I said I was sorry. I said that it was beyond me, that it was all beyond me. I said that I was feeling too overwhelmed to cope.
“There’s nothing to cope with,” she said. “It’s just me, Helen. I’m not so overwhelming.”
“This is not an easy time for me,” I said.
“You’re being egotistical and selfish,” said Helen. “And childish. And it’s not just circumstances making you that way. Underneath all this profound engagement with human drama, you’re still as impossible as ever, like a little boy, like you were when I first met you, years and years and years ago.”
“I don’t mean to be impossible,” I said. “But right now, it’s all of us. It’s just the way we are. Everything’s falling apart, and it all feels impossible.” I drifted out of the last sentence. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how I got to be this way, how things got to be the way they are now.”
She looked at me curiously. “Well, I do know,” she said. “You would also know, if you really tried to think about it. You’ve bought into the myth of your own perfect family. That’s your biggest problem. You’ve bought into it hook, line, and sinker. And it is a myth.” I looked at her, and she put her hands on my shoulders. “Harry, can’t you see that? Can’t you see how muddled things were, even before your mother got sick? Look at the evidence. Bernard, and then Nick, and now me—you’re a cripple, Harry. You can’t love anyone; you can’t let anyone love you. Is that what makes you a perfect part of this perfect family? Is that what comes of your mother’s perfect love for you and your perfect love for her and all the rest of this ‘everything’s perfect’ routine? You have to be able to move on from it all, Harry. Perfect families let you move on. You want to be happy with a boyfriend? Find one. Be happy. You want to be happy with a girlfriend? Find one. Be happy. It doesn’t have to be me, but it has to be some real person, someone who’s got perfections and imperfections, some girl or some boy. You have to be able to make it with someone, and sustain it. You have to give up on the myth.”
“Helen, Helen,” I said. “Not now. It’s not time now. My mother is dying. You know that. You knew that when we started this whole thing a few months ago. It’s taking a toll. I can’t meet everyone’s demands all at once.”
“That’s just it,” said Helen. “It’s so sad to be locked into all these demands, to think that reciprocal demands are what makes love. Love should give you more than it takes. Right now, your mother is dying. Later your mother will have died. You can’t just hide behind that forever. We’re all dying, lamb chop. Your mother is just doing it a little bit faster.” And then she stopped and looked at me long and hard. “It’s not that I don’t see the way of love that you and your mother have,” she said. “I can’t try to talk about whether it’s valid or invalid because it’s just what’s true, and it’s who you are, and the world is full of lonely people, and you aren’t one of them, and maybe that’s the biggest success anyone can hope for. But sometimes I look at you and I think it’s as though you’ve chosen a boat carved from diamond with sapphire masts and sails of rubies and emeralds for your journey across the sea. It’s breathtaking to watch it cutting through the waves, but it’s a stone boat. You have to be crazy to choose a stone boat. Anything else would be easier to sail, Harry.”
• • •
The date of the release of my CD was drawing closer, and my mother said she was counting the days. Meanwhile, we had to attend to the party. There was a great deal that she had intended to do but in the end was unable to do, and so she left more and more of it to me. “Elegant, Harry,” she said. “I hope this is going to be an elegant party. I hope you’re not getting carried away with yourself, and that it’s not going to be too showy. Remember that parties are about the guests, and that the flowers and the setting and the food should be so beautiful that they almost disappear. If they overwhelm the people, it’s not a good party.”
I had been to enough of my mother’s parties to know that. But I had such glittering aspirations of my own; I wanted a party that was as romantic as Love in the Afternoon, in which every detail astonished. It was my mother, extravagant in her way as the day is long, who told me to tone it down. And she also remembered all those sensible details that my mind skipped over. “Don’t serve the herbed chicken in lettuce leaves,” she said. “The leaves break and people spill the chicken down their fronts.” Later she told me, “Don’t serve anything on skewers; people end up holding the skewers and they don’t know what to do with them.” Another time she said, “Make sure there are flowers in the ladies’ room, but make sure the arrangement isn’t too big. Nothing is more irritating than flowers that take up all the space where you want to put your handbag.” But when I asked (for the third time) which of two salads she thought sounded better, she put a hand on my arm; that new tone crept into her voice, that last-four-months tone of hers. “Harry,” she said. “Don’t keep worrying about the salads. Either salad. It doesn’t matter.”
I quoted her back to herself. “It all matters,” I said.
She turned on me a funny look, a new look. “No,” she said. “It doesn’t. Very little really matters. Life is . . . a lot of the things I used to think mattered—I was wrong, Harry. A lot of them really don’t matter at all.”
When I looked at her with an expression of surprise, she laughed. “Serve the tomatoes,” she said. “I like tomatoes.”
• • •
In the end, my mother was too weak to do more than give advice. I threw my own party. It was as though I were in training for the parties to take place after her death, because it was not my kind of party, not like the party I had almost thrown for Bernard. Some days my mother and I still argued, but she would cut short the arguments.
“If you make up your mind that you’re dying, you’re sure to die,” I said once, when she was being negative.
“I don’t think you want to sound so hard,” she said. “I love you, Harry; I’m trying my best to do what will make you happy. Don’t take such a hard tone with me.”
I was in a bad mood that day. “You don’t love me,” I said accusingly. “You’re obsessed with me, and you keep trying to drag me down into your illness. You don’t love me at all. If you loved me, you’d stop striking these dramatic poses all the time and keep on fighting this cancer.”
All she said was, “I wish it were up to me that way.”
• • •
By the time I got my first advance copy of the CD, I had been at enough production sessions so that I knew every second of my own performance by heart and was thoroughly sick of it. I had seen the cover art, and I had seen the designs, and when the messenger came over with the thing itself, I felt no thrill, not even a tremor. I went uptown, and found my mother propped up in bed.
“Hi, Harry,” she said. “I thought you were doing errands all day today.”
I held out the CD. “It’s the first copy,” I told her. “It’s for you.”
She took the disc in her hand and for a long minute she sat and looked at it. The sense of occasion I had not had on seeing it an hour earlier came now. My mother turned the CD over and over, and she clicked the box open and looked at the disc itself, as though she could read its sounds with her eyes. “This is really it,” she said at last, in a voice of satisfaction. “I made it through. I made it through long enough to see it.”
“That’s really it,” I said, and it was as though I had not known, until then, what it was.
“When you were little,” she said, readjusting her pillows and sitting up very slightly, “you were afraid of so many things. You were afraid of the dark, and of playing games, and of thunder, and you were afraid of other children. I recognized all that fear in you, because I was in some ways a very frightened person myself. There are so many things I never did because I was afraid—jobs I never had, people I never met or got to know. I didn’t want you to grow up frightened, to be a frightened person. I used
to say to you, ‘Think of life as an adventure.’ Do you remember?” She looked down at the cover photo, me at the piano. She read the little biography on the back of the CD, and then she looked at the photo again. “And you believed me, even though I didn’t really believe that myself. You believed me. Step by step, you did more and more things, and you began to talk to other children. It was so hard to push you out into the world. And then you began to do it on your own. I just watched you and held my breath. I wanted to think that you could set the world on fire.” She looked at the CD. “And look. Look who you’ve turned into,” she said. Then she looked directly at me, and she smiled. Her face was full of joy. “Look who you’ve turned into!” she repeated. “I don’t know when or how it happened. All that worrying I did, and now look who you are.”
I smiled. “It hasn’t been reviewed yet,” I said.
“‘Think of it as an adventure,’ I used to say to you,” said my mother. “And you did. And so your life became an adventure, a wonderful adventure. Performing in all these places, making records. When you were nine, you said you were going to be a great pianist, and I worried that life might disappoint you. And now—” She paused and then she smiled at me. “Now the world is on fire. You’ve set it on fire, Harry.”
“Should we go through to the library?” I asked. “We could listen to it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, letting herself back down on her pillows. “I’m feeling very weak today. I think I’d better stay in bed. It’s my copy, though?”
I nodded.
“I’ll listen to it later. Maybe I’ll feel stronger this afternoon.” She sounded suddenly crisp. “Listen, you’ve got a lot to do today if you’re going to throw that party Wednesday. You said yesterday you had a thousand errands. You’d better get going.”
“I guess I should,” I said.
“I hope one of your thousand errands is getting a haircut,” she added. “You look like you’re planning to entertain a family of hedgehogs up there.”
• • •
The day of the party broke radiant and clear; I looked through the large windows of my architectonic loft and saw nothing but sunshine stretching in every direction. I had scheduled the day to the minute. I called my mother and asked how she was doing, and she told me that she was fine and that she would be at the party an hour after it started. “I don’t know how long I’ll be able to stay,” she warned me. “I’ll stay for as long as I can, but it may just be half an hour or so. But I’ll be there for long enough to say hello to everyone. You keep calm.” I called Helen, who confirmed that she would meet me at my apartment at four forty-five. I got my hair cut. I shaved slowly and carefully. I spoke with the florist twice, and settled the question about the tall urns. I went out and bought champagne in case close friends wanted to come back to my house after the main event. I collected my watch (my parents had given me that watch for my twenty-first birthday) from the repair people, with whom it had spent a month. I telephoned some very close friends to make sure that they would arrive on the early side. I spoke with the caterer and tried to confirm the number of guests, but by that time the totals had run away from me. There were so many people who had said that they might be bringing friends, and so many others who had said that they would not be bringing friends, and so many who had called and virtually invited themselves, and so many who had been oddly unavailable.
“Don’t let yourself wind up with rooms full of marginal people,” my mother had said. “If you’re having a party, invite only people whose presence at it will make you happy, because those are the people who will have a good time; with them, it will be a success.” In fact, pretty much all of my good friends were coming. Pretty much all of Freddy’s good friends were coming. Almost all of my parents’ good friends were coming. Nearly everyone any of us cared for was going to be crowding on in.
Only one of my mother’s friends responded with regrets and didn’t come. Later, she was to say that she hadn’t understood how close my mother was to the end, but even so—she must have known that this was to be the last of my family’s astonishing parties, the last one at which my mother would quietly lend her air of grace and so make of the flowers and the food and the company something miraculous beyond the simple measure of festivity. I suppose that different people live in worlds of different priorities, and to her this was simply a party, and not very important. She was the sort of person who had never understood why we poured so much energy into the flowers and the food and the invitations and the tablecloths. Perhaps she didn’t believe that we all inhabit a flawed world beyond our control, and that to extract from that world of flaws a moment closer to perfection than daily experience is a great and noble thing. Her friendship—her remarkable friendship, for she was a remarkable friend—had of course been manifest constantly in phone calls and letters and visits, was of course a matter of sensation and emotion and laughter and tears. But it would also have been a part of a collective of love that could for a few hours be brought into one room, and surrounded with peonies, and made wholly palpable.
I talked about it with Helen in the afternoon, while we were getting dressed for the party. I was upset. “Stop being petulant,” said Helen. “She’s a good friend to your mother, and she’s been a good friend in the ways that matter. It’s going to be an astonishing party, but it’s just a party. Try not to get so out of control about it. There’s no point having a fabulous party at which you have a bad time. And if it is your mother’s last party—she’d also like you to have a good time. If you can’t have a good time for yourself, or for me, then have one for her.”
We were both getting dressed at my apartment. Helen had bought a suit of fiery pink watered silk and black velvet for the occasion, and she had amazing shoes with large black rosettes on them. I had had a suit made of dark blue worsted with an almost imperceptible stripe; it was double-breasted, and the trousers had narrow legs. But I had had a hard time choosing a tie; and in the end I had settled not on something new, but on a tie that my mother had given me in my Christmas stocking when I was perhaps eleven years old, a tie with a tiny pattern of bridles and stirrups and prize ribbons on it, a tie she would have bought in Paris on one of those long Paris shopping afternoons that made her forever young. It was the first truly beautiful tie I had ever owned, and I had kept it for all these years, and it had never faded and (miraculously) it had never been spotted, and it had remained in perfect shape and condition. The deep violet of the prize ribbons was as rich as it had been that childhood Christmas morning when I had opened the box, and the elaborate turnings of the bridles and stirrups were still as exquisite and intricate.
I had assumed that my mother would give all her finery a last outing, but when I had gone uptown a few days before the party she had said no. “I’ve had my super-diamond days,” she had said. “Look at me,” she had gone on, and I had looked at her. “I’m wearing a wig. I’ve lost weight. I can’t wear anything that presses against my scars. I can’t wear makeup. I can’t wear high-heeled shoes, because my sense of balance is completely gone. I’d look like a clown in a dress that was too much dress with diamonds all over the place.” I had interrupted her but she would have none of it. “I’ve got a very simple dress and my double rope of big pearls and the earrings your father gave me this Christmas. It’s a cocktail party, Harry. A big cocktail party, with a buffet supper, but still really a cocktail party. I’m going to wear what’s appropriate for me to be wearing to a cocktail party right now. Everyone I care about who’s coming to this party has seen me all dressed up before.” And she had shown me the dress she was planning to wear, a simple, loose black dress with trails of brilliant flowers falling down it, like fresh snowflakes or chance tears, flowers in red and blue and pink. On the hanger, that dress had looked like nothing, like a shapeless bolt of silk, like a dressed-up bathrobe. My mother had watched my face. “Harry, it’s appropriate,” she had said.
• • •
He
len called in to me while I was showering. “You know that it’s almost six o’clock,” she reminded me as I inhaled the steam. “You said you wanted to be uptown by six o’clock.” And so I suddenly realized that I was late, despite all my careful planning, or perhaps because of it. And then I began to panic. I finished my day’s second shave in a mad rush, and cut myself slightly under my chin. I leapt out of the shower and got dressed and put on the wrong shirt. Helen was all ready, sitting in divine calm on one of the black chairs. She had poured herself a glass of white wine, which she was not drinking, but she sat holding it and watching as I dressed myself. “I think you’ve missed a button,” she called out to me as I put on my shirt. “Calm down, Harry,” she said a minute later. “The knot in your tie looks like you’re trying to strangle yourself.”
By the time I was ready I was sweating slightly. Robert had come down to pick us up and take us uptown. In the car, I dropped one of my cuff links behind the seat, and when I put my hand back to get it, I broke the band on my gold watch. It was too late to do anything about it. The party was called for six-thirty; we arrived at six-twenty-five. Helen had given up on trying to keep me calm, and sat erect and dignified, but with one arm draped around my shoulder.
The party was in a small museum uptown that my father had rented through the bank. The rooms were lit with tiny candles, which had all the soft candescence electricity lost us. The musicians were at the top of the stairs, and as we walked in they started to play a trio by Schubert, the E-flat, which I had chosen with them one long afternoon a few months earlier. The many separate buffets had been put into the various galleries, and the food had been arranged with fantastic care, as though each shrimp were an apostle placed for the Last Supper. I had had all of the tablecloths made of heavy dark red watered silk, and there they were on the buffet and cocktail tables. I had at first wanted a brighter fabric, but my mother had said dark red would go better with the occasion and would distract less from the flowers, and the tablecloths were right. The waiters were all in place, in white jackets with gold buttons. Two of them stood near the door with silver trays and tall flutes of champagne.
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