A Stone Boat Page 7
It was on one such evening that I finally told my mother about my recording contract. I had looked forward to the occasion for too long, and by the time it came around I had lost the sense of urgency with which I had carried the news to Paris. It was becoming absurd and inconvenient that she didn’t know yet, and I made my announcement more to have it done with than because I longed to tell her. We were at a commercial break, and my mother said, “I was just looking at the review you left me from Zurich. I like it.”
“He was unusually musical for a reviewer,” I said. “I’ve never met him, but he’s a friend of a friend of Bernard’s, and I gather that he’s charming and incredibly scholarly and very highly regarded in Switzerland.”
The program was starting again, but I seized the moment. “I wanted to tell you something,” I said.
My mother looked tense.
“I got a recording contract,” I said. “I’m making a record. A CD. It’ll go into distribution in about eighteen months.”
My mother looked almost blank. “But that’s incredible, Harry,” she said. “When did you find out?”
“Just before Paris. But I was waiting for a good time to tell you,” I said. “It’s on the label I wanted, too. And they’re going to let me do the Schubert, the sonata in B-flat, and the Rachmaninoff, even though I had been worried about whether those pieces really go together.”
“Oh, Harry. How wonderful for you.” She looked back at the TV for a moment. “That’s more or less what you played in London, at that museum, when your father and I were there. I liked that program.” She hit the mute button on the TV, then turned back to me, her face glowing, and she sat up on her side of the bed, and for a sudden moment it was as if her cancer were gone. “Harry, how nice of you to save a piece of good news for me. I remember when you were a little boy, how you used to get up in the mornings and go play the piano. Your father and I would look at each other and I would say, ‘Well, it’s probably time to get up anyway.’ And he used to joke that I had given birth to a genius, and that someday people would throng to hear you.”
“Genius is maybe a bit premature,” I said.
“It was more than a bit premature at the time. I once woke up in the country and told your father that the dishwasher was jammed in the middle of the rinse cycle, and he told me that that was the Moonlight Sonata. It was the most God-awful noise I had ever heard. I don’t know what you were doing to that piece of music.” The TV family flickered on. “Sometimes other mothers used to tell me they thought you should be out playing football or swimming, and sometimes I worried that they were right. The predominant feeling when you were little was that you should try to help your children fit in with everyone else. But I thought I could try to push you to be good at football, which you clearly hated, or I could just encourage you at the things like music that you were so good at and that you loved. And I thought that the best way to help you be happy was to let you be exceptional where you could be exceptional, and not to try to make you uniform and monochrome and conventional, not to even everything out, not to try to fill in the gaps.”
“Here I am,” I said.
“Sometimes I think I went too far, or that we let you go too far. A little bit of conventional in some areas of life is not necessarily a bad thing.” She paused, pointedly. “But—oh, Harry,” she said, and she smiled her big smile, which I hadn’t seen since that first evening in Paris. “I’m so proud of you. So proud. Enjoy this moment. You’ve worked hard for it.”
“Partly,” I said, “it was just a matter of luck. If I hadn’t done that funny recital in Budapest, which they called me in for at the last minute, and if the English press hadn’t been in town for the reopening of that concert hall, then I don’t think—”
My mother cut me off. “We’ve been very lucky, all of us in this family, very lucky for the most part. But you make a lot of your own luck, Harry. It’s one of your greatest gifts. You deserve every bit of luck you have; it may be luck in a way, but it’s luck that you’ve struggled for.”
I laughed. “So I’ve struggled,” I said.
“You have, though. Sometimes you don’t even notice how much you’re struggling. But I’ve seen it; you’ve had to struggle a lot not to be defeated by all the little defeats, to be one of the survivors. We should celebrate this,” she said. “Have you told your father yet?”
I said that I hadn’t.
My father was in the library, working. “Leonard,” she shouted as loudly as she could. “He’s getting as deaf as a post,” she said.
I went into the hall outside the bedroom. “Dad,” I called. “I want to tell you something.” I walked to the end of the hall, and heard the sound of my father shuffling back in his bedroom slippers.
“It should have been such a lovely week in France,” I heard my mother say, later, to my father.
• • •
When my mother had been home for ten days, she went to see a wigmaker. She had investigated wigmakers as she would have investigated florists or caterers, as my father had investigated doctors, and she had found the names—so she believed—of the two best wigmakers in New York. She went to see them so she could order the wigs and have them in hand before her hair began to go. For my mother, the prospect of baldness was the worst of the punishments of chemotherapy. Internal suffering she could bear with equanimity, telling just what she chose to just whom she chose, willing herself to be brave in the face of it. But the external symptoms that could not be hidden were, to her, intolerable and humiliating. She was not so much shamed by the revolt of her body from within as by the damage that showed without. My mother was accustomed to the kinds of deference that her beauty had always won for her, and to have to give these up at the same moment that she confronted death seemed too unfair. To be a hairless woman was, for her, to be freakish and grotesque. My mother’s hair was heavy and soft and taffy-colored with occasional flashes of gold. It was always neat and clean and orderly; my mother did not ever have hair that curled where it should not have curled, or that frizzed, or that got tangled. I can remember sitting with her as a child and talking when we had just come in or were just about to go out, when she would run a brush over her hair. I remember how any hint of chaos gave way at once to her disciplined and regular strokes. I can remember, too, the rain through which we did not walk, the taxi windows we did not open, the windy paths we circumvented for the sake of my mother’s hair.
My mother had her hair done (it was her first time out of the house, after that first hospital visit), and then went directly to the wigmakers and ordered three wigs from each of them, so that they could copy exactly the appearance of her hair when it was freshly coiffed. My mother did not show any interest in getting a fun wig; she did not want to try new possibilities. My mother had spent some years negotiating the hairstyle that suited her; she had changed it when and as her age had demanded that she do so; and she was not going to change it again now. For the few weeks that her own hair was to last, she kept reaching up and touching it, patting it into place as though to memorize her own gestures and their effect for an unspecified future period. She arranged with her hairdresser to keep free her nine-thirty appointment on Mondays and Thursdays, so that she could take it up again when her hair came back, as all the doctors promised that it would. For the sake of my father and Freddy and me, my mother imagined such a time.
“This treatment may make you feel nauseated for a few weeks, and wholly exhausted, and may cause general malaise,” the doctors warned. But my mother could contain those difficulties. “What about my hair?” she would ask. The loss of her hair was like the loss of herself; when she went to those wigmakers (those horrible depressing basement offices), it was as though she were getting the most meager protection for a war with the world. She was like a bleached zebra getting stripes put on with ink. If it was hard for her to think of herself as a woman with cancer, obliged to submit to chemical assault, then it was twice as difficult for her t
o think of herself as a woman without hair, reliant on petty artifice. There is nothing to be accomplished by focusing on your own cancer; you cannot change it by an act of will. Her hair distracted her: she attached herself to its changes to avoid thinking too relentlessly about the changes within her body. She suffered over the passing humiliation as a means to circumnavigate the prospect of death. I volunteered to come along with her to the wigmakers’ studios, but my mother took only my father. She took him because she could not face these things alone, but she left Freddy and me behind because she could not bear for anyone else to see them. At the time, I was just as glad; the few hours I got alone were a welcome relief from the intense claustrophobia of the vigil, which I felt then might easily go on forever.
I never saw my mother without hair. During the entire period of her illness, she wore wigs outside, and turbans around the house. She hated those turbans; my father told her that she looked like Gloria Swanson, but though she laughed, she told him he was being ridiculous, and believed that to be so. My father, too, was kept away from her humiliation. She would close the bathroom door when she was changing from wig to wig or from wig to turban, and she slept in those turbans as well. “I’d rather you not remember me bald,” she said, “and once you saw it, you’d remember it.” How much she looked at herself without hair I was never to know, but for the rest of us her baldness was little more than a verbal construct. It influenced all of our lives, and she and my father were to develop elaborate routines around it. He would intercept coat-check girls lest they tip the wig forward; he would walk between my mother and the wind when they were outside; but he would also pretend not to know that my mother was, in fact, hairless, and if her turban ever slipped in the night, I think he contrived not to see it.
• • •
“You have to get back and start working on your recording,” my mother said one afternoon. “You’ve already missed enough. You have to keep your engagements for next month.”
“I’ve canceled a couple of performances,” I said. “My agent has been negotiating for me. But if I let it go much longer, I’m going to get a reputation I can’t afford. It’s beginning to get tricky.”
“It’s OK,” said my mother. “I love having you here, but I’ll be fine without you for a little while. I don’t want my illness to take over your work.”
“I’m thinking about flights,” I said. Bernard and I had spoken every day about when I would return.
“Flights,” said my father. “Always off on another plane. My son the jet-setter. It’s not as though you were going to forget how to play the piano if you stayed here for a little while. You could pick up next month. There are pianists who could fill in for you, if you really wanted to arrange that.”
My mother put her hand on his arm. “Let go, Leonard,” she said.
• • •
Helen came over to help me pack. “You’ll be glad to see Bernard,” she said as we counted socks.
“I’ll be glad to get out of here,” I said. “To get back to real life. I have to say I wish Bernard were a little more clued in. He’s trying to be nice about all the stuff going on now, but as for understanding—” I let the thought slide.
“Have you tried to explain it to him?” asked Helen.
I was a bit irritated by this. “I think it should be obvious.” I put down the socks. “You know. You’ve known from the start.”
“What has your mother actually done,” asked Helen, “to warrant—” Her voice trailed off. “To make you want to give up everything else? To freeze you this way.”
Helen was not the first to ask that question, and it was not the first time I had been stymied by it. What had my mother done? In the way of mothers, mine saw to it that I had food to eat, a roof over my head, clothes to wear. She sat at the foot of my bed when I was ill, and gave me soup to comfort me. She was there every day when I came home from school; we would sit in the kitchen and talk for hours, and then over dinner, which she made almost every night, and then over breakfast, which she made without fail every morning. She was obsessively dependable, and was never, in my life experience of her, late for an appointment; she never changed or rearranged or rescheduled or canceled a plan, and she never failed to do anything she had promised. She remembered what I told her better than I did, listened when I wanted to talk, and talked when I was prepared to listen. When I played the piano, she heard every note. She organized trips and parties; she took the time to spin of life’s boring events a thread as rare and fine as any emperor’s silk.
What did she do? Her intelligence cast into perspective the terrors of the given moment; she made life into a meaningful progression, rather than a random splatter, and ordered childhood’s terrible chaos. To love people by knowing them is the most difficult kind of love to sustain, since no one can hold up that level of perfection we hope for, even demand, in the people we adore. My mother could only know people; she could not have preserved ignorance and distance had that been her fondest wish; and knowing me, she nevertheless loved me entirely and completely. It would be a gross inaccuracy to call my mother uncritical: she criticized my choice of ties, the objects in my home, the whole way I lived my life. But she did it all because she felt in the very core of her being so urgently and so clearly involved in my success or failure. In the face of any pleasure of mine, she evinced a quiet joy so intense and so poignant as to ennoble all my happiness. When something saddened me, she came and joined me in my pain, so that I was not alone there; she mitigated sorrow itself for me. You do not necessarily love people for what they do; nor does heroism lie always in action. Those single examples of valiant courage, those stories that sons might tell of their mothers rescuing them from the lions: my mother had never done anything of the kind. She would immediately have come running if the lions had roared in my direction; but we lived in New York, where the lions are gradual and evanescent, and where the defenses against them are made of a slow accumulation of dialogue rather than of a sudden thrust of steel. Such courage as she had does not lend itself to representative anecdotes.
I looked at Helen and shrugged. “It’s not anything she’s done, or that she does,” I finally said. “It’s just the way she is.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say,” said Helen.
“That’s the most important thing,” I said. “More than what she does.”
“Of course,” said Helen. “But it’s also the most inaccessible to other people. Including Bernard, I’m sure.”
“If he really listened to me, he’d get it,” I said.
Helen looked at me long and hard. “The only way to explain that kind of love to someone who hasn’t known it himself,” she replied, “is to give it to him.”
To this piece of admirable advice I had no ready response, and so, with redoubled energy, Helen and I focused on the packing.
III
MY LONDON
The first year of my relationship with Bernard was the happiest year of my life. Being with Bernard was like being on a spa vacation. When I was with him I was calm, and balanced, and pure, and attractive, and wonderfully relaxed—I was everything but tan. I had sometimes longed for men who were all the dangerous things that I was not, for men who were rough and strong, for men who were casual and irresistibly male, with thick hands and coarse hair, men who didn’t know what to do with words and music, and who grappled instead with bodies. But what I found was Bernard, who was tall and strawberry blond with chiseled features and attenuated limbs; he looked like an illustration of England. In surface ways, Bernard was a less self-conscious and less baroque version of me. He never frightened me, and at some profound level I suppose that he never fully satisfied me, but he made me very happy. No one had done that before.
The emotions that appear strongest are often the least, but I did not know that then. I had decided when I was growing up that I would occupy myself with emotions so powerful that they seemed almost to st
and on their own, free of their objects. I engaged proudly with joy and tragedy, with the agony and the ecstasy. Before my mother’s illness, and throughout its early stages, I indulged in the extravagance of this emotional range, and when I talked, I talked in a rhetoric of melodrama. What I was later to learn is that language is not necessarily transparent, and that free-standing emotions can stand far away from you. I realized eventually that memorable experience is not always ostentatious. I thought, when Bernard and I were together, that there was some virtue in my knowledge of joy to the exclusion of happiness, while he believed that happiness was the goal, and that most joy was contrived. Here more than elsewhere, compromise was too difficult, and neither of us considered it. It was not until much later that I wondered whether happiness and joy should not live beside each other, so that you could know them both, so that one could lead you into the other and back again. Only then did I think that some language is transparent, and some language not; that meaning can slide between the cracks or lie on the manifest surface; that both ostentation and understatement have their vitality. Then I realized that simplicity is often as much of a defensive affectation as melodrama, and that to be content is something, but not everything.
• • •
Bernard and I first met through mutual friends, two years before my mother got sick, and then chanced to run into each other in front of a neighborhood greengrocer some six months later. We made a plan for dinner, and within days I had moved into his flat—I kept my own house, but spent less and less time there, until I came to see it almost as storage space. My piano was of course there, but Bernard also had a piano, and though mine had a clearer sound, I eventually grew fond of the muted notes I made at his house. For the first month, the strangeness of being at last in a real proper living-together relationship kept me at bay, but then the easiness of it overwhelmed me. I put aside all the mannerisms of despair at which I had become so expert. I gave up, one by one, the elements of my life that had been about loneliness, and absorbed Bernard’s affection as though I were a towel and he were a swimming pool. He cooked lovely things for breakfast, and he bought bunches of flowers, and he laughed at stories that were really only a smile’s worth of funny, and he showed me that everything on earth was pleasant. He was of course no more in love with me than I was in love with him, but if I had not obstreperously blocked his love, perhaps he would have been; it was part of his lovely English nature not to resist anything that would have been agreeable.