Twenty years later, as I was sitting in a therapist’s office, I made the connection between that brief marriage and the death of my father. It took me that long to see what I had done. I now have deep respect for the power of denial.
My mother continued to take Dexedrine for two more years, and then one day, by accident or an act of grace, she went to a new doctor, and when he asked her about her medications she told him the truth. He took away her Dexedrine and started her on estrogen. In less than a month, she transformed: she gained weight, her moods and body softened, and she began to relax.
I wish I could tell you I felt happy for her, but I didn’t. My mother never acknowledged how she had behaved in those previous nightmarish years. At most, she would say, “Oh, that Dexedrine used to make me nervous.”
So this was my mother, Florence, who walked into Salzo’s Deli in downtown Pittsburgh on an idyllic spring day in 1984 and began to flirt with the handsome older man who was waiting for his lunch. She’d been helping out at my sister Gloria’s hair salon and was picking up their take-out food. The man was in Pittsburgh for a rare city day. He flirted back and said, “If you meet me here next Thursday, I’ll buy you lunch.”
My mother accepted his offer, and they met the next week. Over corned beef sandwiches and coleslaw, she told him she was a widow with five grown children and she loved movies and dancing even though her knees were bad. He told her he lived on a farm, had been married once, and had lived outside Pittsburgh for a long time. It was the first of many dates.
Later I realized how unusual that must have been for Donald, who rarely spoke to strangers. Florence was just the opposite; she was outgoing and loved to talk. A tiny woman, less than five feet tall, with dark hair and gray-blue eyes, my mother was handsome and energetic.
Donald was five feet, eight inches tall, with gray hair cut close on the sides and swept back on top. He had the erect posture that hinted at a military career, and he was lean. Donald looked like a man whose only mirror was probably a small square over the bathroom sink; he was clean-shaven and neat, but there was little style.
The first time I saw Donald he was dressed up. It was my niece’s birthday. We were all dressed casually, but Donald was wearing a business suit. I remember thinking, Well, he’s trying to make a nice impression. I was amused he was dressing up to meet his girlfriend’s family. But I did notice that his white shirt looked as if he had ironed it himself, and his tie was wide with an abstract design, the kind that fills the racks at thrift stores. His shoes were black military brogues, and they were spit-shined.
I made the correct guess that if this relationship continued, I’d see Donald in new clothes. My mother had strong ideas about how people should dress. I’d spent my first twenty years without ever wearing a garment—not even pajamas—with horizontal stripes. “You’re too short, and stripes make you look fat,” my mother would tell me. So I knew she would have a say in Donald’s attire.
As their relationship progressed, Donald’s wardrobe did change, but so did my mother’s. After she’d visited Donald’s farm a few times, my mother asked me where she could buy a “country jacket.” I laughed when she said she wanted something similar to the one I wore for backpacking. Next she wanted to know where to get boots that “are good for mud.” I gave her an L.L.Bean catalog, which would fit all her needs. My mother was happy, and I was happy for her.
My mother kept her city apartment in downtown Pittsburgh, and Donald had his country place about an hour away. He came into the city for movies, dinner, and opera. She spent weekends at his farm. They laughed a lot. When I came to visit once a month, they seemed happy and affectionate.
When I called her on Sunday mornings—now I was the one who had to call—she often said, “We’re still in bed,” and the lightness in her voice told me it was not only arthritis keeping Donald and Florence under the covers.
One day I asked cautiously, “You and Donald are having fun?”
“He has to do it every day,” she said matter-of-factly. I was speechless. I was in my thirties, and my mother’s sex life was better than mine.
“I never knew what it was like, you know,” she went on. “When I was married to your daddy, we were just making babies and fixing up that old house. I just never knew about this.”
Clearly my mother was finding the way of sex and the single girl as a sixty-nine-year-old gal. But her single status was short-lived.
CHAPTER TWO
Getting to Know Donald
My mother and Donald dated for six months before he proposed. They had romance, companionship, and great fun. He brought her flowers, and she gave him books. When I came to visit, he’d always have a little gift for me too: a little figurine from the Hallmark store or a box of chocolates—and newspaper clippings. My mother and Donald loved to clip articles from the newspapers for family and friends.
But there were things about Donald that did give me pause. I had moved from Washington, DC, to Baltimore by then, and, when I talked to my brothers, they would tell me about some things they noticed about Donald. Sometimes we worried, but mostly we laughed.
One of the things they told me about Donald was that he had a television show he had to watch every evening at five o’clock. He was, we joked, like the character played by Dustin Hoffman in the movie Rain Man who always had to be home to watch Jeopardy!.
One weekend Donald had made a big fuss when he and my mother were having dinner at Larry’s house. Donald was insisting that he had to get home by five o’clock to watch his television show.
“He was going crazy, yelling at Mum that they had to leave ‘now, now, now,’” Larry told me.
I thought that was amusing. For years my mother had religiously watched what she called “her stories,” and now she was dating a man who had “his stories,” too. I thought it was odd—kind of old-guy odd.
But they were dating, and my mother was happy and laughed often. When I’d visit them, Donald was always very polite, and I could see how dear he was with my mother, getting her coffee or holding doors—an old-fashioned kind of man. So I wasn’t unhappy or surprised when she told me they were getting married.
Before he proposed to her, Donald had told my mother about his first marriage and where he had lived for so long. But my mother, fearing her children’s reaction, waited until after their honeymoon to tell us.
What I learned from my mother was that Donald had been a Marine in China in 1937. He’d gone there with a battalion of United States Marines to protect American interests when Japan was pushing into China. In his first month, the Japanese had begun bombing Shanghai. Donald was part of the Marine battalion protecting the International Settlement and Chinese civilians. He’d had a difficult time in China, but after his release, Donald had come home to his small Pennsylvania hometown, gone back to work, taken more college classes, and married his high school sweetheart.
But one day, my mother said, Donald came home from work in a state of despair, and he shot his mother-in-law and then his wife. My mother was very clear that he’d done an awful thing, but that it was a long time ago, and he was a different man now. Donald was the man she loved, and she asked us only to accept him.
I saw sweetness between my mother and Donald that I’d never seen between my parents. They touched a lot. She’d rub his shoulder or stroke his arm when they watched television, and they always kissed hello and goodbye.
Part of me thought my mother was crazy to marry a man who had killed two people. But another part of me admired my mother for being able to accept him. When she said, “The past is the past,” she meant it. She had seen her children through business failures, bad relationships, and divorces. Now we were going to judge her?
But over time Donald’s story changed. From him, and