Good Enough Daughter

Whenever my parents came to visit me in New York City, I never met them at the airport; even during the years my husband had a car, I let them take a bus or taxi. Yet for forty years, each time I flew to Cleveland, my parents or brother met my plane no matter how I might demur. They did it out of courtesy and love and to insure that no preventable discomfort could provide me an excuse to stay away. Still, once I wrenched myself out of their lives, nothing they did could bring me back till I was ready. The years rolled by, with some years only the occasional phone call and not one visit. Now I was back--smack in the center of their lives. But this time my parents' car, armed with a car alarm, sat idle in its garage, and my brother Bob was dead. So I took an escalator down to the lowest level of the Cleveland airport, hopped on the convenient Rapid Transit that goes directly to downtown Cleveland and straight out Shaker Boulevard to a stop not two hundred feet from my parents' house. The Rapid had been whisking affluent professionals and businessmen from their downtown offices past Cleveland's industrial slums back up to their grand Shaker Heights houses ever since the 1920s, when the Van Sweringen brothers built the suburb, along with the fancy shops of Shaker Square, for successful Clevelanders--including the architect who built for himself my parents' house. I used to think the proximity of the house to the Rapid was Mom's trump in persuading Dad to sell the modest Cleveland-Heights-style three-bedroom on Ashurst Road where Bob and I grew up ("a postage stamp, but sweet," recalled my mother) for this six-bedroom English-style Shaker edifice: any day of the week he had only to step out the front door at five minutes past the hour or half hour to catch a train that would deposit him in a mere twelve minutes on Public Square, a five-minute walk from his office. Some people might have taken longer, lingering at the enticing windows of those great thriving department stores, Higbee's and May's, or (like me) stopping for cashews at the Nut House or for chocolates at Fannie Farmer; but S. S. Kates, born Samuel Simon and known around town as Speedy Sam, was in too much of a hurry to saunter. "I saw your dad on Prospect Avenue the other day walking so fast he leaned going around the corner," reported a young lawyer to me admiringly when my father was ninety. The brief memoir Dad composed at eighty-eight begins: "I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, November 10, 1901, in the kitchen of my parents' home, apparently in a rush to enter the world, and the habit of rushing--hurrying--being impatient--being early--has stayed with me ever since." Now I know my father agreed to buy the house for Mom for a weightier reason: Okay, Bummer, he said when the time came, I'll move if that will bring you back to me. I carried my bags up the drive past the long leaf-strewn lawn spotted by one tall spruce and one towering elm. There used to be three elms, but two succumbed to Dutch elm disease years ago and were felled and hauled away. Around the garage I trudged, past Mom's flower garden, dormant but for three late roses, to the back porch. Fishing out my key and the secret code to the alarm, I felt an illicit excitement: in the forty years my parents had lived in this house, I'd never stayed in it alone. Now I could search out its secrets without asking permission. An ear-piercing wail violating the dignity of the entire stretch of boulevard shattered the air as I let myself in. Dropping my bags, I dashed past the kitchen to the foyer, flung open the door of the coat closet, and groped behind a scarf for a keypad to shut off the alarm. Consulting my notes, first I punched in the code for the outer ring, which controls doors, windows, cellar, and porch, then the one for the electric eyes that scan the interior spaces in search of an intruder who, breaking the beam, can set off a tremendous clanging in the hoShulman, Alix Kates is the author of 'Good Enough Daughter' with ISBN 9780805211023 and ISBN 0805211020.