And I remembered this: that he was interested in what he was watching. He had an interest in it. What did he think of those Indians who were dancing?
—
I said suddenly, as the lights started to come on throughout the city, “Mommy, do you love me?”
My mother shook her head, looked out at the lights. “Wizzle, stop.”
“Come on, Mom, tell me.” I began to laugh, and she began to laugh too.
“Wizzle, for heaven’s sake.”
I sat up and, like a child, clapped my hands. “Mom! Do you love me, do you love me, do you love me?”
She flicked her hand at me, still looking out the window. “Silly girl,” she said, and shook her head. “You silly, silly girl.”
I lay back down and closed my eyes. I said, “Mom, my eyes are closed.”
“Lucy, you stop it now.” I heard the mirth in her voice.
“Come on, Mom. My eyes are closed.”
There was a silence for a while. I was happy. “Mom?” I said.
“When your eyes are closed,” she said.
“You love me when my eyes are closed?”
“When your eyes are closed,” she said. And we stopped the game, but I was so happy—
—
Sarah Payne said, If there is a weakness in your story, address it head-on, take it in your teeth and address it, before the reader really knows. This is where you will get your authority, she said, during one of those classes when her face was filled with fatigue from teaching. I feel that people may not understand that my mother could never say the words I love you. I feel that people may not understand: It was all right.
It was the next day in the hospital—Monday—when Cookie said I needed just one more X-ray; it would be simple, she said, they’d be up to get me soon. Within an hour I was back in the room. My mother wiggled her fingers at me, and I wiggled mine back once I returned to my bed. “Piece of cake,” I said to her. And she said, “You’re a brave girl, Wizzle-dee.” She looked out the window, and I looked out the window too.
We must have spoken more, I’m sure we did. But then my doctor came in hurriedly and said, “We might have to take you to surgery. You may have a blockage, I don’t like what I see.”
“I can’t,” I said, sitting up. “I’ll die if I have surgery. Look how skinny I’ve gotten!”
My doctor said, “Except for being sick, you’re healthy and you’re young.”
My mother stood up. “It’s time for me to go home,” she said.
“Mommy, no, you can’t!” I cried.
“Yes. I’ve been here long enough, and it’s time I go home.”
My doctor had no response to my mother’s remark. I remember only his determination to get me to the next test to see if I needed surgery. And while I would stay in the hospital for almost five weeks more, he never asked me about my mother, if I missed her, never said that it must have been nice to have her there, not one thing about her did he say. And so I never told this kind doctor how I missed her terribly, that her coming was—well, I couldn’t have said what it was. And I didn’t say anything about it at all.
So my mother left that day. She was frightened about how she would find a cab. I asked one of the nurses to help her, but I knew that once she reached First Avenue, no nurse would be able to help her. Already two male orderlies had brought the gurney into my room, and the bed rail was taken down. I told my mother how to raise her arm, how to say “La Guardia” as though she said it often. But I could see that she was terrified, and I was terrified too. I have no idea if she kissed me goodbye, but I cannot think she would have. I have no memory of my mother ever kissing me. She may have kissed me though; I may be wrong.
I have said that at the time I am writing about, the AIDS disease was a terrible thing. It’s still a terrible thing, but people are used to it now. Being used to it is not good. But when I was in the hospital, the disease was new and no one yet understood how to keep it in abeyance, and so on the door of a hospital room in which a person had this illness would be a yellow sticker, I can remember them still. Yellow stickers with black lines. When I later went to Germany with William I thought of the yellow stickers in the hospital. They did not say ACHTUNG! But they were like that. And I thought of the yellow stars the Nazis made the Jews wear.
My mother had left so quickly, and I had been taken away on a gurney so quickly, that when I was suddenly brought out of the big elevator and parked by a wall in a hallway on a different floor, it was surprising to me that I was left there for so long. But what happened is this: I was left in a place where I could see across the hall to a room with that terrible yellow sticker on the partly opened door, and I saw a man with dark eyes and dark hair in the bed, and he was, it seemed to me, staring at me every second. I felt terrible that he was dying, and I knew that dying that way was a terrible death. I was afraid of dying, but I did not have his illness, and he had to know that—they would not have left a patient in the hallway like they left me there, had I had that illness. I felt in this man’s gaze that he was begging me for something. I tried to look away, to give him privacy, but each time I glanced at him again he was still staring at me. There are times still I think of those dark eyes in the face of the man lying on that bed, peering at me with what in my memory I think of as despair, begging. I have since then—it’s natural as we get older—been with people as they died, and I’ve come to recognize the eyes that burn, the very last of the body’s light to go out. In a way that man helped me that day. His eyes said: I will not look away. And I was afraid of him, of death, of my mother leaving me. But his eyes never looked away.
I did not have more surgery. Again my doctor said that he was sorry to have frightened me, but I only shook my head to let him know that I knew he loved me in his doctor-way and that he had only been trying to keep me alive. Every Friday he said what my mother had heard him say, “Have a good weekend, then, if you can.” And every Saturday and every Sunday he would show up, saying he had another patient to check on and he was stopping by, therefore, to check on me as well. He only did not come on Father’s Day. I was so jealous of his children! Father’s Day! I have never met his children, of course. I heard that his son became a doctor, and later—a few years later, when I saw him in his office and it came up in conversation how I was worried about one of my girls not having many friends—he gave me good advice, citing one of his own girls, saying she now had more friends than his other children, and this has turned out to be true for the daughter I was worried about too. When I had trouble in my marriage—I mentioned it to him briefly—this kind doctor was frightened for me. I do remember I saw that, and that he had no advice to give me. But for those nine weeks that spring and summer so long ago now—for nine weeks minus one day, Father’s Day—this man, this lovely doctor father-man, saw me every day, sometimes twice a day. When I left and the bills came in, he charged me for five hospital visits. I want to record that too.
I was worried about my mother. She had not called to tell me she had made it home, and I could only make local calls on the phone by my bed. Or I could make collect calls, which would mean that whoever answered in my childhood home would be asked if they would accept the charges; that is how it was done. An operator would say: “Will you accept the charges of Lucy Barton?” One time only had I called them like this, it was when I was pregnant with my second child and I had had some sort of altercation with William, I have no memory about what. But I missed my mother, I missed my father, I suddenly missed the stark tree in the cornfield of my youth, I missed this all so deeply and terribly that I pushed the stroller with little Chrissie in it to a telephone booth by Washington Square Park and I called my parents’ home. My mother answered, and the operator said that Lucy Barton was on the line calling from New York, would my mother accept the charges?, and my mother said, “No. You tell that girl she has money now to spend, and she can spend it on her own.” I hung up before the operator had to repeat this to me. And so that night in the hospital I did not ca
ll my parents to see if my mother had gotten home. But William called them from our apartment in the Village, because I asked him to. And he said yes, she had arrived safely back at her home.
“Did she say anything else?” I asked. I was terribly sad. I was as sad, really, as a sad child, and children can be very sad.
“Oh, Button,” my husband said. “Button. No.”
The next week, my friend Molla came to visit. She said, sitting right next to the head of the bed, so close, it seemed, Nice to have had your mother here, and I said yes, and she told me that she hated her mother terrifically, and told me the whole story again as though she had not told it to me before, how much she hated her mother, and when she’d had her babies she had to see a psychiatrist because she was saddened by everything her mother had not given her. Molla said all this to me that day, and recording this now I think of something Sarah Payne had said at the writing class in Arizona. “You will have only one story,” she had said. “You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.”
I smiled at Molla as she talked, I was very glad to see her. I asked her finally about my own children, did they seem terribly distressed I was not around? She said she thought that Chrissie seemed more able to understand, she was the older one, so that would be natural; Chrissie had a long talk on the stoop with Molla, and Molla had listened as Chrissie told her Mommy was sick but getting better. “You did tell her I was getting better, didn’t you?” I said, trying to sit up. And Molla said she had. I loved Molla for this, for her concern about my darling Chrissie. I asked her about Jeremy, how was he?
And she said she hadn’t seen him, he must be away. I told her that was what my husband had said too.
Molla chatted then about other mothers she knew from the park, one was moving to the suburbs, another was moving uptown.
When she left, I was exhausted. But I had been glad to see her. I thanked her for coming. She said, Of course, and she bent down and kissed my head.
My husband came to visit. It may have been a weekend day, I can only think it must have been. He seemed very tired and he did not say much. He was a big man, but he lay down next to me on my skinny bed and ran his hand through his blond hair. He turned on the television that hung above the bed. He was paying for me to have it, but because I didn’t have one growing up, I think I’ve never quite understood television. And in the hospital I seldom put it on, because I associated it with people being sick during the day. Whenever I was told to walk the halls for exercise, pushing my little apparatus of IV bags, I saw that most patients just stared at their televisions, and it made me feel very sad. But my husband turned it on, and he lay next to me on the bed. I wanted to talk, but he was tired. We lay quietly that way.
My doctor seemed surprised to see him. Perhaps he was not at all surprised, but I thought he seemed that way. And he said something about how nice it was, that we could be together like this, and I remember a twing or twang in my head, I didn’t know why. No one knows why until later.
I know that my husband came more than that one day to visit me. But it is that day I remember, and so I write it down. This is not the story of my marriage. I cannot tell that story: I cannot take hold of, or lay out for anyone, the many swamps and grasses and pockets of fresh air and dank air that have gone over us. But I can tell you this: My mother was right; I had trouble in my marriage. And when my girls were nineteen and twenty years old, I left their father, and we have both remarried. There are days when I feel I love him more than I did when I was married to him, but that is an easy thing to think—we are free of each other, and yet not, and never will be. And there are days when I have such a clear image of him sitting at his desk in his study while the girls played in their room that I almost cry out: We were a family! I think of cellphones now, how quickly we are in touch. I remember when the girls were young I said to William, I wish there was something we could each wear on our wrists, like a phone, and then we could talk to each other and know where the other was all the time.
—
But that day that he came to see me in the hospital, when we barely spoke, it might have been when he had found out his father had left him no small amount of money in a Swiss bank account. His grandfather had profited on the war, and had put no small amount of money into a Swiss bank account, and now that William had turned thirty-five, the money was suddenly his. I learned about this later, when I came home. But it must have made William feel strange to think what the money was and what it meant, and he was never a person who could speak easily of his feelings, and so he lay on the bed with me, I who had—as we joked over the years, or perhaps only I joked—I, who had “come from nothing.”
When I first met my mother-in-law she was a great surprise to me. Her house seemed enormous and well-appointed, but over the years I came to see that it was not so, it was just a nice house, a nice middle-class house. Because she had been a farmer’s wife in Maine, and I thought of Maine as smaller in their farms than the Midwestern ones I knew, I had pictured her to look like some of the hired hands’ wives, but she didn’t look like that, she was a pleasing-looking woman who looked—she was fifty-five—no older than she was, and who moved through her lovely house with ease, a woman who had been married to a civil engineer. The first time I met her she said, “Lucy, let’s take you shopping and buy you some clothes.” I did not take offense, I didn’t take anything but some surprise—no one had ever said such a thing to me in my life. And I went shopping with her, and she bought me some clothes.
At our small wedding reception she said to a friend of hers, “This is Lucy.” She added, almost playfully, “Lucy comes from nothing.” I took no offense, and really, I take none now. But I think: No one in this world comes from nothing.
—
Yet there was this: After I left the hospital I had recurring dreams that I, and my babies, were to be killed by the Nazis. Even now, so many years later, I can remember the dreams. In what looked like a locker room, I had my two little girls with me; they were both very young. In the dream I understood—we all understood, for there were others in this locker room—that we were to be taken and killed by the Nazis. At first we thought that this room was a gas chamber, but we came to understand that instead the Nazis would come and take us to another room and that would be the gas chamber. I sang to my babies, and held them, and they were not afraid. I kept them off in a corner, away from the other people. And the situation was this: I accepted my death but did not want my children to be afraid. I was terribly scared they would be taken from me, perhaps they would be adopted by the Germans, for they looked like the little Aryan children they were. I could not bear to think of them mistreated, and there was some sense—a knowledge—in the dream that they would be mistreated. It was the most terrifying dream. It never went beyond that. I don’t know how long I had this dream. But I had it as I lived in New York, with some affluence and as my children were growing and healthy. And I never told my husband that I had this dream.
I wrote my mother a letter. I said I loved her, and I thanked her for coming to see me in the hospital. I said I would never forget that she did that. She wrote back to me on a card that showed the Chrysler Building at night. Where she got that card in Amgash, Illinois, I cannot imagine, but she sent it to me and said I will never forget either. She signed it M. I put the card on my table near the telephone by my bed and looked at it often. I would pick it up and hold it, looking at her handwriting, no longer familiar to me. I still have the card with the Chrysler Building at night that she sent to me.
When I was able to leave the hospital, my shoes did not fit. I had not thought that losing weight meant losing it everywhere, but it did—of course—and my shoes were too big on my feet. I packed the card in the bottom of the plastic bag they gave me to put my things in. My husband and I took a taxi home, and I remember that outside the hospital the world seemed very bright—frighteningly bright—and I did feel frightened by that. My children wanted to sleep with me on my f
irst night home, and William said no, but they lay on the bed with me, my two girls. Dear God, I was happy to see my children, they had grown so. Becka had a terrible haircut; she had got gum in her hair, and the family friend who had no children of her own, who had brought them to me in the hospital, had cut her hair for her.
—
Jeremy.
I didn’t know he was gay. I didn’t know he was sick. No, said my husband, he never looked sick the way so many do. And now he was gone—he had died—while I was away. I wept steadily, a quiet weeping. On the front stoop I sat while Becka patted my head, Chrissie sometimes sat down next to me, putting her small arms around me, before the girls danced up and down the stairs again. Molla came by and said, Oh dear, you’ve heard about Jeremy. She said it was very bad, a terrible thing to happen to men. And women, she added. She sat with me while I wept.