But my mother looked much as she had looked for months. She was sitting up on the pink love seat at the foot of the bed, her back erect, and she had a magazine in her lap. “Hello, boys,” she said. It was the last time she ever said that. “Hi,” we said. She had on her little bit of non-allergenic makeup (still from the doctor’s appointment? Was it just what she had worn to go out for the day, or had she touched it up before we arrived?) and she was wearing a nightgown with pink roses on it, and with lace around the neck and the arms. It was not one of the amazing silk nightgowns she saved for European trips; it was just a nightgown, in her favorite color, with flowers. It was the kind of thing my mother wore, the kind of thing she always wore, that she slept in from my earliest childhood. She was wearing a long pink bathrobe, and one of her white turbans, very fresh and clean, carefully straight on her head. She looked so much herself that I could hardly bear to see her; nor could I turn my eyes away.
Had she said in the hospital room, one year before, that she was already dead? She had repeated, insistently: can’t you see that the woman you loved is already gone, that I am only a shadow, that she isn’t here anymore? But the day she died, that was altogether untrue. She was never more entirely present than she was on that last day in her bedroom. On the day my mother died, it was as though all the richness of her character that provident nature had saved to be slowly dispensed over the following thirty-two years (had she lived as long as her own mother) was suddenly poured out in the space of three or four hours. It was almost blinding, so dazzling you could hardly look at it, a distillation of her capacity to love. Never have I loved anyone so much, or felt so loved, as I did in those few hours.
Freddy went and sat beside her on the love seat, and I sat down on the floor at her feet. Freddy took one of her hands, and I took the other. My father sat opposite us in his red chair. The three of us who were not my mother were full of anxiety, but my mother behaved as though this were only another ordinary matter in the course of family life. “How exactly does this work?” my mother asked, and my father dutifully looked again through the booklet with the directions for ill people who want to kill themselves. He said that according to the booklet it was the usual practice to have a light meal about forty-five minutes before taking the pills. Freddy kept interrupting. “This is just too weird,” he said. Then he said, “Are you sure you want to do this now?” and my father and I were more or less in tears.
My mother said to Freddy: “It’s really time now. I think you know that.” And then she said, “I think we’re all being a little bit melodramatic, don’t you?” And she said, “I guess we might as well get started and go eat something, if that’s what the directions say to do.” And she stood up and led us into the kitchen, her long pink bathrobe trailing out behind her. Freddy and my father and I trailed along in her wake like clouds. “Who wants an English muffin?” she asked. My father said he couldn’t possibly eat anything, and my brother also ate nothing. I had had nothing to eat all day and I was desperately hungry, and though I felt sick, I had a feeling that I would feel sicker later on, and I had an English muffin.
Freddy and I set the table and my mother sat in her place at its far end. We kept up a stream of non-talk: who wanted tea and where had the potholder gone and did everyone have a napkin. Freddy took a box of cookies, left from the previous evening, and put it on the table. My mother looked up at him, a look full of affection and a lifetime’s frustration, lessons still untaught but worth another chance, and she said, “Freddy. For the last time. Please. Would you put the cookies on a plate.”
We all laughed (it seems incredible that we all laughed, but it’s true) and Freddy put the cookies on a plate. “Just for you, Mom,” he said.
My mind was crowded with something ridiculous. I couldn’t decide whether to tell my mother that I had broken a dessert plate the previous weekend in the country. It seemed like such a small matter, the dessert plate; I had intended to buy a replacement and just quietly take it up to the house. She would never have known. Why, then, tell her now? But I suddenly regretted every detail of my life that I had never shared with her, every misdeed, every calculation to which I had not immediately confessed. I have repeated as though it were a mantra that my mother knew me, but at that moment I wanted to tell her everything there was that she didn’t know, to hold on to the absoluteness of her. And I wanted her to forgive me, though that dessert plate was a small matter to forgive. I don’t know what the total is of the things I did that made my mother unhappy. At that moment, she would have forgiven anything. I knew that the dessert plate was so unimportant as not to be worth mentioning, and I never mentioned it; but in my dreams, I can still see that plate shattered on the white marble floor, the fragments high-gloss in their glaze, with dull edges of rough white.
The period in that day about which I am fuzziest is the period in the kitchen. I made my mother’s chamomile tea, so pale it was hardly more than water, the way she liked it. I ate a muffin. I was aware, as I put on not too much butter, that it was the last time I would ever do what I knew was best for myself in deference to her watchful eye. Freddy had put out the cookies in their box, but I knew not to put too much butter on my muffin, and yet I also knew that a well-toasted muffin must have enough butter to make it delicious—an amount my mother had demonstrated to me in my early childhood.
She buttered her own muffin.
I said that there were a thousand things I had still to ask her. “I’m not ready for this yet,” I said.
“We’re all as ready as we’re ever going to be,” said my mother. “If you have things to ask me, then ask me now, Harry. I’ll do my best to tell you.”
I couldn’t think of anything. For some reason, I asked her how to make oatmeal. She said to follow the directions on the box but use milk instead of water, and to add a little bit of cinnamon. “And keep stirring,” she said. “Don’t let it get lumpy.” Freddy asked how to make roast chicken. “Boys,” she said. “Most of my recipes are written down in that blue notebook. Whatever isn’t in that blue notebook you can ask Janet about; she knows how I cook most things. Otherwise, use a cookbook. The world is full of good recipes.”
Freddy looked up at the shelves over the table and saw the winning half of the wishbone still sitting there. He reached over and picked it up. “What did you wish, Mom?” he asked.
“I wished for this to be over as quickly and as painlessly as possible.” My father began to cry again, but my mother smiled. “And I got my wish.” She looked back down at her English muffin. “I got my wishes so often,” she said.
There was a pause.
She turned to me then. “Harry,” she said. “There’s one thing I haven’t had time to do, and I’m telling you because you’ll remember and your father and Freddy won’t. I had the arrangement of dried flowers that goes in the front hall in the country redone, and I haven’t picked it up yet. It’s at that dried-flower shop near the antique dealer where we bought your desk, and it’s supposed to be ready this weekend. Please try to get it before the end of the month, because if you wait all summer, it’ll get kicked around in their storage area and it’ll look awful.”
I stared at her for a second. “Yes, of course,” I said. “I’ll get the flowers.”
“They’re being put in that same ceramic pot that they’ve always been in,” she said.
“OK,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll recognize them.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I had a few more weeks. I didn’t think I had much time, but I thought a few more weeks at least. Still, I’ve done almost everything. I’m probably forgetting something, but you’ll all figure it out.”
The cookies were on a plate but no one was eating them.
“When I’m gone, you should make sure that you get rid of my clothes and my personal things as quickly as you can. Don’t distribute my belongings to your friends or my friends or even to Janet. You don’t need to see
them wandering around. I don’t care what you do with them, but get them out of here sometime this month. I know that it will be unpleasant, but it will be a relief to get them out. My jewelry should be left in the safe. It’s for my daughters-in-law. Don’t bury me with any of it, except my wedding ring; it would be a stupid waste. And don’t you boys give it to the first people you think you like. When you have real relationships that are forever, then you can give it to those people.”
We all nodded.
“Shall we go back to the bedroom?” asked my mother, and she stood up. As though in a trance, we all followed her.
She took off her bathrobe and got into bed. She arranged her pillows for the last time in that odd way she had of arranging her pillows, and she said she was a little bit cold, and asked for her blanket. It was that same blanket that she had kept taking to the hospital, the plaid blanket with the squares in different colors.
“What’s next?” she asked my father.
My father studied the booklet for a moment, though, in fact, he’d read it a thousand times and knew it almost by heart. “You’ve got to take the antiemetic,” he said.
“Freddy,” my mother said. “Go and get me a glass of water, would you?”
Freddy remembered the cookies. “No ice, no lime, sparkling water in a stem glass?” he asked.
“Thank you, Freddy,” she said. And he went and got the water, and my mother took the antiemetics.
“Now we have to wait about forty-five minutes,” said my father.
“Isn’t this strange?” said my mother. “Here we all are together again, going through all of this. I feel as though tomorrow we’re all going to be sitting together and talking about it, making it into a family routine about how we weathered another disaster. It seems so unreal to me, the idea that I’m not going to be here.” There was a strangeness in her voice. “I hope you’re not going to be angry at me about this,” she said. She looked at Freddy and she looked at me. “I think it’s best for me, and for you boys, and for you, Leonard.” She paused.
“Losing you can’t be best for me,” said my father.
“This has gone on long enough,” said my mother. “You’ve all lived through enough, and you have to get on. If I had a choice, no one would be losing me, but there isn’t any choice now. I just meant that I hoped you wouldn’t be sorry afterward that you had all been here today. I thought about doing this when you were all out of the house, but I thought it would be such a horrible surprise. And then I thought about doing it just with you, Leonard, but I thought you two boys might feel . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Left out,” she finished, with a sort of shrug.
My father interrupted. “I couldn’t have gone through this alone,” he said.
“I know,” said my mother. “I knew that, too. So I decided this was the best way to do it. But it’s a terrible thing for you boys to have to go through, and for you, Leonard, a terrible thing for you to have to remember. I’ve tried my best. I really have.” She drifted off into silence.
“You seem so calm,” Freddy said. “You seem so in control. You’re about to die, Mom, and you seem completely in control.”
My mother nodded. “That’s the way I’ve lived my whole life, Freddy, and it’s not a bad way to live. Think about it. You too, Harry.”
My father had started to cry again.
“Don’t you feel frightened?” I asked.
“Frightened?” My mother looked puzzled. “No, not frightened. The only thing I’m afraid of is that this may not work, that I may take all those pills and then wake up again. Aside from that, I feel only sad. I feel terribly sad,” she said. “I feel as though I’m leaving sooner than I’d planned to. But in many ways I feel as though I do have the bulk of it all behind me, as though I’ve had the real experiences of my life. I’ve run the race.” She paused again.
“I wanted you to be here to see me run it, too,” I said plaintively.
“Oh, yes, Harry,” she said. “That’s what I wanted, too. I wanted that more than anything.”
There was a brief pause. “I’m glad you made it to my party,” I said, rather idiotically.
My mother smiled. “Of course, Harry,” she said, as though we were discussing the scheduling of a lunch engagement. “I wouldn’t have missed your party.” Then she looked across the room. I was sitting with her on the bed, and Freddy was rubbing her shoulders, which she’d said were stiff. My father was in his red chair on the other side of the room, weeping quietly. “Leonard,” she said, and she reached out her arms. “Come here, Leonard,” she said, and my father slowly crossed the room and came and stood by her head and held her hands in his. They looked at each other.
“I wish it weren’t raining,” I said.
“Oh, I’m glad it’s raining,” said my mother. I remembered that it had been raining the day we left Lake Como, ten months earlier. It was always my mother’s ideal to have a holiday of unrelenting sun, and then to have the rain begin the day we left. It should rain the day you leave, she used to say, because it makes you feel more ready to go home. Was it coincidence that my mother killed herself on a wet day? The day she went to the doctor and got bad news happened to be rainy, but I think I had known that she would choose a wet afternoon; I had come to be afraid of the weather itself. Our lives are shaped when water hangs in the air.
“Maybe each of us should get a minute alone with you,” said Freddy. “Just a minute.” I said that I thought it was a good idea. My mother said that would be fine. So Freddy went first. My father and I waited in the hall while they talked. I don’t know what they talked about.
Then it was my turn. I went into the bedroom and closed the door. “Harry, I want to make sure you know this,” my mother said in a strong, stern tone of voice, a tone I had not expected.
“What is it?” I said.
“Harry, what happened to me is genetic.” My mother paused. “You had nothing to do with this illness. Make sure you know that, and that you believe it. It was terrible, what I said to you that week, and it was untrue. You have to believe me. It was untrue and I know that it was untrue. You didn’t make me ill. You did help to make me well for the periods when I was well, and to keep me alive through these two years, which, awful though they’ve been, I wouldn’t have missed for anything.”
I saw in that moment how much I had made her suffer over what she had said during that first hospital visit. I saw how much I’d made her suffer for years and years, and I felt terrible about it; but it was too late to change it. I thought about telling her about the dessert plate. I thought about telling her about Helen, but it was too late also for that, and it would have seemed absurd and theatrical. So I just went over and hugged her. “I love you so much,” I said. “I know I’ve been stubborn sometimes, but I hope you know how much I love you.”
“And I hope you know that I love you, Harry. I’m not obsessed, or anything else. I love you, plain and simple. I always have. I always will. Now go and open the door.”
My father stepped inside but he didn’t close the door.
“Leonard.” My mother smiled. “I have nothing to say to you that you don’t already know. I’ve said it all to you over and over again.”
“We’ve said it all,” agreed my father in a dim voice, and he crossed the room, and Freddy and I filed in behind him. He sat down on the edge of the bed and he held my mother tightly for a moment. Then he let her back down onto the pillows, very softly, as though she might chip.
“How long has it been since the antiemetics?” asked my mother. I’d known she was going to ask soon.
“It’s been an hour,” said my father.
“So it’s time for the pills,” said my mother. “Any more instructions?” It was Wednesday evening at seven-thirty. Exactly a week earlier, to the minute, she had arrived at my party.
My father went back to his red chair, where the booklet lay. “You’re supposed
to try to take them with alcohol,” he said. “You need to take at least twenty-five. They suggest thirty.” He shook his head. “You’ve got sixty of them,” he said. My parents were always thorough. “Can you take thirty pills?” he asked.
“If I can take one pill, I think I can take thirty. I’m not so sure about the alcohol. Freddy, could you get me some more water, and maybe a small glass of something alcoholic?”
“How about vodka?” said Freddy.
“Vodka will be fine,” she said.
Freddy went off to get the water and the vodka. My father went to get the pills from the bathroom. I sat at the foot of the bed and stared out the window at the endless rain.
When Freddy and my father came back, my mother said she couldn’t swallow the pills lying down. So she sat up and opened the bottle, and poured the pills out onto her plaid blanket. Then she began scooping them up, three at a time, like jacks, and putting them in her mouth and swallowing them with the mineral water. When she had taken thirty pills, she tried to swallow some of the vodka, but she choked on it. “We’re going to have to hope that this works without that,” she said. “I’ve never had straight vodka before. How can people drink that stuff ?”
I often think that I will never be able to escape the terrible image of those red pills strewn across that blanket like a handful of confetti. When I close my eyes in fear so as not to see something terrible, what I see in the chaos inside my own eyelids is those thirty red pills. In traffic at twilight, they are there ahead of me in the rear lights of every car. When I see fireworks, I find in the last of the falling stars from some glorious explosion the image of those pills again. When I see the hands of models, nails lacquered to reflect the light, I remember. And every night, as I look for sleep, I find them imprinted in my mind like thirty red lights that say stop, stop, stop, stop, over and over and to no one and to no avail.
A Stone Boat Page 25