A Stone Boat Read online

  Her world rose and fell by me: for I was as vast to my mother as she was to me. My mother wanted me to have a perfect life, more perfect even than hers, because she sincerely believed that the surest way to be happy was to be perfect. That is why she was so embattled about Bernard before she got sick: he was, to her mind, an imperfection in human form. Though I often disappointed my mother with my irregularities, she believed that I had what it would take to be perfect, and pushed me toward it. God knows the agenda is an absurd one; the battle for perfection that occupied so much of my energy and of my mother’s is obviously a losing one. But I would not know how to give it up—or, at least, I would not have known then.

  II

  HOME AGAIN

  I should tell you, for the sake of honesty, that I believed from the start that my mother would die of her cancer, though I held off that belief so vigorously that some of the time it seemed to recede, almost to vanish. I think that she, too, believed, most of the time, that she would die. How did we get back to New York from France? How, indeed? How did we get from my mother’s straightforward life to the world as it is now? The processes that the mind cannot conceive before their time often prove to be as simple and as gradual as the summer twilight that unfolded outside my mother’s hospital room every day of that first hospital week.

  I knew as a child that my father would live forever: he is made of the stuff of tree trunks and of great lakes, of the things that last. And my father was never in a rush. I don’t mean that he wasn’t occasionally eager to get to the office, or hasty getting dressed to go out for dinner; I can say without hesitation that, from time to time, he looked forward to the weekend or to a holiday. But at some more fundamental level, he always had his leisure, world enough to do whatever he was doing; he made me feel that time itself was an ordinary thing, as eternally replaceable as the food we ate and took for granted. My mother, however, for all her strength of will, was as fragile as a new leaf, as indeterminate as a flame; it always seemed to me that she could no more linger in the world than a soap bubble can stay on the air. Many the hour she would devote to her long baths, many the quiet day, many the leisured walk on a spring afternoon; she scheduled her time well enough so that she was never late for an appointment, never hurrying (as I am always hurrying) to meet someone or to get somewhere. She did not (as I do) oversleep and then dress in haste, did not underestimate the number of hours needed for transportation, did not make more plans than she could manage. But she lived life with the particular, careful, slow hunger with which you might approach the last dessert on earth. She held on to every moment as though it were the final one; she did not race through any given day, but, unlike my father, she rushed to have all the experiences of her life before it was too late.

  “You’ve got to keep up with life,” she said to me more than once. “It runs away from you.”

  “Well, I guess so,” I said, “but sometimes you’ve got to stop and enjoy whatever you’ve done.”

  “That’s part of life, part of what you’re keeping up with,” said my mother. “But what you can’t do is to sit back and get distracted and let the world pass you by. There’s not enough time for that. Stop long enough to make your experiences your own, but don’t get so lost among them that you miss everything else. And don’t end up having them alone.”

  • • •

  Freddy and I flew from Nice through London, and Bernard came to Heathrow with a suitcase he had packed for me. Though I felt already that he was a stranger, I held him tighter for that. I didn’t know when or how I would see him again; I didn’t know what place he held in this new world order to which I, too, was a stranger. When the fixed center of your life comes under siege, you scurry around collecting all the other love there is, hoping that in some great balance the fragmentary affections will add up to more than the monolithic one. It doesn’t work; Bernard had never been a great love, and in the vacuum of my mother’s illness he was altogether weightless.

  But he and I stood at the airport like two overgrown boys, and Freddy looked at once jealous and embarrassed. “We’d better go or we’ll be late for the plane,” Freddy said nervously.

  Bernard held my chin in his hand for a moment. “It’s all going to be fine,” he said. I might have preferred it if he had said, “I love you,” but though Bernard had said that in the past, it was not a remark that he produced under pressure.

  “How fine can it be?” I asked, and Bernard shrugged helplessly. He would have liked to reassure me.

  “I’m sorry, but we’re going to be late,” Freddy said, and pulled on my sleeve.

  “I’ll come back as soon as I can,” I promised Bernard.

  “I’ll be here,” he said. “Call me when you land.” And he kissed me very gently on the forehead.

  Then Freddy and I headed off through passport control, and in the dim gray light we set off for New York. It was in the same dim gray light that we arrived in New York. My father had sent Robert with the car. My indecisive luggage (how long was I staying? what would I need? what seasons might pass before I found myself back in London, able to pack again?) was piled in the trunk along with Freddy’s two bags, and we set off toward Manhattan.

  We stopped at home, at my parents’ apartment, to drop off our things before settling in at the hospital. When we came in, Molly started barking; she greeted Freddy first, and then me, nearly knocking us over in her enthusiasm. Janet was dusting the chest in the front hall. “Your mother’s in the hospital,” Janet said in a half-whisper, as though we might not have known. We kissed her hello; Freddy started to haul the luggage back to the bedrooms.

  “I’m so worried about her,” Janet said to me. “I just hope she’s OK. I keep on thinking about her and worrying and this house feels so strange without her here. I mean, she’s gone on vacation before, but this is different.”

  “We’re all worried about her, Janet, but I think she’s going to be OK,” I said. “I certainly hope so.”

  Janet stood and polished the top of the front hall chest, turning the cloth over and over. Then she turned around and dusted a Japanese bowl with a heron painted on it.

  “She’s expecting Freddy and me at the hospital,” I said. “We’re running, but I’ll see you later, Janet, or maybe tomorrow—I guess we’ll be there most of the day. Could you make sure there are fresh sheets in my room and Freddy’s, and fresh towels?”

  Molly, who had padded off toward the living room, chose this moment to rush at Janet’s ankles, and the fate of the Japanese bowl was briefly endangered; but years of experience stood Janet in good stead.

  “Even the dog is acting peculiar,” Janet said. “The towels and all are there. As soon as your father said there was bad news and that you boys were coming home. Listen, tell your mother I want to come see her. Tell her I keep thinking about how she came to see me after my accident. You remember that?” I remembered. I could hear Freddy running water in his bathroom. There wasn’t really time for a long conversation. “There I was in that hospital the day after I fell,” Janet said, “lying flat out, and I couldn’t even get out of my bed. So I asked one of the other women to call your mother to tell her I wasn’t going to be at work. And your mother, she got right in the car and came out to that place to see me. Right then, at eight o’clock in the morning. I’ll never forget it, when she came into that room, and everyone turned around to stare at her, and she walked straight over to me. ‘Janet,’ she said, ‘how are you feeling?’”

  “I remember, Janet,” I said.

  “That day they gave me some different doctor and moved me to another room. And do you know your mother came to see me every single day the whole two weeks I was in there? She didn’t stay too long, but she was there every single day, regular as clockwork, eleven o’clock in the morning. ‘You’re looking a bit better today, Janet,’ she’d say. Always with some flowers or a piece of fresh fruit, and once with one of those chocolate-chip cakes you all
eat in the summer. And now she’s in the hospital and your father told me not to go see her. But if she’s there and so sick and all, it makes me feel terrible, not going.”

  “She’s under a lot of stress right now, but I’m sure she’d be very pleased if you came to visit in a day or two,” I said. “She’s very fond of you.” I remembered all that dragging to the hospital. “You can’t imagine,” my mother had said, “how they take advantage of people like Janet in those places.” My father had shrugged. “Still,” he had said. “Every day.”

  Janet’s was the first of dozens of such monologues that were to come. Upon hearing about my mother’s cancer, people would dig out tales of generosity, episodes, as often as not, that my mother herself had forgotten. It was a kind of automatic response built on authentic detail. Acquaintances, shop assistants, the doormen in our building, the man who sold vegetables at the store on Third Avenue, the woman who set her hair—everyone seemed to have an anecdote of benevolence. They recounted these partly to be polite, I suppose, but their stories were not fictive, and they were always moving to me. Within the family, and even among close friends, there were more complicated stories to tell, but in the hearts and minds of that world where she had busied herself from day to day, there seemed, at least in the face of her suffering, to be no end of noble recollections.

  “All my friends,” Janet went on, “are praying for your mother. In my church last week, we all prayed together for her. You know she’s never yelled at me, not once in twenty-six years.” Janet put down the heron bowl and returned to the chest. “Tell her I’m keeping everything just the way she likes it here. Tell her I’ve even been keeping some roses in that glass bowl by her bed, just the way she likes them. You tell her everything’s just fine here, in case she’s worrying.”

  The phone rang, and I answered it. It was my mother, her voice as raw and ulcerated as though it, too, had been cut up with a scalpel. “What are you doing there?” she screamed down the line. I tried to explain. “Why are you fussing with the luggage? I thought you were coming straight to the hospital. I thought you would be here by now.” In my mind’s eye she was not really in a hospital, and there was no bad news, and that urgent tone of voice was a little bit ridiculous. I persisted in imagining how I would tell her what a fright she had given us; in fact, in this past year, even, I have gone on sketching for myself how I would have narrated my anxiety at the false alarm. There is too much that is false in the world of illness, so much that is false that the less-than-watchful eye may never notice anything real at all. My mother was already angry at us for stopping at the apartment, but was it real anger? Was it at us? Later, I figured out just how angry she was.

  • • •

  I was born blond. I have thin, silky hair, straight on clear days and softly curling on damp days. I was born with roses in my cheeks (so my mother used to say) and blue eyes and the kind of hair not brown enough to make me brown-haired. As I grew up, my hair faded into dullness. And so I, to make my hair consistent with my personality and the rest of my coloring, used, when we were in someplace warm and sunny, to comb the juice of lemons through my hair to turn it gold. I was as full of wonder in the face of this as the king for whom Rumpelstiltskin had done his spinning, and I watched and studied my own hair with an obsessive fascination, seeking out new traces of the colors with which I had been born, and to which I believed myself to be entitled.

  My mother was almost the only one who noticed these gradual changes, so slight they could hardly be credited to more than the sun itself. I never made it past the slightest hints of blond, but my mother hated it. She couldn’t bear the idea of my vanity, though if someone had taught me this personal vanity, it must have been my mother, who was forever discussing with me what clothes to wear and how to wear them, and how to get my hair cut, and how to stand up, and how to eat, and even how lucky I was to have eyes as blue as the royal navy. I do not believe it was the color my hair turned that caused my mother so much dismay. Let us be quite honest: so far as my mother was concerned, my combing lemon juice through my hair was much the same as my sleeping with Bernard. One of these things implied the other, and, taken together, they were intolerable.

  Freddy and I ran to the hospital. Or rather, we had Robert drive us to the hospital, and then we ran through its tentacular corridors straight to the room where my mother lay. We walked into the room with our love in our hands and found my mother the color of typing paper, with her hair (it was almost the end for her hair) in slight disarray. My father was on a chair next to her bed, holding a hand as limp as if she were asleep. “Boys!” she said, turning to us, and looking with an unflinching gaze of bewilderment. The harshness had been seeped out of her voice. So much of my hope had been pinned on that moment; my father had said that my mother’s misery was unyielding, but I imagined that I could break it down or penetrate it, that the very fact of me might somehow bring my mother back from the strange place where she had gone. She turned and looked out the window. “Hello, Freddy. Hello, Harry,” she said. We went over to kiss her and she presented an unmoving and unresponsive face. “Thank you for coming,” she said vaguely to Freddy, as though he were a dignitary on a state visit. She looked at me expressionlessly, and then her face suddenly darkened. “Oh, Harry,” she said. “Oh, Harry. What have you done to your hair?” I reached up to touch my hair, which I had encouraged with lemons just a bit in the château in Saint-Paul. “Oh, Harry,” said my mother. “You promised me, promised me, promised me that you wouldn’t do that to your hair.” And my mother began to weep, in a slow steady way, the tears seeming gradually to push one another out of her eyes. My mother turned her head so that she would not have to look, and though I tried to move into her line of sight to apologize, or to explain, or to say anything, she kept pivoting and would not speak to me.

  “It’s OK,” said Freddy.

  “It’s all going to be fine,” said my father.

  And my mother looked back and forth between them and kept her gaze locked away from me.

  I cannot quite remember how many of the flowers that were to arrive had shown up at that point. By the time my mother was ready to go home, there were more than a hundred arrangements in the room. Her private nurses, who had tended film stars and heads of state, said that never in their lives had they seen so many flowers. It was almost like being in a formal garden: the vases were crowded together, at first along the walls and the windowsill, and later in double and triple columns, so that you had to pick your way among them on narrow paths of linoleum. My mother, who had always adored flowers, said that the number of them, all cut, all about to die, was absolutely nauseating, and she kept having them cleared out and distributed to patients in other wards. “The smell,” she said, though the rich perfume, in fact, was barely sufficient to kill the disinfectant rankness of that room. “The smell of all those stems rotting in water is revolting.”

  My mother was in the hospital, that time, for a week. She grew accustomed to my hair, but she was not nice about it. “I came so far to see you,” I said, “so far, so quickly. The least you could do is to look at me.” Or else I said, “I love you. What difference does my hair make?”

  And she said, “If you loved me, you wouldn’t have done that to yourself.” And then I would get angry, and my mother would stare out the window, as if it were all just too much for her.

  “Would you like me to get some brown dye and dye my hair brown?” I asked, and then my mother looked at me dully and repeated, as though I were a slightly retarded child, “Do not dye your hair. Men do not dye their hair. Just leave your hair alone.”

  • • •

  I do not remember at what stage my mother accused me of giving her cancer. The episode was not so long ago; this forgetfulness is not like my inability to remember events of my early childhood. It’s more that what she said was so sharp and so petrifying that it has frozen itself into words for which there is no chronology. I can remember a dozen su
bsequent related conversations, complete with their time and place. I can remember how, later, she apologized. That first conversation, though, eludes me. If I’m to be honest, I think part of the reason I cannot remember my mother’s first accusing me is that she accused me only of what I already suspected to be true.

  I can remember thinking when I was still quite young, and the idea of desiring men had all the terrifying resonance of novelty to it, that I could do nothing more terrible to my mother than to experience and act on those desires. “How could she have let you grow up thinking that?” asked Helen, later, but I don’t know that my mother had chosen her horror any more than I had chosen my desires; and if her phobia was terrible for me, I accepted that it was probably no worse than my sexuality was for her. I can remember days when I had angered her, when she would complain at me in flushes of passionate rage—I can remember that this secret was my unacknowledged revenge on her. I would lie in the silence of my own room and imagine the pain I would later cause my mother, and I would exult in the appalling longings, in which, for all that I, too, hated them, there was power such as I had never before known. I had believed at an early age that I could destroy her life; I had thought that I would use my desire someday to punish her. But I did not quite suppose that it could kill her. I thought of it as modern war-makers think of the most powerful weapons in their arsenals, as something too terrible to call forth, as something whose very existence could be the basis for an uneasy peace, as a device the precise effects of which were too complex and unspeakable to predict, too frightening even for secret tests on barren plains.