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A Stone Boat Page 14


  “If you don’t help me, I’ll find a way to do it myself,” she said. “There you all are setting off for dinner somewhere, and you get on with your lives, and why do you want to have more days sitting in this stifling, miserable room and watching me lie in bed? It’s what we all need. It’s time now. It’s time for me to die.”

  My father tried to calm her with his old reassuring voice, which he produced from the air like a magician’s rabbit. “You’re being ridiculous,” he assured her. “You’re fabricating something. You’re going to be here in the hospital for a few more days, and then you’re going to come home.”

  “No,” my mother screamed. “No,” and her voice seemed to grow beyond her proportions.

  It was after ten o’clock when we left that room that night. We ate dinner as quickly as we could. My father kept starting to cry, and Freddy and I just looked the other way; we had nothing to say to him. At home there were dozens of messages from friends who wanted to come to the hospital to visit my mother. “There’s nothing to lose,” I said to my father. “At least they’ll add a little variety to the day.” So I called them, and woke many of them up, and said that if they wanted to stop by sometime over the next few days, my mother, though weak, would be able to receive them.

  Then I called Bernard and woke him up and tried to explain what was going on. “You must just behave as you always have,” he said. It was four o’clock in the morning in London. “I’m sure that it’s all rather dreadful right now, but in a few days she’ll probably be fine.” I tried to paint for him how awful it really was, but he seemed not to get it. Or perhaps he did get it; perhaps he thought that there is nothing to say about the parts of life that are that awful, that you can only look away from them. Perhaps he did not want to tell me that he thought I was being foolish, looking into it and into it and into it. “The lobelias are blossoming,” Bernard volunteered. “Blue as your eyes,” he said. “I took Nora in to the vet, because she isn’t really eating properly,” he went on, “but the vet says she’s just getting old.” I sent my love to Nora. “Come back soon,” he said, and I wanted to tell him that when I came back I would not be the person he remembered; I wanted to tell him that my eyes were no longer anything like the lobelias. But all I said was that I missed him.

  I was of course responsible for starting the continental drift between Bernard and me. It was not so much that I had skipped town before the party, leaving him to throw it by himself. That morning when I woke up to find the breakfast he had made me, I should have called him and thanked him and told him that I was going to New York. I should not have left the house in silence and hailed a cab and flown home. I should have told him what I planned to do. Bernard made so few demands: he didn’t want my sorrows, but he did at least want to be consulted about my actual activities. If I had called him that day and asked whether he thought I should go to New York, he would have told me by all means to go; he would probably have driven me to Heathrow; and I might still be living in the world of the lobelias and Nora and the vet.

  After we hung up, I sat down at the piano and, in a sudden panic, practiced the Chopin until nearly dawn.

  • • •

  On the fourth day, my mother was mostly silent. Periodically, she would sit up partway, and tears would pour down her face. When any of us tried to talk to her, she went into her litany about pills. “If you won’t help me to kill myself here and now,” she said, “then I’ll kill myself when I get home, and it will be worse and messier for all of us.”

  At three o’clock that afternoon, a friend of my mother’s arrived. The effect was absolutely astonishing. My mother sat up, and asked for her pink bed jacket, and made unremarkable conversation. The tears and the expression of rage—which none of us had been able to penetrate—seemed to evaporate.

  “I hear the prognosis is pretty good,” said the friend.

  “Still dying,” said my mother. “They’re planning a whole variety of new tortures for me.” A few minutes later, another friend of my mother’s came in, and then another, and by four-thirty there were more than thirty people there, all the close friends in succession. My mother was sitting up in her bed; her remarks were occasional and negative, but she was still the focus of the room. It was like some kind of bizarre cocktail party. Everyone talked about the room. “What I wouldn’t give to have views like this at home,” one friend remarked. The flowers also attracted a lot of notice. “Which are mine?” more than one friend asked. My father and Freddy and I were doing full-time duty as hosts, trying to circulate.

  “This is too weird,” Freddy said to me at one point.

  “It’s more fun than yesterday!” I replied.

  “What do you suppose Mom is thinking?” he asked.

  But I got carried off by another friend who wanted to know what had been happening. “How’s her mood been?” people kept asking.

  “Not great,” I said, but I provided no further details.

  “How’ve you been?” people asked my mother.

  “Oh, up and down,” she said.

  At about six o’clock, people started leaving. “You must be tired,” they said as they paused by my mother’s bed.

  She smiled graciously at each one, and thanked each for coming. “Stop by anytime,” she laughed to the people she loved most. “I’m not going anywhere in a hurry.” When the last of these friends had gone, I went over to my mother’s bed and took her hand. She was limp with exhaustion, and she had started to cry again, her tears as unconscious as breathing.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” I said to her. “Weren’t you glad to see all those people? It was almost like a party.”

  “Oh, Harry,” my mother said. “Everyone always had such a good time at our house.”

  • • •

  The last nine days of my mother’s second surgery stay in the hospital took on a pattern. In the mornings, my mother was sad but it was possible to comfort her. We talked about the next chemotherapy. “Why should it work?” my mother would say, and I would say, “The doctors seem to think that it will be fine.” I told her about friends of hers, and we talked about who had come to the hospital and who hadn’t come and who had called and why. We even talked about Bernard once or twice. Helen came a couple of times in the morning, and my mother would always perk up for Helen. I loved to watch them speaking to each other. Helen could not afford enormous arrangements of the kind that filled the room, but she always brought a rose, or a stem of lilies, and my mother would put the flowers from Helen into a little glass vase and keep them on the nightstand next to her bed. “What a lovely haircut,” she would say to Helen, or, “Those earrings are wonderful on you.”

  In the afternoons, friends of my mother’s would come, and she would make desultory conversation with them. She was hungry for the news they could offer, and she chatted away. Many of them sought her advice on small matters, and she gave advice calmly, bringing order to other lives as she always had. While she talked to these friends, I would take my electric organ into the hallway and practice with the sound on low.

  In the evenings, things would degenerate rapidly. We were almost always there for a full two hours after the end of visiting time. “Leonard,” my mother said every night, “I will go through with this only if you promise me that you will get me some pills so that I can end this when I decide to end it. I won’t go through with it under any other circumstances.”

  And my father would say, “You would take those pills right now if you had them, and right now there’s no reason to take them. Besides, how do you think I’m going to get you pills to take to kill yourself ? Where do you think I have my secret connections?”

  “You figure it out, Leonard. That’s your problem.” And then she would weep and sometimes she would scream and in the end that enraged sadness would come flying out of her. To be in the room with it was like being splattered with blood. “I can’t live like this,” she would say. “I ca
n’t go on this way. Why won’t you let me die? It would be so much better for everyone. It’s so selfish of you to keep me alive when all I want is to die. I hate this, I hate it, I hate it.”

  Once I became furious myself. “So go ahead and die,” I said. “Go ahead and die. How many times do we have to have this scene?”

  My mother looked at me then. “Oh, Harry. I know that you all love me. But no matter what you do, I am alone. All alone. It’s so terrible to be trapped all alone in this body. I don’t want to be such a misery. Harry, Leonard, Freddy—wouldn’t it be better, really better, for you all to let go of me?”

  • • •

  By the time my mother came home, I had had my fill of New York. The prospect of London and Bernard filled me with joy. How sorry I felt for my father, who had no escape, who had no one to go to! In some very secret part of myself, I thought I might go to London and never come home again; when Helen told me that I was being extreme, I told her about concerts, which I had, in fact, scheduled thick and fast for the following month. I planned various programs for forthcoming performances. I talked to my agent daily. The drift away from Bernard seemed to me to have been arrested, or even reversed, as I had spent more and more time thinking about him as a way not to think about my mother. If anyone had ever been ready for a spa vacation, I was ready for one at that moment. My mother was about to start her minor, easy, nearly unnoticeable chemotherapy. I wanted to get as far away as possible, to where I could continue to imagine that chemotherapy could be easy, to where things happening to my mother might be unnoticeable.

  “That sounded lovely, Harry,” said my mother, drifting into the living room one evening when I was practicing. She had given up that hospital tone of despair.

  “It’s a technical nightmare,” I said. “I want to work on the melody but I can’t do that until I get the fingering down better.”

  “I don’t want to interrupt you,” she said. “Go on playing. I’ll just listen.” She sat down on one of the yellow chairs.

  “I’ll play something else,” I said. “This is no fun to listen to.”

  “No, don’t do that,” she said. “Play what you were working on. It changes each time you play it.”

  I did not entirely know it then, but my mother had that week given up on the hope of a cure. She had stopped treating each day of sickness as part of a temporary punishment, to be endured until a better time would come; she had accepted that she had only these days left, and that she should make the most of them. She was trying simply to live in the world and in the moment, something she had never done before; it had been her way to negotiate the present as though it were laid on for future memories. She sat that evening in one of the yellow chairs, listening, and I worked on fingering, and after the first fifteen minutes, the fact of her being there ceased to distract me. I played better than I had played in a long time. When she stood up an hour later, I had almost forgotten she was in the room with me. “Well, you’ve solved that,” she said with satisfaction as she left.

  • • •

  When I got back to London, Bernard told me how everyone had missed me at his birthday party. In fact, it had gone off much as it might have, had I been in town for it. Norman—with whom Bernard had finally reached an adequate peace—had taken lots of photographs, and Bernard and I spent a long and happy evening looking over them. Jane had worn the most purple dress ever made, and if the photos were to be believed, Frieda had spent the entire evening grinning madly. Bernard did not know why. I thought Bernard’s choice of the gray linen suit very successful, and wanted a blowup of the photograph of him with Claire and Michael, which was really a great photo. The flowers were not quite as I had ordered them, but they looked acceptable, and I was very pleased with the lighting in the room. They had remembered about the candles’ being ivory.

  In the first weeks that I was back with Bernard, I was afraid of calling my mother, afraid of being depressed or angered, afraid that I would be splattered with blood again. But in fact, when I called her we would laugh and tell each other stories until it was difficult for me to say goodbye. I felt that my mother knew what I was going to say before I said it, and that I knew what she was going to say, and I sometimes wondered why, if that was the case, it gave us both so much pleasure to say these already known things. But I could not stop, and neither could she. My mother was slowly turning into my fondest memories of her. She did not drop her ironies, but she took on a tender mildness that surprised me by telephone. Her essential softness had seemed to disappear during the first year of her illness; now it was back, closer to the surface than it had ever been.

  My mother’s unnoticeable chemotherapy clearly made her feel terrible; sometimes when I spoke to her I felt that she was expending the most enormous effort to exchange the day’s pleasantries, that to say what she had always said without thinking now required an intense concentration of hypnotic energy. The new chemotherapy did not affect her hair, and she told me by phone that she had given up the wig. “I look like I’ve been shorn for the army,” she reported. “But at least it’s been trimmed and styled. Wait till you see your mother with a crew cut.”

  My parents had planned a trip to Italy to celebrate the end of the chemotherapy, and in the hospital we had all assumed that it would be canceled; indeed, in the hospital we had thought it unlikely that my mother would ever again travel as far as Madison Avenue. But her new softness was built upon an unfathomable strength, and she was all for going on this trip. “We can come back through London,” she said. “I can meet Bernard, and see what you’ve done with your house.” My father worried that she would tire herself, but she shrugged this off. “It will be a good, relaxing trip. All of us could stand to get away for a little while.” Once or twice she let slide a little phrase of melancholy. “I think this will probably be our last family trip,” she said. “I want to enjoy it, and I want you and Freddy to enjoy it. I want you to have as many happy memories as you possibly can.”

  Then I withdrew back into Bernard and London. “It’s not our last trip,” I said defiantly. “And we already have plenty of happy memories.”

  • • •

  It was not to be our last trip, but it was to be our last trip to Europe, our last grand tour, our last journey in our own high tradition. We met in Paris, at the Ritz, on a clear August day, almost exactly a year after that fateful weekend when my mother had asked me to remember her only as she had been until then. She seemed to be free without her wig; she had new jewelry, heavy earrings and a cuff bracelet with rubies that my father had bought her, which went with her new look. “Very modern,” she said as she ran her hand along her hairline. Sometimes she talked about how we were on our last trip, but she mostly tried not to do that. “I might keep my hair short,” she said. “Not this short. But I might not grow it down to my shoulders again.”

  We were in Paris for just a few days, time to do some shopping and eat a few meals, time to shake the ghosts of the previous summer. It was as though my mother wanted to give us back the Paris we had always known through her. She wanted to give memories to Freddy and to me, but she also wanted to have the full pleasure of her own memories, and she pulled them all out, one after the next, as though they were the flowers of a hundred summers. Much has been made of the pathos of men whose strong exteriors mask breakable souls, of the ones who, beneath their cowboy hats and rough skin and murderous ways, are riddled with insecurities and anxieties. Too little has been said of the drama of those whose surfaces are fragile and mutable, who have all the mannerisms of delicacy, but who keep hidden at their center a devastating strength. You cannot live in this brutal world with the fragility of sensibility that my mother had unless you have concentrated much of your force in some hidden place. As my mother’s core became stronger that month, her discourse with the world became more and more delicate, until it was virtually transparent.

  After Paris, we headed for Italy. From time to time throughout m
y childhood my parents would go off for a week to Lake Como, and it was the one spot to which Freddy and I were never invited. “Someday, when you’re older,” my mother would say when we were little, “you’ll have a girl to take to Lake Como. It’s not a place for family holidays.” But by now we were past resisting the romance of our own family, and at last we went, all four of us, to Lake Como, to stay in a stuccoed pink villa hotel with rooms that looked straight into the sunset. My mother had to conserve her energy that week, and she spent most of her time sitting on the terrace outside her room, reading books and doing her beloved crossword puzzles. She always had a cup of chamomile tea or a glass of mineral water at her side, sparkling water without ice and without lime in a stem glass. She wore loose clothes that did not press too much on the scars from her surgery. In the afternoons she would take naps, sometimes also in the mornings, or just before dinner; she saved up her energy so that when she was awake and we were all together she could be free with it. Liberally, almost squanderously, she gave us all that was best in her.

  • • •

  On an end table near my piano, where I can see them when I play, I have three photographs of my parents together, in addition to various photos of them separately, of my brother, of Helen, and of other friends. One of the photos of my parents together is their wedding photo; one is a picture that was taken by a magazine photographer at a New York party just a couple of months before my mother got sick; and one is a photo of my parents dancing in that hotel room on Lake Como, when my mother’s hair had grown an inch and a half between rounds of chemotherapy, when she had finally, however grudgingly, agreed to snapshots after a year that, ostensibly because of the wigs, had gone undocumented.

  The wedding photo sat on my bureau when I was a child. I remember that when I was about ten, my mother said that it was odd for me to have her wedding photo on my bureau, and she put it away; but how on earth but by her doing could it have come to be there in the first place? I took the photo back out, perhaps a year later, and after that it stayed always on my bureau. You can tell looking at that photo that it’s had a rough time; the glass is cracked in one corner, and the support tab has separated from the black velvet panel at the back, so that the photo now has to sit up against a stack of sheet paper. The frame is of an unusual construction: the glass is at the front, and then the frame slopes like a false perspective toward the photo, which is some two inches behind the glass. The sloping part of the frame is silver, and it is covered with baroque engraved designs, swirls and eddies; at the corners are bas-relief branches of oak leaves that must cover the joins of the sides. The photo has faded slightly. My father is wearing a morning coat and a double-breasted dove-gray waistcoat. He has what I now realize must be a spray of lily of the valley pinned to his lapel, what now seems, in fact, to be very legibly a spray of lily of the valley; but when I was little, I always thought that this blurred shape was a silver reindeer, which I took to be part of the traditional wedding garb, something one might easily don to complement the waistcoat. Even now, I cannot see only flowers; in my mind’s eye, my father wore a silver reindeer on his lapel the day he was married.