Finery and Deliverance

A mother-in-law and her nemesis reach a state of grace


By Herbert Hadad

I was resigned to a slab of couch in a small house outside Tampa, Florida, made miserable by the heat, the boredom, and the fright of witnessing my wife, Evelyn, surrender all interest in me or our marriage. It was the kind of misery for which there was no solace, for thirty feet away, propped up in a hospital bed, my mother-in-law was waging a valiant struggle for life.

When I’d arrived, I’d immediately gone over to greet her. Katie just opened her eyes wide, as if to say, “Oh, my.” Though we had never shared a meaningful conversation, I took her gesture to be one of momentary pleasure.

Later, when I decided to visit her Catholic church to pray, she said secretly to my wife, “I think he’s coming over to our side.”

Day after day was given over to measuring and dispensing Katie’s medicines, discussing how to comfort her, furtively calling doctors and nurses, and waiting for the blessings of evening, when Evelyn, our three children, and the rest of Katie’s clan in attendance paused for food and drink, and beckoned the cooler evening air.

Evelyn and I phoned her doctor to insist on a meeting. When we arrived at his office, he seemed annoyed, somehow believing we were challenging his authority and judgment.

“What?” he said. “She drinks? She and the daughter she lives with insisted she doesn’t use alcohol. It would have made a big difference in the medications I prescribed.” I glared at the doctor in disbelief. His patient was an 89-year-old woman who admitted to bouts of loneliness and depression. It had never crossed his mind that she might seek relief in liquor?

During our long relationship, I learned early on that Katie harbored deep and painful demons that she sometimes shut out with drink. She scared her family because these demons gave her a manic strength. She scared me because I had become one of her demons.

Yet she also had a generous spirit. We enjoyed many occasions together, and, unlike many in-laws, she had a swift and sure hand when reaching for a check.

In fact, our happiest time together as mother- and son-in-law was animated, if not driven, by drink. It happened in Carnegie Hall—a huge irony, because Katie was obsessed with privacy. (She insisted, for example, whenever our family visited her house on Staten Island, that we enter by the back door, so the neighbors couldn’t view our arrival or the gifts we had brought.)

Katie, then still living in New York, joined Evelyn and me one rainy St. Patrick’s Day night for dinner and drinks, followed by a short walk to the renowned music hall. This night, the sounds of Handel and Bach would be replaced by the infectious, atavistic music of a group of Irishmen called the Clancy Brothers.

A blithe mood pervaded the standing-room-only audience. Katie’s proper, cautious mien melted away as she delicately tossed her head from side to side, enjoying the tunes of her youth, when she was the daughter of Irish immigrants in England.

But five rows behind us, a group of young men began to shout and interrupt the musicians. Open cans of beer in hand, they seemed to want to turn Carnegie Hall into a brawling tavern. A middle-aged gentleman near them stood and pleaded for decorum. They threatened to pummel him. From the stage, a Clancy Brother said with feeble bravado, “Folks, there is no extra charge for the additional entertainment.” A growl of anxious murmurs and confusion began to fill the air.

Without thinking, I stood and faced the fomenters, and shouted, like a patriot at the barricades, “You’re a disgrace to the Irish race!” Though they raised their fists, they were too far away to give me a good drubbing. Guards began to gather in the aisles but didn’t seize the louts, perhaps afraid a riot might break out.

Katie reserved for herself the biggest surprise. Wiry and just under five feet tall, she suddenly rose, raised her furled umbrella, and gave her cautious manner the night off. “I’d like to swat every one of you dimwits,” she shouted at the troublemakers. “You’re nothing but a bunch of disgusting hooligans!” The words that traveled across the aisles carried the traces of her origins, making them sound exactly right for this occasion.

The hooligans settled down. The nervous security guards retreated, and the concert went on. Evelyn and I congratulated Katie for bringing everything back under control. There was a look on her face I had never seen before. It was joy.

Now, from her bed in Florida, Katie looked across the room at her favorite paintings, idealized impressions of Irish coastal villages and farms. Then she squinted at a calendar. “My goodness, today is September the twenty-fourth. It’s my birthday. I’m ninety years old.”

Evelyn and her sisters slipped out, bought a dress, a satin top, earrings, a birthday cake, and a greeting card they signed with lavish declarations of love and gratitude. Everyone sang “Happy Birthday.” Even through her frailty, Katie beamed with happiness. The date was August the twenty-fourth.

The story of another gift—a bonnet—brought me the closest I ever came to truly understanding my mother-in-law; it was a story she had revealed to my wife. When Katie was a schoolgirl in a hardscrabble English industrial town called Burnley, she harbored a modest but fervent dream—to possess a piece of finery, a straw bonnet with a crimson ribbon.

She spoke of it often to her mother and sister Nellie. One day, when she came home from school, they told her, “Look in the bottom drawer of the chest, Katie. Your dream has come true.”

Though it occurred to her that this was an odd place to lay a bonnet, she excitedly pulled open the drawer. What she saw confused her, then made her heart sink. On top of the folded linens was the hat of her dreams, but in miniature, made for a doll. She heard her mother and sister laughing behind her.

Her family might not have set out to hurt her deeply, but I came to believe the humiliation and deceit of that afternoon haunted my mother-in-law throughout her life. I came to believe that moment bred suspicion, anger, and even cruelty in her, even as she grappled for personal salvation through a life devoted to kindness and gentility. She was made to feel unworthy. She was made to seek expiation for sins she never committed.

Most men acquire a mother-in-law, and I imagine I was no different from most as I fell in love with Evelyn. I thought I would also grow to love the woman who had borne her and brought her to young adulthood.

We three first met on West 72nd Street in Manhattan, where I had an apartment. I kissed Evelyn, and Katie, tentatively. Katie had a pleasant lilt of an accent. On the way to dinner, I tried some small talk by remarking on it. “You have a very nice accent. French, perhaps?” She was supposed to laugh and correct me.

“English,” she spat, halfway to a fury. “English and Irish.” I was in trouble from the very first moment. The kissing stopped.

A crucial day in our relationship occurred in a restaurant not long afterward, away from my presence. Katie invited her daughter to lunch and, as soon as they were seated, began a campaign to get rid of me. “He’s been married, he doesn’t make a great salary, he’s a different religion, I even think he’s some kind of Arab.”

Evelyn was a loving and dutiful daughter but tried to deflect the assault. She described my manifold qualities and our mutual commitment. She asked her mother to desist, and when she wouldn’t, Evelyn reached into her handbag, dropped the price of the lunches on the table, and walked out.

When I heard this story, I cried and fell deeper in love.

Our wedding was held in the chambers of a New York State Supreme Court judge. He might have used a standard text; still he touched us when he said, “You have made this union a long time ago. Today’s event is merely a formality.” Then he asked to kiss my beautiful bride.

I came to recognize Katie’s look that day, a small, constant smile that hid a frown and a host of unhappy feelings. Evelyn’s two sisters, Carol and Jo-Ellen, were present, but not her brother, John, and his wife, Yvonne. My small family was in attendance, my sweet dad, with his gold-toothed smile, serving as best man.

God granted us three children, and they brought to Katie’s life a whole new and happy dimension. In their presence, she was affectionate, she laughed, her generosity was virtually boundless. They in turn loved her without reservation. The children of another daughter were on the West Coast and therefore inaccessible. Her son’s children, in upstate New York, seldom visited, partly because Katie, who had meddled in my courtship, had likewise tried to convince John to forsake Yvonne. (Remembering the guerilla warfare we endured with Katie, Yvonne once laughingly said to me, “We both deserve the Purple Heart.”)

Katie’s dining-room wall was covered with photos of her family. She even displayed a framed photo of a man, presumably still a favorite, who was briefly married to one of her daughters several years earlier. The only face missing was mine. During visits to our new house in Westchester County, Katie waited until I left the room to say what was on her mind. Evelyn would fill me in that night in bed or the next day—or never.

One day, when I picked up the phone, Katie said, “Oh, I can’t tell you how much I enjoy the children. They’re absolutely wonderful.”

“Thank you,” I said, under the assumption she’d meant I had something to do with their wonderfulness.

Katie went silent.

My original intention to love my mother-in-law disintegrated into a fragile tolerance. I resented that she demanded obedience from Evelyn. When she didn’t get her way, she could become punitive and turn on Evelyn or even the children, even though that didn’t seem to make her any happier. I wearied of hearing yet another time about the opening of the George Washington Bridge or the mobsters who lunched at Schrafft’s. I got tired of monitoring and editing my words. “She neither likes nor respects me,” I lamented privately to Evelyn.

I worried and pondered, took long walks and sat on a large rock in the woods when Katie visited. I finally concluded that for me there was only one kind of grace. She had won. Our relationship would be a superficial ritual. Still, I would encourage the children to love and appreciate her. I would not deny her the exquisite wonders of my children, even as I feared she might undermine my marriage.

Her demons soon brought disaster to a family, but not mine. A robin had built a nest in a large yew bush near our front door that spring, and our family watched with growing fascination as she spent the day flying to and fro, establishing new life. Katie was on one of her frequent visits and watched with deep interest as well.

Which will never explain why she suddenly plunged her fist into the bush. Two small speckled blue eggs fell and splattered open on our bluestone stoop. The mother robin shrieked from a nearby tree. Evelyn and I were in shock, and stared at Katie for an explanation. “Oh, if I didn’t get them, the cat would’ve,” she scoffed.

As much as she adored our children, Katie stunned me during another visit. Sara Jameel, Charles Aram, and Edward Salim had always hugged and kissed her. This day, she put out her hand to 12-year-old Edward, our oldest, named for Katie’s late husband. “We’ll shake from now on,” she ordered. “You’re getting too old for hugs.”

It struck me as tragic. This could not be what she really wanted. Katie was succumbing again to some tortured fragment of a feeling. I suspected she had been seized by the notion that she didn’t smell right. Each morning, she doused herself with perfume and gargled with Listerine. Her bouquet preceded her into a room.

“Children, don’t listen to her,” I told them in the garden. “She doesn’t mean it. She loves your hugs and kisses. Who wouldn’t?” They believed me, and continued to hug and kiss her. She never mentioned handshakes again.

Like many men kept at arm’s length by a mother-in-law, I resorted to uttering feeble jokes as a form of refuge. Every culture in the world, I’d read, uses mother-in-law jokes to ease the frustration and the pain.

In Russia, a pharmacist tells a customer, “In order to buy arsenic, you need a legal prescription. A picture of your mother-in-law is not enough.” An American husband tells a friend, “I just returned from a wonderful trip. I took my mother-in-law to the airport.”

Though Katie certainly enjoyed visiting our home, she would never commit to arrival or departure times until the last second, if then. Early one Sunday morning, still in bed, we were surprised by a call from the local police department. “Don’t get upset—your mother-in-law is going to be okay. We took her over to Phelps Hospital for observation.”

As I stumbled through a series of questions, the officer said, “You live on Bedford Road? Take a ride down by the Rockefeller pastures; you’ll see her car. And don’t worry—she’s fine.”

We dressed and rushed to the site. She had crashed through a wooden fence, narrowly missing a fire hydrant, and slammed into a tree. At the hospital, we learned that Katie, who was staying with us, had awakened in the middle of the night and started cleaning up after the previous night’s dinner party, sipping cordials as she worked.

She then decided she’d slip out early to drive back to Staten Island. She’d made the first four hundred yards of the trip. A young woman driving by found the car on its roof and Katie swinging in her seat belt as if it were a harness. “Call my son-in-law,” she said, reciting our phone number. Another driver summoned the police. To my knowledge, it was the only time in twenty-five years she ever expressed a need for me.

In the emergency-room bed, she seemed all right except for the bruises on her forehead. When the doctor arrived, he was furious. “You could have killed several people!” he shouted. “Never mind what you could have done to yourself. The alcohol in your blood is twice the legal limit. You cannot drink and drive!”

Katie was not a humorist, and she often had too much regard for authority, but this morning she was different. “I tell you what,” she said to the doctor, raising a forefinger playfully for emphasis. “I won’t give up drinking, but I’ll give up driving.” I don’t know why we found this so funny. I guess because, as she thumbed her nose at authority and at death, we knew she was going to recover. She never drove again.

After almost a week in Florida, I had to return to my office in New York. I bade everyone good-bye and kissed Katie, who appeared to be asleep, on the forehead. Evelyn and her brother took me to the airport. Though I had never done anything but shake his hand, this night I kissed John on the cheek. It was the kiss you give a son who is already grieving for his mother.
On the flight home, I stared out the window and prayed again for Katie. The trip was uneventful, until the plane approached Newark Airport and began to dip and pitch violently as it circled and circled. I was seated next to a young woman from the rural South. When our glances met, we both saw fear. We clutched each other’s forearm hard and prayed, this time for ourselves. When the plane finally landed, we had become such intimate strangers that we parted without saying a word.

In the baggage area, I found the driver of the cab I’d ordered several days earlier and soon settled into his back seat. But after several miles, the cab began to sputter. We coasted into an all-night gas station somewhere in the industrial wastelands of New Jersey under a starless sky. The driver went off to call his dispatcher, and I was left alone, cold and exhausted, and slipping into despair.

A trim older man in black trousers and white dress shirt approached. “I was on the way home,” he said. “I’m a limousine driver, and I was filling up for tomorrow. I understand you have a problem. I would be glad to take you home.” I wanted to embrace him. “The fee is fifty dollars,” he said. I had only $41. “I will take it,” he said. “Please get in.”

I learned the next morning that Katie had slipped away to her salvation as Charles Aram held her hand, at about the same time my limousine driver materialized.

I could draw only one conclusion. Katie had always been capable of both mischief and kindness. Her last acts on earth were rattling that airplane and stalling that cab. But her first act in heaven was sending the limousine. I could see her doing it. She was wearing a straw bonnet with a crimson ribbon.

Herbert Hadad, Northeastern graduate, prize-winning author, and teacher, writes this magazine’s “Alumni Passages” column.