Helen and I took things slowly and privately: I had been able to pull my relationship with Nick to psychological bits, turn it into phrases and rhetoric, and so contain it, but my relationship to Helen did not allow for such analysis. There were two things I never told my mother: one was the lonely narrative of my life before Bernard, and the other was the amazing fact of my love for Helen. I couldn’t tell my mother about my life before Bernard because it would have horrified her too much; and I couldn’t tell her about Helen because it would have made her too happy, and I needed at that point to have a secret, something that was entirely mine. If I had once confided in my mother, I would not have been able to tell what was her delight and what was mine, and I needed, for as long as possible, to preserve my happiness, this happiness, as my own.
I thought there would be time to tell my mother later on. Also, I had fought so hard to get her far enough to understand my anguish over Nick, and I wasn’t sure that there would never be a Nick again, and I didn’t want to lose that sympathy. It was too late for my loving Helen to make my mother well, and so I loved Helen for myself alone. When I held Helen in my arms, I came back to life. Nick had left me for dead. Helen saved me, or my love for Helen saved me, from despair. When I was with Helen, I believed, as I had not before, that I could do anything. I felt strong where Nick had made me feel weak.
“What would have happened if I’d been a boy?” Helen asked me one night. We were lying on my white sheets, and I was cupped around her body; her head was beside mine, but she was not facing me when she spoke. I touched her face, to get its expression.
“You’re not a boy,” I said. “That’s become extremely clear to me this week.” And I pulled her tighter, as though to remember her female body.
Helen laughed. “But if I had been,” she said. “Would we have become lovers years ago, or this week, or not at all?”
“If you’d been a boy,” I started, but then I stopped. Helen as Helen. Helen as a woman. Helen as the one in my life while my mother was getting sicker. I couldn’t separate it all.
“Would you love me more if I were a boy?” she asked.
“I couldn’t love you more,” I told her confidently. “I’ve never loved anyone more.” This was automatic, and true. Then I said, thinking, “Well, it would have been easier.” It was too much for me to explain to her. “It just would have been different, Helen. It would also have been different if you were a sixteenth-century Spanish courtesan and I were a pirate of the high seas.”
“But not easier, I think,” she said. She sounded almost coy. “Shame, isn’t it, that you never get to know what would have happened.” And I reflected that this had never seemed like much of a shame to Nick, and, to fill in the silence, I turned her over and stretched my body on top of hers.
• • •
I suppose that my mother and I may have stopped being in a rage with each other before I started seeing Helen, though it seems to me that I noticed how we were no longer angry only in the weeks after I started seeing Helen. It was, so far as I am concerned, one of the great miracles of modern times that my mother lived long enough for us to make peace. For though I had loved my mother entirely for my whole life, though our flashes of intense hatred had never really undermined our adoration of each other—still, there was no ease between us until that moment when I finally held Helen in my arms. Bernard had been a pawn between my mother and me, but Helen—Helen knew me. She was as kind as Bernard, and she knew me. I became the person she knew. My feeling for Helen was not a matter between my mother and me, but it absorbed what had for so long stood between my mother and me, so that the remaining barriers could at last drop, to reveal entire the straightforward and fitting love my mother and I had for each other. The madness went out of it, at last, and we loved each other simply as sons and mothers have loved each other all the days of the world.
I did not know it then, but there were only four months left for my mother. She and I were given just four months of wisdom after a lifetime of folly, four months of peace and a measure of serenity. Four months! It seems so terribly short a time, and on sad days I imagine what it might have been like to have had five months, or six, or another forty years. Four months was hardly time enough for us to register the truth of this new relationship we had found. I am profoundly aware that had my mother’s lethal cells multiplied more rapidly we might never have had those months. A fate as arbitrary as the weather, which served to take my mother away, gave us with equal indifference that almost holy time before she went, the Helen time, when we could live in the compass of our pleasure in each other, while I had for myself the pleasure of Helen.
• • •
All happy families are not the same; nor are all happy lives the same. The day my mother died, I thought of saying something about Helen, but by then it was too late. I did not want my mother in the world Helen and I took for our own, but I suppose also that in those final months, I wanted to have the joy of my mother unmarked by the drama of my own changes. I wanted to keep separate things separate. There were a thousand empty reasons for not stirring things with my mother any further, but in the end, she must have known this as she knew so many other things. “Would you love me more if I were a boy?” Helen had asked me; a week later, she said, “Would you love me more or less if your mother weren’t ill?”
“It’s not about my mother,” I said. “It’s about you. About you only.”
“Even I,” said Helen, “am smart enough to know that that’s not true.”
It was humiliating to have her say that. “If my mother weren’t ill,” I said, “I’d have more time and energy for you, and I’d be able to love you as much as you deserve.” This sounded like the right answer.
“But I might have to be a boy,” said Helen.
“I like your being a girl,” I said. It seemed not to matter anymore, and I was tired of talking about it, tired of thinking about it, even.
“Well, we’ve both agreed on that, then,” said Helen. “I like being a girl. A woman. Not a boy. I like being with you as a woman. It’s something private, something of our own, something you haven’t been squandering all over town for years and years.” She paused. “Pirate,” she said, with a smile. “I adore your mother in her way, but I wish we could sail away and not worry about her for a swashbuckling month or two.”
This conversation taxed me more than I realized. All my life I had feared my mother’s death, and now that it was coming I had to give myself over to that fear. Sadly, it overwhelmed everything else. What Helen and I had was both too happy and too difficult to last through the consuming sadness, too enormous, too frightening, too much of a seeming answer at a time when I was figuring out how to live without answers. She and I had both tangled our love too entirely with my mothers’ illness. Swashbuckling was not in the cards. My mother was dying, and I was careless with Helen in the face of that, and she was hurt, and for a while things were uncomfortable between us. Helen and I never actually broke up, but we paused. I paused, anyway. All along I had had to choose between joy and sorrow, and I now selected sorrow gladly because I believed that joy would wait for me around the corner. I think that in the end Helen understood that. I think that in the end I understood that myself. Loneliness is the only and terrible thing; and I had a CD coming out, and a party to plan, and a mother dying. I had made up with Bernard, and now spoke to him from time to time in an effortless fashion. He was an old friend and nothing more; but my easy conversation with him made me believe that romantic love was easily repaired, that cracks in love could be painted out after the fact. I assumed that Helen would be there later on. Besides, I was exhausted, so exhausted that I could hardly think or move or feel, and Helen was hungry for feeling, for all that feeling I had wasted earlier on Nick, that wasn’t there to give anymore. These changes of mood and self wear us out.
• • •
How, then, to reconcile the surface and the depth? How to rec
oncile England and America, the love of men and the love of women, childhood and adulthood, joy and sorrow, the glamorous and the substantive ways of life? It seemed too often to me that the surface of my life was a work in lacquer, exquisitely wrought to conceal the simple but cavernous fact of a wooden box beneath; or on better days it seemed that a watery surface was so churned with waves and turbulence as to give only a passing hint of the infinite stillness below. This is what I imagined: a surface that gave way only by degrees, a surface as transparent as what lay under it, a surface that was like a glassy and exquisite introduction to depth itself. This is what I imagined: that you could slide from level to level, from surface to depth, by slow and gradual measures, never losing sight of your passage, so that from the greatest depth you might gaze up infinitely far and still catch the hues of the sky, so that from the surface you would see at least the vague and hulking forms of the rocks on the ocean floor. This is what I imagined: a life that was both beautiful and full of meaning, a life that encompassed what I had felt for men and what I had felt for women, a life as innocent as birth and as wise as age, a life made glorious not by the joy that comes of pain avoided, but by the joy that lives intimately with the unavoidable kinds of pain. I dreamed of a life in which the control at which I had arrived in England met with the power of my feelings in America, a world in which what was heavy encompassed some measure of lightness, and what was light, all the weight of insight. It was not compromise that I imagined; it was not a limpid pool or a fresh pond that I wanted, but the sea itself, for a flashing instant as clear as knowledge.
VIII
AN ALMOST PERFECT PARTY
I can remember how, as the long afternoons of that spring drew to a close, I would from time to time ask my mother what she was doing in the evening, and how she would tell me of some engagement that, under previous circumstances, would have sounded dull or remote or too adult for my attention; and I can remember how she would say, casually, as if it didn’t matter, “You’re welcome to come along,” speaking in a tone halfway between question and comment, between a favor granted and a favor requested. “You’re welcome to come along,” my mother would say, and I would feel—I think we both would feel—that strange enormous quality that time could take on between us, and I would decide to go along to dinner with some rather remote friends of my parents’, or to a benefit for some good cause, and I would cancel peremptorily whatever considered plans I might have had for the evening.
Frequently—this is the way with seating plans—we would go off to some lovely restaurant and sit far apart. I would spend the evening in insignificant conversation with those members of my parents’ outer circle who were the evening’s novelty. What I remember is that feeling of being within reaching distance of my mother, that neither of us had had to part from the other just yet. When at the end of such an evening we would get back to my parents’ apartment, I would go in and sit at the foot of my mother’s bed for hours, talking about the marginal people, the restaurant, whether her duck had been good, whether the mint sauce on the chocolate torte was a big mistake (my mother insisted that sauce was made by folding toothpaste into crème anglaise), about whether I had spilled something on my tie and about whether it was likely to come out if I rubbed talc on the spot. (“For heaven’s sake,” my mother would say. “Just put it out for the dry cleaner. Everyone but your grandmother gave up on those tricks twenty years ago.”) We would go on talking, and from time to time my mother would say, “It’s getting late; I should go to sleep,” and I, inventive in those precious moments at the edge of night, would ask questions that reached as far back as her childhood, or beg advice, and, sustaining her interest in an absurd line of topics, would keep her awake and even—so it often seemed—alive for an hour or more. In a clear tone she might have used to give driving directions, my mother would answer my questions. They were often questions she had answered many times before, but she gave me those familiar answers a last time, so that I could remember them. We would keep time at bay for a little while, by being together, until finally it would get so late that my mother couldn’t stay up any longer. Near midnight—and my mother, rigid in her ways as a wrought-iron fence, had never stayed up until then unless there was an occasion—I would heave myself out of that bedroom and go downtown and practice obsessively or talk on the phone, doing anything to keep the time full enough so that I did not need to be reminded that in such a way at a future time we would say good night and mean all the nights that there had ever been or would ever be.
Sometimes in my dreams, my mother is standing at the front door of that apartment and saying to me, “You’re welcome to come,” and I am racing, with my heart pounding, to some banal social event, at which to sit feeling as whole and entire as an unpeeled orange, watching my mother across the table, some simple bits of jewelry flashing when she moves her hands or shakes her head, talking about the sauce on the chocolate torte. Eventually, I run out of my own dreams and find myself back in my own apartment, and I do not think so much of the voice with which my mother would say that she loved me, or that she missed me, or that she was worried about me. I hear instead that offhand way she had of saying, “You’re welcome to come,” and I wonder whether I will ever again be welcome to go anywhere, really, in the way that I was welcome to come to dinner with my mother’s college roommate and her husband.
• • •
During this period, the period before my CD came out, the period when I was always welcome to come with my mother wherever she went—during this period my mother became steadily sicker. When one therapy failed they tried another. As the therapies blurred, my mother railed against them less and less. I told her that her fighting spirit seemed to have gone out of her. “What will come of fighting?” she said. In that clear spring, one of the treatments caused her hair to fall out again, though the doctors had promised that the risk of that was almost nil. I spoke with her every hour the day it happened. “It’s coming out in handfuls,” she said. “Bald again. Like a freak show. And it’s giving me a rash, too. Harry, I’m becoming disgusting.” I tried to contradict her. “I disgust myself,” she said.
Once more the wigs came out, now trimmed to something closer to the length her new hair had been reaching. Her tremor had by that time become terrible and it was increasingly difficult for her to walk. She had to steady herself on an arm to go outside, and sometimes she had trouble even with the short distances within the apartment. Once she fell down while I was there, just after dinner. I heard a bang, and then I heard my father’s voice, like the bewildered voice of a child. “Harry, Harry, Harry, Harry,” he called, over and over as I ran into the room. By the time I got there she was propping herself up. “Don’t come in, Harry,” she called out as I got to the door. “You don’t need this memory.” When she stood up she was bleeding slightly from a cut on her face. She turned to me and my father. “Excuse me,” she said, and went into the bathroom, and closed the door. When she came out, the wound was gone. On feet she could not trust, she walked across the room and got into her side of the bed. “I get all the fun of being ninety while I’m in my fifties,” she said, and laughed. “Thank you, Leonard. Thank you, Harry.” My father was still holding the paper he had been about to read when she fell. “Anything in the news?” she asked.
• • •
Some days she had to stay in the hospital. Most days she was at home. I was up at the apartment constantly; Freddy had a summer job at a lab and was living with my parents. My father’s hours at the bank got shorter and shorter. Meanwhile, my mother could eat less and less. The doctors had suggested some crackers that were supposed to settle her stomach. She would sit down at the table with a plate of them in front of her and smile at the rest of us. “Would any of you care for a dog biscuit?” she would ask wryly before she started to eat. Still she continued, on nights when she was able, to go out with my father. She continued to have lunch with her friends.
“You shouldn’t push yourself so h
ard,” my father would say to her, but she would brush him off.
“There doesn’t seem to be much of a floor show on in the bedroom all day,” she said. “I might as well distract myself.” Laced through that tough stance, which she used to propel herself through the days, was a softness delicate as the silk left behind by a new butterfly. She told me over and over again, afraid perhaps that I would forget, how much she loved me. She had always told me that with what she did and the way that she was, but now she said it in so many words. She told my father and Freddy how much she loved them. Some afternoons, she would describe everything she had ever imagined for me, cataloging the pleasures and pitfalls of every stage of life in sequence; it was as though she wanted to pack into the little time that remained to us all the wisdom she might have dispensed over the ensuing decades. I tried to remember every detail of every day, as one tries to remember the nature of heat on the last day of summer. I spoke to Helen from time to time, but I did not sleep with her; I imagined that I was only a mind and a heart, that I had left my body as entirely as if it had been laid in earth.
Helen was crisp. “There’s no point arguing with you now,” she conceded on the phone at one point.
On a subsequent occasion, she said, “You haven’t been very nice to me, Harry. Why did you go and start all this if you didn’t want to follow through with it?”
A Stone Boat Page 21