Little Boy Blues

  Prelude  

On certain autumn days in New York City, the light seems to come from every direction. Maybe it’s because there is so much glass, so many reflections and so many ways a beam can be fractured and redirected, but by the time sunlight reaches street level, it can appear even brighter than the sky. There are moments, particularly at midday, when people and objects take on a peculiar, almost hallucinatory clarity, and those days have a way of fixing their events in our memories with remarkable, almost excruciating detail.

With no effort at all, I can recall a day like that from four years ago. A friend and I were walking back from lunch, heading east on 57th Street. Just as we came abreast of an apartment building halfway down the block between 8th and 9th Avenues, a frail old woman emerged from the building, tottered toward the curb and collapsed at our feet. The doorman who had been holding the door for her saw it happen and rushed to her side, yelling over his shoulder for someone to call an ambulance. A nurse ran out from a doctor’s office on the ground floor of the apartment building. In
less than a minute, the crisis was under control. It was one of those small, miraculous moments when, for once, everything goes exactly right. So, with nothing left for us to do but gawk, I drew my friend away, and we walked on, talking about what we had just witnessed. Then, half a block down the sidewalk, I stopped at the window of an optician’s shop and pointed out some sunglasses I liked. After a moment or two, she moved away, muttering that she really wasn’t in the mood to look at sunglasses. Hearing that, I felt immediately ashamed and apologized for my callousness. My friend assured me that it wasn’t callous, and we dropped the subject and turned in at our building. But I could not stop thinking about what had happened. Though not nearly as kind as my friend, whose first impulse was to climb into the ambulance and ride with the woman to the hospital, I, too, had been concerned about that old woman. And then, unconsciously, I had turned that feeling off as quickly and absently as you would turn off the tap. Back at my desk, going over and over the episode, I tried to fathom how I could stare at someone so helpless and in need one minute and window-shop for sunglasses a minute or two later. It took me the better part of the afternoon to figure it out—and even before it came clear, I saw that some part of me did not want to understand it—and by mentally tracing my steps back to that disturbing scene on the sidewalk, and forcing myself to look down again, I saw at last what had so frightened me. It was my mother.

Reconstructing the moment in which the woman fell and then lay there on the concrete, small and pale in that ginlike autumn light, I broke open a door kept locked since my mother died, a door behind which hid every image of her steady decline into helplessness and senility and finally death. I saw a woman who
for the last year of her life had come unmoored in time, a woman for whom the past now formed only a continuous present: one moment she was a child in a tiny South Carolina mill town, then a middle-aged single mother in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, then a happy single schoolteacher just out of college and dancing in the moonlight on the beach in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. In her mind, it was all the same, compassless and clockless. When she slept, her face was like a dozing child’s, blank and slack, but sometimes, even in sleep, some emotion, faint as breath, would ripple across the surface, light and quick, like a little breeze across a glassy lake. Most wretched were the infrequent moments when she did break through the fog, when you could catch, behind the doll’s-eye blankness of her gaze, some brief kindling of terrified awareness signaling that she knew where she was and what was happening. A month before she died, she woke up in the hospital and realized that her leg had been amputated. “Oh God,” she cried, “please let me die. Don’t take me a piece at a time.” And it wasn’t just her helplessness I saw but my own as well: all those moments staring down into a bed—beds in the nursing home where she lived out the last years of her life, or beds in the hospital where she would be taken occasionally, each time returning a little more disoriented. I remembered standing beside her, listening to her talk and trying to decide from moment to moment who she thought I was—her father, her husband, her son? Faced with the fact that the one person who had known me longer—and yes, adored me more—than anyone else now no longer knew who I was, I felt almost as lost as she was. Being with her eased the sadness. The worst times came when, driven by some kind of perverse optimism, I picked up the phone in New York and called her room in the infirmary in Winston-Salem and
then sat there gripping the receiver, willing her to answer—the phone was right there within easy reach of the bed she never left. Sometimes I let it ring for a minute, and a minute can seem like a long time when no one is taking your call. I felt like a man trying to drill through a rock with a feather. As long as she was alive, I never had the phone disconnected, but she never picked it up again.

I can’t say what surprised me more: the vividness of those memories or the unconscious ruthlessness with which I had buried them. Until the moment when that woman collapsed on the sidewalk, I would have said “banished,” not “buried.” But now I understood that those memories had never gone away. They had been there all along, waiting for the right moment to erupt.

When my mother died, I was not sad, only relieved. She would suffer no longer, and neither would I. There would be no more emergency plane trips for me when she went to the hospital, no more making decisions for her and hoping I was choosing wisely. There would be no more bills to pay or doctors to interrogate. I felt little guilt. But there was doubt. When my mother’s considerate friends assured me that I had done all I could for her, I believed them, because I wanted to agree with them, and because “all I could do” was not necessarily the same thing as “all that could be done.”

It sounds fanciful to say that after that afternoon I allowed my mother back into my life. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I acknowledged that I could no longer keep her out. I had been trying to do that for my whole adult life, without much success. When I was a child—her only child—we were inseparable. After that, I retreated, while she laid siege to my defenses in a
battle that continued until she died. Each of us tried, at various times and in very different ways, to bridge the gap that lay between us. My mother wanted her little boy back. I wanted her to see me as I saw myself, not as the idealized child she had lost. Until she died, I nursed the hope that things could be better between us, and I believe she did, too. But both of us were stubborn. We each wanted the reconciliation on our terms, and neither of us gave an inch.

When my father died, six years before my mother, the ground felt like sponge beneath my feet for a few months, and then things righted themselves. My parents had divorced when I was twelve, and after that, my father and I rarely saw each other. We loved each other, but we were never close. When my mother died, it was as though a planet had suddenly been removed from the solar system, and not some marginal, Pluto-like dwarf planet but one as big as Jupiter or Saturn. It threw my whole life off balance, not for just a few months but forever. Even now, I find it hard to admit how much of my life was defined by her, how I lived—no matter how far away I got—with respect to her, and how much remained unchanged even after she was gone. Nothing about her dying surprised me much. It’s how fiercely she stayed alive after she was dead that caught me unaware.

  Pulling Strings