I will not forget the image of my mother entering the restaurant that evening. Our table is at the end of a long corridor of tables, commanding a view toward the door. I saw in the dim distance that my parents and Freddy had arrived, and I watched the rituals of coat-check, and then I saw the owner guiding my family toward the table. On other occasions, I had come to meet my parents, and had sat at that table, and had watched my mother walk down that aisle, maintaining her particular elegant composure and her social smile, asking the owner after his family and about how business was at the restaurant. That day my mother walked like someone newly blind. She was wearing a black-and-white wool suit that seemed to be too big for her, and her walk was almost loping. Her arms hung strangely and uselessly at her sides. It was not, as usual, that she did not pay attention to the other people at the restaurant; she did not see them. Her eyes were only partly open, and she blinked constantly, as though she were staring into a very bright light beyond which there were only indistinct shadows. As for the wig, if you had never before seen my mother, you would not have paid particular attention to that wig; it looked like hair, and it was not unbecoming. But it did not look like her hair. It hung down onto her shoulders like a dead weight. A few flyaway strands had blown over her face, and others were lying on the wrong side of her head. She was no longer herself, and she knew this.
My mother had never suggested to me that I come home for her birthday that year. My mother at that stage carried her illness outside of her, as though it were a bag of groceries she was never to be allowed to put down. She had found already that it was impossible to give the bag, or its contents, to anyone else. It took all her energy to keep holding it, and for the first time she had too little wherewithal even to appeal to the rest of us. My mother had stopped giving voice to her demands. She was so upset that she depended on us only in the wordless way that you depend on shelter. She needed for us to be at her beck and call, but she had nothing particular or specific or meaningful to ask of us. In other years, she had not asked me to come home for her birthday because she liked being surprised, and I had come most years, but not every year, because I wanted to be able to surprise her. But that year she had not asked me to come home because it had not occurred to her.
“Hello, Harry,” she said when she got to the table and saw me. “I thought you were in London.” She sounded puzzled and neutral. “I thought you had some meeting about your recording this week.”
“Surprise!” I said. There was a sort of terrible empty moment while she looked around the restaurant. Then she put her hand on my arm, and with an enormous effort of her conscious mind she opened her eyes all the way, and turned to face me. She did not laugh or clap her hands, and her face did not light up as it had when I had surprised her before. “It’s your birthday,” I added. “Didn’t you guess I might surprise you for your birthday?”
She looked through her open eyes to mine in silence for perhaps ten seconds. “Thank you for being here,” she said at last, looking straight into me, and in that moment it was as though she could see everything—Bernard, her accusations, my love for her, Paris, how much I needed for her to get well, how frightened I was, how the appointment to see the recording studio had been rescheduled, how I, too, was learning this new Chinese, how I had left London after just ten days—all of it in the depths of my eyes. “Thank you for being here, Harry,” she said again, simply, still holding me in that immense look; and when she said my name her voice went up, as though it were headed elsewhere.
Then, “Good trip, Harry?” said Freddy, and my father said he had been worried all day about whether I would be at the restaurant on time, and we settled into birthday conversation.
“So what do you think of your mother in a wig?” my mother asked in the light voice she had been using ever since her surgery, and I assured her that she had never looked better. “Either you’re becoming a very accomplished liar,” she rejoined, “or your standards have been slipping in England.”
• • •
That winter I went back and forth every month. I was preparing for my recording, and had to be in England to go over details and talk to engineers. I also had a rigorous performance schedule, and had to get to various European and Asian destinations. At the time, I had no American engagements; I had been trying to make a foreign career first, so that I might burst on America already glorious. I accompanied a friend who sang lieder, worked on the Mozart, and learned everything Schubert had ever written for the piano. The Beethoven sonata became a standard encore piece for me, and I studied more early Beethoven. For a festival in Warsaw I polished up all the Chopin waltzes, and these were a great success. In Russia, I played Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto; when I finished, a stout woman came up to me in tears to tell me she had worked as a housekeeper for the great man. “I think,” she said, “that you are very sad, or you could not play so well this piece. For me, your sadness is very beautiful, and I think there will be more of it, for your whole life.” I thought this was a little grim, but Bernard assured me that the Russians are like that.
I seemed to be on a different piano every week, and my fingers never felt accustomed to anything anymore. Notes came too fast, or they came too slowly; they were too loud or too soft. Everything felt disrupted and under-rehearsed. I dreamed of being one of those famous pianists who could insist on traveling with his Steinway and a trusty piano tuner. After every concert I would call New York; it always distracted my mother when I read my reviews aloud to her. “That’s so true,” she would say of someone’s praise. “Sometimes people just don’t get it,” she would say of a disparagement, though once or twice she also asked, “Were you feeling tired that night?” Once she said, “Well, you haven’t been practicing Liszt for very long, and you don’t really have a Liszt personality. I’m not sure you should be playing the Liszt in Paris next week.” It was good advice, though I did not always want it; in any case, this subject seemed to draw her from the pondering of her own illness.
I wanted to be in London to be with Bernard and get on with my life, and I lied to my father in order to stay there. I pretended more concerts than I actually had, and said that I had to work with a teacher on the pieces I was to record. “Don’t keep rushing back here,” my mother used to say, but to my father I was one of the luxuries he could provide my mother, and he wanted me to be as full-time as the hospital nurses. He paid uncomplainingly for every ticket, but resented the fact that they were always round-trips. I did want to be in New York for my mother, and I came home at least once every three weeks, but I stayed for only a few days at a time. I was afraid my life in London would dissolve if I left it for too long, that the gloom of our household would swallow me whole. In some sense, and to my surprise, my culture shock seemed to be getting worse and worse. I had somehow lost both the comfort of the familiar and the thrill of the novel; it was like altitude sickness every time, getting off the plane like a rude snatch back from the ecstasy of the deep and into the violence and shock of the appallingly familiar. Those were the heady airplane days. I could have papered the downstairs bathroom with my tickets. I had a favorite seat on each plane and a favorite seat in each departure lounge and a favorite desk at each passport control point and a favorite spot by each baggage-claim carousel. But I no longer had a favorite country. Wherever I was, I felt that I should be elsewhere; I thought of each place as a transit zone from which I would shortly migrate to some farther spot.
Bernard accepted the new shape of our relationship without protest; it was one of Bernard’s great strengths to bow to the inevitable. You would have thought, to see me with Bernard, that everything was much as it had always been. Our jokes and routines were unaltered, and we were serious about those matters about which we had always been serious, and jokey about the things that had always amused us. This made me feel rooted and secure; it was impossible to believe, when I was with Bernard, that life was tragic. I would sit down to the cold suppers he made on my arrival night
s—when winter began, he added soup and they became warmer meals—and he would fill me in on what had happened while I was away. In the way that people take care of other people’s pets during a span of absence, Bernard took care of my life, so that when I came back I found it just where it would have been had I not gone to America. He called all my friends and paid my bills and dealt with the washing machine and bought me clothes I might under other circumstances have bought for myself; he spoke of me at dinners at which I would otherwise have been present, so that everyone I knew was always up-to-date on my various ups and downs.
“Don’t worry,” Bernard would say to me.
I worried all the time.
“Don’t worry,” he would say again, and when I was in England, some of the time, for his sake, I stopped worrying. Our relationship settled into a rhythm based on my nobility in the face of disaster and his kindness in the face of my nobility. It was what is known in the vernacular as an unequal struggle. I found that it was easier to let Bernard lead my life than to lead it myself; my time in England became more and more sedentary, and began to resemble time off.
• • •
I spent long hours practicing the Schubert and the Rachmaninoff, and when I went to record, it was a complete disaster. I was terrified by the permanence of these sounds, frozen by the thought of an eternal blunder. In the recording studio I was so keen to avoid wrong notes that I played as if I were wearing wooden gloves. I went in every day for a week, knowing that there was no poetry coming out of me. My agent came over at the end of each afternoon. “Well,” he would say dubiously, “that sounds a little better than it did before.” But I knew that it didn’t sound better. The joints of my fingers seemed to have gone out of my control. It was like trying to drive a car with a broken gearshift.
I attempted to explain all this to the engineers and the producers, and finally I played like a trump card the narrative of my mother’s illness. My agent had some long discussions behind closed doors, and prevailed on them to let me redo the whole thing a few months later. “Listen,” he said to me. “This is not easy to arrange. You’d better get it together between now and then. Maybe you want to rent a real piano to take to this hospital in New York where your mother is, but you’ve got to do something.”
I practiced more than ever. The Schubert was much trickier than I had expected. I played it accurately, and, at least in general, with feeling, but I seemed not to be able to get the magic of the first movement, and I knew that there was magic buried there.
“I’ve heard you play that first movement well,” my mother said one day on the phone. “I think it’s a matter of mood for you. Really I do. I just love that one phrase, that little melody we talked about last time you were home, which you play particularly well. It’s all tone of voice, and carrying the feeling of that one phrase into the rest of the movement.”
“Tone of voice,” I said.
“Yes,” my mother said. “Do you remember, after my third chemotherapy, I’d come home from the hospital and I was feeling so sick, and I thought I just couldn’t eat anything. Your father was at the office and Freddy had gone back to school, and you and I and Janet were all alone in the house. You kept coming back to my room to cajole me with smoked salmon and poached eggs and that ghastly carrot bread you’d bought. Do you remember that day?”
“You were in bad shape,” I said. “You kept saying how weak you felt, and I thought you should have something, or you’d really just collapse.”
“I felt as much like eating smoked salmon as I did like flying to the moon,” said my mother. “Salty fish. On that stomach. But you kept telling me that the doctor wanted me to eat, and I finally said I would have some dry toast. You came back with that toast and a nectarine, and I sat there and ate the toast, because I knew that I had to have something. And then you waved that nectarine at me. And you said, ‘Oh, Mom, what about the nectarine?’ And you sounded sad, and anxious, and forlorn. And so I ate that nectarine—which I will tell you now was mealy on top of everything else.”
“You ate two bites of the nectarine.”
“It’s incredible that I ate any of that nectarine at all. Who buys nectarines in November, Harry? Ripened on a plane. Pretty to look at but inedible under the best of circumstances. Which those were not.”
“It had vitamin C in it,” I said.
“In the summer, Harry. Fresh nectarines in the summer. Anyway, I ate that nectarine, or part of that nectarine, because of your voice when you gave it to me.”
“Why are we talking about that nectarine?” I asked.
“That’s the tone of voice you need in the first movement, Harry,” my mother said. “The way you’re playing it now is technically accomplished, but it should have a little bit of longing in it, something a little bit more urgent.”
• • •
New York was in too many ways the life I had outgrown. When I was there, I lived in my parents’ apartment, back in the room of my childhood. I practiced on the piano on which I had learned scales at the age of five. When Freddy came down from medical school, he was in his room next door. It was all set up as it had been when we were infants. He and I argued about whose turn it was to walk the dog and who should be doing the dishes. Janet did our ironing and in the end did most of the dishes and made the beds and smoothed the machinery between us as she had always done. “It’s OK,” she would say. “You two go talk to your mother. I’ll walk Molly.”
Then we would both be embarrassed.
“I’ve got some errands anyway,” Freddy would say. And he would shoot me an angry look and go to find the dog’s leash.
Each day, morning and evening, at rising and at sleeping, I examined my state of mind. I measured its progress against the previous day and noted the details of its changes, as though it were something outside of me, a variation in air pollution or fluctuation of humidity. It is almost impossible to remember from one feeling to another: England disappeared as soon as I touched down on US soil. And whereas Bernard went on with my life on my behalf, my family life seemed to die when I went away and to die again when I returned; there was nothing to keep up with.
We lived in a strange and artificial world. The house was kept unbearably overheated in deference to my mother’s lack of blood, and it was seen almost as a matter of poor form to comment on the temperature elsewhere. We all agreed with her that restaurants were icily cold; we all said that the winter was the worst in years; we all bundled into layers of sweaters and coats so as not to suggest that for us the days were bright and sunny and fine. And in time we came to feel how cold it was for my mother, who had always tended to feel the cold anyway, and our shivers became as authentic as hers. With time, we all found the days unbearable, because when we were with my mother and saw how her ever-delicate figure had become like some kind of exotic filigree work, as inexplicably fragile as inlay, we began to find our own flesh absurd, and we curled up within it as though to warm ourselves from the inside out.
In consideration of her illness, we ceased to get sick. My mother’s immune system was so depressed that the slightest infection might have proved fatal to her; she could have used up her day’s entire reserve of energy in five minutes of coughing. Even a touch of a cold would have delayed and extended her loathed chemotherapy. So we lived out her fragility. Sickness took on the status of a forbidden indulgence. To protect my mother, we all became untouchable. I longed for the old discomforts of a sore throat, cups of soup, valiance in the face of sneezes. It had been my habit, every winter, to contract some mild edition of the year’s flu, and to go on in spite of it, to feel strong and brave and young because the illness did not stop me from practicing and performing. In the face of a hacking cough, I had proved my heroism season after season. Now this occasion for dignity had been stripped away from me, and though I would, in previous times, have thought a winter without a single sneeze a great luxury, in this year it came to be another press
ure. I refused to see friends who were feeling slightly off, and I never left the house with wet hair, and I made sure that I slept regularly and ate well—not out of concern for my own well-being, but out of concern for my mother’s health. Much later, it would seem like the ultimate luxury to go out and feel that to risk a cold was to risk only my own cough and congestion. In the time of my mother’s illness I took every possible precaution so as not to be the Typhoid Mary of the family; and so my own health became not my own, but a gift to her.
My mother herself became extravagantly untouched. You could not affect cancer with your own conduct, but you could control your chances of other diseases, and my mother, determined to control something, brought to bear a discipline extraordinary even for her. She would not kiss a friend hello. She would not use a public ladies’ room. She would not sit in a public theatre, where someone might breathe down her neck, and she would visit only those restaurants where she could be guaranteed a corner table at some considerable distance from the other diners. She gave up public transport entirely; even a taxi might carry the germs of a stranger. So she stood unwillingly aloof from ordinary life. My mother hated solitude, but solitude was one of the prices this disease exacted from her, the solitude of a misery she could not authentically share, and then the added indignity of physical isolation from the people she loved, who loved her, who wanted to see her, and whose visits she was often obliged to prohibit. She placed as much physical distance between herself and the world as she could; she lived in a cocoon of privacy, with only her illness for an intimate.
During the period of my mother’s illness, I became deeply superstitious. For two solid years, I avoided ladders, and handled mirrors like babies. I pulled my side of every wishbone as though it had come not from a boiled chicken, but from a phoenix. I was perpetually rapping on wood. I played—this was a private ritual—something in a major key first and last when I was practicing, and played minor keys in between. I am not by nature a deeply superstitious person, but I had a voice of “better safe than sorry” forever ringing in my ears; there was no precaution that could be overlooked. I thought it rash to tempt fate. I believed that you were more likely to get your wishes if they were unselfish, and so I sustained a struggle to be unselfish in every particular and at every level. After my mother got sick, I almost gave up on wishes for myself. With monotonous regularity I asked for my mother’s health. Sometimes I wished to fall in love with a suitable girl, because I knew how happy that would make her. Sometimes I just wished for the sun to come out, because she so liked sunshine, or for the doctor to smile when she went to see him, or for her to enjoy her dinner for once, and not feel nauseated. Sometimes I wished for higher spirits for myself because they would have allowed me to sustain her better; I hoped to change my sorrow for happiness not so much because I longed to be happy as because I knew how my happiness would become a happiness for my mother.
A Stone Boat Page 11