Freedom

There was still one big thing she didn’t understand, though, and when Joyce returned from Albany the following afternoon, full of anger at the senate Republicans who were paralyzing the state government (Ray, alas, no longer being around to rag Joyce about the Democrats’ own role in the paralysis), Patty was waiting in the kitchen with a question for her. She asked it as soon as Joyce had taken off her raincoat: “Why did you never go to any of my basketball games?”

“You’re right,” Joyce said immediately, as if she’d been expecting the question for thirty years. “You’re right, you’re right, you’re right. I should have gone to more of your games.”

“So why didn’t you?”

Joyce reflected for a moment. “I can’t really explain it,” she said, “except to say that we had so many things going on, we couldn’t get to everything. We made mistakes as parents. You’ve probably made some yourself now. You can probably understand how confused everything gets, and how busy. What a struggle it is to get to everything.”

“Here’s the thing, though,” Patty said. “You did have time for other things. It was specifically my games that you weren’t going to. And I’m not talking about every game, I’m talking about any games.”

“Oh, why are you bringing this up now? I said I was sorry I made a mistake.”

“I’m not blaming you,” Patty said. “I’m asking because I was really good at basketball. I was really, really good. I’ve probably made more mistakes as a mother than you did, so this is not a criticism. I’m just thinking, it would have made you happy to see how good I was. To see how talented I was. It would have made you feel good about yourself.”

Joyce looked away. “I suppose I was never one for sports.”

“But you went to Edgar’s fencing meets.”

“Not many.”

“More than you went to my games. And it’s not like you liked fencing so much. And it’s not like Edgar was any good.”

Joyce, whose self-control was ordinarily perfect, went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of white wine that Patty had nearly killed the night before. She poured the remainder in a juice glass, drank half of it, laughed at herself, and drank the other half.

“I don’t know why your sisters aren’t doing better,” she said, in an apparent non sequitur. “But Abigail said an interesting thing to me once. A terrible thing, which still tears me up. I shouldn’t tell you, but somehow I trust you not to talk about these things. Abigail was very . . . inebriated. This was a long time ago, when she was still trying to be a stage actress. There was an excellent role that she’d thought she was going to be cast in, but hadn’t been. And I tried to encourage her, and tell her I believed in her talents, and she just had to keep trying. And she said the most terrible thing to me. She said that I was the reason she’d failed. I who had been nothing, nothing, nothing but supportive. But that’s what she said.”

“Did she explain that?”

“She said . . .” Joyce looked woefully out into her flower garden. “She said the reason she couldn’t succeed was that, if she ever did succeed, then I would take it from her. It would be my success, not hers. Which isn’t true! But this is how she felt. And the only way she had to show me how she felt, and make me keep suffering, and not let me think that everything was OK with her, was to keep on not succeeding. Oh, I still hate to think about it! I told her it wasn’t true, and I hope she believed me, because it is not true.”

“OK,” Patty said, “that does sound hard. But what does it have to do with my basketball games?”

Joyce shook her head. “I don’t know. It just occurred to me.”

“I was succeeding, Mommy. That’s the weird thing. I was totally succeeding.”

Here, all at once, Joyce’s face crumpled up terribly. She shook her head again, as if with repugnance, trying to hold back tears. “I know you were,” she said. “I should have been there. I blame myself.”

“It’s really OK that you weren’t. Maybe almost better, in the long run. I was just asking a curious question.”

Joyce’s summation, after a long silence, was: “I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I wanted. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.”