The Night Listener : A Novel

immigrants, and she clung to her roots with a vengeance, as if to remind snobby little Charleston that she’d come from a far more cultivated milieu. (This was why her children were instructed to call her Mummie, though I rarely used the name in public after the age of eight; it made me sound too much like Little Lord Fauntleroy, and my mother like an Egyptian artifact.) This flaunting of all things English reached its fullest flower when Mummie was chosen to play Eliza Doolittle in the Dock Street Theatre’s 1954 production of Pygmalion . She spent hours at home running lines with me and practicing her cockney, which, I’ve since come to realize, consisted of little more than dropping her H’s. But I was so impressed that I studied her technique carefully and inflicted my own strangled cockney upon friends, as if it were some new form of pig Latin. And I remember what it was like at home on rehearsal nights when Mummie would leave a casserole in the fridge, or pay our maid, Lottie, to stay after work and fix us her fried chicken. My father would sulk in his den, his face buried in the latest tome on the Civil War. “Your mother’s off at the theater,” he would mutter, “with the fairies.” He was desolate without her, an orphaned wretch—even with three children in the house.
    If you’d known my mother, you’d understand. She was lovely, to begin with, in a creamy-skinned, hazel-eyed, Deborah Kerr kind of way. And she was such a light, such a beam of pure compassion, that darkness of any sort—even my father’s stubborn variety—didn’t stand a chance in her presence. Drawn to strays of any kind, she was a pillar of the SPCA, but she rescued a number of humans, as well—or attempted to—over the years. I came to refer to them as the Refugees, since, for some reason, they were usually European, perhaps because it offered Mummie the illusion of a larger world.
    The Refugees were divorcées, or in the process of becoming: vaguely scarlet women who had met their American husbands at military bases overseas. Lured to the Low Country by the promise of True Love and Tara-like plantations, they ended up in trailer parks and tract houses, married to some abusive Bible-spouting dickhead whose name seemed always to begin with O—an Orville or an Olin or an Otis.
    It was my mother’s mission, she believed, to pry these women from their personal hells, to offer comfort and conversation, to find them suitable mates among the well-bred bachelors of the Yacht Club. She rarely succeeded. More often than not she landed smack dab in the middle of some knock-down-drag-out marital fracas.
    “Your mother’s lost her goddamned mind,” my father once reported.
    “She’s hiding in a phone booth at a motel in Ravenel, and she won’t come home until Veronique comes out.” Exactly why Mummie was hiding—or what her Refugee was doing inside—I was never told, but my father did volunteer that Veronique was “common as pigs’
    tracks,” and that my mother would end up in a serious lawsuit if she didn’t mind her own goddamned business. I waited for all hell to break loose, but Mummie returned that evening in time to take her pot roast out of the oven and settle in for The Bob Cummings Show .
    As she snuggled up to my father on the sofa, all that betrayed her busy afternoon of espionage (and the apparent accomplishment of her mission) was the cryptic little half-smile blooming on her face.
    In later years Mummie’s caretaking was more confined to home.
    My father’s mother—the grandmother we called Dodie—had Parkinson’s disease and the beginnings of Alzheimer’s, though we thought of it then as garden-variety senility. Dodie was shaky and bent over, a human parenthesis with a hearing aid as big as a prayer book hitched to her bosom. She needed help getting out of chairs and going to the toilet and even walking—all of which services my mother provided with unending goodwill. As the two of them inched across a room together, Dodie, who had strived for gentility all her life, could sometimes be heard to emit a barrage of unladylike farts. “Oh, goodness me,” she would murmur in mortification. And Mummie would squeeze Dodie’s shoulder and say: “That’s all right.
    We’ll just hurry and get away from it.” Then they would both dis-solve in giggles, bowing in their mirth to the awful hopelessness of it all.
    Dodie’s failing mind sometimes fell prey to demons. When I was in my early teens she