Mommie

Mary Alice Arno Winston no longer exists. 

After her suicide on December 27, 1961, she was cremated. 

Her ashes were placed in a silvery brass urn inside the bottom of the night table next to my father’s side of the double-king-sized bed they shared. Eventually, my brother and I asked Dad to remove the urn. We thought it was creepy. Now it resides in a niche next to my grandmother’s urn, at Calvary Cemetery in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 

Mommie and Grandma Arno had an uncomfortable relationship after Grandma’s divorce when Mommie was only ten. I never met Grandpa. He moved to Minneapolis where he married two women, one of them twice. 

Grandma never admitted to any romantic relationships after the divorce. She was a single, working mother with a latch-key daughter in the 1930s. Mommie was a master manipulator. There were a lot of arguments and tears when Grandma came for visits. I can only imagine what is going on inside the niche where they reside today.

Dad and Mommie entertained a few of their friends in the evening on December 26. After the company left, they descended into a hideous argument, brought on by alcohol and drugs. It was one of the worst my brother and I had ever witnessed. 

Dad fainted. We were afraid he had had a heart attack.

Bobbie and I were trying to wake him up. Mommie walked around him as she left the kitchen. “Make sure you cover him with a blanket,” she said as she went upstairs and closed the bedroom door. 

Dad eventually came to and spent the night sleeping on the living-room sofa.

I went up to my bedroom after Bobbie. His bedroom was next to mine, which was next to the hall bathroom. He had to leave early the next morning to enlist in the Army.

I turned the knob on my parents’ bedroom door. It didn’t move. The door was locked from the inside.

I was exhausted. All summer I played the loving daughter. I went to the drugstore and picked up the drugs Mommie told Dad she wasn’t taking any more. The drugs kept her emotions under control. She was charming. Dad was happy. He told me it was the best summer they had had in years.

When I came home from college for the holidays, everything had changed. She no longer had anyone to go to the drugstore and lie for her. She and Dad fought except when she was passed out. 

I lay on my bed behind my closed door. I heard her door open. She went into the hall bathroom and turned on the faucet. “Why?” I thought. She has a bathroom inside the master bedroom. 

The water ran for a short time, then stopped. She went into her bedroom and locked the door again.

Early the next morning. I went downstairs to check on Dad. Bobbie had already left. 

Dad was in the kitchen making tea for himself and Mommie. He smiled as he looked at me.

“You’re right,” he said. “She needs professional help.”

He carried the hot tea upstairs.

A few minutes later I heard him call her name. “Mary, I have your tea.” “Mary, open the door.” “Mary Alice! Unlock the door!” “Mary!”

Running up the stairs, I heard him holler “Mary” again as he put his right shoulder to the door.

“Oh, my God! Mary!”

I ran into the room behind him and saw her lying on her side of the bed, the right side. Her skin had started to turn pink and yellow and green under her beautiful pastel-colored chiffon nightgown. I can’t remember the expression on her face. Only her nightgown.

Did she know how many pills she needed to take to kill herself or did she unconsciously take too many pills? We will never know. She was gone, leaving her mother, my father, my brother, me, and the pain she had suffered, behind. 

The large bed and Mommie’s vanity in the bedroom, as well as the furniture in the living room and dining room, eventually made their way into the homes my father shared with Sarah, his second wife. Dad spent his life looking for the mother who died on December 15, 1918, during the Spanish flu epidemic when he was only six months old. 

Sarah fulfilled that role beautifully. She never met mother and only knew what Dad told her about the woman who had chosen to kill herself eleven months before their wedding.

After my father died in 1997, he was cremated. His ashes were placed in an urn in a columbarium at the Presbyterian church he and Sarah attended near San Jose, California. Shortly afterwards, my daughter and I flew from Texas so we could all say “goodbye.” The pastor brought the urn to a wall overlooking the ocean. Dad’s final resting place was beautiful. We all held hands and said a prayer. 

Sarah, my daughter, and I returned to the house. She showed us around their retirement cottage. Dad never mentioned mother’s name after she left but the furniture in the houses he shared with Sarah was arranged exactly – I mean, exactly – the way it was arranged in our home in Pittsburgh on Mommie’s last day there. 

As I entered the bedroom, I noticed an addition near the ceiling on the wall above their bed ─ Mommie’s bed with a similar bedspread. Photographs of their six children. Me first, the oldest. My brother. Then Sarah’s four children. I pointed my portrait out to my daughter, saying it was the photograph I had taken for Georgio when I graduated from college in 1962.

Sarah commented that I was probably glad I had followed my father’s wishes. I believe her exact words were, “I’ll bet you’re glad you didn’t marry Georgio.” 

How dare the woman, I thought, this stranger, ask me if I was glad Georgio and I had never married? 

I believe if I had murdered Sarah at that moment, my defense would have been temporary insanity. 

We all returned to the living room, my mother’s living room. 

I pointed Mommie’s furniture out to my daughter, telling her that the six children’s name for our combined parents was “the ‘rents.” 

Sarah laughed. “I didn’t know that,” she said. 

Really! After thirty-six years of marriage?

“You know what we always said about the furniture,” I asked quietly.

“No,” replied Sarah. 

“We said, ‘Mother bought the furniture and Sarah paid for it.’” 

My daughter and I left Sarah, the house, and my mother’s furniture very quickly. I didn’t look back as we drove away in our rented car.

Sarah never spoke to me again. 

As I write these words, I feel myself tearing up, mourning the pain I caused someone who had never meant to hurt me, whose words only reflected the version of our family history my father told her. 

I am also mourning the woman who was my best friend, the woman I told everything. The woman I loved. The woman I trusted. When I told her on Christmas eve that I wanted to marry Georgio, she replied, “If you marry him, it will kill me.”

Recently I came across a comment I wrote later. “Mommie died on December 27, and so did I.” 

I will be cremated, my ashes saved in an urn placed in a niche I chose because of its beautiful location the first time I saw it. The afternoon sun was streaming through a large window on my right, past the wall where the small niche was located, going out the large glass window on my left, illuminating stained glass in its path. 

I will be alone.