Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (40 page)

It was a revelation. It meant my
selfishness
would calm her. At first I said, “Do you really want me to go? You’ll be alone here.” I was partly sarcastic, laughing at her in that way, and then I began muttering, or saying with stubborn authority that I would not leave, I wanted my comfort considered, I wanted her to worry about my life. She said, huffing and gasping but less yellow and pinched and extreme, “You’re a spoiled brat.” I mean she was calmed to some extent; she was reduced to being incensed from being insane. But she screamed still. And I kept on too: I did not care what grounds she used—it could be on the grounds of my selfishness—but I was really stubborn: I was determined that she try being a good woman. I remember being so tense at my presumption that I kept thinking something physical in me would fail, would burst through my skin—my nerves, or my blood, my heart, everything was pounding, or my brain, but anyway that particular fight ended sort of in a draw, with Doris insulted and exhausted, appalled at what I’d said. At the stupidity. But with me adamant. I couldn’t have stopped myself, actually.

After that, with my shoulders hunched and my eyes on the ground or occasionally wide open and innocent for inspection and fixed on her, I referred to her always as brave and generous. I dealt with her as if she was the most generous woman imaginable, as if she had been only good to me all my life. I referred to her kindness, her bravery, her selflessness. She said I was crazy. I suppose certain accusations, certain demands, were the natural habitat of her mind. At one point she even telephoned the junior-high-school principal to complain I was crazy. He wouldn’t listen to her. I went right on behaving as if I remembered sacrifice after sacrifice she had made for me. She was enraged, then irritated, then desperate, then bored, then nonplussed, and the nonsense of it depressed her: she felt alone and misunderstood; she did not want me to be idealistic about her; she wanted me to be a companion to her, for her. But she stopped screaming at me.

I don’t know if she saw through me or not. I don’t think I consciously remembered over the weeks that this went on what had started all this or its history; continued acts develop their own atmosphere; that I
sincerely wanted a home of a certain kind for us was all that it seemed to be about after a while. That I had to protect myself. When she gave in, it was at first that she indulged the male of the family, the fool, the boy who was less realistic than she was. Then to conceal her defeat, she made it seem she couldn’t bear to disillusion me. Also, while she more or less said that she hadn’t the energy to do what I expected of her, she must have realized it took energy to fight me. She may have said to herself—as I said to myself before I imagined myself to be her—Why not? I think, too, my faith seduced her, my authority: I was so sure of myself. And besides, the other didn’t work anymore.

Of course, it was a swindle all the way: she could no longer ask things of me so freely, so without thought of what it would do to me. She became resigned, and then after a while she became less sad—she even showed a wried amusement. She almost became good-tempered. She was generous to some extent with everyone or I was hurt. She reconciled with her mother and her daughter, with her brothers and her sister, with the neighbors sometimes at my insistence—even with my advice—but after a while she did it on her own in her own way. It seemed to me it was obvious that considering all the factors, she was much kinder to us than any of us were, or could be, to her, so that no matter what bargain she thought she was negotiating, she really was unselfish now. The bargain was not in her favor. She practiced a polite death or whatever, a sheltering politeness, which wasn’t always phony, and a forgiveness of circumstances that was partly calculated to win friends: she comforted everyone who came near her, sometimes cornily; but still it was comfort. I was a little awed by her; she was maybe awed and instructed by herself; she took over the—the
role,
and my opinions were something she asked but she had her own life. Her own predicament. She still denounced people behind their backs but briefly, and she gloated now and then: when her rich brother died suddenly, she said with a gently melancholy satisfaction, “Who would have thought I could outlast J.J.?” She showed a shakily calm and remarkable daily courage; she made herself, although she was a dying woman, into a woman who was good company. She put together a whole new set of friends. Those friends loved her actually, they looked up to her, they admired her. She often boasted, “I have many, many very good friends who have stuck by me.” But they were all new friends—none of her old friends came back. Young people always liked her now and envied me. What was so moving was her dying woman’s gaiety—it was so unexpected
and so unforced, a kind of amusement with things. Sometimes when no one was around she would yell at me that she was in pain all the time and that I was a fool to believe the act she put on. But after a certain point, that stopped, too. She said, “I want to be an encouragement—I want you to remember me as someone who was a help to you.” Do you see? After a certain time she was never again hysterical when I was there. Never. She was setting me an example. She was good to me in a way possible to her, the way she thought she, Doris, ought to be to me. But she was always Doris, no matter how kind she was. If at any time restlessness showed in me or if I was unhappy even about something very minor at school she would be upset; I had to have no feelings at all or stay within a narrow range for her comfort; she said often, “I know I’m unfair but wait until I die—can’t you bear with me?” When I stayed out sometimes because I had to, because I was going crazy, when I came home she would say pleadingly, “Don’t ask too much of me, Buddy.” She would sit there, on the couch in the living room, having waited fully dressed for me to come home, and she would say that.

All right, her happiness rested on me. Her sister and one brother and her daughter told me I couldn’t go to college, I couldn’t leave Doris, it would be a crime. Her cancer was in remission; she had never gotten on so well with her own family (she was patient with them now), I owed it to her to stay. I am trying to establish what she gained and what she lost. Her family often said to me bullyingly, without affection or admiration, “Her life is in your hands.” I hadn’t intended this. Doris said they were jealous of me. I wanted to go to college; I wanted to use my mind and all that: I was willing for Doris’s life to be in her mother’s and sister’s hands. I was modest about what I meant to Doris—does that mean I didn’t love her?

The high school, when I refused to apply to Harvard, asked me why and then someone went to see Doris, and Doris went into her bedroom and locked the door and refused to eat until I agreed to go away to college. To leave her. And she made her family and her doctor ask me to go (they pounded on her door but she wouldn’t eat until they did what she told them). Doris’s sister Ida came and shouted through the bedroom door at her and then said to me in a cutting, angry voice, blaming me, that Doris was killing herself. This was when I was sixteen.

I said I wasn’t that important. My modesty stymied Ida.

That sacrifice, if it was that, was either the first or second thing Doris
had ever done for me. But perhaps she did it for herself, to strengthen her hand for some Last Judgment. Perhaps she was glad to be rid of me. I only lost my nerve once in accepting it from her, this gift. I was lying on my bed—it was evening in early spring and I should have been doing physics—and I was thinking about college, Harvard, about a place, the Yard, that I’d never seen, grass and paths and a wall around it, and buildings and trees, an enclosed park for young people. The thought took me to a pitch of anticipation and longing and readiness unlike anything I’d felt in years; all at once it was unendurable that I had that and Doris had nothing—had what she had. It was terrible to think how Doris was cheated in terms of what she could see ahead of her. I felt I’d tricked her in some way. Not that that was wrong but she was too nice, now that she was cheated, for me to—I don’t know what. I suppose I was out of control. Clumsy, even lumbering, I blundered into her room and without warning or explanation began to say I was sorry and that I’d better back out of going to Harvard. She breathed in the loud, nervous way of a woman concerned about herself, but then she got herself in hand and said in the detached, slightly ironic voice, gentle, convivial, and conspiratorial, that she used at that time, a Middle Western voice, “Sorry for what? What is it? Buddy, you have nothing to be sorry for.”

I’d never brought up in conversation with her matters that had to do with feelings of mine that were unclear or difficult: what good would it have done? She would not have made the effort to understand; she did not know how; she would only have felt lousy and been upset. I was silenced by a long tradition of lying to her and being lucid. I could at this time only say over and over that I was sorry—I couldn’t try to explain any of it to her.

She said, “You’re being silly. I think you’re too close to me, Buddy. I don’t want you to grow up to be a mother’s boy.”

I said, “What will you do when I go away?”

“You think I can’t manage? You don’t know much about me. Don’t be so conceited where you’re concerned.” (But I’d put that idea into the air.) She said, “I can manage very well, believe me.” I expressed disbelief by the way I stared at her. She said, “Go into my top bureau drawer. Look under the handkerchiefs.”

There was a bottle there. I held it up. “What is it?”

“My morphine.”

“You hide it?”

“I know how boys like to try things.…”

“You hide it from
me?”

“I don’t want you to be tempted—I know you’re often under a strain.”

“Momma, I wouldn’t take your
morphine.”

“But I don’t use it much anymore. Haven’t you noticed I’m clearer lately? I don’t let myself use it, Buddy—look at the date on the bottle: it’s lasted over a year. The doctor can’t believe I’m so reformed; he’ll ask me to marry him yet. Just sometimes I take it on a rainy day. Or at night. I thought you knew I wasn’t using morphine anymore.”

I hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t been keeping track. I didn’t like to be too aware of her.

She could have had another bottle hidden; there was a nurse who came twice a week and who could, and I think did, give Doris injections of morphine. I didn’t want to investigate. Or know. I just wanted to go on experiencing the release of having her care about me. Worry about me. She said, “You’ve been a help to me. You’ve done more than your share. You know what they say—out of the mouths of babes. I’ll be honest with you: I’d like to be young again, I’d like to have my health back. But I’m not unhappy. I even think I’m happy now. Believe me, Buddy, the pain is less for me than it was.”

A
T
H
ARVARD
, I began to forget her. But at times I felt arrogant because of what she and I had done; I’d managed to do more than many of my professors could. I’d done more than many of them would try. I knew more than they did about some things.

Often I felt I was guilty of possessing an overspecialized maturity. At times I felt called upon to defend Doris by believing the great world to which Harvard was a kind of crooked door was worthless in its cruelty and its misuse of its inhabitants, and Doris was more important than any of it. Than what I had come to Harvard for. But I didn’t go home.

And Doris wanted me to enter that great world: the only parts of my letters she really enjoyed were about things like my meeting a girl whose mother was a billionairess. By the standards of this new world I was sentimental and easily gulled and Doris was shrill. I did not want to see beyond a present folly or escape from one or be corrected or remember anything. Otherwise the shadow of Doris lay everywhere. I began to forget her even while she was alive.

The daughter of the billionairess was, in addition to everything else,
a really admirable and intelligent girl. But I didn’t trust her. One night she confessed various approaches she followed for winning the affection of boys. If you don’t want to be silly and overly frail, you have to be immune and heartless to the fine-drawn, drawn-out, infinitely ludicrous, workable plots that women engage in. The delicacy and density of those plots. But I wasn’t confident and I ran away from that girl. It seemed to me my whole life was sad. It was very hard to bear to see that in the worldly frame of Harvard Doris was, even in her relative nobility, unimportant. I had never been conscious before of the limitations of her intelligence. She had asked me to send her money and I did, my freshman year. I had a scholarship and I worked. It wasn’t any longer that she was jealous of my life but she wanted me to show I cared about her still. She had changed her manner just before I left her; she had become like a German-Jewish matron of the sort who has a son at Harvard. And her letters were foolish, almost illiterate. It was too much for me, the costliness of loyalty, the pursuit of meanings, and everything savage from the past, half forgotten or summarized (and unreal) or lost in memory already. How beautiful I thought the ordinary was. I did not go home to live with her and she did not ask me to, when, after three years of remission, and three months after my leaving her, her cancer recurred.

H
OW CAN
I even guess at what she gained, what she lost?

I spent the summer with her. I had a job and stayed home with her in the evenings. My manner unnerved her a bit. I was as agreeable as I knew how to be; I tried to be as Middle Western as before. When company came, Doris would ask me to stay only for a little while and then to excuse myself and leave: “People pay too much attention to you, and I like a little attention for myself.”

The Christmas after that, I traveled out to be with her, fell ill, and was in a delirium for most of two weeks. Doris was curiously patient, not reproachful that I’d been ill, not worried, and when we spoke it was with a curious peace, and caution, too, as if we were the only two adults in the world. She said for the first time, “I love you, Buddy.”

I
N
M
AY
I was called to her bedside because she was about to die. Her family had gathered and they stood aside, or else Doris had told them to leave us alone; perhaps they recognized my prior right to her;
they had never been able to get along with her, they had only loved her. Doris said, “I was waiting for you. It’s awful. Mose comes in here and complains about his health and carries on about me and doesn’t hear me ask for water, and Ida cries and says it’s terrible for her—Ida was never any good at a deathbed—and your sister comes in here and says, ‘Have a little nap,’ and when I close my eyes she runs to the dresser and looks at things: she’s afraid I left it all to you; she already took my compact and she uses it in front of me. I wasn’t a good mother but she doesn’t have to rub it in. She thinks I’m dead already. Her feelings are hurt. How is college? What I’d like to hear about is the rich people you’ve met.…”