A Stone Boat Read online

  My mother is wearing her wedding dress, yards of white satin and lace, and she has her veil pushed back from her head, held in place by a wreath of flowers, which looks, in its slight blurriness, like a crown of tiny diamonds. My mother is wearing a simple string of pearls. My father is staring straight out at the camera and smiling. My mother is holding a glass of what I think must be champagne, and she is also smiling, but she is looking just slightly off to the side, as though something restless in her draws her from the center. In her right hand she is holding a bridal bouquet, most of which lies outside the space of the photograph; on her left hand, the hand holding the glass, her engagement ring is sparkling in the light.

  When my parents were married, my grandfather’s illness and death had eaten most of my mother’s money, and my father had not yet taken over at the bank. The reception was just drinks, at the Plaza. It was in December. I have always imagined it like this: the ceremony ended, and my parents led all their friends and relations out into the crisp air of December. Everyone proceeded down Fifth Avenue in the light snow. The Plaza fountain would have been filled with small pines and lit with strings of Christmas lights.

  This is what my mother once told me: on her wedding morning, she woke feeling tense and anxious. Her mother was busy getting dressed, and she also got dressed. Her mother came and corrected her hair, and corrected the way the dress hung, and then fussed about her own hair and her own dress. No one spoke to her about anything but her dress and her hair. And all the time she wondered whether she was making a terrible mistake. But when she got to her own wedding ceremony, and walked to the foot of the aisle, she saw my father look back at her. “It was like a thousand lights had suddenly gone on,” she told me. “He looked so happy, happier than I had ever seen anyone look, and all for me; and I stopped being afraid, and I knew that I wasn’t making a mistake, that I was doing the best thing I’d ever done.” I can imagine the music—my father would have selected the music carefully—how its steady rhythms must have kept my mother walking down the aisle slowly and ceremonially, kept my father standing at the head of the aisle, kept them from doing anything more, for the moment, than look at each other. The photo in the silver frame, taken at the reception, is the aftermath of that look, and you can almost hear the music, a wedding march, romantic and precise, compelling them forward as only marches can.

  The second photo was taken at the Metropolitan Club, just a month before my mother got sick. My mother was very fond of that photo, but I don’t love it as much as the others. My father has a banker’s contented smile, and my mother a doyenne’s grace. This time they are both holding glasses of champagne. My father is in black tie, with what is very clearly a white carnation in his lapel; I can’t think why he should have had a carnation on, but perhaps it had something to do with the function they were attending. My mother is wearing a black lace dress with a high neck, and she has on large diamond earrings, a diamond necklace, and a wide Deco diamond bracelet. A great dark sapphire sparkles on one hand; on the other, her diamond engagement ring. My mother’s smile in that photo is the smile of a woman who smiles out of habit, her smile for the photographer. She looks beautiful, but that is all she looks.

  The third photo is the one Freddy took that week at Lake Como. My parents’ suite overlooked the lake, which meant it also overlooked the small orchestra that played each night until midnight. We had come up from dinner, and my mother, who was tired, had put on a nightgown and a flowered silk dressing gown. In the photo, she is wearing no makeup, because the chemotherapy had by then made her allergic to everything; for some reason, she has not yet taken off her jewelry, and so she has on, with her dressing gown, a necklace of black pearls, earrings of gold and onyx, and a gold bracelet that belonged to my grandmother. My father has taken off his jacket, but he is still wearing his shirt and tie. I don’t remember which tune it was that drifted up from the small orchestra by the side of the lake that evening, but it was some tune which for my parents had rich associations. I remember how my mother emerged from the bedroom, and stood for a minute in the door of the turquoise living room swaying in time, and how my father jumped up and went over to her; I think he may have been afraid that she would fall, because she had been suffering from dizziness.

  But when my father drew closer, he must have seen that she was not so weak after all; he took her in his arms and they danced, laughing, around that room, to the sounds of the orchestra that floated through the half-drawn shutters. They danced that way for the length of the song, and it was a long song. In that photo my mother has the smile I know best. It is the smile of what-the-hell, the smile of the-world-is-full-of-possibilities, the smile of so-long-as-I’m-with-you-nothing-matters. She has on her brave smile, her reckless smile, her determined smile, the smile that was the reason for that whole trip. It is the smile of being afraid but knowing that there have been and may again be moments of not being afraid. She is looking straight at the camera, the camera from which her eyes somehow darted in the pleasure of the wedding photo; she seems to be looking beyond the camera at the time when the photo will have outlasted her. And my father has the nostalgic smile I have always known best on him. He is looking down and at my mother, apparently unaware of the camera. And you can see how this moment of happiness is recalling other moments of happiness, perhaps even that moment when my mother appeared at the end of the aisle in her white wedding dress; and you can see how happiness itself fills him with sorrow. So smiling and so sad he looks, with my mother’s tiny, thin hand, a shadow even of the tiny, thin hands she had always had, clasped in his own.

  • • •

  Ten days later, my mother and Bernard finally met over dinner in London. How much weight I had placed on that moment! And like so many moments given too much weight in advance, it seemed extravagantly insignificant when it finally came. Bernard said only that my mother seemed tense and rather uncomfortable, which was perhaps understandable. My mother said that if a daughter of hers had brought Bernard home, she would have thought him a perfect son-in-law. “He seems very nice, and very presentable, and I hope he makes you happy,” she said. There was a trace of the old brittleness in her voice, but she kept it to a trace. She even went so far as to invite Bernard to come to stay with us in New York.

  “In our house?” I asked my mother afterward.

  “Why not, Harry? If it’s what you want. Why not have Bernard to stay with us at home?” Sitting at dinner with the two of them—and Freddy and my father—I felt a profoundly hollow sense of triumph. So many years had gone into the abstract of effecting such a meeting as this, and when it finally happened, I felt only that all that energy might have been better used elsewhere. If I’d only spent it on Bernard himself, I thought, then perhaps I would really love him. That night, I lay by his side, and discovered again that he was a stranger. When I tossed and turned, he reached out to comfort me, and I could not tell him to leave me alone; nor could I say, as perhaps I should have, how sorry I was. That night was my last chance, and I failed to avail myself of it; I lay beside him in the tactful silence that had become the language of our sufficient affinity. In retrospect, I can see that I had loved him in the way of the Metropolitan Club, and that I had never managed to do more than that. Nor, to be quite fair, did he manage much more than that for me. I understood, then, that he and I would never make it to Lake Como.

  VI

  OCTOBER

  Some days, I dream of a life without sequence, a life all mixed up like a crazy salad, in which, when you suddenly yearn for a week of childhood, you can have a week of childhood, in which, when you miss the quality of your grandmother’s voice singing, you can find again your grandmother singing, in which, when you want a stretch of the calm maturity of middle age, you can settle into a stretch of it. I would love to move back and forth, to have days saved like summer flowers caught forever in winter ice, days that I knew were waiting for me. What use was it to try to spend every waking moment with my mother in the
months of her worsening illness? I somehow had the idea that if I spent every moment with her, the accrued hours would fill in for all the time I might not be spending with her for the rest of my life. If only I could have held some of those days for the occasions later in my life when the need for my mother, that vivid longing that comes with the sharpness of a fever, seeks only the fact of her presence to answer—for what I wanted was not to be with my mother every second of every day (a program well calculated to drive us both mad), but to be with my mother from time to time for the rest of my days.

  Everything in life goes away or is taken from you before you are done with it. The present is always dark, since by having any moment you destroy the possibility of having it again. If death meant that you could see someone only once a decade for half an hour, and not that you could never see that person again, it would be a very different business. I have to be careful with my memories: they are like those pictures whose colors fade slowly in boxes or rapidly in the sun. I save certain memories and do not touch them, so that they will not get used up. I know that a time will come when the memories of my mother that I have traced as vividly as I can in these pages will seem as unreal as if they were someone else’s memories. Then I will take out the other memories, the ones I do not allow myself to describe here, and I will lose myself in them. They will no doubt be brittle by that point, but they will still be real to me, and I will keep them by my side, and regret that life is not a crazy salad, that it operates in sequences and progressions, and that nothing that has happened ever happens again.

  • • •

  I suppose it is not surprising that Bernard and I were to break up within six weeks of that dinner with my parents. It is not surprising, but it was nonetheless shocking and horrifying to me. What you expect is perhaps somewhat easier than what you do not expect, but not much. Bernard and I had had an enormously peaceful relationship and a day-to-day life that functioned exquisitely, and though one cannot, perhaps, live for such things, they are in their way almost as beguiling as true love. Bernard and I were not—at least in relation to each other—very passionate people, and the demeanor of passion that we had partially sustained in the early months of our relationship had been allowed to fall away. Domesticity is passion spread very thin. Still, it has all passion’s vulnerability. It is, whatever its shortcomings, a way of life, and to leave it behind is terrible. In the last weeks of our relationship, I found Bernard ridiculous and unimportant and inadequate, but when the end came I was more miserable than I had ever been before.

  We started breaking up on a Thursday in late September. I had made plans to go to New York in October, and I had invited Bernard to stay with us for the two middle weeks of that month. “I wish,” I said to him, “that you could come and stay with all of us the way we used to be.” Then we had gone on to talk about what the month would be like, and we had made plans for the time we would spend together in New York. Bernard and I loved making plans, and we were good at that. I had learned by then that my mother’s condition was degenerating further, that her second chemotherapy was not so effective as had been hoped. “Oh, Bernard,” I said. “What to do?”

  And Bernard, in his supportive way, said, “You must just go back to New York and try to keep everything stable, and try to be the same with your mother as you’ve always been.”

  I stopped him this time. “No,” I said. “It’s not time for things to be the same anymore; it’s time for things to be different. I need to go back to New York and ask my mother all the things I’ve never asked her, tell her the secrets she’s never known. We have to understand everything before it’s too late, to find all the answers—so that, when she’s gone, I will have no regrets, no uncertainty about who she is and what she feels; and so that when she dies she will know as an absolute certainty how much I love her.”

  When Bernard looked at me pityingly, I wanted to strike him. Bernard was a master of sympathy, but he was unacquainted with empathy. The idea that my being sad might have made him sad was as odd to him as the idea that my being fat would make him fat. And so the idea that my mother’s sadness had become my sadness was for him impossible to understand.

  • • •

  In the end, we argued about curtains. We had gone to stay in the country with Claire and Michael, and we had been given the upstairs bedroom at the end of the long hall, with the view out over the garden. We came up from dinner: Claire had made lamb, and pavlova for pudding. Some friends from down the road had come for the evening, people who were trying to bring art exhibitions to the county. We had had a fire, and talked about how the days were getting shorter. We’d dipped into claret that Michael had discovered the previous year, and of which he’d put up several cases. Michael’s mother was also staying, and she had been in top form, telling her stories from the Roaring ’20s, including one about a performing bear in a striptease bar in Berlin; Michael had kept rolling his eyes toward the ceiling, but the rest of us had loved it.

  And so it was quite late when Bernard and I finally went up to the bedroom at the end of the long hall to settle down for the night. We both climbed into bed, and Bernard read. “I do think this is a pretty room,” I said.

  “Mm,” said Bernard. “Lovely mirror, isn’t it. Regency.”

  I looked at the mirror vaguely. “Yes,” I said. “And such beautiful curtains. I wonder who Claire got to do them?”

  Bernard shifted in bed. “Actually,” he said, “I don’t like the curtains.”

  “No?” I said.

  “It’s those undercurtains,” he said. “I think it’s so much better just to have curtains, and pelmets, and not to have those fussy little gauzy undercurtains blowing around.”

  I should explain that I was at the time in the midst of getting new curtains for my own house, and had just commissioned my curtain-maker to do linen undercurtains in every room. Bernard had told me that he thought they were not in good taste, but I thought they were convenient. Bernard’s remark therefore seemed deliberately barbed. “Any more veiled criticisms this evening?” I asked peevishly, fishing for an argument. “If there are, I think it would be just as well to get them over with now.”

  Bernard looked at me with an aggrieved expression. “I don’t think we were talking about your curtains, which we discussed, in any event, before you chose the design, and about which I made my views perfectly clear at the time. I think we were talking about Claire’s curtains, which I do not care for, and which you apparently like.”

  “Did it ever occur to you,” I asked, in a tone that I had been using more and more since the second surgery, “that you could be fond of me and that your fondness could extend to the things about me and the way I live? Your flat is pretty dreary and depressing, with all that chipped furniture and faded, cat-clawed upholstery and stained carpeting. I don’t care where the rugs came from or how significant the design of the furniture is or how original the upholstery may be.” Bernard made a gesture to remind me that Michael’s mother was in the next room. I lowered my voice to a loud whisper. “But I don’t find it disgusting. I don’t find it disgusting because it is part of you and who you are and how you live. I see all that stuff as an extension of you, and though I would never in a thousand years have all those chipped things in my house, I like being with them in your flat. I’m not always criticizing them and pulling them apart, and I’ve been living with them very happily for more than two years.”

  Our conversation unfolded in whispers because we were much too polite to wake up Michael’s mother. We finished the night together in the same bed, because we were much too polite to trouble Claire and Michael about personal matters, and we were perfectly sunny to everyone all through Sunday lunch, because we were too polite to spoil the weekend, and then we continued to be sunny to each other in the car going back to London because we were much too polite to add to each other’s burdens by being nasty. Indeed we were so polite to each other that Sunday that when we got back
to London there was a sort of confused pause, because in our rage of politeness we were finally unsure as to whether we had broken up at all. Bernard drove to my house—which came before his on the way in from the country—and I didn’t know whether I should ask him in. Reason had begun to penetrate, and I wasn’t sure I could afford another trauma. I wondered whether it would be wise to swallow my pride, put this behind me, and go on with Bernard as I had always done.

  “You’re going to pack?” he asked.

  “I guess so,” I said. “The plane’s first thing tomorrow morning.” There was a long pause.

  “Do you need to pick anything up at the flat?” asked Bernard. I almost never slept at my house; we almost never slept there. None of my ordinary things was there.