My Mother’s Vendetta

“I’m not even dead yet, and that woman is trying to get her claws in my husband,” my mother seethed from her throne of pillows as I stood in the doorway with the chocolate cake. I couldn’t get over it—this abiding jealousy that she would no doubt take to the grave. My parents had been married fifty years, had known and loved each other since kindergarten, had “gone steady” since Jr. High, save for the one year in high school when they’d broken up for a couple of months. It was during that brief hiatus in a 70-some year relationship that my father had dated my mother’s only rival. My mother was still haunted by the image of this woman riding on the handlebars of his bicycle (“She looked so smug!”). That betrayal had happened in 1946 and my mother was still fuming in 2001! “Get over it, Mother. Get over it!” I said to her this time as I’d said to her again and again throughout my lifetime of hearing about “that vixen Jane.”

Jane had never gone away, in part because she’d married my father’s first cousin, in part because people in Thomasville rarely go away. Though my father had lived all over the world throughout his 30 year army career, he’d spent the 20 years of his retirement in the same house, in the same church, in the same social circle he had spent the first 20 years of his life and had not truly been absent during his thirty year’s absence, given Christmas and summer home-comings and his years in Iran or Vietnam when my mother had chosen to live with her mother. Jane had therefore been omnipresent at church, at family gatherings, at high school reunions, at the country club, at the Plaza, at the Culture Center. And, I had to admit, Jane was one of those Southern Belles who had kept her looks and her figure and still dressed the part. Never did a hair flutter from her crisp Nancy Reagan-do. Never did her lipstick or mascara smudge. There were rumors about a face-lift, but I chose to believe she had good skin. Her perfume pulsed. And yes, she was sweet, chatty, charming, Cousin Jane.

But I had never once believed my mother had anything to worry about. In fact, I believed that my mother was slightly insane, frozen in a perpetual adolescence, unhinged from present-day realities. My father was one of those aging southern gents who sought his pleasures in such boy’s club activities as Rotary, Historical Society, Golf, Hunting, and Booze. He liked women, but mostly for their cooking and lunatic antics than for their sex-appeal. Not once in the 40 years that I had known Jane had I picked up a single vibe between her and my father—no surreptitious glances or flirty banter, nothing. If confronted with his long ago lapse in affections for my mother, my father would come back with: “Hell, I gave Jane a ride on my bicycle. Your mother dated Worth Upchurch, who had an airplane. They would fly around all day in his airplane and buzz me! Jane Watt! Why on earth is she jealous of Jane Watt!”

The funny thing is: By the time Jane delivered the third chocolate cake, I had picked up on something. “Jane!” I tested. “Come in and say hello to Mother. I’m sure she’d be delighted to see you.” Her eyes took on that caught-in-the-headlights terror. She balked. She stammered. “Honey, I just can’t. “ My father appeared from the den. “Keep ‘em coming!” he called after her as she made a hasty retreat down the front steps. “You know I’ve always loved your chocolate cake!” “You know I will,” Jane called back, over her left shoulder, clearly pleased. “Was that Jane Watt?” my mother screamed from her deathbed. “The nerve of that woman. I am not even dead.”

My mother died. The first irony came to our attention the day of the funeral. My father was reading the newspaper with his coffee on the back porch. “Well, I’ll be damned!” he called out to me. “Worth Upchurch died.” I was used to morning death announcements from my father because he had reached the age of knowing everyone in the obituaries. He reminded me that Worth Upchurch was the other boy my mother had dated in high school. The one with the airplane. He looked at me as though spooked. His eyes flared with sudden wonder and then jealousy. “You think they ran off together?” I confronted him. “It does make you wonder, doesn’t it?” he affirmed.

A couple of years passed. I stayed with my father for awhile and then went back to Italy. He decided to sell the house, which had been my mother’s childhood home, and move into a retirement community. There was generations’ worth of stuff in the old Victorian home, which warranted an estate sale. On the Friday before the actual Saturday of the Open House, members of the extended family were urged to come by and have first dibs on the family antiques. Among the first family members to appear was Cousin Jane, but while climbing the stairs to the front porch, one of her high-heels got caught in a wooden slat and she fell, banging her head on the sidewalk. She seemed fine at first, and gathered herself to mount the stairs once again, but felt a little dizzy.

My father called me in Italy. He spoke at length about the sale and then added as an afterthought: “Jane Watt is in the hospital,” and then described what had happened. “Mother tripped her!” I teased. “Oh, get out of here!” he sort of chuckled. “Don’t think the thought did not cross my mind. Don’t think it hasn’t crossed everybody’s mind! No way would your mother have wanted Jane to get her claws on any of her belongings.”

Jane died the next morning. I didn’t know what to think when I heard the news. I didn’t know what to say to my cousins, Jane’s children. I felt embarrassed for some reason. I felt I owed them some kind of apology.