Smoke

My childhood smelled like smoke. Something was always burning. An endless chain of cigarettes--my father’s Kents and my mother’s Benson and Hedges--burning to ash in heavy silver trays, bittersweet incense burning at Catholic High Mass, the flickering hope of votive candles burning beside the church altar, and toast burning regularly in our old, unreliable and apparently irreplaceable toaster. 

“Mother, the toast is burned.” 

That’s how it always started, my father reminding my mother of the imperfection of the morning toast, reminding her that she had somehow missed that golden mark of domestic achievement. Even before the day had really gotten started, my father could reliably alert us to the smell of something already ruined. 

Smoke was the harried, anxious smell of my mother trying to do ten things at once, trying to raise a blended family, maintain a perfect image, console an inconsolable husband and be the perfectly coiffed and controlled Catholic.  She had converted to Catholicism as part of her marriage agreement to my Dad. In those days, it was a non-negotiable term. People who wanted to marry Catholics converted to their faith and agreed to raise all their children as Catholics. But even it if had been negotiable with the Church, it would never have been negotiable with my father, the true, bruised believer. 

In zealous convert style, my mother embraced Catholicism and the three arms of The Trinity: the suffering, sweet-faced Son; the flighty, mercurial Holy Ghost; and the Father, disapproving, disappointed and mad as hell. A lot like my dad.  But my mother’s primary devotion was always to Mary, the Mother, the human being whose life and destiny was, both with and without her consent, beyond her control.  Mary, like my mother, had agreed to certain terms and lived with them, alternately anxious and resolved. At Sunday mass, I sometimes saw this same mixed expression cross the face of my mother who became for me, because of her fashion sense, Our Lady of the Sealskin Coat. 

When I was a kid, there was a kind of quiet, steady magic to me about our parish church. I felt it in the constancy of the flame of the sanctuary candle over the Tabernacle, in the beauty of the stained glass windows streaming their colored light down onto our shoulders, and in the sound of my mother’s voice calling me her girl, her Chickadee Girl, and charming me into singing the carols with her at Christmas mass, teaching me to love the story of the baby in the manger. 

It was the story of a man and a woman, too, who traveled a difficult, dangerous road together, often in darkness and fear, to bring their child into the world. And this child, the story told, would become “the light of the world.” 

As a kid, it comforted me in some important way that light could come from darkness, that young Mary and old Joseph could make things work between themselves and protect their child through desperate times. It amazed me to think that a child could know and be something powerful right from the very start. 
 
That’s why part of me will always love the Catholic Church, despite the horrific abuse some of the Catholic clergy has heaped on some of its children. When my parents were too battered to give me anything else, they gave me a vision of something greater than themselves. Because of that religion, and my parents’ devotion to it, I learned a sacred language early in my life when I was a waiting cup. 

That language gave me words to describe mysteries, like joyful, glorious, sorrowful, and luminous. It gave me stories that described acts and outcomes, big things like betrayal and forgiveness, suffering and salvation, death and resurrection.  It introduced me to the mystical concept of a sacrament, describing it, astonishingly, unforgettably, as “an outward sign of an inward grace.” It gave me hope about being small in a big world and taught me, standing beside my mother at Midnight Mass, how to sing in four-part harmony. 

“Mother, the toast is burned again.” 

These few words froze everyone at the kitchen table every time my father spoke them. They were said most often during Dad’s sober, penitent phase, somewhere between the regret and the next, inevitable drink. The anxiety of this phase made my father impatient and quick to criticize even the smallest fault, from the size of our facial pores to the quality of the morning toast.  Both of my parents understood my father’s sobriety, and the cover up when sobriety failed, to be my mother’s responsibility. She provided the alibi, the excuse, the lie. This was supremely convenient for my father and supremely inconvenient, among other things, for my mother.

“Mother, I said the toast is burned again.”
 
My sister Colleen and I waited in silence at the breakfast table for Mom to take her cue. The silence was quickly filled by Mom scooping up the rejected slices, hurrying to reload the toaster with fresh ones, waiting for the filaments to heat to a bright orange, holding her breath and standing watch to make sure that the toast was neither too light nor too dark, bringing the new toast back and setting it before my father, hoping she was neither too late nor too soon. 

Dad always surveyed the toast like a tiny piece of our future, searching for flaws. All the good slices looked pretty much the same to my sister and me. But our mother knew that perfection varied by degrees, could be measured in tiny, exacting karats like gold. And Dad was the only one allowed to measure. If the fresh slices passed the test, Mom could take her place at the table again.

“But you don’t have any toast, Mom.” 

One of us would say some variation of that, at least in the early days before we knew the drill. Mom would jump up quickly, gather up all the rejected pieces of toast and scrape them clean of any real or imagined charring. She would then return to the table and begin to eat them. 

“But those are the burned ones, Mom.” 

One of us would often say that, too, at least in the beginning. Even if the toast looked fine, even if it looked nearly exactly the same as the fresh ones Mom had just delivered to our father. Mom would smile her Catholic convert smile and say, “It doesn’t matter, girls. It’s just for me.” 

Eating the burned slice was part of our mother’s legacy to us, part of the sorrowful mysteries of her life: to feed the lives of others and live on the leftovers that remained, to learn to believe that was all she deserved, to spend the better part of her life trying to solve the riddle of someone else’s. 

Dad was the antithesis of practically everything essential about my young mother. They approached God, nature and their respective, collective, children—his, hers and theirs—in radically different ways. He gave each of his children a legacy, something to live with and to live against. The early kids, from his first marriage, got more of the younger, healthier, tyrannical man. The later kids, from his second marriage to my mother, got more of the older, sicker, self-destructive man. Which experience of our father was true? All of them.  And each of our experiences was as personal and authentic as our fingerprints.
   
By the time I, the youngest, was born, my father was well on his way to dying. I’m told he was a kind man, a good provider, a graceful swimmer, an agile golfer, a loyal friend. My sister Colleen remembers being held in his arms as the surest, safest place in the world. I don’t remember being held in his arms at all, mostly because by the time I was old enough to be aware of my father, all his arms could hold was whatever comfort a couple of  bottles and later, a pile of pills, could provide. Life can drive you to hold all kinds of things. I understand that now. But then, I only understood that my father was disintegrating and alternately, agitated, repentant and furious about it all. And sorrowful, I believe, to his core, and disinclined to hold a late-in-life child. 

He yearned to be saved, to be forgiven for all of his real and imagined failings. But as far as I know, and that is admittedly not nearly far enough, he never managed to forgive himself. In the absence of self-forgiveness, he periodically hammered the rest of us with the hard center of his self-loathing.

“Mother, can’t you see that the toast is burned again?” 

Whether or not she could ever see the nagging imperfection of the toast, she could sense that her survival, and ours, depended on her at least pretending that she could. And pretending came easy to her, a habit that both strengthened and unraveled her. 

She was not, however, without her powers. As the second and much younger wife to my father, she had the advantage of dark-eyed beauty, physical strength and, in the beginning, emotional resilience. She was nimble in ways my fading father had long forgotten how to conjure in himself. 

My mother knew how to get by, get on and get through. She knew how to put on her lipstick -- always red, always Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow -- and whistle in the dark, even on the worst days of her life. She was practiced in the art of looking away from the close thing that disturbed her and focusing on the faraway thing that consoled her.  From the vantage point of that far-sighted consolation, she learned how to precisely, perfectly and unequivocally pretend. And that was the snag, because somewhere along the path of pretending, she forgot that the pretense was a lie. Over the course of my parent’s marriage, my mother’s armor became her shroud, her youth evaporating long before my old Dad sputtered to a stop. 

And still, I don’t believe that either of my parents wanted themselves to be something fearsome, martyred or destructive to their kids. What happened to us in our father’s decay and our mother’s decline was just collateral damage, just secondhand smoke. 

Excerpted from Smoke: A story of Love, Lies and Cigarettes 

By Kate Kerry Spencer

Smoke is the story of fatal consolations--tobacco, denial and deceit--and the second chances that can come to us in the most unlikely places. For Kate and her mother, Imogene, it was a rehab center where the two women wrestled with cigarettes, scrambled brains and each other--and in the process, found the long way back to love. 

Chapter Three: Life Boat, Rehab

My mother is jonesing for some firsthand smoke while I scan the room for every available exit.  We’ve just arrived in the nursing home lunch room where close to fifty hungry people wait for their trays like wild-eyed first graders.  My mother doesn’t want to be here and neither do I. Read more . . .

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