. This time their home was in a high-rise for the elderly. The building was new and made of sturdy red bricks, and the politicians had gotten up on a flatbed truck and dedicated it with speeches about the time my parents moved in early in the year. Their apartment was on the fifth floor. From the living room’s one wide window you could see, across the street, a large maple tree that turned flame red in autumn and a church ground bordered by a low stone wall. The wall made me think about appendicitis. I had been a first grader when a burning stomachache forced me to leave school to meet my mother at a doctor’s office. I had gotten as far as the wall, where Mom found me, hugging my knees in pain, and hours later my appendix was removed. That was in 1952.

  They took a Florida vacation in 1953, and Mom fell in love with Fort Myers Beach, a resort island and shrimping port on the lower Gulf Coast. We moved that fall, when I was seven, and I grew up and finished high school there. They returned to North Carolina after I finished college, in 1967. They stayed five years, then moved to the Mexican village of Jocotepec, near Guadalajara, in 1972. Four years later they moved back to southwest Florida and into their first high-rise for the elderly, a building on the Caloosahatchee River in Fort Myers called the Presbyterian Apartments. I thought they would stay there. Dad was seventy then, and Mom was sixty-seven. But the restlessness set in after seven years. They decided to return again to North Carolina, and moved just a few months before I opened the mail to find that Mom had written their obituaries.

  Waynesville, like everyplace, had changed. The Mount Olive Baptist Church didn’t hold its Sunday dinners anymore. The whole town had spread outward to the bypass, and the welcoming “Gateway to the Smokies” sign that once hung over Main Street had been taken down. The downtown newsstand now sold the New York Times on Sundays. It was a convenient four-hour drive from my home in Atlanta to Waynesville. Now, after all their moving, surely my parents would stay until they died.

  1984

  The new year was barely underway when I was helping them pack to return to Mexico. I was against the move. Dad took digitalis for his heart, and Mom wasn’t what she used to be. She’d had an accident a few months earlier, and although she’d been indignant when the judge sent her to driving school, it had clearly been her fault. They were determined to go regardless.

  A light rain was falling that February morning, increasing my sense of gloomy foreboding. In winter the southern mountains are impassive, as if they’ve turned their backs and don’t give a damn; I felt their rejection in my mood. My wife, Barbara, and I carried suitcases and boxes from their apartment to their big old Plymouth. A row of old men and women sat watching in the lobby, country people who had their own reasons for resenting the circumstances in which they found themselves. They had been corralled from farms and cabins by well-meaning children like myself who came gravely every Sunday to take them out to dinner. Snuff bulged their lips and the women’s stockings were rolled down around their calves and they stared at us with the flinty, unforgiving eyes of prisoners watching an escape. They planned to die there; why should anyone be allowed to leave alive? My heart should have soared, but I was thinking of myself.

  My parents had been a big part of my life when I was growing up; that is to say, our relationship was necessary. We were not the kind of family that played touch football or went to reunions or even embraced each other heartily. Partly, I think, it was because we were rootless. My father was born in England, my mother on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I had an uncle I wouldn’t have recognized and cousins I had never met. I went to work after college, lived in three cities in four years, got married, settled in Atlanta, divorced, remarried. Over time I grew used to loving my parents coolly, with a minimum of muss and fuss. I thought it was inconsiderate of them to move to Mexico at their age, when I was beginning to worry about them. It would have been much easier on me if like the others, they had chosen to simply sit and wait for death.

  At last the car was loaded. We stood together in the parking lot, awkward at the moment of departure. Dad was hopping from foot to foot, anxious to get started. Mom had a pained wistfulness in her blue eyes, a look of endurance. I brushed my pursed lips against my mother’s lips. I hugged my father, felt him hang on a second longer than we were accustomed to. The forces arrayed against them, these two people who had gotten old, seemed dangerously potent all at once. Mom settled behind the steering wheel. The car engulfed her. She had to tilt her head back to see down the long hood, which raised her chin and emphasized it. Dad wouldn’t drive. I couldn’t remember the last time he had driven. “Too goddamned much trouble,” he said. “Your mother’s a good driver, let her drive.” He didn’t even have a license anymore; he had let it lapse as a way of denying the state’s power over him. He took the passenger seat and right away set about fussing. He would have preferred to fly ahead while I drove Mom to Mexico, as he had the last time while we slogged it, but this was my punishment fo
r his insistence. You play, you pay; you want to move to Mexico, you by God don’t take the easy way of getting there while your family does the dirty work. I eyed him sitting there and felt some satisfaction at the fifteen hundred miles ahead of him. Serves you right, you mean old fart, I thought. He’d found the short trip to my wedding in Atlanta too much for him the year before. Then he turned a sweet smile upon me. “Goodbye, Nick,” he said, and patted my hand resting on the door.

  “Come on, Mammy,” he said sharply, turning to my mother. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  “You settle down,” she said.

  Then my wife and I watched them pull away. I knew as the rain erased their tire tracks that I could not take their safe journey for granted. My concerns were theirs, twenty years removed. Would they be safe? Would they get lost, run out of gas, have a flat tire, fall asleep at the wheel, be run off the road by a drunk? My waking nightmares were lurid and extravagant. The phone would ring in the middle of the night. A sheriff from south Texas would drawl devastating news. I would make a hasty trip to nowhere. We would return on a medevac plane. The inconvenience of it! The expense!

  I followed their progress on National Geographic maps. They called from Houston and again from Brownsville. When they called from Chapala to say they’d arrived, I felt the relief of a parent whose child reaches home overdue, but safely, from a date. I felt another kind of relief as well, that of lifted responsibility. I could get on with my life.

  Their first letters came from a different place from the one-bedroom apartments in the high-rises in which they’d lived for several years. My father revealed an amiability with his surroundings he hadn’t shown in some time. “We have been in our casita a week and still are unpacking the car,” he wrote.

  Today Mamacita is off to a garden club luncheon or something. Two gardeners are sprucing up the white geraniums and stuff along one side of the house. They are part of the staff.

  Needless to say our quarters are somewhat larger than Waynesville. In the bedroom, besides the two beds, are two armchairs, two upholstered chairs, two dressers and a fireplace! Then there is an adjacent dressing room with closets all along one wall that opens into the bathroom with tiled shower and tiled washbasin and tiled counter on two sides, very attractive. Whereas we have had hardly more than three places to sit down in our apartments, we now have four in the bedroom alone, then five easy chairs and a settee around the fireplace in the living area and a settee, chaise, five chairs and a couple of tables on the porch!! There is still the dining area and kitchen and the extra bedroom and bathroom. It will take a little time to get used to all this space, but it is just great to step out the door onto terra firma, and grass and such. At night the stars are really bright and they seem countless.

  “Your room is ready for you at any time,” he reminded me in closing.

  His letters continued in an expansive vein. “We are enjoying our casita and the environment more every day,” he wrote two weeks later. “The lack of noise is wonderful! The abundance of blooming flowers and the riot of colors is a constant joy, as are the many varieties of new birds and their brilliant plumage. From our dining table we look out over lawn, trees, shrubs—every prospect pleases. Our days are taken as they come.” He closed with innocent conviction: “I do not think we need to move again, ever!”

  Their weeks in Chapala became months. Dad wrote that he was bringing out his carving tools and ink rollers from the cardboard boxes where he’d stored them in the apartment years, when he’d had no room to use them. He was thinking of making prints again. In the meantime he was designing a bookcase for their bedroom. Mom took on English students, tutoring for free a child of their twice-a-week maid, the maid’s younger sister and her boyfriend, and later a couple who had a stall in Chapala’s market and wanted to deal better with their English-speaking customers. My parents grumbled that their Social Security checks were slow to find them at their new address. But for the most part, their letters were giddy with delight. They had grasped the life I would have denied them in the interest of my own convenience.

  They kept urging me to visit. They fantasized about it, conjuring a “feeling that you might show up any day,” as Dad put it in one of his letters, to which he appended directions from the airport. I kept writing back that I had things to do. Mexico was a trip, and as long as things were fine with them, I couldn’t spare the time or money. Then Barbara accepted a job with WCBS-TV, and we moved from Atlanta to New York City. It was the next spring before I got around to visiting my parents.

  1985

  March brought an urgent letter from my mother: “It seems years—centuries—since we have seen you and we have much to discuss, papers for you to sign, etc., important matters that must be dealt with before we follow Wint on the upward? trail. I think your papa was greatly shocked by Wint’s sudden demise and has decided that time is of the essence.”

  Winston McConnell was an old friend. He and his wife and three sons had been our neighbors in Florida when I was growing up. Wint had frolicked scandalously in his last years, when his wife, in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s disease, had forgotten who he was. He and his “nurse-companion” descended on my parents in February, but departed suddenly when he got sick. He died soon afterward.

  I arrived in Guadalajara on April 17, Mom’s seventy-sixth birthday. From the airport’s international luggage bay, I saw her waiting outside customs. In the line where I stood, an inspector ordered a nervous campesino to reveal the contents of a gigantic duffel bag. The bag shrank as the man pulled out wads of clothing until, somewhere in the middle, a television set appeared. The campesino turned from the customs man to his family and shrugged helplessly, palms up. The inspector grinned. Beyond him, Mom had seen me and was waving avidly. I passed through customs without an inspection, walked around the long, low wall that separated us, and, for the first time in over a year, hugged her.

  “Boy, kiddo, you sure are a sight for sore eyes,” she said after we broke apart and she held me at arm’s length, viewing me through tears.

  “Happy birthday, Mom,” I said.

  “Oh, that.” She waved a hand.

  Just then my father came into view, walking with his familiar rolling limp. He hadn’t walked till he was five years old. Then his mother died, and with her, her fanatical opposition to the surgery that then repaired his congenitally dislocated hip. The roll had grown more pronounced as he got older, giving the impression that he was walking uphill into a stiff wind. He drew close, broke into a grin, gave me a hug, and took my suitcase, loaded with gifts. The three of us walked into the afternoon heat. At the curb, Dad put the suitcase down, shook his hand, and blew his cheeks out in a long breath. “Heavy,” he said. “What have you got in there, bricks?” He let me take it as we crossed the road. In the parking lot, he turned one way, Mom another. He said, “The car’s over here.” She said, “No, Jack, it’s over here.” They went off in opposite directions. I jumped up and down and tried to spot the car. Among us it was found and we began the thirty-minute drive to Chapala.

  I drove; Dad sat in the front seat and Mom in back. We rode in silence much of the way. Dad denied it, but he had needed a hearing aid for several years. When I tried to talk to Mom, I found myself repeating everything for Dad. But the silence felt comfortable, because my parents were content in my presence and somehow reassured. Outside the windows, the terrain of the Mexican plateau signified the remove at which I found them. It was harsh, uninviting, and chaotic, while I wanted neat, orderly, predictable. The edges of the road—a divided, shoulderless four-lane that swerved abruptly back into a single roadway—dwindled into scrub brush and rocks. Here and there a side road meandered toward a town placed seemingly at random, a cluster of trees and buildings dominated by a church spire. Nothing illustrated quite so well their adventure of foolhardiness and faith, their vulnerability.

  The road curved up to a pass in the hills and then fell toward Chapala. The blue lake, also named Chapala, stretched out of sigh
t in either direction. White houses with tile roofs sprinkled the hillsides. A frieze of mountains rose beyond the lake’s far shore. Mom had been dozing. Her head shot up abruptly and they both grew animated as they directed me into the town. We turned off the road across from a small bullring and a soccer field and went down a rough cobbled street among a community of houses and storefront cantinas, past a school to a mustard-colored adobe wall with a steel gate in the middle. Dad opened the gate and I drove inside.

  I saw immediately what had animated their letters with such pleasure. We were at the back of a lot that was perhaps three quarters of an acre, twice as deep as it was wide, with manicured grass, trimmed shrubbery, and bursting flower beds, shaded by a few large trees and cascading trellises of bougainvillea. Half a dozen one- and two-story houses, all in the mustard adobe of the wall, were arranged behind a big house that occupied a front corner of the lot. A gardener was hoeing weeds from a round flower bed. “Mi hijo,” my mother called proudly. “My son.” The gardener smiled and lifted his sombrero.

  Their house had large arched windows on two sides and a tiled roof rising to a central peak. “It used to be a swan house,” Dad said as he opened the door. A door to the left off the wide screened porch led to their suite. Straight ahead beyond a glass door and more arched windows, the main part of the house contained the living room and dining area, a cozy den with fireplace, a small bedroom and a bathroom, all under the exposed roof tiles held up by beams that fanned like spokes out from the central supporting pillar. The kitchen was beyond this at the back.