A Stone Boat Read online

  • • •

  On the day my mother went into the hospital, while Freddy and I were still in France, before anyone knew whether she had cancer, my father bought my mother an enormous bunch of perfect roses and scribbled on a white florist’s card, “Love, love, love. We will go on forever.” I kept that card when we left the hospital at the end of my mother’s first surgery; I thought it was an amulet, and I could not imagine, any more than my father could, that it might prove not to be true. Of course, the treatments were going to be terrible, but I had been brought up to believe that you recover from the woes of the body and of the spirit. Did I say that my mother was as fragile as a soap bubble, that I had always known she would die young? The touch of her hand on my arm, the way she would call out, “Hello, Harry”—that sound of hello could not, after all, fade or decay; its continuation could hardly depend on something as technical and fussy as chemotherapy.

  But that technical and fussy business, which could not begin until my mother had recovered from her surgery, was to prove darker than I could guess. I do not think she would have liked for me to tell you about the details of her surgeries or of her treatments. Forgive me, then, if I do not describe to you some things that I am trying, for my mother and for myself, to forget. Forgive me if I do not dwell on the acid white anonymity of those many hospital rooms, and on the ceaseless comedy of lumpy beds with elaborate control panels, which we never, or almost never, adjusted. Forgive me if I do not speak of how those needles were put into vein after vein, how one vein after the next collapsed, those tiny delicate veins of my mother’s, more like filaments in the stems of flowers than like vessels to carry blood. Forgive me if I do not dwell on those sacs of poison, like giant spider glands, that were hung on a steel pole and then pumped into her arm or her abdomen as though she were a Strasbourg goose being prepared for the slaughter. Chemotherapy became as regular as a metronome, as tediously inevitable as days that give way to night. I will tell you until you are tired of hearing it how I lived from one test result to the next, but I will not tell you the complex, almost Masonic significance of those numbers, a system I learned so well that you could say twenty-eight to me and make me breathe easy, or say sixty-two and make me scream. I will not tell you too much of spread and containment, of bad cells we thought would wash away in the flood of sepia liquids, as if they were only markings in the sand on a tide-flooded beach. “It’s incredible to me,” my mother said one day, “that I go into the hospital just as I’m beginning to feel better, and allow them to give me therapy that makes me feel terrible, that I go to the doctors, not when I’m in pain, but as soon as the pain abates.” What kind of faith is it that allows us to run so contrary to our own experience?

  I will not teach you the vocabulary of disease, the thousand thousand terms I learned, until I could chat with the doctors and nurses and my father and Freddy in a language that, a year before, would have been far stranger than Greek to me, nor will I say much of how, in my mind, I translated those terms into words gentler than the bodily violations they, in fact, represented. I will speak as little as possible about the stream of medical staff for whom the quality of life was in the fact of living, and not in pleasure or the relief from pain. All there is to tell about the modern way of death, the American way of death, the way of death we come upon when we suppose that all things can be cured with enough logic and enough pragmatism—I will not dwell on those ordinary indecencies, those bedpans and breathing games, one like a child’s toy, a three-ball device in which your lung power is measured by whether you can keep all three balls at the tops of their vertical chambers. I have tried to forget the questions asked by interns in whose eyes my mother was an example of the grotesque, whose disease they battled as if it were an orange monster in a video game, and not as though it were something that consumed her very humanity. Forgive me for steering clear of the accompanied visits to the bathroom, of the days of guiding an IV pole around the hallways and calling the dull perambulation from room 702 to room 740 by the ridiculous term of “exercise.”

  “Of course he wants me to get well,” my mother said of one doctor, “because it will give him a better statistical rate for this treatment.”

  I will try to forget how we sought out every grain of kindness in those doctors, clinging to the scant evidence of feeling as though any emotion were a vein of platinum in a monolith of shale. I will not detail the complexities of blood tests, but I will tell you that they could have filled a swimming pool with the amount of blood that was taken from my mother during her two years of illness, that in my worst dreams I imagine all that blood floating like a tanker-spill over a sea far more than wine-dark. Perhaps you will laugh if I dwell on what they fed my mother after surgery and chemotherapy, when she could hardly have taken a boiled egg or a piece of toast, if I tell you about the thick leaden lumps of meatloaf, the pasty cream soups, the inexplicably slimy vegetables. I would like not to remember hospital arrivals and departures, installation and check-out, my brother and me collecting odds and ends as my father almost carried my mother (as light as a wilted spinach leaf on her weakest days) out to the car, with only her anxiety bearing witness that she was still alive.

  You will not know my mother better for learning what went on in those clean but dingy hospitals with their linoleum hallways and their greenish fluorescent lighting. Better to remember how my mother with tired patience transformed those rooms, as she used to change her suite at the Ritz, with flowers, with the plaid blanket on which I first learned to trace a square in my early childhood (its autumn orange and dark yellow and rich green, curiously not my mother’s favorite colors, so immense in that dreary hospital). Surely it is better to remember the lace pillowcase, the little enameled clock, the pink bed jacket, the half-glasses in their red case that somehow humanized the adjustable Formica table. Better to remember how the little suitcase in which her things were brought to the hospital lay in a corner of the room, and made it possible to pretend that the room was a destination of its own, found at the end of a pleasant flight.

  So also I remember with precipitate clarity those moments when my mother would be animated by a passing fancy or a quick insight or a comic thought, and how she would suddenly become herself again. In those moments we would all become ourselves again, as though we were furniture in storage which had been abruptly liberated from sheets thick with dust. Our backs ceased to ache and the muscles of our faces became operative again and our eyes came back to us, so that we could see. The hospital smells faded away. My mother made all the agony—it was doubly hard for her because so much of it was her agony—seem small and remote and unimportant. Sometimes we would find ourselves convulsed with laughter (“I’m afraid this silverware doesn’t manage a single kind word,” said my father, remembering the Ritz. “You wouldn’t, either,” my mother replied, “if you spent your life with this food. Poor abused forks, and these browbeaten, innocent spoons.”), until the nurses and patients from other rooms would come and gaze wistfully in the door, baffled at our happiness. I would glimpse other visitors arriving to see other patients, and would think how they might envy me my mother, who could for a few minutes at a time be herself just because we were, all four of us, together. And in those moments I remembered (as I sometimes forgot) why we were keeping the vigil around her, what it was to be one of the four of us.

  Sometimes, on those occasions, I would go to the end of the hall and phone Bernard, for whom I might have a sudden rush of affection. When my mother turned back into herself, it was as though my emotions had been given back to me, and I felt that I had love to spare. Bernard responded to what happened to my mother only insofar as it affected me. “But how are you?” he would ask; and I was never, never able to get him to see how little meaning there was in that question, taken by itself. “How are you?” he would ask, and I would say, “My mother is in better spirits at the moment.” And when he would repeat his question, I would awkwardly manufacture moods of my own to fit his rhetori
c of concern.

  By the time my mother came home from her first surgery, we had become a new family. We were the afflicted, our pain a subject for public consumption. My mother, who had always required support and protection, was now to be buoyed up against all odds by every ounce of our energy, and by every ounce of energy we could solicit from her friends, our friends, from doctors, from the doormen in our building and the man who filled prescriptions at the local pharmacy and the shoemaker who had been resoling our shoes since before I was born and the headwaiters at her favorite restaurants. My mother had such broad systems of friendship that her friends seemed almost to compete for her notice, anxiously presenting their attention and their flowers (I associate my mother’s entire illness with cut flowers), which we accepted as though they were sung ballads and tributes of gold.

  We were transformed, but at the same time we were very much as we had always been. We were of course no longer bravely untroubled, but we were to compensate for that by having the perfect experience of illness. We would mention in a casual way the particular attentions paid by famous specialists whose names we had, two weeks earlier, never heard, as though these men and women were the medical equivalent of family silver. We noticed how much sympathy there was around us, so much sympathy that it became like part of the air, a supplement to oxygen and carbon dioxide. My mother had decided, for public purposes, to be brave and pessimistic. “Leonard tells me I’m not dying, but I don’t believe a word of it,” she would say lightly to a friend. And as we continued not to separate for more than an hour at a time, she would sometimes say, “The boys are keeping a deathwatch over me. I keep telling them to go out, but they don’t want to miss a minute of the fun.”

  My mother had a succession of strange and powerful whims, like a child princess in a fairy tale or a pregnant woman in a myth: she would suddenly conceive a longing for the particular pasta she sometimes ordered at a restaurant we all knew, and so my father would go down and persuade the chefs to give him dinner to take home. She read books she would ordinarily not have read, and refused those she might under other circumstances have enjoyed. She arranged for a manicurist to come to the apartment and paid exquisite attention to her nails. A few days after she came home from the first surgery, she agreed to take walks around the block; it was the brink of autumn then, a favorite time of year, and the sun was pleasant, and my mother would wear loose clothes that did not constrain her and walk slowly, holding her head steady as if she had a book on it, and moving as though an abrupt gesture might dissever one of her limbs.

  “I was your age when my father died,” she said to me one day. “I remember so little about him. I hope you and Freddy will remember me. I’d like to be remembered.”

  I told my mother that she was not going anywhere and that I would remember her for a good long time because she was going to go on reminding me of herself.

  “You go on thinking that,” she said. “Maybe it’s true.”

  I told her that I could never forget her anyway.

  “I suppose you’re going to be heading back to London soon,” she said. “Remember me when you’re in London.”

  I did not tell her, for the moment, how my father had yelled at me that morning, and told me that it was selfish and wrong for me to go to London and abandon the family to suffering, right when Freddy had to return to medical school. “Of course I will,” was all I said to her.

  • • •

  That was all in the afternoons. In the mornings, my mother was sad. She woke up weak and tearful and exhausted, unable to face the day. I woke up each morning afraid, and lived a strange blank minute before I remembered that there was some reason for what, in the first moments, seemed like irrational foreboding. In the mornings, my mother would sit in the kitchen and stare vaguely into a cup of chamomile tea so weak it was hardly more than hot water, and her face would sag, and her hands would shake, sometimes so badly that she spilled her tea, and she would seem like an old woman. My mother on those mornings frightened me; it took all my discipline to go into the kitchen. In the mornings, my mother’s pain was fresh, like a wound picked open by the night. At the other end of the negotiable days, she would rail against fate; in the evenings she was furious. “This is so unfair,” she would say, gritting her teeth until her jaw shook. “What have I done to deserve this?” She was silently outraged at friends who could come and go as it might suit them, drinking the tea Janet seemed forever to be making, eating a cookie or two, going outside with an ennobling awareness of their own concern. She was furious at the days, furious at her own body, furious at the food she did not feel like eating. It was as though there were a big festival going on outside, to which everyone in the world but she had been invited. My father and Freddy and I stayed in to keep her company, but we could at any moment have gone out where they were dancing, and she was under lock and key. She hated us for that, too.

  There were still occasional moments of life as it had been, which felt as though they had been cut out of a colorful magazine and glued onto our monochrome days. There were the snatched hours each day that I spent practicing. Sometimes my mother would come in and sit at the end of the piano bench and listen. This destroyed my concentration, but it was also a strangely intimate time, when neither of us thought of saying anything, and cancer did not intervene. She would stay for perhaps half an hour, and then we would lapse into conversation, and I would follow her back to the bedroom to talk.

  Later in her illness, I was to incorporate the idea of her suffering, and had to make an effort to put it aside. At the beginning, however, I had to remind myself that my mother was really ill, or the strangeness and unreality of the situation would take over and I would dissociate myself from it entirely. If it was in the end hard to find the vestiges of our old lives, in the beginning it was in some ways difficult to be aware of the fresh changes. My mother and I could not talk about her or her plans without discussing the disease, but we could easily talk about me, and so with a kind of generous egotism (since my mother was also better off discussing something other than her own illness) I would drag the conversation to subjects of my own. This was, however, an imperfect solution, since too often my life braided its way back into hers. It was much safer to discuss friends, better yet to watch television in the evenings and analyze the people on the screen.

  I have talked about my mother in Paris, dressed in couture, at her best and brightest, and about my mother in a hospital, at her lowest of all. What is hardest to describe is my mother as she was on the ordinary days of our ordinary lives. I have as strong a memory of my mother when I hear the theme tunes from certain television shows as when I sit in the bar at the Paris Ritz. Maybe the TV memories remain clearer, in fact, because I have celebrated them less often. Starting when I was eight or nine, and continuing until I was about fourteen, on Saturday nights when my parents did not go out, my father, after dinner, would sit in the living room and work, and my mother and I would watch television together. Sometimes Freddy joined us, but what we watched was not his kind of TV and he got bored; those evenings were mostly my mother’s and mine. Over the years, the lineup varied, but the shows were all the same anyway, so the changes didn’t really matter. We watched situation comedies about people bumbling through their lives, or their jobs, or their families. Later, my mother tended to dismiss that time; she referred to the shows as junk we had watched for lack of anything better to do. But, in fact, we loved them.

  My mother and I would be in her bedroom, and she would sit up on her side of the bed, under the covers, doing needlepoint while we watched, and I would sit on the other side, cross-legged, in my pajamas, and we would chat during the commercials. We talked a lot about the TV lives unfolding before us which, by intention or otherwise, were full of lessons to be learned. We talked about what various characters could do or should do or shouldn’t do and we indulged in the sort of strong opinions that in real life need so often to be held in check. We would laugh and laugh
and laugh: not so much at the funny lines, though some of those sent us into easy stitches, as at the absurdity of the relationships portrayed, or the clothes, or the unconsidered values. There was a letting go that went on, on those TV Saturdays. So much of our life together was planned and complex—scheduled dinners, evenings at the theater, weekends at our house in the country with visiting friends—and to have those evenings of just being, and of just being together, talking of nothing of great moment: it was palpable, something you could bask in. There was a sublimely effortless and undangerous quality to these TV people, to whom—since, after all, they were fictive—we did not have any obligation to be generous. When a series ended, we missed it: our affection encompassed all the people in the world and not in the world, and we breezily extended it to the characters who had amused us.

  That world in the TV was a dream version of what was resolutely American and mainstream about our lives, about my life with my mother and father and Freddy. On reruns, the characters seem more than a little bit ridiculous. But those antiheroes and antiheroines were icons, as those evenings my mother and I shared were, too, for something solid and permanent, a kind of smiling middle-of-the-road way of life that nothing could change. The people were nice enough, some of them energetic, or funny, or resilient; underneath a very different exterior, my mother had some of their solid American-ness. Like them, she suffered disproportionately over the episodes of the moment, but in the end remained fairly certain that any real difficulties would be resolved into unimportance. Our lives seemed as ultimately safe as theirs. When my mother first got ill, and throughout the time of her illness, when she was tired, we would watch TV together, and I would remember how easy life was, and it was as though I were eleven, and everything could not help being all right in the end.