“Don, I want you to know that I know there are things you need to say to me,” she said. And I had to wonder: What was he doing here? She leaned forward. “You go ahead.”
“Um.”
“I suspect you must be upset and curious about some things.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got a lot of serenity in my life now, so I can hear you.” She turned to S. “Isn’t that right?”
“Do you have serenity, Don?” my mother asked me.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Yes and no.”
“That doesn’t sound like serenity.”
“I guess it’s something I’ll have to work on.”
“You’re angry.”
I sighed. Things weren’t getting off to a good start. I said to my mother, “Really, I just wanted to be able to say a few things.”
“I’m listening.”
“I was hoping we’d talk. About the way things were when Terry and I were little. When we were growing up.”
But what, after all, did I want to tell her? Did I want to tell her how scary she’d looked to me when she was drunk? Did I want to tell her what it had been like to lie awake at night, waiting for the house to be quiet? Or did I want to tell her that I, her son, lived every day with the fear that I would never know how to love another person? Were these the kinds of things that a man could say to his mother? Were these the kinds of things that a man could say to his recovering-alcoholic mother while her recovering-alcoholic boyfriend was sitting beside her?
I sat in my chair. They sat in their chairs. Not one of us, I think, was serene. Everywhere on the white walls of my mother’s condominium were the framed Art Deco prints that my father had bought for her, fashion illustrations by Icart and Erté, and a large series of magazine plates of the sort that had been featured in popular French publications of the early twentieth century. The plates showed women wearing improbable dresses and enormous hats, some of them walking the favored dogs of the day, borzois and other distinguished breeds. This was my mother’s art. It was from a period in history, and represented a set of styles, that she loved. I now have most of it — about a dozen pieces — in my apartment in New York, wedged behind furniture, propped against walls, where it can’t easily be seen. For a while, after my mother died, I tried hanging one of the Icarts, a beautiful illustration of a woman undressing in a darkened bedroom. I gave it a prominent place over a low sofa in the living room. But after a while I couldn’t bear to look at it. I had to take it down and put it away.
That night in Florida, the night in the dining room, I watched my mother smoke her cigarettes and drink her coffee. Every now and then, she reached downward and made tiny come-hither motions with her hand, in the direction of the cat, which stood off in the shadows, as if uncertain whether it was safe to come all the way into the room. I had watched my mother smoke cigarettes and drink coffee my entire life. Never at night, though. At night it had been Jim Beam in a large glass.
She said to me — and I could hear, again, that nasal, southern-Appalachian sound in her voice—“Everything you want to talk about is in the past.”
“I know.”
“Why do you need to live in the past?”
“I’m not living in the past.”
“You are. You live in the past. I’ve let the past go. I don’t live in the past. I won’t.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“Don’t come into my home and attack my serenity. I don’t need your hostility. If you have something constructive to add to this conversation, go ahead. But if you’re going to tear me down and get at me with your hostility, that’s something I don’t need. You want to live in the past, and you want to drag me back into all that shit. You’re angry. You’re angry and you’re hostile.”
“Wait a minute,” I begged. And I went on: “In the first place, there’s a difference between anger and hostility.” What a mistake. My mother glared at me, and then turned away and looked at S., who, frankly, seemed terrified. She said to him, in a kind of scream, “I don’t need this hatred from my own child!”
And to me she said, “You can be a supportive member of this family or you can get out of my house.”
It was not long before I found myself lying on the carpet in my mother’s dining room, curled up, weeping. From time to time, I looked up and saw my mother or S., or the pair of them, peering out of their bedroom on the far side of the apartment. It was as if, like the cat, they were afraid to step into the room. Were they afraid of contamination? Contamination by the Past? I was the Past. The bedroom door would open a short way, and light would spill out, and, by that light, I could distinguish their figures. My mother looked tall and imposing in her plain white housedress. S., by contrast, was small and slight and wiry, a thin man whose gestures and movements, like his voice (and the cryptic signatures he gave his own paintings, and the haphazard research methods he would use, years later, to avoid properly identifying the painting in New York), conveyed his need to remain unseen, undetected, and, like the creator of the work that became his obsession, unknown.
I do not recall precisely how things played out over the remainder of that dismal trip to Florida. Nor do I recall at what point I became certain that S. and my mother were conspiring to leave the identity of the painting a mystery By the middle of 1989, the matter seemed to have been dropped.
Then, after what seemed a long stretch of time, I got a phone call. It was S. He said that he had something important to tell me concerning the painting, which, as it turned out, was still in the hands of one of the cousins. S. told me that he had been doing a lot of thinking about the painting. He told me that he was, by the way, grateful for my help during the months when he had worked so hard to establish the painting’s authenticity. But he had been wrong, he said, wrong about the painting. After much meditation on the problem, he had come to realize why he—we—had failed to identify the painting. He told me that this realization had caused him much pain, and a great deal of soul-searching. He told me that the painting was not what he had taken it to be.
Of the many silences in all the conversations I had with S. in those years — the years before he fell out of AA and out of my mother’s life — this seemed the longest. I held the phone to my ear. What was S. trying to tell me?
“Excuse me?”
“Frederic Church,” he said again.
Frederic Church? The Hudson River School painter? Nineteenth century? Owned that Persian-style mansion overlooking the Hudson in upstate New York? Famous for his landscapes? Spent some time in South America? Painted animals and birds?
“Frederic Church,” I said to S. “Thank you for telling me that.” And a while later we finished our conversation and hung up.
K. and I had, by this time, moved to another, smaller, apartment on the Upper East Side. For the better part of a year, I had been depressed, and our relationship — confined, as it were, to a space far too cramped to permit either privacy or a comfortable intimacy — was beginning to unravel.
“He says he now thinks it’s a Frederic Church,” I told her when, later that night, she got home from work, slammed the door to our apartment, and dumped her shoulder bag on the floor.
“Whatever,” K. said, capturing perfectly, I thought, the strange and sad and true essence of everything.
And, really, that should have been that. But there was more to come.