A Stone Boat

by Andrew Solomon

  “A couple of months ago I went out to lunch, and I put on that diamond pin of Grandma’s. Do you know the one I mean? With her monogram done in little stones?”

  My father looked confused. “You know,” Freddy said to him. “It was square. Grandma always wore it in the winter.”

  “Oh, yes,” said my father. He looked at my mother. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wear that pin,” he said.

  “I’ve only worn it two or three times in my life,” said my mother. “But I wore it out to lunch that time, on that blue jacket, and I think I left the pin on the lapel when I sent the jacket to the dry cleaner. I’m so annoyed about it. I thought I might have brought it up here, but it’s not with my jewelry and it’s not in my box in New York.”

  “Maybe if you call the dry cleaner they’ll have it,” I said.

  “No, I’m sure it’s gone,” said my mother. “I didn’t wear it much, of course. But someone else might have worn it someday. Your grandmother loved that pin.”

  In the late afternoon, she and my father and Freddy got into my parents’ car, and I got into mine, to drive back to New York. It wasn’t until I was alone in the car that I felt afraid. I turned on the radio as loud as possible and tried to bang out time to the music. I switched from classical to rock to light FM and back to classical, trying to figure out how best to block my mind. By the time I was halfway to the city, I knew that I could not go back to my apartment. I thought about going to my parents’ apartment, but that option was also intolerable. I couldn’t bear to stop at home even to collect a razor and a toothbrush, so I headed for Helen’s instead, even though I knew that she was having friends over for dinner.

  I arrived just as Helen and her friends—they were all acquaintances of mine, people who had been at the party—were sitting down to dinner. When I rang the bell from downstairs, Helen guessed who it was. “Come on up,” she said.

  The elevator was impossibly slow.

  “So how was your weekend?” Helen asked when I got upstairs. The others all looked at me, politely expectant.

  I found myself telling them about what we had had for breakfast, and then I started to talk about the jigsaw puzzle. I kept interrupting myself, as though I were several people all talking at once, and as I went on I got faster and faster and faster, as though I were several people all being played on fast-forward. “I don’t know,” I said. “It could be one month or two months or six months, but it’s not going to be forever. She’s not going to go on like this forever,” I said. I had to go on talking, in front of all these people. Helen was rubbing my shoulders as I talked, and I knew that I was being incoherent, but my voice wouldn’t stop. As some people sob uncontrollably, I talked uncontrollably. I didn’t know what I was saying. I couldn’t even hear myself.

  Helen interrupted after about twenty minutes. No one else said a word. “What you’re saying is that you want her to die soon,” said Helen.

  I didn’t stop. I went on and on. I said, of course, that I wanted my mother to live forever.

  “She’s not going to live forever,” said Helen. “You know, it’s not going to be a relief when she dies. It’s going to be pretty awful.”

  I went on talking and talking and talking. No one else said anything. I felt that I was taking up the entire room, squeezing everyone back into the silence of the walls.

  “It sounds terrible,” said Helen. “It’s a terrible thing to say, but I hope, for your sake, that she dies soon.”

  We all stayed over that night. I asked the others not to leave, and by the time I asked them it was already late, and so we all camped out in solidarity on Helen’s floor. I lay on the floor like a tightly strung bow, and then suddenly I fell asleep, into a turbulent sleep full of dreams, an exhausting sleep, in which it was as though I had gone on talking and talking and talking.

  • • •

  There is a silent time when you wake up, and another before you fall asleep. There are moments of silence during a shower, or while you brush your teeth. There can be silence if you drive in a car alone. I found the silence unbearable at all these times. On Monday morning, I woke up at Helen’s apartment. She had left, and so had the others. I’d slept through everyone’s leaving. I called my mother on the phone and we talked about nothing. Then I went over to my parents’ apartment, in principle to pick up a package my mother told me had arrived.

  A sofa had also come back that morning. My mother had been systematically reupholstering things that spring. She’d had all the curtains cleaned, some of them changed. She’d had the restorer in to treat all the wood surfaces in the house. She’d had the kitchen ceiling repainted. My mother was getting things in order. “Your father would never cope with any of this,” she said. “If I get all these things done, he’s got a good five years of the apartment looking all right, and by the time five years have gone by, I hope he’ll have found another woman.” So that Monday, the sofa came back. I thought it looked great; I have a feeling my mother was not entirely content with it. But it was good enough. She couldn’t very well have it redone again at this stage.

  I helped arrange the pillows. “That looks fine,” she said.

  We went into the kitchen and I made tea. We took it back to her bedroom.

  We talked about her current treatment. She said that she was having more tests in the afternoon. “The fun never stops,” she said.

  I told her that I had stayed at Helen’s.

  “Helen is a really good friend,” she said.

  Suddenly, I started to cry. I could say that it was very complicated, that it was about everything, and of course it was about everything, too. But in fact, I started to cry in simple mourning for my mother, who was there in the room with me. I started while she sat across the room, and then I walked over and sat down beside her and buried my head and wept on her shoulder. For a long time she stroked my hair. “Harry,” she said. “You will be all right, Harry.” I shook with tears, as I had cried when I was very little. It was a kind of crying I had almost forgotten. “Harry, you’ve been working yourself up into hysterics,” said my mother. “I know that you’ll miss me, Harry, but you can go on and you will go on, because you don’t have any other choice. I understand why you’re sad, Harry, but not why you’re so overwrought. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” I held on to my mother’s fragile body, the shadow of a body that she had then. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she said again. “You have such a good life, Harry. You’ve got to get on with it and live it.” Still I cried. “This has gone on long enough,” my mother said quietly, almost to herself. “You’ve all got to get on with your lives.” Then she pushed me gently away. She put a hand under my chin. “Come on, Harry,” she said. “Pull yourself together. Let’s make ourselves some lunch.” And she stood up, and led me along the hallway to the kitchen. Janet was doing the cabinets. “Janet, is there some of that salmon left?” my mother asked, and we made toast.

  • • •

  The verb “to die” is one of the few that is only readily usable in the past and future tenses. We accept, “He died last year,” and we can easily accept, “We will all die someday.” But the present tense, “I die, you die, he dies”—that should be canceled right out of the language. And to have to use the verb in that tense not for a single moment but for weeks and months and then years: that is altogether intolerable. We tend to think, furthermore, that “to die” is a verb of the instant, like “to dive.” It is a thing that takes almost no measurable time. One second you are on the board, looking at the water, and the next second you have left the board behind you and taken the plunge. So with many deaths: one second you are alive, and the next second you are dead. Science defines death in this way, and your death certificate indicates a particular moment as the moment of death. But sometimes the verb “to die” is more like the verb “to age,” and is a thing that happens by terrible and slow and imperceptible degrees. My mother was not giv
en a chance to age in that manner, and was, by way of inadequate compensation, given an experience of death as gradual as a life span.

  • • •

  On Tuesday night, we all had dinner together, in the kitchen. My mother had made chicken. She was not feeling at all well, and was off to see the stomach specialist again the following day. I had plans to meet friends that night, and had said that I could stay only until nine o’clock. My father wanted me to have no plans, but I had done enough rearranging of my schedule and I put my foot down.

  Freddy pulled the wishbone out of the chicken. “How about it, Mom?” he asked, offering her one side.

  “If wishes were horses,” she said, and they each pulled, and she won. “Look at that,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said my father. “I’m sure you both wished for the same thing.”

  “I don’t think so,” said my mother cryptically. And she put her half of the wishbone at the front of one of the shelves above the kitchen table.

  At nine o’clock sharp I stood up to leave the apartment. I kissed everyone good night. “Always running off to something,” said my father.

  “Leonard, let him do what he likes,” said my mother.

  “I suppose you’re leaving all the dishes for Dad and me,” said Freddy.

  I pointed out that I had done more than my share of the dishes over the weekend in the country, while Freddy had been on the phone endlessly with that friend of his who’d moved to Chicago.

  “I’ll do the dishes,” said my father in a tone of mock heroism. “Just stop arguing.”

  “Go on, Harry,” said my mother. “You’re keeping your friends waiting.” And so, though I suddenly wanted to stay, I went.

  • • •

  The next morning, Wednesday morning, my mother went to see her last doctor, for a test the details of which seem too miserable to tell, a test whose lack of dignity, in a day when my mother had, above all else, an unsullied sense of her own dignity, seems to make it irrelevant. The truth of that day lies not in what she endured at the hands of that gastroenterologist, but in the quiet, unyielding, and generous determination with which she was to carry off her death itself. Because that day, Wednesday, after seeing the doctor, in the late afternoon, my mother killed herself.

  In real life, people do not have deathbed scenes. Deathbed scenes are a matter for grand opera, and you will perhaps recall that my mother hated grand opera. I can remember her joking about women who stumble across the stage singing for an hour while the knives turn in their hearts; it was one of her synecdoches for the absurdity of the form. But my mother had a deathbed scene as grand and rich, as well-conceived and as stunning as La Traviata’s. Like some Butterfly loosed on Manhattan, she plunged her many knives into her own ravaged frame, and having done that she sang like the sea itself, as though the lifetime she had saved and felt and known had suddenly all come to repeat itself, until we felt, finally, that love was in the room with us, an object no more substantial than her last breaths, but so strong that it would stay with us for all our lives.

  On the Wednesday my mother died, the implausible weather finally broke, and it rained and it rained and it rained and it rained. I remember that this seemed like a dark omen when I woke up in the morning, as though the clouds had come to tell me something I would have preferred not to know. But I remember feeling also that the rain seemed protective, all that water flowing down around us, and that my apartment seemed strangely dry and safe in the downpour. I remember sitting inside with all the lights on, thinking that I needed more and better lamps. I played the Schubert over, the piece on my CD, which I was to play for a concert two weeks later. I tried to play it just as it was on the CD, but I found that the piece had changed for me, that it had become softer and less clear. I put down the lid of the piano, and decided that I would rearrange all my closets, bring to the apartment the fullness of order, the order that had degenerated into chaos during the weeks before the party. Seldom have I been so meticulous and so thorough: I chose each hanger for each pair of trousers, put the suits at the left side, the winter things far to the right, arranged my neckties in a chromatic progression.

  Did I have a sense of foreboding on that damp morning? Is there anyone in the world who, recalling the events, has not had a sense of foreboding on the day of his mother’s death? I had had a sense of foreboding every day for a month, and on that day I had a strange sense of peace, a sense that the time had come to put everything in place. Was I hoping for my mother’s death? The thought made me ill. And yet it cannot be denied that what we have anticipated with dread for too long comes to seduce us. I wanted to put pain behind me, and though my mother’s death, in fact, would only change the shape of my pain, it would be at least an end to her pain, an end to the pain outside my knowledge or ability to affect. I wanted my mother to live forever, but if she could not live forever, I wondered whether it wasn’t time for her to go.

  That is not to say that I was prepared or even comprehending when she called at three o’clock. “Hello, Harry,” she said. “How are you?”

  I said that I was OK, and that I had been rehanging the closets. “And how are you?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t good news this afternoon from that doctor,” she said, and paused for a moment. “I think this is it.”

  I felt a strange surge of terror, and excitement, and also panic, and also a sudden blankness. “Do you mean—” I started. I tried to think of words.

  “I think you’d better come uptown,” she continued. “I’m going to call Freddy now.” Then we hung up. I spun around. I was in a bathrobe and wearing glasses, my hair all standing on end; I had not bothered to get dressed before attacking the closets. Should I just throw on something fast and rush uptown, or should I have a shower first and try to calm down? I couldn’t bear to waste any of my mother’s remaining minutes on earth, but I also wanted to spend the last evening I would spend with her feeling, in small external ways, my best; she hated it when I didn’t shave. I wanted her to remember me as she most liked to see me. I rushed into the bathroom to wash my hands, and the phone rang. I couldn’t decide whether to pick it up, and I almost left it, and then I grabbed it, and it was my mother. “I thought it might be easiest if I sent Robert down to get you,” she said. “I’ll send him down now, and you can collect Freddy from the lab on your way uptown, and you boys can come up here together.”

  So I had time to shower and shave after all. My hands were shaking so badly that I could barely hold on to the soap, and the razor was tricky. My contact lenses were almost impossible. Haste makes waste, I thought, trying not to jab myself too many times. I stood in the shower and tried to lose myself in the rush of the water, tried to find repose in the splashing of the water, rubbed shampoo into my hair. I felt physically sick.

  I was rubbing conditioner into my scalp when I suddenly felt again the urgency of time, and so I rinsed my hair quickly. I wondered whether Robert was downstairs yet, and worried that I might be wasting minutes I could have been spending with my mother. I rushed to get clothes to wear. And then there was a moment of puzzlement: what to wear to head uptown for my mother’s death? As I looked at my clothes, each item seemed to me marked either as something I had bought in accord with and tribute to my mother’s taste, or as something I had bought in resistance to my mother’s taste. I might have organized my closets that morning by putting the clothes she liked on one side and the clothes she disliked on the other; the items she liked well enough but would never have chosen for me could have been ranged in the middle.

  I put on khaki trousers and a blue oxford-cloth shirt, nothing ostentatious, not items we had talked about at any length, year-old and comfortable, but clean and freshly pressed and neat. I stared in confusion at my sweaters, and then suddenly saw the green sweater she had knitted for me. I’d never worn it much, because it itches slightly, and because I’d had a fear of wearing it out: I started saving that
sweater when it was made, even before my mother got sick. It seemed like the right thing to wear that day. It occurred to me then that I would probably be the one to choose the clothes in which my mother would be buried.

  I became aware again that I was wasting time, and I went downstairs. I stood inside the glass doors to my building and stared at the steady gray pulse of the rain. Robert wasn’t there yet. The traffic was moving agonizingly slowly. Finally, he pulled up. He, of course, didn’t know what was happening, so I ducked through the rain, got into the car, and tried to seem sunny as we drove uptown. Freddy was waiting on the corner outside his office, and we hugged each other. “This is too weird,” he said, and I agreed. “I don’t feel anything,” he said, and I realized that I was numb, completely numb. On the way to my parents’ apartment we had a conversation that was only half in code, so as not to give away too much to Robert; but we didn’t keep much secret, either.

  We inched our way north through the slow traffic. Robert naturally drove us up Madison Avenue. Whether it is the most convenient route or not, Robert still drives up Madison Avenue rather than Park or Third, because it was always my mother’s preference. That training ran deep. I can remember how, when I was little, she would say: “Leonard, let’s drive up Madison. And don’t drive too quickly; I want to see what’s in the windows.” And my father would grumble something about shop windows, but he would drive up Madison, not too quickly, and my mother would watch out her window as though she were at the movies, at a movie version of her own life. So on this day, too, true to his training, Robert drove us up Madison Avenue, in the rainy day traffic, until we were finally there.

  How many times had I gone upstairs on that same elevator in much that same way and come into the front hall, where the light was on? How many times had I gone from the front hall through the big wooden door into the back hall, how many times called out greetings (because my mother hated for people to come in and not call out their hellos; she said it was like thieves in the night). So this time, Freddy and I walked in the front door and we called out hello, and heard the echo sounding through the hall. And then we walked along that hall (my mother had lately recarpeted it in green, as part of her scheme to get the apartment into shape) and in my parents’ room (I still seem to call it my parents’ room; that was the last day that I did not have to reproach myself and say instead that it is my father’s room)—in my parents’ room were my parents. My father looked shocked and so grief-stricken; his whole face was tensed, as though his jaw and neck were being held together only through the strain of muscles beneath the skin.