A Stone Boat Page 13
The morning of my mother’s second surgery broke brilliantly clear. It was the kind of June day my mother had always loved, when the sun casts blithe shadows on the sidewalks and the air is bright and your skin feels blissfully soft. By the time of my mother’s second surgery, my father had become a benefactor of the hospital where she was being treated, and she had therefore been given a room unlike any other hospital room on earth, the size of a small recital hall, with windows on three sides looking out at the stately East River. There were, as usual, flowers. The room seemed too good for bad news. We arrived at dawn on the day of my mother’s second surgery, and gave her all our sunrise assurances, and half an hour later watched as they wheeled her away down the long corridor.
And then we sat down to wait. The time of my mother’s illness was in some sense entirely a time of waiting. For two years, there was not a single day when we were not waiting for a test result, waiting for the end of a course of therapy, waiting for good health again, even waiting for my mother to die. The day of her second surgery, we had arrived in the hospital earlier than early, and we waited for them to take her up to the operating room, and then we waited for them to bring her back down, and every one of the many seconds that passed in such waiting was like a little death of its own, so that by the time noon struck we all felt as though we had died a thousand times without being once reborn. And yet the idea of ceasing to wait was also intolerable. I had in my mind a cartoon image of characters trying to stop short of some precipice and finding themselves unable, skidding along on their heels while the dirt churns up around them: we lived in eager dread that our waiting would end. On the day of my mother’s second surgery, we tried at first to keep up conversation, then lapsed into the books we had brought for distraction. I drummed meaningless chord progressions on my silent keyboard. In the end, we gave up and let ourselves stare fixedly into our three kinds of middle distance, unable to connect by any stretch of our collective imagination. My father and Freddy and I were lost in a neighborhood of pause, and it seemed to me that we remained stranded there forever.
Then there was a lull in the waiting. The doctor came down to tell us that the news was good, and as he spoke the sun poured in like butterscotch. He came to tell us that my mother’s cancer had almost entirely disappeared. He came to tell us that only a rigorous search on his part had located the few resistant cells. He came to tell us that there was no tumor mass, that you could not be closer to being healthy without being in perfect health. He came to tell us that what was left would wash away with a little bit more chemotherapy, the tiniest bit of chemotherapy, minor, easy, nearly unnoticeable chemotherapy. How can I describe the glowing enthusiastic optimistic vocabulary that doctor used when he came into the enormous bright hospital room with its roses all in bloom and told us that my mother was still dying? Because this much was clear to us all: if some of the cancer was left after that agonizing nine-month treatment, then all the good predictions that had been made over those months were wrong. If so much as a shadow of the cancer had survived those traumatizing attacks, then we had been living in false hope. “What’s left will wash away in no time,” said the doctor, and we all remembered hearing him say those words after the first surgery. We knew how often first-line chemotherapy works, and how seldom second-line chemotherapy works. The upbeat tone the doctor had used was not far from the tone that someone in an older profession could have used to say that souls in heaven are happier than those on earth. All I know for sure is that the slow minutes that had seemed like prisons until that moment seemed now to be inside of us instead of out, to be pressing from the center, like a sustained and ripping explosion, like some multiplication of our own flesh, like cancer itself.
For an hour, my father and Freddy and I held council on what to say, how to tell my mother, and in the end we came up with nothing much better than that radiant vocabulary the butterscotch doctor had spread around his news. Freddy called one of his medical school professors and discussed statistics, but none of us cared about statistics much; we had just fallen by the wayside of a tiny statistic, and were in that undreamed-of two percent that gives foil to a treatment with a ninety-eight percent success rate. Each of us tried to believe the doctor’s tone for the sake of the others, and so we repeated in apologetic litany that things might have been much, much worse. And then the orderlies appeared with my mother on a rolling bed. My father, my poor father, was the only one who could tell her the news, her news, our news, and now she opened her eyes and stared groggily for a moment. “Well?” she asked with all the fervid effort of anesthetized concentration. “It’s good news and it’s bad news,” my father said. Lines of anger etched themselves into my mother’s face and her teeth set. “It’s not over,” she said, and closed her anesthesia eyes before my father could progress into his efforts at cheer. On that day, the day we all understood that my mother would probably die, there was an expression on her face like nothing I had ever seen, a concentrate of the final rage that lies beyond despair. And my father, when he saw that she had locked herself back in unconsciousness, turned to my brother and me, and said, “What are they going to do to her now?” And then he paused and murmured, “And she looks so beautiful.”
Freddy put a hand on his arm. “Dad, she doesn’t look so beautiful right now,” he said. My father turned to see again, as though he were afraid that it was the wrong body they had brought in, as though to make sure that it really was my mother who lay on the hospital bed. He looked at her pale, distorted face, and at her almost hairless head—an eighth of an inch had grown in since the chemotherapy had ended—and at the emptiness where her eyebrows should have been; he looked at her features puffed from surgery, her teeth clenched tight enough to fix girders. He stared for a long moment as though he were trying to see clearly. And then he shrugged. “To me, she’s beautiful,” he said.
During the week of that second surgery, I watched my mother die. For two days after the surgery she remained in what looked like a trance. She did not open her eyes or move her face; when the nurses woke her up for blood tests or to make her bed, she seemed not to know who they were, and she moved in their arms like a dead body. She did not see us. The IV drip continued to flow into her arm, and from time to time she would shudder, but she did not move or turn or speak. Her face remained set in that expression of rage. When I was a child, I could make my mother completely happy, but I could also make her desperately angry, and I had seen her face when she was in a fury that touched on violence. Never, though, had I seen an expression like the one on her face those days, her lips pressed so tightly into their frown that the blood went out of them. To my father, my mother might be beautiful, but to me, my mother, who had always been so beautiful, was appalling.
At first, we didn’t understand what was happening. It was not until the end of the second day that my father asked one of the nurses why my mother was recovering so slowly from her anesthesia. The nurse—a kind, clean, efficient woman who had been helping my mother since she first got sick—shook her head and said, “The anesthesia is long gone. She’s depressed. It’s a natural response to this kind of news; she’s been so disciplined all year, and she should have been well. She’ll come out, but it’ll take time.”
I suppose that these were really just instructions to wait some more, but how much more could we go on waiting while this inert figure lay in the bed looking like a badly drawn copy of my mother? My mother had been depressed many times that winter, and we knew what her depression was like: she was morose and sentimental and touchy and afraid. This frozen anger was like nothing any of us had ever met. My mother had a thousand different moods, and this was not one of them.
That night, my father and Freddy and I went out to dinner, as we had done at the end of every hospital day. Freddy and I were manic, making absurd jokes, laughing hysterically, until my father’s reserve of calm ran out and his strained sense of humor disappeared, and he pounded on the table with his fist. Everyone else in the rest
aurant stopped what he was doing and turned and stared. “Would you two stop carrying on!” my father thundered. Neither Freddy nor I could respond. We ended that meal in the same white heat of silence in which we had spent the day.
That night I called Helen, and she and I went sneaking out for one of our late drinks and I tried to explain. But my voice went running away from me; after all that silence, my voice wouldn’t stop. “It’s just not livable anymore,” I said to her. “Last year, when my mother got sick, it was shocking, but I still had all my energy then, and now my energy is just about used up, and I just can’t deal with it. I can’t go back to that enormous hospital room tomorrow and spend another day talking to my mother while she lies on the bed like something out of a horror movie and I go on telling my father and Freddy that it’s all going to be fine. I can’t do it, Helen. I’m going to go crazy. In fact, I am going crazy, and so is my father, and so is Freddy.”
Helen reached out to touch me, but I was beyond touching by then and I jumped at her hand as though it were going to burn me. “It’s just for now,” said Helen, and she swirled her white wine around in its big glass. “You said the prognosis isn’t so bad, and your mother will have to get out of her depression, and then your father will be all right. You’ve pulled through all this so far, and you’ll pull through today.”
I nearly hit Helen. “I can’t believe,” I said, my voice rising, “that my mother just doesn’t care that she’s killing all of us. What about the rest of us? Remember how the rest of us used to matter, too? I keep expecting her to look at my life and say, ‘I’m sorry.’ No. More than that. I keep expecting her to look deep into my life and be sorry. I’ve lost so much, Helen. We’ve all lost so much. We used to be joyful people, all four of us. She’s killing us with her, and she just couldn’t care less. If she loves me so much and depends on me so much then how the hell does she get off caring so little? If she’s going to die, I wish she’d just do it already. I wish she would just die tonight, that we could get back to that hospital tomorrow and find out it was over and have a funeral and just go on from there. Because this can’t go on this way, it just can’t, and I can’t, I can’t anymore, I just can’t.”
I stopped for breath and Helen, in a single swift movement, got up from her chair and moved behind me and held me from the back, pinning my arms to my seat, in a cross between an embrace and the Heimlich maneuver. When she spoke, her voice had the softness of insight behind it, but it was sharp as a drill bit. “Harry,” she said. “Your mother is going to be in that hospital for another week at the outside, and then she’ll be at home. You are in this country for another two weeks and then you’re going back to see Bernard and get on with your life in London and then play at that Beethoven festival in Bavaria that you’ve been grumbling about. If you don’t want to stay in the hospital room all day every day, then don’t stay there. Your father hasn’t tied you to a chair. Make a plan with someone and go out to lunch. Go home and practice for an hour. Keep a grip on yourself. You have not destroyed your life to help your mother. If you’re mad, then go home and smash a mixing bowl or something. If you’re sad, then cry. If you need to distract yourself, then watch TV or call friends or have a party or do whatever you have to do to get through this, Harry. But stop being hysterical. It’s not helping anyone at all.” The hard, rational, moral, just side of Helen, the side that would change the world with legislative codes and make it a better place—that side of her came to the surface as she spoke. It was a rationality that was not incommensurate with kindness. When she finished, she let go of me, very slowly. I did not move, and she sat down again. Her face was calm, and my hysteria was gone, at least for the moment.
I reached out to touch her hair, which was hanging forward, because she looked, all at once, so very beautiful. “We’re all drawn to the romance of being slaves to love,” she said quietly. “It happens in fairy tales and it happens in movies and it’s a compelling principle. Lamb, in the real world that can’t be the whole story. With your mother—you have to make yourself free. If you’re a slave, it’s not to love. It’s to something else. Your mother is a remarkable woman, Harry, and God knows she loves you. That’s not the question.”
“Then what is it?” I asked. Helen seemed terribly serious. I felt we were wandering toward a big subject I had not planned to visit, then or later.
“It’s just what I said,” she answered. “Love should set you free, the way your love for the piano does. Maybe Bernard does, at least a little? Even now, even if she’s dying, your mother’s love should do that. You should let it do that.”
I thought again about my mother saying, in her most honest voice, “I think you could do anything, Harry, anything in the world if you wanted to.” It seemed to me that it was she who had made that true. Her powerful, unrelenting belief: who would I have been without it? Life, love—it did not strike me as a free business. But to be tactful, I told Helen that her friendship was a very freeing thing indeed.
“I’ll walk you home,” she said after a second, and she did walk me home, and then came up to the apartment, and waited while I put on my pajamas—I still wore pajamas in my parents’ home—and that night she stayed with me until I went to sleep.
• • •
On the third day, my father and Freddy and I took turns sitting on the end of the bed and talking to my mother. Periodically she would move, and once or twice she opened her eyes, but she seemed not to understand what we were saying. My father sat beside her and repeated and repeated her name, as though he were trying to call her back. “It’s going to be all right,” he said lamely. “It’s going to be all right.” The nurse became more forceful that day. “You have to get out of that bed for a little while,” she said to my mother. “You have to stand up today and walk at least across the room.” And with her sleek efficiency she pushed the buttons and made the bed sit up and propped my mother out and escorted her to a chair. We gathered around my mother then; her eyes were open and she was staring, but she continued not to say anything. “Mom,” said Freddy, and passed his hands in front of her face. “Oh, Mom!” he said, his tone like a joke, an echo of the previous night’s mania. “Are you there? Earth to Mom!” And my mother turned slightly in her chair, but that was all. Then the nurse came over and helped my mother to stand up and walked with her back to the bed.
Later in the afternoon, I sat for a long two hours on the side of the bed and held my mother’s hand and looked at her. And she for a long time lay in her stony silence with that expression still fixed on her face. “Please look at me,” I said. “Please say something. You’re taking this too hard, and you’re making it even worse for yourself than it is. Life isn’t over. You have less cancer than you had in the fall and you’re going to have these few treatments and then that’s going to be it. This is just taking a little longer than we thought it was going to take. It’s going to be fine. It really is. It’s going to be just fine.” And suddenly I saw that my mother had started to cry. Her expression was still the same, but there were tears running down her face, and she was looking up at me. And finally—we had begun to fear she had lost her voice forever—she began to speak.
“Let go, Harry,” she said. “Just let go of me. I was sick, and everyone told me what I had to do, and I did it, and it didn’t work. And this is also not going to work. You and Freddy and your father need to let go of me. You have to let me die.”
When my mother started talking, Freddy and my father came at once to the bedside. “You’re not dying,” my father said. “We don’t have to let you die. We have to help you to live. Because we love you.”
My mother looked up at him, and the tears continued to flow in an endless stream down her face. “I’m not really here anymore,” she said. “What’s here for you to love?”
“Oh, Mom,” said Freddy.
It was terrible how much I loved my mother. It was the most terrible thing in the world.
My mother looked a
t our three faces, and the hardness left her voice for an instant. “Can’t you see,” she said hoarsely, “that the person you loved is already dead?” And then she closed her eyes again, and lay on the bed with tears coming from under her eyelids. We stood around the bed, but she didn’t look at us again, and after a few minutes the nurse came, and told us to go back to the chairs and sit down.
“She’s very tired,” said the nurse. “Don’t push her too hard today.”
• • •
The rest of the afternoon lapsed in silence. I drummed away at my silent electric keyboard. I learned a Chopin nocturne by heart. I didn’t have any plan to play it in concert, but it was satisfying to know I had it on hand should an occasion offer itself in the future. I felt I had come up with a musical interpretation, even though I had heard no sounds. I considered turning on the sound, but I knew it would bother my mother’s sleep, and that it would sound awful. I thought about deaf Beethoven composing, and looked forward to trying the Chopin on the piano at home.
At eight o’clock that night, the three of us had a brisk conversation and chose a restaurant, and headed for the door. I felt like I was being let out of a cage. My father stopped by the bed and bent over it and kissed my mother. “We’re leaving now,” he said. “We’ll be back in the morning.”
Freddy and I were right behind him. “Have some happy dreams,” I said.
And then my mother sat up for the first time and her voice seemed to rise suddenly out of the middle of her. “I won’t do it,” she said. “I won’t do another round of chemotherapy. I won’t follow through with this. I’ve done as much as I have to do and I’m ready to die. Leonard, you have to help me. This is a hospital. Get me some pills or some morphine. They have enough poison to pump into your system for therapy, so they must have enough to kill me. I’m ready to die and I want to do it now.”
“You know I can’t arrange—” my father began, but my mother would have none of it.