A Stone Boat Page 2
“Everyone leads a double life with their parents,” said Freddy.
• • •
For better or for worse, when my mother was planning our trip to the south of France, I was living with Bernard and trying to love him, and Freddy was stepping out with Melanie. Melanie was as much interested in the rest of the family as she was in the theory of special relativity. I disliked that girl partly on my mother’s behalf, but I disliked her also for her icy self: it was bipartisan antipathy. Freddy announced that he wanted to bring Melanie along to France, and my mother, aware that one of the two women in Freddy’s life was likely to seem small, and anxious lest it be she, acceded. Holding fast to her notion that fair was fair (that equality was equivalence), she said that if Freddy was allowed to bring a girl on the trip, I was allowed to bring a girl as well. If I’d had any dignity I would have refused, but I was still proud of my mother’s Paris, and so I asked Helen, who had a few months earlier broken off her relationship to a man who worked in film, and was now rather at loose ends. I asked her to come stay at the Ritz, to travel to Saint-Paul de Vence, to bear witness to the infinite lightness of our attractive family discourse. I invited her also because I felt that I needed someone on my side for this trip, and that Helen, though she admired my mother, would always be behind me, whether I was right or not.
We all met in Paris. Helen and Freddy and I arrived variously in the course of the afternoon; we were all coming from different countries. Helen and I checked into our room; Freddy was to have his own. We had dinner in the Espadon, at the back of the hotel, and then went for a drink in the bar. I had just been given a contract to make a recording, my first recording, with the label I had most wanted, and I knew how much this would mean to my mother. They were going to let me do the Schubert and the Rachmaninoff; I had signed the contract an hour before leaving. I did not mention this over dinner with Helen and Freddy, nor did I plan to tell my parents that night. In some angry part of my heart, I was considering keeping this success completely secret, to punish them.
“I really hope we aren’t going to spend this entire vacation talking about you and Bernard,” Freddy said, picking at his feuilleté. “I hope you’re not going to fight with Mom every day. I have to go back to medical school at the end of this trip, and I want to have a holiday.”
Helen cut him short. “I think Harry’s going to settle whatever he feels he has to settle with your mother, and then he’s going to relax for a little while and get a tan and hear some music, and not go spinning out of control. Isn’t that true, lamb chop?” She turned to me.
“I wasn’t planning on spinning out of control,” I said.
“Good,” said Helen, acidly businesslike. “So, Freddy,” she asked, “how are you doing? Was it a bad breakup?”
And for the next forty-five minutes we discussed the ins and outs of Freddy’s relationship.
• • •
And then my parents arrived. My mother had felt odd on the plane, bloated, and wondered, while she unpacked, whether it was just a problem with the cabin pressure. My father thought she should see a doctor (my father believed at that time in doctors). “Settle whatever it is,” he said. “Don’t spend a week in Saint-Paul being uncomfortable.”
“Perhaps it was just the plane, Leonard,” my mother said to him.
My father thought it was best to be sure. “You’ve never felt odd on planes before,” he said. “It was a very smooth flight.”
My mother wavered.
“Better to see a doctor in Paris than to get stuck with a doctor in Saint-Paul,” said my father. And while my mother continued unpacking, he telephoned friends in Paris and in New York so that he could select a duly qualified physician.
My mother started on that thing she did, ordering flowers and putting out the odds and ends that somehow transformed the place into her room. The square travel bag on the desk, and the silk bathrobe thrown over a chair, and the felt-tipped pens and a book on an end table, and the makeup brushes in the bathroom, reflected forever in facing mirrors, and the dry-cleaning papers in the wastebasket, and the little travel clock and the manicure set with two emery boards by the bed, and the great suitcase in the corner—it was all at once ours. Even the smell of bath powder and roses and clean silk blouses conjured home. Other guests who came to stay in that room found only the Louis XV furniture, and never saw how it looked when it was really lived in and full of my mother, how its whole quality changed when, by the end of four days, it was softened further by roses just beginning to drop their petals. My mother had to stop the maids from throwing away those roses; she loved them when they had opened too far and always kept them a day longer than the French staff thought fitting. In fact, that last day of the roses was her favorite.
After my mother had unpacked, my father went downstairs to confirm the week’s restaurant reservations and car bookings with the concierge. Freddy was sitting on my mother’s bed and she was looking for her reading glasses when Helen and I stood up to say good night. We both kissed my mother and Freddy, and then we headed for the door, where we paused for a second while Helen checked to make sure that she had our room key.
“So, Freddy,” said my mother in an offhand way when she heard us opening the door. “Any news from Melanie?”
Helen looked through her purse.
Freddy squirmed a little bit. “I talked to her on the phone yesterday,” he said. “She sounded fine.” You could tell from his voice that he would have liked her to sound any way but fine.
“The fact that she sounded fine doesn’t mean that she’s feeling that way,” said my mother reassuringly. “Melanie was always very good at sounding fine.”
“She wasn’t—not with me,” said Freddy. “You had to know her really well to get the other side of her. Sometimes she sounded completely miserable.”
There was a pause.
“Is she still working on lighting design?” asked my mother. “Is she still working on that same musical—the one with the pig in it?”
“Of course she’s doing lighting design,” said Freddy. “That’s what she does, is lighting design.” He began to play with the hotel notepad next to the telephone. “I don’t know whether she’s doing that musical anymore. She should have finished it by now. In fact, she should have finished it a month ago. I just don’t understand why she let it drift on and on that way. It wasn’t such a big project. I could have finished it by now, and I’m busy full-time with my own work.”
“Freddy, please stop fiddling with that notepad. I’d like to have it there in case someone calls,” said my mother.
“She’s an amazing designer,” said Freddy. “She was having some kind of a block with that musical, but you know her work is terrific.” He put down the notepad. “I learned a lot about lights from her. She understood them.” He turned around and saw Helen and me. “I thought you two were leaving,” he said sharply.
“Yes, Mussolini, we’re going,” I said. “Helen’s just looking for our key.”
“You left the key in the living room next door. It’s on that end table with the ugly Empire lamp,” my mother said. “Remember, breakfast is at nine o’clock sharp. If you come late, you may find your croissants eaten and all the marmalade gone.” Helen and I kissed my mother good night again. “Sleep well,” she said as we left.
We closed the bedroom door. But the voices trailed after us as we stopped in the outer room of the suite to find the key, which was not, in fact, on the table with the Empire lamp.
“Freddy, you know that Melanie wasn’t my kind of person. Insofar as I came to be fond of her, it was because she made you happy and I loved to see you happy. Now that she’s making you unhappy, I don’t have a lot of affection for her to fall back on, and I won’t miss her, not for herself. But—I’m sorry things ended this way, and especially that they ended right now, right before this trip, which I thought could be a really good time for all of us.
I want you to know that I admired your loving her, and your loyalty to her. I want you to know that I tried my best to love her, too.”
Helen picked up the key, which she had located on another end table. I pretended to be preoccupied with an article in a magazine my father had left in the room. We didn’t leave quite yet.
“I know you did, Mom,” said my brother.
“Freddy, each of us loves in his own way,” my mother’s voice filtered through the closed door. “You give to people what you have to give. You can’t give them what you don’t have. And you gave Melanie everything you had to give. Maybe what you had wasn’t right for her, and she needed something else. And maybe you needed to feel loved in a way she wasn’t capable of, or that she wasn’t capable of sustaining, anyway. Somewhere out there is a girl who wants just exactly what you have to give, and who will give you everything you need. There’s someone out there whom you’ll make happier than she ever imagined she could be. You’ll make each other that happy. Remember what your grandmother used to say? ‘For every pot, there’s a lid.’ The right person is out there, Freddy, but it takes time.” There was a pause, then my mother’s voice again. “Freddy. You are loving, and kind, and loyal, and very few people have that. It’s . . .” Her voice drifted off. “It’s the best thing there is, just to be the kind of person you are. Be patient for a little while, and try not to be too sad now. I know it’s hard, but it’s important, too, not to be so sad you miss the other things and the other people life has to offer you.”
“I’ll try,” said Freddy.
My mother’s voice suddenly rose sharply. “And would you please also try not to destroy that notepad?” she said. “I’m sure there are notepads in your room. I’d like to have that one so that I can write down a phone number if I need to. We are no longer seven years old, Freddy.”
Helen and I walked quietly out of the suite and back down to our room.
• • •
The day after we arrived in Paris, I went out with Helen and Freddy for a long walk. We had ice cream at Helen’s favorite place, and we strolled past Notre-Dame. I had bitten my lower lip and had an irritating cut inside my mouth, which the ice cream inflamed. On the Île Saint-Louis we passed a shop selling amusing socks (Helen vetoed the ones with cherubs on them as too amusing), and I bought three pair for myself and one for Bernard. Then I decided that I was really not feeling my best, and I left Helen and Freddy and headed back to the hotel. I was trying to decide when I would tell everyone about the recording contract, and I was playing the Schubert over and over again in my mind. I wanted to find all the sensation there could ever be in B-flat.
I can remember that walk back, the long stretch of the rue de Rivoli before I reached the hotel, my decisions about the Schubert. What I cannot now remember is how or when I heard about the visit to the doctor, which we had all supposed that morning would be a routine business. My mother had had her hair done first thing that day: I do remember that. Then she had gone to the doctor. He had taken her along to the American hospital for a scan. What is unclear is just what I did and when. I can remember being in my room after the ice cream and socks, and standing at the enormous gilded mirror, studying my lower lip and trying to guess how long it would take for it to heal. And then I can remember what came later: my memory picks up around dinner that night. But I have no recollection at all of what came between looking at my lip and dinner, except that I can remember seeing the radiologist’s report, which was in French. By the time I saw it, I had been told its gist. I can remember that the verb évoquer was used; the scan, it seemed, could “évoque une tumeur maligne.” Wildly, I told my parents—my French was better than theirs—that the verb évoquer referred to the most remote possibility. I knew that there was some kind of mistake, and I wanted to protect my mother from it. This was, fortunately, not out of keeping with what the doctor had said; he thought it most unlikely that there was actually a cancer. “One would feel better,” he had said, “if one had a look inside to see. It is the most ordinary kind of surgery.” My mother would have to return to New York. It was Saturday, and the afternoon was gone. There was no point leaving before the early plane Monday morning, which would get her to New York at eight-thirty a.m.
So we had thirty-six hours to spend all together, that first thirty-six hours of fear and sadness. How strange it is, though, that I can’t recall the moment when my father (it would have been my father who would tell) actually said that my mother might have cancer. Was I alone with him? With him and my mother? Were Helen and Freddy back from their walk by then? Were we in my parents’ suite? Some of the memories of those thirty-six hours are shaky; some are missing altogether; and some are too clear, so photographically clear that they seem not like memories but like the images that replace memories in the mind. Some moments from those thirty-six hours I have described so many times that I have no real hold on them at all, but there are others of which I have never spoken. That day my mother refused the offers Freddy and I made to go with her and my father. “The surgery is very simple. There’s no need for you to come home; you could all use a vacation. So long as it’s not cancer, I’ll be fine. But if this turns out to be cancer—then I’m going to need you by my side. If that happens, get on the first plane.” I remember like a series of snapshots our dinner that night at a modern restaurant that was just coming into fashion. It was August and so the usual favorites were all closed. I had heard of but never been to this one, and my mother had chosen it in part as a treat for me. I have never been there since. Someday, I may go back to bring to life the very memories that I now wish I could escape, but not this year, and not next year. That evening, the cut on my lip was so painful that I could hardly eat. I remember it all flat, all in two dimensions. I have no idea what we talked about.
I think I called Bernard that night when I got back to the hotel. He was his usual sensible self, and advised me not to worry. Like my father, Bernard was always sure things would be fine. Helen, though she dutifully said that these upsets were routine, clearly feared the worst. She and I lay in our separate beds in our large beautiful room; I hardly slept at all, and she seemed to toss and turn all night.
• • •
Sunday is as vivid in my mind as Saturday is confused. I can remember waking up to the fact of my mother’s illness, and a strained room-service breakfast with Helen. That day my mother wore a shell-pink suit and a white blouse with a thousand little flowers on it in shades of pale pink. The blouse looked like a Monet painting. She wore shoes with small buckles. We had a driver, one of those handsome young Ritz drivers, who told us that he was really working in video production (though he gave every appearance of really working as a driver for the hotel), and we drew him out at some length on the subject of French video. We were going to lunch at another lovely restaurant, another landmark of my mother’s Paris. It was a beautiful day, a day of perfect Paris weather, the air warm, the breeze light, the sun clear. We were meeting a Parisian friend of mine for lunch. My mother was in a mood that being with my friends often brought out in her, a philosophic mood of trenchant generalities.
“It’s so hard to understand at your age,” she said to my friend, apropos of nothing in particular. “When you’re in your twenties, so many things seem exciting, or seem like fun, and then when you try to hold on to them they fall apart. There are so few structures that really last.”
This was the first in a series of remarks to other people that were abstractly stirring in principle but that were, in fact, intended to communicate to me my mother’s discontent with my life with Bernard and her belief that I was destroying all my chances of future happiness. Her inkling that a disaster of her own was impending seemed to make her more urgent in this communication than she had been previously; I wished that the portents had distracted her from Bernard instead of making her focus on him. I wanted to feel only affection for her in our moment of crisis, and she was making it extremely difficult. She and Freddy had s
omehow become closer as a result of his breakup with Melanie, and I felt that she and I were drifting further and further apart. My response to her conversation at lunch that day was a mix of fondness for the particular mode employed, a mode I associated with my mother at her wisest and most beguiling, and irritation (I was not keyed-up enough for rage) at her inability to accept that all happiness for all people does not spring from a single maze of roots.
“I think,” my mother said, with a tone of authority that made it clear that what she thought was what other people of insight would also think, “that what you want early in life is different from what you want later, and that happiness comes of understanding early what you will want later, and finding it.” She ate a few bites of her salmon (my mother never liked fish much) and looked through the glass at the Bois de Boulogne. The meticulous waiters served the food on large plates. The vegetables were laid out in patterns as colorful and intricate as the plan du métro. I had duck. Freddy had lamb. Helen and my father both had monkfish. My Parisian friend had sweetbreads. I had been to this place for lunch with my mother on a dozen previous occasions, but I noticed as though for the first time how fresh the bunches of white roses and freesia on every table were, how enchanting the view of the Bois. I noticed the afternoon sun and the elegant cut of the waiters’ uniforms. I took in what each of us was wearing, the way my mother’s hair was brushed, how her hand lay on the table—I noticed then, though I was of course both nettled and frightened, how perfect it all was.
I can tell you in a sentence that my mother was dying, and in a way there is nothing more to be said about that. Or I can tell you every detail, and try to give you the quality of that lovely, terrible Sunday and of the other days like it that were to become our way of life. To us they were vital days, their details immemorial. My father expected everyone to understand at once that my mother was more important than anyone else, that her suffering was more terrible. I didn’t expect the doctors to understand that; I didn’t expect headwaiters to defer to her on that basis; I didn’t expect everyone who came to our parties to notice it. But at some useless level I was as much in the habit of believing it as he was. And in this we were fools. Illness is not the great equalizer, but it is a seven-league step in that direction.