A Stone Boat Page 12
• • •
Every morning when I was in New York, I would go into my mother’s room and find her propped up in bed, post-breakfast, having a cup of chamomile tea. Calling upon reserves of energy—I am not naturally cheerful in the mornings—I would bounce in and smile broadly. “How are you today?” I would ask.
“I feel terrible,” my mother would say. Often she would catalog how terrible she felt.
One day I replied, in a harmless ironic tone, “What ever happened to, ‘Fine, thank you, and how are you?’”
Her thinning eyebrows drew together. “What ever happened to it? I have enough acquaintances who get, ‘Fine, thank you, and how are you.’ You’re the family. You’re supposed to be the ones to whom I can say just how terrible I feel. And when I tell you, you’re supposed to comfort me and not criticize me.” Her tone of voice was deliberately grating.
“We all love you,” I said, “but you’ve got to make some of the effort yourself. If I can try to be cheerful, you can try to be cheered. Why don’t we try to make the best of things as they are?”
“I’m trying, Harry,” said my mother. “Can’t you see that? Can’t you see how hard I’m trying?” Then tears began to roll down her face. “I’m not trying to make your life miserable. You asked how I was feeling, and I thought it was because you really wanted to know. If you don’t want to know, then go play your piano when you get up, and don’t come in here. Or go back to London, where you can socialize with all your friends. Go work on your recording. I’m not making you come to New York, Harry. I’ve tried to tell you to keep doing other things, and I’ve tried to make it easier with your father, so he doesn’t pressure you all the time. It doesn’t help me to have you here resenting me. Believe me, I don’t want to have all these problems myself.” As she worked herself up to a pitch she began to shake, as though a wind were blowing through her, and then, quite suddenly, she dropped her teacup. We both watched as it rolled the length of her quilt, fell off the bed, and smashed on the floor. It left a long pale stain behind it. For a second there was silence.
“I’ll get the dustpan and brush,” I said.
“Go ask Janet to change the bed,” said my mother.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am. You know that I didn’t mean it. I mean, I do want to know how you are when I ask you.”
“Harry, go get the dustpan and go get Janet before the stain sets,” my mother said.
A few minutes later, while I was sweeping up the pieces, she said, “Do you think I would be like this if I had any choice?”
“No, I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“You’d better hope that if they don’t cure me, I go fast, or there won’t be anything in this house that isn’t stained or chipped or broken,” she said.
• • •
Two months after my mother’s birthday, they carried out the first serious tests to see whether the chemotherapy was working. My mother knew nothing of these tests in advance; my father wanted to protect her, and protect her he did. He made all the arrangements behind closed doors. “You talk to the doctors,” my mother would say. “Make me believe that you are telling the truth, because if I think you’re lying to me, I’ll go crazy. But tell me only what’s important, in the way you think best. Don’t drag me through what I don’t need to know.” So far as my mother was concerned, they took extra blood that month to check her immune counts twice; they took so many tubes of blood every week that one more or less went unremarked. But my father and Freddy and I knew that they were performing the first meaningful tests, and we waited breathless for the results. If there was bad news, we would bear it ourselves and say nothing to my mother; she could not have taken it on. But if there was good news, we would bring it to her like a slice of heaven. The day the results were due, I was on a plane from Rome to London, and when I landed at Heathrow I made straight for a pay telephone. I called my mother, and not my father, knowing that if she were to say anything it meant there was hope, and that if she said nothing, it meant that she knew nothing, and that the hour for despair had come.
Every time I go through Terminal One at Heathrow I see the pay phone from which I made that call, next to baggage-claim Carousel One. I remember how my hands shook when I dialed, and I remember how measured and flat my voice was when my mother answered the phone. “You’re back?” she asked when she answered the phone. “How was your trip? Was the concert hall as acoustically bad as you’d feared?”
“It was OK,” I said. “I got some good reviews.”
“How are you?” she asked.
“Fine. A good trip,” I said, making my responses as short as possible so that we could cut to the point we might or might not be cutting to. “How are you?” I asked.
“Tired as usual,” she said. “But we’ve had what your father seems to think is good news.” And it was at that moment as though I had got my life back from the place where I’d accidentally left it some months earlier. There it was, intact, just as I remembered it. No one had sullied it; no one had chipped it; no one had broken it. It was a bit dusty, but the dust could soon be blown off. And I loved it, loved life, as you love anything you thought you had lost that you find again.
“I’m so glad,” I said, and I must have said it eight times, and I felt gladness as I had never felt it before, as something that begins in the middle of your stomach and rises in shivering waves up your whole frame and into your mouth and your face and your mind, making the world shimmer in front of you, raising the pitch of every sound, concentrating your senses until it seems that everything around you exists five times. “I’m so glad,” I chorused again and again, and told my mother about my trip, and then had to run because my bags had just appeared on baggage-claim Carousel Four. And so I claimed them, and cleared customs, and rushed into Bernard’s arms. That night I ate the dinner he had made for me as though it were so many plates of triumph.
• • •
When I spoke to my father, he sounded transformed. “These test results are not a hundred percent conclusive,” he said cautiously. But he couldn’t keep it up. “According to the material I’ve reviewed, the chances are incredibly good. It’s the most remote possibility that there’s still anything there. It’s better than we would have dared to hope.” My father explained the test results then, drawing in the Geneva study of ten years earlier and the Santa Fe clinical trials that had been completed shortly thereafter. I was speechless in the face of my father’s unbounded information. While my mother had been worrying, he had been learning. “In a secondary stage,” he began, and then explained the mechanisms of the cancerous cells themselves, as though they were some kind of fascinating new invention, a scientific fact and not an emotional one. He knew more than my doctor-to-be brother. “You have to come home soon so we can all celebrate this together,” he said. “And we have to work together to keep your mother’s spirits up. I explained all this to her, but she’s being skeptical.”
“I’m going to stick around in London for a little while,” I said to him.
“Don’t do that,” he said. “We need you here.”
I said I’d have to work out a schedule, and got off the phone, and put on a new shirt Bernard had bought me. We were going to dinner with Claire and Michael. We were going to celebrate quite satisfactorily.
When I spoke to Freddy, the next day, we laughed about it all. “My professor told me we should be really thrilled about this. Seriously. So now it’s back to full-time medical school,” he said. “No more excuses for bad exam results. No more crazy trips to New York for dinner. We’re free!”
• • •
If the following year seemed to go by in ten minutes, that first winter of chemotherapy lasted a decade. My mother’s test results (there were results every two weeks) continued to point to her being cured, and I did not entertain the possibility that they were lying. We all felt sorry for my mother because of the disco
mfort of her therapy, but gave little weight to the fear of her disease. The knowing doctors told us that it was virtually certain that the cancer would not linger, and so death itself, to which we had begun to become accustomed, seemed to shrink and recede. At least it shrank away from me. Only my mother held on to the thought of her own death with what I took to be a morbid fixation. She operated at a low level of depression, like a cloud-swelled weather system. She hated her doctors, and she hated the hospital, and she hated her treatments, and she hated all the disciplined isolation. She hated the chemicals. “You should see the stuff they’re giving me now,” she said. “It’s the most hideous shade of orange, about the color of those beach chairs we had when you were little. Remember? The ones that discolored in the basement? You just watch it drip into your arm and wait to see whether you’ll change color yourself.”
I should say here that, since I did not have so much as a cold all winter, I forgot how unpleasant it is simply to be under the weather. Two years later, when I endured an upset stomach and general malaise and a slight sore throat for a few days—a seventy-two-hour virus—I realized that I was experiencing some of the symptoms my mother had known during that long winter, and I tried to imagine what it would have been like to feel that way for an unrelenting nine months. Then I realized how hard it is to sustain any optimism when you are occupied with your own discomfort, and I saw that if my mother thought she was dying, this was in part because she had had too many sensations that were too much like death for far, far too long. In the way that a slight skin irritation sustained over months becomes as bad as a deep flesh wound, so my mother’s chemotherapy symptoms became terrible simply because they never went away. I tried to be a staunch support to her: I called every day when I was abroad, and came back to New York at least once a month. I went with her to have the wig fixed (in the end, she did have wigs that looked so much like her hair you would never have known they were anything else, but it required unholy care to make what was dead appear to be part of her living self). I did everything a perfect son would have done, but I did it in a spirit of largely unarticulated peevishness. I wanted credit all the time; I wanted a marching band to come to Kennedy airport each time I landed, to sing out my praises on the tuba and the big bass drum. June sparkled on the horizon: in June they would do a final test, prove that my mother was fine, and abandon the chemotherapy. In June, we would be entirely free.
• • •
My mother apologized at least a thousand times that winter for the terrible accusation she had made in the first weeks of her illness. She had repeated that all she wanted was for me to be happy, that she accepted my decisions, and that she worried only about my having a lonely old age and living at the margins of society. I insisted that she had to meet Bernard when next she came to London, and she insisted that she wouldn’t. I can remember sitting with her at tea one afternoon, telling her that if she loved me she had to include herself in the whole of my life.
“You cannot love me but close out Bernard and our relationship,” I insisted, “because that is now a part of me.”
She said, “You want to make this all more real, and what I am trying to tell you is that I will accept it but that I don’t want it to be more real. I don’t want to have to see it. As long as it remains invisible it remains remote to my time with you.”
I can remember that, at that time, her chemotherapy had affected her ability to balance so much that she could not lift a teacup at all, and so our tea together consisted of her watching me eat and drink. It was hard to argue with my mother under these circumstances—hard but not impossible. When I told her that her time with me had always been riddled with artifice, her hands shook even more and the lines of exhaustion that had set in around her mouth seemed to sag. As she got thinner and thinner, her resistance wore down, and by the early spring, she had conceded that she would meet Bernard when she came to London. I looked forward at that time to years of my mother as she would be after the end of her chemotherapy; if I had taken advantage of her weakened condition, I had done so with a wise eye to the future.
• • •
The crisis seemed to have passed by the time I went back to the recording studio in London, for my second chance; but when I sat down, I felt myself starting to freeze again, and I heard more of those wooden notes from which I had sworn I would free myself. I panicked. At noon, I stopped playing and called home, and I talked to my mother on the phone for a few minutes. She was going in for another round of chemotherapy that day. “Come on,” said my agent, interrupting the conversation. “Talk to her on your own time, not on studio time. Are you playing this for your mother or for the world?” I carefully avoided answering him.
As I sat down to play, I thought about what the actual CD would look like, the flat disc of plastic, neutral as a large coin. I began the Schubert. I thought about the nectarine, and about my mother, and about the orange chemical. And then I stopped playing, brought up short at the phrase that had appeared in my dream. Suddenly I felt all the sadness that I had tried to close out in England, that I had put aside after my mother’s good test results had started. I had not been able to explain this sadness to Bernard, nor to admit it to my mother, nor to share it with Freddy or my father, nor, much of the time, to see it myself; but it came washing out all over the piano that day. The Schubert is not exactly a sad piece of music, but it has enough sadness in it so that it could lead me to my own sadness in that sad season. It was the most incredible release, to play that piece, to say at last all the things I had not been saying. I played it from beginning to end without pausing, and when I stopped, I found tears on my face. I wiped them off quickly, before anyone else could see them.
“Well,” said my agent, delighted and ironic. “I see we’re finally getting someplace. Where the hell did that come from?”
“I’ve been practicing,” I said helplessly.
“You keep practicing,” he said to me.
• • •
It was on a clear day in May, when I was having dinner with Bernard and some friends in his dining room—Bernard had made the first of the season’s lamb—that Freddy called. My father had not been able to bring himself to do it. It was Freddy who said that there had been aberrant test results, and that they would be doing surgery on my mother in five days, to make sure that she really was OK. “It’s all very unclear,” said Freddy. “They seem to think she’ll be fine, but they’re a little vague. I guess we just can’t tell what’s going on until they get inside her and look.” His voice had that same upbeat tone that we had all used to protect my mother in the first months of her illness. I did not need to challenge him on it. I hung up the telephone, and ran down the hallway, past the dining room and all the people in it, and I locked myself in the bathroom. I lay on the floor and curled myself into a tight bundle and clutched my knees under my chin and closed my eyes and tried to remember the complacence in which I had been living for the better part of that long winter. After some time, Bernard came and knocked on the bathroom door and asked whether I was all right, but I was unable to answer him. I stayed curled on the ugly yellowed carpeting of his bathroom and made no sounds at all, because if I had opened my mouth a wail would have poured out of me that would not have stopped.
A minute later I went back to the table, but I seemed to have lost my ability to speak. I smiled vaguely at everyone, but I couldn’t follow the conversation, and within a minute or two, everyone stood up to leave. I could hear a voice in my mind that said that we had company over, and that I was making a scene, and that I should just say something ordinary, but I couldn’t do it. After the guests were gone, Bernard came back to the dining room and sat beside me and, with that infinite gentleness of his, stroked my hair. Then he picked me up and carried me to our bedroom and put me down on the bed. “Come on,” he said softly, and he unfolded me and helped take off my clothes and put me under the covers. He lay down beside me and stroked my hair and held on to me unti
l I did finally fall into that oddly peaceful slumber that comes when sleep can hold nothing more terrible than your waking dreams. I slept until noon; when I woke up I found a long note from Bernard, and a lovely breakfast standing in the dining room. I wanted to telephone him, but I was still unable to make a sound. In three days, it would be Bernard’s birthday, and we were to have a party. I had planned that beautiful party endlessly, to be a fitting tribute to his measureless patience. I had poured all my affection for Bernard into it; it was to be the public evidence of a love in some ways so private I feared Bernard himself might not always have known it was there. In the silence of that morning my happy plans blew apart. I ate the breakfast, and then I hailed a cab to Heathrow. I quietly boarded another plane, leaving the party, like an orphan child, to take care of itself.
V
VALSE BRILLANTE