“It’s insanity!” The suite was luxurious, with two large bedrooms and a living room, decorated in European style, with golden moulding and the ceiling painted like the Sistine Chapel. “I never asked for this! It’s far too beautiful!” She moved from one room to the next, with that rolling gait her swollen legs gave her. “It’s … it’s.…!”
“What do you want me to do? Tell them we’re leaving?”
She wasn’t listening. Talking to herself, indignant, as if she had just discovered some hidden scandalous secrets in a teenager’s room. “My God! I don’t believe it! The bathrobe is as thick as a rug! Bouquets as big as in a funeral home! A television ... a colour television! Two king-sized beds! Two! And two marble bathrooms! And chocolate! I don’t believe it!”
“Ma, please. Sit down, just for a couple of minutes.”
As calmly as possible, I told her we were in New York and that in New York, that’s the way things were. I was happy to spoil her. I wasn’t going into debt. It was a gift for myself as well as for her. She calmed down a bit. A bit.
She changed and we went to the hotel bar. There, I actually succeeded in the herculean feat of getting her to have a drink, a Bloody Mary, the house specialty created in this very bar, the King Cole, in the thirties, something the staff was very proud of. But no one had told her there was alcohol in it, and I was certainly not going to be the one. It was far too funny to see my mother this way, glass in hand, my mother who never drank, oh, once she might have wet her lips with a glass of champagne if the Tees had been insistent enough. She drank all of her Bloody Mary, noisily biting into her celery stick, and licking the halo of celery salt around the glass. I laughed; she seemed to calm down a little, her mood getting warmer, her cheeks reddened, and we spent a lovely first night together at the Tavern on the Green in Central Park, where she ordered another Bloody Mary, and drank it with as much delight as the first. I remember her sceptical look, soon aghast, when I told her it contained a little alcohol, “There’s drink in this?” Once we left the table, she pulled a cinnamon candy out of her purse and popped it in her mouth, mindful of her breath.
Early the next morning, she knocked on the door to my room, ready to bring me to the barber’s. “You didn’t forget, I hope?” She looked at my head. “Can you believe it? It’s worse this morning.”
“Ma, I’ll get a haircut later, okay? We’ve only got three days. It’s nice out. Let’s go see the Statue of Liberty instead, okay?”
“Not a chance. I’m not walking around with you looking like that!”
And so, after breakfast (which was brought to her room — “Can you believe it? Silverware! Crêpes! Whipped cream!”), she brought me to Tony’s, a barbershop the doorman had told us about, only a block away.
Tony was a proud Italian with dyed hair in an exuberant pompadour, a black silk shirt, and a silver lock in the shape of the cornucopia around his neck, as big as a shark’s tooth. He fell victim to my mother’s “charm” — it reminded him of his own mother, who had died just last winter. He offered her coffee, though my mother didn’t drink that either. Tony insisted, saying his coffee was the best, not like the dishwater served everywhere else. “This coffee, it’s the coffee of the Madonna!” He pointed to a large plaster statue of the Virgin Mary on the counter in the back. “Yes! The Caffè della Madonna!”
My mother accepted for the Holy Mother. A dark, thick cup of coffee that gave her energy all the way to the evening, making her forget her legs that had been so painful only a few hours before. “Strange, I don’t hurt anymore, the coffee of the Holy Virgin, maybe?”
We laughed together. The coffee had done such wonders for her pain that the very next morning, before leaving for the day, she insisted we stop at Tony’s place. Tony was overjoyed to see her, “Ah! Signora Carriera!” Tony took advantage of my mother’s visit to inspect the back of my neck, which he’d meticulously shaved the night before, his thick, warm Italian hands on the back of my head making me shiver.
Now was my chance to catch up with the lost time I’d never had with my mother.
My mother who, her whole life, believed in the virtue of frugality and penitence, was now filling her memory with images, music, and pleasure. Ice cream at the Plaza, where she thought she saw Doris Day. A shopping spree at Saks, where I bought her a beautiful Pierre Cardin wool suit that she proudly wore that same evening to Broadway, where we listened to Gilbert Bécaud Sings Love. Her eyes, filled with wonder, on the edge of tears.
I showed her the university at Washington Square and one of the great amphitheatres where Martin Valenti spoke of Dalí and the surrealists with such fervour. I hid the fact that I hadn’t gone to a single lecture since classes resumed in September. Since Dana’s death, I couldn’t concentrate on my studies, not with the headaches and anxiety attacks that overcame me, and the impossibly painful memory of Dana in my heart, a picture of her at every street corner in New York. And yet, physically, I was fine — the deep cut on my forehead was scarring over; the sutures had been removed. As for my right eye, my vision was permanently affected, but with the help of my left eye, my brain could mask most effects. If I returned to class, I’d need to sit in the first row to see, but that was a moot point. I was done. It wasn’t important anymore; I wouldn’t go back to school, my decision was made, and my mother didn’t know it yet. In the amphitheatre, wider than it was deep, our voices traded secrets with their echos; I pointed out the screen where the slides of the great works of a thousand painters and architects scrolled by. And while she looked around, respectfully silent, I grieved the end of my three happy years there.
My mother suddenly said, as if scolding me, “You still haven’t shown me your museum!”
Your museum wasn’t my museum anymore. But she didn’t know that either. We hailed a cab on the corner of Avenue of the Americas and 4th Street, and went to the MoMA, where I hadn’t set foot since the accident — there were still too many cruel memories there.
“Roman!” Peggy and Betty, on their weekly visit. Overjoyed at seeing me, warmly introducing themselves to my mother, asking her all sorts of questions about her visit, alarmed at the scar on my forehead, my damaged eye, and my haircut. Peggy said, disappointed, “Where have your nice brown locks gone, Roman?” Betty quickly said, with a smile for my mother, “Come now, Peggy, mothers prefer their sons with short hair.” “Well, I don’t!” Peggy said, vexed at being associated with traditional mothers. And my mother, dizzied by the conversation, not understanding everything that was being said, smiled, intimidated.
They let me be her guide, as if I was still working there. I took my mother by the arm, leading her through the exhibits. She was sceptical of the Rothkos, Jasper Johns, Motherwells, and Picassos. But she listened anyway, attentively, and ended up saying, with pride in her voice, “You know all these things, do you?”
On our last day together, she just wanted to relax. We went for a walk in Central Park, admiring the fall colours. There was a surprising sense of closeness between us, something I had never felt before, even when I was small. We remained silent, each in our own thoughts, certainly miles and miles between those thoughts, a solar system between them, but still, we were close, closer than we’d ever been.
Suddenly she began speaking about Moïse.
“He calls the house from time to time, asking how we’re doing. He speaks good French for an American. It’s sad that his country wants to send him off to war. Why don’t they let kids be? War … It makes you do stupid things.”
“You’re talking about Moïse?”
She sighed, “No. About your father and mother.”
My father. I felt a chill come over me. I would have preferred to leave the subject be, though I knew there was little chance of that.
She took her gloves off and opened her coat. It was a warm afternoon. Her cheeks pink from our walk, she told me they married in 1942 so my father wouldn’t need to go to war. It was after
the plebiscite on conscription. My father worked as a radio operator on merchant ships and, for a reason that wasn’t entirely clear, he lost his job and returned to the village. My father, an old bachelor, knowing he’d be called to war sooner or later, especially considering his good health and knowledge of ships, began looking for a woman to marry, “any woman.” My mother said it without a trace of irony. “You know your father.” She sniffed, blew her nose. “I was the oldest, I was twenty-nine. An old maid doomed to take care of her young brothers and sisters because mother had a bad heart. The smallest effort tired her out. At the end she had to stay in bed, all day long.”
I realized I never knew how my parents had met. The war forced a lot of young people into each other’s arms, without a thought for compatibility. With his savings, my father bought the building where they’d been living since, with the store on the ground floor and in the back the woodworking shop he built for himself. Once tied to the moorings of marriage, my father was forced to give up the sea — a difficult thing for a sailor. Maybe that helped explain his anger.
My mother wanted to stretch her legs. We made our way towards the lake.
I thought of those three pictures my father kept in his workshop, nailed to the back wall. That’s all that was left of his life before my mother. As a child, I spent hours in front of those pictures, intrigued. The first picture showed my father on the radio on a ship, smiling vaguely, a cigarette in his mouth. The second was an older man in a captain’s uniform, skin like parchment and piercing eyes — a friend of my father’s, perhaps, or his boss. And on the third, a picture my mother had torn up and that my father had carefully restored — my father, laughter in his eyes, a young man accompanied by a friend and a very pretty brunette in a light dress. They were on a paradisiacal beach complete with palm trees and, behind them, a tall ship flying a British flag — the Sofia Ann, you could read on its side with a magnifying glass.
My mother, convinced that my father had had his fun with “that … that!...,” ordered him to hide the picture. Each time, he repeated, “No, Ida. It was the other guy’s girlfriend, how many times do I have to tell you?” But my mother refused to listen. One day she had enough and ripped it off the wall and tore it in two.
“Give it to me, Ida.”
“No! None of that filth in my house.”
“It isn’t in the house, it’s in my workshop.”
“You want to humiliate me in front of everyone, is that it?”
“Give it to me, Ida. I won’t ask again.”
And my mother gave him his picture back. He stuck it back together and pinned it on his wall. A long scar disfigured the young woman now: her breasts and her thighs, once ideally round, had lost some of their depth, flat now like a cubist painting. To buy peace, my father pinned a fourth picture, small and yellowed, of a woman of eighteen or nineteen, rather pretty, in a far more modest summer dress.
“You’re going to get into trouble, Dad.”
He looked at me with that permanently exasperated look of his. “What? What do you want?”
I said, sincerely worried for him, “It’s about Ma. You know she can’t stand pretty girls.”
“That’s not a pretty girl, for chrissakes! It’s your mother!”
My mother stiffened as soon as I spoke Dana’s name. When I called home — I was always the one who called, never my mother — I avoided mentioning Dana, suspecting she thought the worst of her. That...! That...! What? Woman? Feminist? Jew? Who slept with her … son? She couldn’t know the truth of it, but she might have intuited something. We sat facing the lake, eating hot dogs we bought from a cart. The wind had picked up, the lake’s surface quivered, and the oaks and sycamores and hackberry trees trembled. I spoke carefully, as if walking barefoot on glass. “They buried her so quickly that, in the middle of the night, I sometimes wake up thinking none of it happened. I wake up, sure she’s still there. I start breathing again, easily, like before. A moment of relief. I cry with joy until the truth hits me, all over again.…”
It was the most intimate conversation I had ever had with my mother, and it embarrassed her, I could tell. Her brow was furrowed, she fidgeted on the bench, a drop of mustard from her hot dog fell on her skirt. She grimaced, tried to wipe it off with her handkerchief, then asked, nearly mumbling, whether we could return to the hotel so she could change.
“Ma! I’m talking to you!”
She bit her lip, “You’re sad. It’ll pass. It always passes.”
I knew that was the best she could do, and that there was nothing else to say.
As we turned towards Harperley Hall, I could feel she was nervous. That strange dry cough she had, when she was worried or bothered. “Are you okay, Ma?” Her legs seemed better, the walk seemed to have helped, but she was complaining anyway — her skirt was dirty, her fingers sticky, she wasn’t presentable. “You’ll freshen up at Dana’s. In the bathroom that used to be mine. You know, I had my own bathroom there.” I was watching her from the corner of my eye and saw her stiffen. She coughed again, then took my hand and said, “Okay, it’s okay.” Suddenly I felt like my heart was lighter, like things would start to get better.
“Mrs. Carrier!”
Ethel was radiant in a light blue dress, with her smile of happier days and her short brown hair, which she had cut right after Dana’s death. Ethel who, after tea, took my mother by the hand and showed her around the apartment, presenting the Braque, the Soutine, the small Dalí, and the handful of Franz Klines — which had all been Dana’s — as well as her own paintings here and there on the walls, including one of her series that would become famous, Nordica: Ocean Stillness, inspired by the tumultuous and changing waters of Métis Beach. My mother nodded, a perplexed look on her face. Ethel then brought her into the office, took a small oil painting off the wall, a still life with a dark background, composed around a bouquet of peonies. My mother exclaimed, embarrassed, “No, Ethel! I can’t!”
“Please. It’s one of my first paintings. I was fourteen. Take it; it makes me happy to give it to you.”
“Take it, Ma, it’s a gift.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “It’s too beautiful.… I … I don’t know what to say. Thank you!”
On her last evening, I invited her to a restaurant that was all the rage: Ocello’s, on West 56th Street. It was owned by two flamboyant Italian brothers, intimate friends of Tony the barber. On the menu, dishes costing more than four dollars (thankfully my mother received the ladies’ menu, which had no prices on it). What can I say about our evening out? No doubt we stood out in the fancy pretentious crowd. My mother, proudly wearing her Pierre Cardin suit, with her son, black jacket and pants, black tie and white shirt, buzz-cut inspected by Tony that very morning who, after coffee, recommended the place to us. This place? Had he gotten the name wrong? Thought it was a family joint? With girls like in the magazines, dresses so short you needed all your will power to keep looking them in the eyes. My mother observed the scene, shocked. “Do you want to leave?”
“No! Mr. Tony told us that.…” The din in that place, like a stormy sea, and music, much too loud.
“Are you sure you don’t want to leave?” She shook her head energetically. No. What kept her there was the hope of seeing some of the famous regulars; Tony had mentioned Frank Sinatra, Princess Grace, and Jackie Kennedy.
To my great relief, we were moved to another table a bit off the main floor. Apparently, at Ocello’s, if you mentioned Tony’s name, they treated you like royalty. My mother spoke freely of the village, the house, the store that Françoise was minding in her absence. “She works well, that girl. She keeps saying we should ‘modernize.’ I don’t know what that means exactly, but she helps me order new stock, ‘young’ clothes, like she says, and it works with the English. We had a pretty good summer last year.”
We were seated near the aquariums, and the music wasn’t so loud there, nor could we hear the bursts o
f laughter from the noisy tables next to the windows.
I announced, “It’s our last evening. A glass of champagne?”
“No!”
“Come on! Just a glass!”
She looked like a girl caught with her hand in the cookie jar when she finally relented. On her first sip, her cheeks flushed.
“I’ve got good news, Ma.”
“What?”
“I can stay in America as long as I want.”
She wavered. I went on, “They don’t want me. The army, I mean.”
She looked appalled, “The army? You said you’d return to Montreal in December, after classes. So you wouldn’t need to go to war. What are you saying?”
“The accident. You see my eye?” She nodded, hesitant. “There’s a small scar on it. It won’t go away. I’ll have it forever.”
She paled, “That’s what you call good news?”
“The cornea was affected. Depending on the angle, it deforms my vision. I’m also hypersensitive to light. It’s permanent.”
She seemed to be wondering whether I was pulling her leg. I went on, trying to be as reassuring as possible, “The doctor was the first one to tell me. He said it disqualified me automatically. I went to my draft board, and they gave me a test. Classified me 4-F. That means I’m ‘unfit for duty’ for medical reasons. In other words, I’m free. Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Romain!”
“I’m not suffering, Mom. It bothers me a bit, but I’ll get used to it. There’s far worse. Like returning from Vietnam in a wheelchair, or in a box.”
Métis Beach Page 22