I read my note over, and then I set off downtown. Helen met me at the door.
• • •
The process of holding on to someone who is dying and the process of holding on to someone who has died are as alien to each other as love and indifference. I had argued with my mother in the weeks before her death, but for those first months after she died she was in my mind an angel, and I had no purchase on the reality of our relationship. I played memories over and over until I eventually made them tedious even to myself. Every day I talked on the phone with my father and argued. Then I called Freddy to tell him how impossible my father was. Sometimes his line was busy, when my father was calling him to complain about me. Freddy was implacable and even-tempered; some days I thought this must mean he had loved my mother the least of us all, but some days I thought it meant he had loved her the most.
In the weeks after the funeral, Helen provided endless comfort, but so, too, did my many other friends, and I felt that I was living in the luxury of their sympathy, and that sympathy so preoccupied me that sometimes I lost for a little while any sense of my own sadness. As the months went by, however, that sympathy seemed to fall away. I went to England a few times; friends in New York and friends in London had never seemed more different, though the meaning of their friendship came in the end to parity. The English say to you frankly (Bernard said it, too): it will take you years and years and years to recover from this. The English say to you: it would be in poor form for you to tell me too much about your suffering. The English say to you: the thing to do is not to express your pain. The English say to you: you’re being very brave and good not mentioning that you are at a pitch of anguish, pretending that life is fine, and that’s just what you should go on doing.
The Americans, on the other hand, say: let it all hang out. The Americans say: tell me what is in your mind and on your mind. The Americans say: whatever you are suffering I want to be part of; I want to suffer it with you. And the Americans listen to you for one or two months with an intensity of focus before which the fragile constructs of your sorrow crumple. After two months, when Americans ask how you are, you say, as you would to the English: I’m fine. You say that because if you say anything else you will be called on to explicate it and unravel it and include the person to whom you are responding in it. You say that because you make people too uneasy if you say, simply: I feel that life itself has lost its purpose. You say that because people don’t know how to respond if you say: I feel so worn out that I have stopped answering the telephone. America and England are both terrible countries for mourning, but perhaps there are no countries that are better. At least in England people give you some credit for pulling yourself together; in America people only assume that your suffering was never so great in the first place, that if things weren’t fine you would say so.
I tried to explain this to Helen, and she stopped me. “Don’t you see,” she asked, “that there’s nothing else to do? That there’s nothing for people to say, no matter why it is that they’re not saying it? At the beginning, you had this terrible thing happen to you. Your mother died. It was straightforward and concrete and anyone could respond to it. It was outside of you. It was an event. But what you have now is something very different. You have this sorrow that is simply a part of you, that isn’t an event at all. There’s nothing to say about it; all people can do is to love you as you now are, with this pain that has become a part of you. They can’t keep responding to it as though it were a thing of its own. It’s like the way people love you while you grow older; they don’t keep telling you how sorry they are that you’re growing older, or keep saying that they really like you and how it must be awful for you that you’re becoming old. It’s just you. It’s just who you are. You’re someone else now than who you were before, and your friends are as fond of you as ever, or maybe fonder than ever. Stop complaining about it. What you’re getting is as much as anyone has any right to expect.”
• • •
I thought about that, and the months passed. I saw Helen often, but I could not quite bring myself to push our friendship back into that physical realm where it had dallied at the end of winter, and I thought that I had world enough and time to think of such matters later on. I was, of course, quite wrong. In the autumn, Helen found a new boyfriend, a sweet man who clearly adored her, and though she continued to offer me her friendship, I saw that I had in some very fundamental way missed my chance. The man she had found was less difficult than I, less demanding, more devoted to her; I look at him and I look at myself and I am reminded how very sensible Helen is. These days, I see her once every couple of weeks, and though we are always glad to see each other, she is not at the center of my life; I miss her terribly. I am forever struggling not to be angry at Helen and her boyfriend. I have found boyfriends and girlfriends of my own, but as I am not sensible like Helen, they have mostly appeared and disappeared like dots on a disk of snow. Sooner or later, perhaps, I will really fall in love with one of them, and that one will last. I suppose that someone will be the one who cares, and for whom I care; but this is scant comfort right now. Helen gave me so much time, more time than I could possibly have deserved, even under the circumstances. I know that. I am the one who wasted it.
• • •
I wasted a lot of the time I had with my mother as well. Is forgiveness ever fully conscious? Insofar as it is, I forgive my mother here and now for whatever she may ever have done that I may have failed to forgive, even for her death. Today it is a Tuesday, and the sun is out (how prone I used to be to the weather! how happy such days as this made us!)—and I forgive my mother as though I were spokesman for the very gates of heaven, as though I could paint forgiveness to stretch from my childhood to the place among the constellations where right now, perhaps, my mother is smiling her particular smile and struggling to articulate one of those little, passing insights that give life its foil of meaning. I have learned now that loss and forgiveness come only too readily to join each other, like shy and sorry partners at a crowded dance. As my sense of loss settles and becomes clearer each day, so, too, does my desire to forgive rise up and overwhelm me, until I feel I could forgive not only my mother, but also the terrors of war, the cruelty of illness, the mystery of life and death. In the end, long after a death, when your pain has become fully a part of you from which there will be no separation, as integral as your sense of humor or of self-worth, you find that the pain has brought with it its reverse. For it is also the case that all the joy that came before that pain, which had seemed foreign, or inaccessible, or temporal, or forgettable, also becomes an inalienable part of you. Then the act of memory does not entail recollection of events or circumstances; then everything you do is a part of your act of memory, and every bit of your daily life, no matter how trivial or banal, becomes a form of tribute. Already, some kinds of memory of my mother are fading. I cannot remember so well as I once could what her voice sounded like, or how she walked, or the smell of perfume and fur that came with her into the house on a winter day. I have gone on with my life, and I busy myself with ordinary negotiations, with playing the piano, with Helen, and with other friends, with lovers, with taking care of my father, with Freddy. From time to time I plan and throw a party. You get on; you get on with life because there is nothing else to do. The new experiences do not fill the void this death has left, but they lie beside it, and, as they accumulate, form banks around it to make it less terrible. My mother said the day she died that she had wanted all her life for her love to wrap me up and make the world a safe place for me, and I imagined then that her love was made of masses of cotton wool in which I could roll and luxuriate. But my mother’s love is no longer outside of me; it is within me. It is not made of cotton wool, but of bones. What the world sees are skin and eyes and the soft shapes of flesh; but that unknown and unknowable part of me that holds together the rest, giving it worth and meaning, is the part that my mother gave to me. I have built myself upon it. Th
e little memories that are the stuff of this book are almost meaningless by comparison to that. The credible life I lead does nothing to belie the wonder of this truth beneath the surface.
• • •
Until October of the year my mother died, I lived shrouded in a pure and immutable mourning, and I saw all the world out of focus. But one crisp afternoon, when I had gone out to do neighborhood errands, I chanced to hear from someone’s passing car window a song from the forties. I caught only half a minute of music before the light changed and the car sped away, but that half minute brought back to me a memory of Venice. Before our first family trip to Italy, when I was six, my mother had said, “Rome is overwhelming, and Florence is beautiful, but Venice is like fairyland.” And though in the month before that trip she had told me about Medicis and museums, about the Pitti Palace and the Arch of Constantine, she had refused to say more of Venice than that: “Venice is like fairyland.” And so for me Venice was forever fairyland.
When I was perhaps twelve, my mother and I went there, for reasons I no longer remember, without my father or my brother. I think it may have been that my school vacation and Freddy’s were out of alignment, and that we could not all travel at once. On the last day of that holiday, my mother and I went for a long walk, which took us through some of the southern parts of the city, and then led us into Piazza San Marco. We would have had to walk only another two minutes to get to the hotel. My mother was tired; it was the end of the afternoon, the hour at which she always went back to have a bath. But I was so full of delight at being in Venice—and it was our last day—and she suddenly turned to me and smiled, and suggested, to my astonishment, that we not return to the hotel yet, that we sit instead for a few minutes in one of the cafés of the square.
It was a sudden gift, a gift of time I would not have thought to ask for: her afternoon bath was sacred. And yet there it was. We walked together across the piazza, spurned Florian, and went through to the piazzetta, because an orchestra was playing there, and because we could see the sunshine on the water. It was a beautiful day, clear, with a slight breeze, and we sat at an outside table and talked and felt the air and the sun and the freshness of the water beyond us, and listened to the sentimental music of the orchestra. Did they play the song I was to hear from a car window a few months after my mother’s death? Perhaps they did; certainly it was that music that returned this Venetian day to me. What I remember about sitting there at the café, while my mother sang along to some of the tunes and played out the rhythms of others on the table, abstractedly, with one hand, and talked to me about what time we would have dinner, and about her first trip to Venice when she was in college, and about friends and small events: what I remember most about it is that I was, at that moment, completely happy. It was the simplest, easiest, most unlabored sense in the world. I felt that there was nothing I wanted on earth that was not mine, that to be there in that café, eating—who knows what I was eating—perhaps ice cream, talking to my mother and listening to the faint strains of music and the man whistling at the next table, watching the pigeons group themselves around a few scattered tourists—it was fairyland, as full of enchantment as any promise my mother had ever made. She of course looked beautiful, and she, too, was happy, and I was a part of her happiness as much as she was a part of mine, and so our happiness seemed to form a sort of cloud of magic in which we sat, like the lucky Queen and Prince in a fairy tale. I saw—or rather, see in retrospect—not simply that it was a lovely moment, but that I was unscathed, in a way that I was soon to lose and will never reach again. For an hour or two, I felt a total and absolute rapture that nothing could mar. And what is most astonishing to me is that I didn’t have any inkling then of how rare such feelings are. I thought that this was simply what life was, that every childhood was full of such love, that everyone in the world went on much as I did, felt what I felt, knew what I knew. I understood by the time I was thirteen that I was lucky to get to Venice for spring vacation, but I had not the slightest idea of how remarkable it was to grow up in the constant radiance of my mother’s affection. Nor indeed did I know, then, that I had already embarked on a course of exchanging easier for more difficult pleasures, that my mother’s love was one of the most difficult pleasures of all, that I had been paying for it for years and would go on paying for it forever. I did not guess, then, that emotions so profound and so far-reaching might come only to those who were willing to suffer (I do not remember being asked if I were willing), that I could have such tremendous joy only if I gave up the anodyne pleasure of ordinary freedoms. I did not know that those children who grew up outside of this passionate empathy might live to the end of their days on the easy satisfactions of the manifest world, while for me love itself would remain so perilous, so engaging, and so entire as to be almost inconceivable.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is above all a novel about love, and the outpouring of affection qua editing that came from friends was profoundly moving to me. First and foremost, I must thank the close readers of every draft: Amanda Smithson, Katherine Keenum, James Wood, Mary Marks, and Maggie Robbins each plowed through version after version. Others gave wonderfully close responses to single drafts: Fran Kiernan, Jane Mendelsohn, Betsy Joly de Lotbinière, Julie Sheehan, Christian Caryl, Dorothy Arnsten, Claudia Swan, Brian D’Amato, Claire Messud, Rachel Eisler, James Meyer, Thomas Caplan, Dana Cowin, Sue Macartney-Snape, Harold Bloom, Lydia Phelps Stokes Katzenbach, Michael Lee, Talcott Camp and Carl Halvorson. Howard and David Solomon both read this closely, provided useful critical suggestions, and supported me in the writing of a story that was not without pain for them. There are three people who deserve particular thanks for giving me a vision that is at the heart of this book: Maggie Robbins, Sue Macartney-Snape, and Talcott Camp. They have been better friends than I deserve. Finally, I must thank Carolina Sherman Salguero, the bravest soldier of them all, who lived through all the terrible moods of this undertaking, and managed not to give up on me despite them. Without her, I would never have been happy enough to be able to write this book.
As a new edition of the book comes out, I would like to thank my steadfast agent, Andrew Wylie, and my remarkable editor, Nan Graham. I would also like to thank my husband, John Habich Solomon, who turned out to be the “someone who cares” to whom the mother in this novel refers.
Also by Andrew Solomon
Far from the Tree:
Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
The Noonday Demon:
An Atlas of Depression
The Irony Tower:
Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost
©ANNIE LEIBOVITZ
ANDREW SOLOMON is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and many other awards, and The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of fourteen awards, including the 2001 National Book Award. Solomon’s work is published in twenty-two languages. He is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Cornell University and Special Adviser on LGBT Affairs to Yale University’s Department of Psychiatry.
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COVER PHOTOGRAPH: BIBI IN THE NEW EDEN ROC RESTAURANT, CAP D’ANTIBES, 1920, PRINTED 1977, JACQUES HENRI LARTIGUE, FRENCH, 1894–1986, DYE COUPLER PRINT, 23.8 X 30.3 CM; GIFT OF ROSEMARY SPEIRS, OTTAWA, 1996, IN MEMORY OF ALAN JOHN WALKER, © TORONTO NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA (NO. 38430)
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Excerpt from “At the Fishhouses” from The Complete Poems 1927–1979 by
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