We talked about the past and my adventures at Harvard and about the hospital as if they were worlds in which no one and nothing like Nonie existed.
And we had a damned good time. Mother said so—in various surprised and gentle ways. I made her laugh a couple of times and she smiled now and then; and she made me laugh twice. It really was okay. She said, I’m holding my end up . . . We’re not doing so badly, are we, Pisher? Are you okay?
Sure, I said, Sure if you say I am . . .
She said, You’re nuts through and through but I like you . . .
She said, then: Things didn’t always go so well . . . Tell me you forgive me . . .
I suppose I had known before then that the sympathy and closeness in one—in me, in her—had a limit. I suppose I remembered from when S.L. died that someone died and you lived on—the separation was that acute (like a rock and a stone in a row of stones) even if the person who was gone lived on as a presence and as a voice in your mind; still one rock in the row tumbled over and vanished out of sight, and the other stayed. I suppose I thought or believed one could go beyond that to other fields or levels of feeling and of attachment: earlier, when Lila had talked to me about my real mother and how she’d died, perhaps of a bungled abortion after having been mistreated by my real father (Lila told me nothing optimistic except for sentences of praise for life and for the people in the stories), she’d said my first mother, in her life in such a small town, had invested everything—emotionally—in the baby, me at that other time; and the baby had seemed attached to his mother so strongly that she, Lila, felt it was strange, even remarkable that the baby had lived, that I had lived. No one expected you to live but here you are, she said.
I said, Maybe I didn’t really live—maybe it’s just a shadow thing . . .
Lila said, No, it was your mother: she didn’t want her effort wasted . . . she kept you alive . . .
But having said that, Lila then did want to explore the subject of life-after-death and of limitlessness of emotion between people—of things that were beyond ordinary discipline and that were beyond calculation—attachments of one soul to another on one hand and then sizable sins on the other—but she did believe me, or so she said, when I pointed out that to give yourself over to one emotion or to one goal had no limit in terms of how far you went but it had limits to either side of itself in that it didn’t turn into another feeling or let itself be deflected or diluted. And that maybe you shouldn’t call it calculation if it was done warmly—or hotly—(Ha-ha, Lila said hoarsely)—but it required will or heart in the sense you used the word heart of athletes, of boxers, and of horses who ran-their-hearts-out.
Lila said, Well, YOU’RE still alive—will wonders never cease . . . I swear you’ve been PROTECTED . . . [in a whisper] by a ghost . . . Your MOTHER . . .
I knew Mom was a little jealous—and competitive—toward other deathbed scenes and toward things in operas and toward S.L. and, generally, toward what other people had. And I had, a bit, been keeping things shallower than she intended—mostly so I could keep on going and not be horrified and upset; and she’d been keeping track, I think—keeping score. When she asked for forgiveness, I was a little startled, first, because it seemed un-Jewish—of course you forgive the dying; you forgive everyone—but, more, because it suggested something existed between her and me that did not exist: we’d never, even in my infancy, been sentimental with each other—Lila had little or no gift for sentimentality. I thought she meant something hackneyed as in a movie scene—fabricated, fictitious life, envy solved for a while: she didn’t like candy and she had no talent for sentiment but she had a weakness for doing famous scenes in real life—they made life seem unordinary: they opened into history.
But I disbelieved myself—I didn’t think I could be right. But I thought I could read her somewhat. So, I tried a movie scene anyway: There’s nothing to forgive—you were always open with me . . . pretty open . . . You played fair: we were always pretty close, Mom . . . Forgiveness isn’t an issue for us . . . not for us, Momma . . .
I want it, she said. I want it from you—WILL YOU GIVE ME YOUR FORGIVENESS!
Well, do you forgive me? Isn’t this all beyond question? You and me? Isn’t it just here? Don’t we take it for granted between us—you and me?
It’s different between you and me; it’s different for me; I’m not you; I’m nobody and I’m dying—you was a child: I didn’t keep the promises I made your mother; I didn’t do the things she wanted me to do—I thought I could get away with doing what I wanted to do—I need you to forgive ME . . .
Ma . . . I don’t care that you didn’t keep all your promises . . . I’m not my other mother . . . I don’t even remember her . . .
You are her . . .
Ma . . . you’re making it too serious—really, what do you need MY forgiveness for? What did you do that’s so bad? I’m alive, I’m here, I’m in school; I sleep at night, I have girls now; some people like me . . .
It’s a hard world, Wiley. I know what went on. I won out when I shouldn’t of won out. I did things I regret. I want your forgiveness. Don’t just be polite: I’m talking seriously. I am serious. I’ve thought about this. I’ve thought about you every day for months now. This is what I want from you.
Mom, you have it—you always had it—here’s my forgiveness: I sure as hell forgive you: you saved my life . . . I’m glad I’m alive—I never blamed you for anything you did, I never blamed you for what you did . . .
I WANT YOU TO SAY IT WITH YOUR WHOLE HEART AND SOUL . . .
For almost a moment, I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t get my lips and throat and lungs to do anything. Or my soul. Or my heart. Except breathe—and, finally, to blink.
It was astonishment first, astonishment as a passional form of bitterness over the past; I didn’t feel bitter about the past; I just didn’t want to think about it or take it seriously now when I had to face it that she was dying; I wasn’t dying; I didn’t feel any bitterness toward her; it was a matter of not wanting to be sincere now and feeling a lot and admitting things just because she felt like it. Or needed it.
It was a form of agonized astonishment at how real, maybe, and how deep her feelings went, and how unsentimental and how real they were. It was the presence of real feeling in the room.
Not mine. Not only mine. My astonished silence lifted me for a moment into being someone who could perceive or glimpse the size of something larger than himself. This was an ashy feeling I glimpsed, largely lightless. I maybe made up the form in which I saw it but its presence was unmistakable. She hadn’t asked for forgiveness in any real way before except only of a light sort, that and forgetfulness, some of which was automatic, and she’d asked me not to harm myself and punish her that way but to go on—I mean in the past—and that was all that we’d ever rehearsed. I’d never thought she would be scared and guilty—not toward me anyway—I was flattered. I was enormously moved. I was overawed. But I couldn’t match her tone, produce a response as a partner. I couldn’t face it that her feelings were real or that I couldn’t face them. Hell, I was inwardly angry—not burningly so—but scared as hell, she seemed so huge with feeling—and brimstony—made of ashes and clay: almost a golem: and I seemed petty and minor to myself—and she liked that although wearily, only wearily.
But I was pissed at her not knowing how tricky it was for me to manage to go on day by day; I lived fairly completely but within limits, aestheticized, and with a lot of stuff, most stuff, turned-over-to-the-mind. It is hardly complete or hardly even a majority of parts of myself that I use—hell, or can use without becoming violent and weird: isolated and in a certain kind of danger and in a certain kind of dance or boxing match with people and with moments as they pass and with life. My past is explosive for me—it’s the presence of the reality of so much difficulty, it’s the difficulty of understanding and of guessing all along at things. I believe I hardly knew anyone who wanted not to remember as much as I wanted not to have to remember anything . . . Nonie, Da
d, and Mom, for all their gassing about never looking back, reminisced a lot, the whole time; they did memory-lane stuff right and left . . . I had by then in my life a built-in sense of when I was near the point (my limit) and how, if I went on—if I went past this point—I would be inconsolable, uncontrollable, ill or dead, in half a hundred ways—Mom used to call it losing my head and I am afraid of the rearoused pain in it. And then, too, this was in L.A. where I knew only a few people . . . I knew my relatives would not help me . . . The doctor would. I mean I had a long history of no-kindness-from-my-family—and some kindness from outsiders. Any automatism of forgiveness would have been okay for me with her—I’d have just this upheaval of a sense of danger in me, but the real thing, real forgiveness person-to-person, from deep down, us having sort of like equal lives and rights and being in the same room, with me being the wronged and important one, the one pushed around, though, was impossible if I was to survive her death.
Forget about kinds of murder—it was murderous but on both sides and the murderous stuff went in all directions and as it often is, it’s a sign of stuff being ultimate. Then if you think of maybe carelessness and curiosity and love-of-a-kind—not for a child but of your own body and not for a synopsis of what is in you but for a Casanova-Romeo-Francis-Bacon-Caesar coward or for a false, local, really powerful, though, Cleopatra—maybe someone you don’t think is so alive or is tough enough to live anyway: or someone who doesn’t love in a way you really understand; or you do but that’s all buried under the blankets; and one of you sees maybe a murderously lovely kind of male doll you want to take with you, half-gently, emotionally into the shades; and the other sees vanished breasts, pain, giant pride at the last minute—a kind of humor—even of sincerity . . . Or you do think Little Lord Casanova is tough . . . or lucky . . . and you want to measure this, see this . . . and you think the failing Cleopatra isn’t so lucky or so tough after all . . . but she has some surprises in her still . . . some unreadability . . . Then think of a feeling shaded with its opposite, with a wish to save the other creature all along its boundaries and your own and all along the boundaries of the other feelings in you, a wish to be close and to say farewell in this way maybe and maybe not, to say it on your own terms and from within your own life and will.
And that is partly because you don’t, and can’t, excuse the other life, the other life’s continuing, the other life’s luck of whatever sort. It isn’t you. And the bridge out is too new. Imagine feelings not tightly edited, not dedicated, and moving along second by second. Imagine generosity itself as ungenerous and so what but maybe so-a-lot. And a curious measure a parent takes of a child who is not hers but who has lived with her in often stunning degrees of intimacy, a measurement now acted out and not at all clear to me—what the shit do you do? It was enormously flattering and utterly dismantling and it suggested an at least comparative innocence and personal worth and one that required no further protection. And in its truth it denies any real sort of lying to you or about you then or in the past. It was impossible for me to understand that she was dying and then not to comprehend her feelings somewhat. So to fail to comprehend her request and to fail to be generous, openly, boldly, had a certain implication. Not consciously at first. But consciously then—an element of judgment I could not bear to have. I could not bear to know this, too. On top of the rest I could not bear to know. I could not bear even to begin to know I could not bear to know something here. Blame, regret, not only regret, horror, filled me: and resistance—an insomniac griever’s swirl of independent time, of independence of thought and feeling in the moments, independent motions going off to one side, veeringly resistant, and perilous: words, an outburst formed—I evaded them. I sidestepped the monstrous (or the angelic) scene. I used boyish and shallow mastery—and the flirtation, if I might be allowed to say it like this—and obstinacy. Life, a continuing of life, a continuing of whatever line of half-life and quarter-thought I had, a continuing of history—those were my chief premise, my chief concern—nothing apocalyptic . . . Nothing absolute. Not even her death. I had died, or cooled emotionally toward her years before. Certainly not her death now. I had a wish to ask her questions and to haggle over her answers. But I avoided the upheaval of personality, the redeeming thing she wanted, the salvationary metamorphosis (into being a real boy and into having straightforward ambitions and rages).
But the no in me—the years of refusing her entry into my moods and the continuing of that into this last scene with her—ah, I stink still as I did then of sudden sweat at her wanting to save both of us, at how wrong she thought I was, at how wrong she thought the tie between us was, or pretended to think it was in order to have her will now on the vestibule of her exiting from the world. I denied her a triumph. I forswore the past of her triumphs. And sins. Over me. In regard to me. The no won out—as it often had before. It had its way. The past summed itself up in me as No-I-CAN’T-do-this. I can writhe and be in pain but I can’t do some things . . . I can die. I can die and be jealous but I can’t do these things.
I love you, I always loved you, we’re fine, Mom—I forgive you, there—is that okay?
No . . . But it will have to do . . .
Then she said: I hope you can learn to take care of yourself . . .
Later she went back to the forgiveness motif and I tried to fake a sincerity and even to be a little sincere but without remembering and without tearing myself open and being sort of pieces lying around waiting to be put together in some grotesquely torn way, in some original form, in some after-my-second-mother’s-death sort of way.
This stuff went on for an hour and then recurred for another two hours: I said, Mom, look at me: I’m doing okay . . . How can I blame you without throwing away every single thing that I have now; and if I don’t blame you, will you tell me how the fuck I can forgive you the way you’re talking about?
I guess they teach you to argue at Harvard, she said. No: you was always good at it. Do as you like—you will anyway . . . I think that, after death, I’m going to meet your real mother and I wanted to feel clean about things; but I know you’re a thoughtful boy, a thoughtful person, I know you always liked me, you always had a soft spot for me . . . But love, you’re careful about love . . . Maybe, in the end, you’re the kind that lasts . . .
And she said: I’ll tell you the truth now: I loved you. I always loved you. I went in circles maybe. I didn’t do the right thing—I’ll tell you here and now I didn’t always want to do the right thing . . . I lie here and think about it and I regret it: tell me you forgive me for that . . .
I forgive you, sure—that’s not so bad, Mom . . .
I loved you and I took advantage of you and I didn’t always take care of you and it didn’t come out like love . . .
Yes, it did . . . It’s just that things get different—some times . . .
And she thought and she gathered herself together and then she said mightily (or so I thought): You mean at the end when there’s no time ahead of you—and having to take care of things as they go along isn’t the be-all and the end-all . . . ?
That’s right—that’s what I think, Momma . . .
Well, live and learn—see, I can still joke. Kiss me and say you forgive me and we can change the subject then . . .
So I did.
And she said, I shouldn’t have made you live with Nonie . . .
Then, the last day, a half-hour before she died: You’ve been very nice, Wiley—you made dying seem almost nice . . .Now go a little bit away; go sit in the corner where I can’t see you clearly—I’ll know you’re there but it won’t distract me . . . The next part is hard. The next part is serious. The next part is something I don’t want you to see—you won’t approve of me if you look at my face up close. And I can’t take any more; I’m ready; it’s time; and I don’t want your opinions pulling at me the whole time—I don’t want to be saved. I don’t want you to see my face up close while I’m dying. I don’t want to have to think about any of that while I die . . . I don�
��t want you to go away, though: don’t leave me alone until I’m gone; but let me do what I have to do . . .
She closed her eyes and her breath labored—I thought, almost idly, she would change her mind and live. I could see her face from where I was. I realized within a short while that she was letting go and then grabbing on to breath and then letting go . . . I did not have thoughts encouraging her to live. She died laboringly—by that I mean that it sounded from her breath and it seemed from her face and neck that it was some kind of dirty thing—letting go—dirty and of interest to her: she did it with determination—as if she’d learned how almost to let go in the five years she was sick and as if now she did let go, rehearsed step by rehearsed step and was not appalled by the novelty or by the immensity, either one, or by the intelligence and bitterness and grave luminosity of meaning.
Or if she was, she went ahead anyway and did it, not all that differently from the way she had described Daddy doing it when she came home the day he died and said, I want to talk about it—can I talk about it with you, Pisher? . . . You ought to know a little about death, about S.L., don’t you think?
No, I said.
Well, listen anyway . . .
I’d covered my ears. I’d been lying on the couch reading a novel and she sat on the edge of the couch.
She’d said, I can’t tell it like a story—I know you two loved each other . . . Yours was the only name he mentioned; I won’t tell you what he said—I’ll spare you that . . . He wouldn’t talk to anyone at the end; he turned his face to the wall and he made himself die. I asked him not to but he wouldn’t listen to me . . . I guess you were the only one he really loved, Pisher . . . It certainly is funny how things turned out . . .
Her death rattle was small and final. Some wet came out of her mouth. Not a lot. She looked ugly. The only sound in the room was my breath and then I got up and went over and closed her eyelids and kissed each one and her cheeks on either side of her lips. The movements of my eyelids sounded truly loud, a terrible intrusion, like a storm of insects, or like a weird, quiet clapping for me on the part of time which she had, in her way, nurtured, off and on.
The Runaway Soul Page 81