A Stone Boat

by Andrew Solomon

  She said that she was uncomfortable and asked me to get her another pillow, and I got it for her, and then she lay down again, and I straightened out the plaid blanket, and for a long time Freddy sat beside her on one side and I sat beside her on the other side and held her hand, and my father sat back on his red chair, crying. And then she began to speak. I noticed that the hand I held had on her wedding ring, which was the only ring she wore. My mother had always spoken easily, but now she seemed to speak in a new language, a language of transfiguration. At first she spoke quickly, but as the drug settled in, it became a slow monologue.

  I said to her, “You look so fragile.” Freddy and my father were silent.

  And she said, “I am fragile.” She reached up and touched my arm, and then sat up slightly. “That’s the sweater I made you,” she said in a tone of surprise, and readjusted the shoulder slightly. “It’s good to see you in that sweater. It’s a nice sweater, Harry. Enjoy it.”

  “You gave us such a wonderful life,” I said. “The trips and the parties and—”

  She interrupted. “Oh, Harry, I hope you remember more than the trips and the parties,” she said. “I hope you remember something else. You were,” and she paused, as though she were looking for a word. When she spoke again, she put an enormous weight onto each syllable. “You were the most beloved child.” She looked straight at me. “We waited so long for you. No child was ever loved more than you.” She paused again. “Until you were born I had no idea that I could feel anything like what I felt then. Suddenly there you were. I had read books all my life about mothers who bravely said that they would die for their children, and that was just how I felt. I would have died for you. I hated for you to be unhappy. I felt so deeply for you whenever you were unhappy. It was so much worse than to be unhappy myself, it pulled at me so terribly. I wanted to wrap you up in my love, to protect you from all the terrible things in the world. Maybe I sometimes protected you too much, but I always did it because I loved you. I wanted my love to make the world a happy and joyful and safe place for you.” She squeezed my hand, so gently that it was almost imperceptible. “Harry, Freddy, I want you to feel that that love is always there, that it will go on wrapping you up even after I am gone. My greatest hope is that the love I’ve given you will stay with you for your whole life.” Her voice took on a softer tone, almost at the edge of incredulity. “I loved you so much. And you always returned that love. I never knew why, why I loved you so much, or why you should love me. It was something that was just there, and it was the most wonderful and amazing thing in the world.

  “And then you were born, Freddy. I felt it all over again. I felt twice as much as I had known I could feel.” She looked away, and called out for my father, and he, almost reluctantly, came to sit on the side of the bed. He took her left hand. I curled up farther down the bed, so that several times she had to ask me to move slightly so she could stretch out her legs. Freddy and I held her right hand together. “First there was you, Leonard. All my childhood I was this little girl who thought she was unlovable, and then you came along and you really loved me. When I met you, you made me feel like a person. I wasn’t a person until I met you. I didn’t know it, but I wasn’t, I really wasn’t. And now I’ve had thirty wonderful years. You just accepted me exactly as I was, and loved me as exactly who I was. You supported me through fights, and miscarriages, and worries, and panic. You always told me I was right, even when you didn’t think so.” A shiver ran down her spine. “I would gladly have given decades of my life to be the one who went first. I can’t imagine what I would have done if you had died before me. You are my life. For thirty years you have been my life.”

  Her voice trailed off for a minute. The drug was beginning to set in, and her speech was slowing. “I always felt important when we went out together. You always made me feel important. It wasn’t the jewelry and clothes. When I went out with you, I was carried along by your love. And then you were born, Harry. And then you, Freddy. Two more came along, and then there were three people who all really loved me. And I loved you all so much; I was so overwhelmed, so overpowered by it.”

  She turned her head and looked at my father. “Leonard,” she said. “Leonard, don’t forget that your life is in other people. I know you, Leonard. I’ll be gone and you’ll try to bury yourself in the office and work and you’ll crowd up your mind. I’ve told the boys and I’ve told all our friends: you have to find someone for yourself. You could live for another thirty years, Leonard, for as long as we’ve known each other. Don’t waste that time.”

  Then she looked at me. “Pull yourself together, Harry,” she said. “You’ve been letting yourself go to pieces these last few months. You’ve got to get your life in order and get on with it. Everyone’s mother dies, sooner or later. Don’t sit around feeling sorry for yourself: you’re brilliant and talented and you have wonderful friends, and you’re a good person, and you should have a good life. And don’t lose yourself in ridiculous teenage crushes. Wait for someone who cares. Harry, there will be someone who cares.” She paused. “Don’t think that you’re paying me some kind of tribute if you let my death become the great event of your life and you fall apart. The best tribute you can pay to me as a mother is to go on and have a good and fulfilling life, and to love someone who deserves and returns your love.”

  She turned her head again. “Freddy, you have to let go a little bit. You’re like me with all that control. You have to let go a little bit and let someone love you, and make a life for yourself. The only thing I regret right now is that I’ve spent my whole life looking forward. Don’t do that. I’ve had so many of the things that everyone else only dreams of, and I haven’t always enjoyed them as much as I should have. Enjoy what you have. All of you. Life is—” She paused. “Life is so sweet.”

  She paused again, for longer. “I’m so proud of both you boys and I love you so much. I’ll go on loving you even when I’m not here; I’ll love you your whole life. I’ll come sit on your shoulder, the one Grandma isn’t on, and stay there forever.”

  And then there was a sort of struggle, as though she were negotiating a few last minutes with her own heavy eyes. She looked at my father again. “I’ve been so lucky. Ever since I married you, I’ve been so lucky. I wouldn’t want to change my life with anyone else’s. I have loved completely, and I have been completely loved, and I’ve had such a good time. I might want to change my death, but even with this death, I wouldn’t want to change my life for any other life in the world. There are so few people who can say that.” She looked up. “I love this room,” she said. “I love this color pink. I’ve loved lying in here, afternoons, nights. It’s like being inside a shell.”

  Her voice was becoming faint, as though she were speaking through water. “I’ve looked for so many things in my life,” she said. “So many things.” She stopped and she moved her head very slightly to one side. “And all the time Paradise has been in this room with the three of you.” She closed her eyes for a minute. I thought they might not open again, but they did. She looked straight at Freddy. “Thanks for the back rub, Freddy,” she said. “Thanks for taking care of Dad.” And then she closed her eyes again, for the last time. For a while we all sat there on the bed with her, waiting, wondering whether she was going to say anything more. After about ten minutes, my father stood up and crossed the room and sat back in his red chair. “Oh, my sweet wife,” he sobbed. I looked at my watch. It was ten-thirty. At exactly that time, a week earlier, my mother had quietly left the party.

  Freddy and I stayed on the bed for a few more minutes, looking at each other. Then he stood up and crossed the room, and went to sit on my father’s lap. My eyes and my mouth were dry. I looked at my mother, lying there and breathing steadily. It seemed incredible to me that none of us was waking her up, that we weren’t doing anything about the fact that she was dying, that we weren’t trying to stop it. I wanted to reach out and shake her by her shoulders; she would proba
bly have looked up at me and perhaps then she would have said something. I wanted to call an ambulance and take her to the hospital and get her stomach pumped. I thought she was wrong, that even if she had only two months of agony left they would be better than this.

  But I didn’t do anything. I just sat there and held her hand. Occasionally I said something. I didn’t know whether she could hear me or not. It didn’t matter. There wasn’t anything left to say.

  • • •

  At the end of an hour, I finally stood up and crossed the room to where my father and Freddy were, and threw in my lot with the living. “How long does this take?” I asked my father, who I thought should be making sure that things proceeded in an orderly fashion. He handed me the booklet, as though he no longer had any responsibility for it. The booklet, however, did not say how long it took for the pills to work. We had somehow, all of us, assumed that it took an hour or so, but here we were an hour later, and my mother was still breathing peacefully and regularly.

  “We can’t just sit here watching,” said Freddy.

  “I don’t know what else to do,” said my father. “Look at her,” he said. “She’s still so beautiful.”

  “Well, let’s at least get out of this room,” I said, and I led them down the hall to the kitchen. My father sat on a chair and continued to cry. Freddy and I washed the dishes from the light meal we’d had earlier.

  “Anyone want a cookie?” said Freddy, but no one did, so he put the cookies back in the box and put the plate in the dishwasher.

  “Does someone want to go back and see what’s happening in there?” asked my father.

  There was a brief silence. I focused on rearranging the glasses on the upper rack of the dishwasher. “I’ll go,” said Freddy. My father and I stared at the walls until Freddy came back a minute later. “Same as before,” he said.

  I took out a pad. “All that stuff she said was incredible,” I said.

  “Your mother was such a remarkable woman,” my father began, and then started to weep again.

  I was suddenly businesslike. “Let’s try to remember as much as we can,” I said. “I want to write down as much as possible, so we can remember it.” I began listing things as I remembered them. Freddy came up with some others that I had already forgotten. My father also volunteered a few. It never occurred to me to write down what I had said to her; now it saddens me that I remember her last words so well, while my last words to her have vanished.

  “The first night your mother and I went out,” my father said, “she recited Yeats to me.” My mother had had a joke about that first date. She used to say that she had recited Yeats because she couldn’t think of anything to say. But my father was not in a jokey mood. “I’d never been out with a girl who did anything like that.” He paused. “It was something about dreams,” he said.

  Freddy and I, who had known the story since childhood, chimed almost in unison, “Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.”

  My father looked at us in surprise. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, that was it.” And he seemed to drift off into thought. “I guess someone should check again,” he said.

  I went this time. My mother was still lying there, just as she had been, breathing softly. I had realized by then that I was going to have to spend the night uptown. I wanted to call Helen. I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to get away from my whole family. I wanted to wake my mother up, but I also wanted her dead, wanted it almost enough to kill her, because I couldn’t stand any more waiting. My mother had been right. It was time for it to be over. If it hadn’t been time in the afternoon, it was certainly time now. I went back to the kitchen. “Nothing’s changed,” I said.

  My father studied the booklet for a few minutes. Freddy went back to his room and got a big file with all the letters and birthday cards and postcards and funny notes my mother had ever sent him, and he dumped it all over the kitchen floor. “I want to find something she wrote to me,” he said. “For a eulogy.”

  My father shook his head. “I could never deliver a eulogy,” he said. I looked at my list of sentences, the last words on the yellow notepad. My father coughed. “Boys,” he said. “It says here that sometimes the pills don’t work, and that if they don’t take effect and you think the patient is waking up you should try to smother him under a pillow, as he will be too weak to fight back and will in that way die as planned.”

  I remembered my mother saying that the one thing she feared was waking up, and though I still wanted in some ways to wake her myself, to get something more from her, I knew that she had closed her eyes when and as she had meant to close them. I knew that she would hate waking up and having her life end in a mess. I looked at my father blankly. A minute earlier, I had thought about killing her.

  “If someone has to do it, I’ll do it,” said Freddy staunchly.

  I looked at my father and waited for him to decline that offer, but it didn’t happen. “Thank you, Freddy,” he said. “I just couldn’t.”

  I went back and checked again. I thought her breathing was becoming slower, but I wasn’t sure. I went and sat by her side, and made some more meaningless remarks.

  When I got back to the kitchen, Freddy was arranging everything in piles. “Look at this,” he said, and passed me an old letter that had been sent to him at summer camp. “And do you remember these?” he said, and showed me a series of postcards my mother had sent one summer from a trip to Scandinavia with my father.

  It was nearing midnight. “It’s been a long time,” said my father. “I’ll go and check this time,” he said, and he went back, but he returned within a few seconds. “I think you’re right, Harry. I think her breathing is slower. But it’s not much slower.”

  I said that I thought we should eat something, but my father and Freddy both refused, and I, in fact, felt too sick to eat anything myself. I started trying to write a eulogy. “Should we call any of her friends?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” said my father. “Just in case something goes wrong. I think we should wait until she’s really dead before we do that.”

  “Do you know what arrangements need to be made in the morning?” I asked.

  “Your mother and I figured it all out,” said my father. “We’re going to have the funeral on Friday. We’ll have to go tomorrow and work out the details. Maybe you boys can phone our friends tomorrow. I’m not sure I could bear it. I’ll call a few people, maybe, but I can’t face that list. Your mother had so many friends.”

  An hour later, everyone agreed that we should try to eat something. There was soup in the refrigerator, which my mother had made a few days earlier. I heated it up. My father cried into his bowl, but he finished it. “This is the last time I’ll ever have your mother’s soup,” he said.

  • • •

  It took four hours for my mother to die. Freddy was the one who finally found her dead. No one had to smother her. I never looked at her dead. I could hear her voice saying, “I don’t want you to have this memory.” We had to get the death certificate and call the funeral home. While we waited for the relevant people to show up, I played the piano. First I played Scarlatti, whose work I never play in concert. My first serious teacher had told me that I should work on Scarlatti because it would give me discipline. Then I played Beethoven, and then I played the Schubert. My father came into the living room and looked at me playing. It would be touching to say that I had never played that piece better, but in fact, I knew even as I played it that there was, finally, too much emotion, that Schubert had got lost in all my emotion, and that I was playing badly. My playing was not so much an interpretation as a conquest. Nonetheless, I kept on, through the whole piece, because I thought that if I stopped I would go crazy. My father and Freddy stared at me blankly. I put in repetitions that Schubert never wrote, and I pounded on the piano hard enough to break a hammer and I stopped playing only when the doorbell rang, and the three men from the fune
ral home came in with a stretcher on wheels.

  Then I stood at the side of the hallway and told them to be careful of the wallpaper as they wheeled the stretcher back. I noticed that my mother had died on a day with an even number, that her death certificate would list an even-numbered day, which I felt was rather like her.

  After the men from the funeral home had left, my father distributed sleeping pills. We did not take the leftover red pills; we took ordinary sleeping pills, the kind my parents kept for jet lag. Still, there was something sinister about my father’s standing at the door to his room with that bottle, distributing those pills, taking one himself before getting into the bed in which my mother had died an hour earlier. “I hope you get some sleep,” my father said. Then he closed the bedroom door. I went into my old bedroom, where I had last slept the afternoon Nick broke up with me, and eventually, under the influence of the pills I had taken, I drifted off into a silence of my own.

  X

  OUR VENICE

  When I woke up the next morning, my mother was dead. This was incredible to me, and it remained incredible to me, and it is still incredible to me now. During the ordinary daylight hours, I have come to accept that my mother is dead; but in the earliest part of the day I still have the sense of bewildered disbelief that woke me up the morning after her death. She said, on the day she died, that she could not believe that we wouldn’t all be sitting around afterward discussing how we had weathered another family storm, and I feel that way myself. So much of the reality of events always came from her; if she and I could compare notes about her death, I would perhaps accept it, but since she and I have not been able to talk about it, it remains obscure and dreamlike. In the early mornings, it seems no more plausible than that the earth is round. I acquiesce to the general wisdom according to which these things are true, but I do so in contravention of every natural instinct and of the evidence of my heart.