After Body Weather, Maisie launched her film on Harry. She trailed after her mother in the studio, set up shots by the water, and held the camera tightly on Harry as she told the story of her life or expounded on ideas, in which the words preconceptual and embodied came up frequently. I credit Maisie with propping up Harry’s sacked dignity. I underscore this: I don’t know what we would have done without Maisie. The hours of footage mounted. The daughter was going to tell the mother’s story, come hell or high water or hurricane or typhoon, and this made Harry happy, at least intermittently.
I wrapped up my own autobiography-hyphen-memoir, had it typed up on a computer by a woman named Edith Klinkhammer (no fooling), mailed it out to agents, and, after several rejections, found myself a willing representative and then, hail holy light, a New York publisher, after which Harry could gloat at me with her own “I told you so.” Those are rosy days now when I look back on them — that stretch of freedom we had together after we found each other again. The artists in residence had left us, all except the Barometer, whose existence had become more orderly because he had a doctor and a little lithium and a new diagnosis — schizoaffective. All in all, I have to call those days rosy, just plain old rosy, cozy days of coffee and bagels and goodbye-I’m-off-to-work-now-my-love kisses in the morning and a whole lot of chitchat after work about not all that much as we chopped vegetables for or cleaned up after dinner. We yelled at the evil president in unison and had a few royal fights about men and women and what’s innate in one sex or the other and what’s not. Yes, to be honest: We fought. We fought, but we also rolled in the hay, and, to be honest again, there were plenty of nights we were too tired to do any rolling because we weren’t young anymore, and we talked instead, long sessions of thinking aloud about art and poems and our youngest ones, Aven and Bran, the children who would brave a future we would never see.
When Rune died in his own contraption, he made the cover of the New York Post and the Daily News, and page 9 of The New York Times. Innumerable other “outlets” opined on his tragic exit from the planet as well. Tributes to Rune spewed from the media maw, accompanied by photos of still-youthful brooding artist decoratively slouched beside his works, including Beneath, no, especially Beneath. Art magazines devoted issues to his legacy, speculating on what might have been, had the remarkable bad boy only lived. He suffered from depression, it seemed. He had, in fact, a whole drugstore of pharmaceuticals in his bathroom to treat the condition. Sympathy for the down-in-the-dumps artist oozed from journalistic pores. Depression is a chemical imbalance, they wrote. The poor guy was a victim of his own cracked brain chemistry.
Not a word about Harry. Her obliteration was total. The Open Eye and the Eldridge letter were meant to cast a spotlight on Harry, but somebody forgot to hit the switch. One night over a nice piece of hake and broccoli, Harry declared in that creepy cold voice I had heard on the day she saw Rune that she had wanted to hurt him, but now that he was dead, she felt nothing. He was dead, but she was dead to him, too, dead to the story, dead to the pseudonyms. Her shining vehicle had crashed before it reached its destination, just as his had. Harry did not believe he had wanted to kill himself. There was nothing to be done. She had been more right than she had even known. The powers-that-be would never accept her art, because it was hers. Harriet Burden was nobody, a big, fat, unrecognized nobody.
I had prayed for Harry to end her obsession, but the stiff, bitter, defeated woman on the other side of the table unnerved me. I longed for some old vigor and bite. I longed for the dragon lady to return, if only for an hour or so. In this spirit, I asked the lady pugilist if the two hard punches that bastard had taken from her hadn’t felt pretty good. But Harry just stared at me, frost in her eyes. The punches, she said, had meant nothing. They had meant nothing because they had not had the desired effect. She had wanted to humiliate and shame him, to make him grovel before her — or something to that effect. It hadn’t worked. I wondered about Harry then. I wondered about who she was and if I really understood her at all. She could be so hard.
When she said the story was dead, she must have believed what she was saying, but later I discovered that she hadn’t let go of it completely. One afternoon, I interrupted her in the studio to tell her about a starred review I had received in Publishers Weekly, which included the words uproarious and tender. I had let myself in to surprise her with it. I tiptoed in the door with review in hand and saw that she was sitting at her long wooden desk with a pair of scissors in her hands, hunched over a large book with a concentrated look on her face. When I approached her, I looked down to see what she was doing.
The book she had in front of her was called The Book of Runes. It turned out that Harry had read and clipped every article that had been written about Beneath and the now-deceased traitor to her cause and had pasted them carefully into a fat, old-fashioned scrapbook, as if she were a 1950s housewife saving recipes. She did not need to explain. They were documents of the struggle — texts Harry called “proliferations.”
After that day, we had a little less than a year left, but seven months of it passed before Harry’s diagnosis. Every once in a while she complained of bloating and constipation, but show me someone over sixty who doesn’t complain of bloating and constipation. She grew a little thinner because she often felt full and couldn’t eat more, but her weight loss wasn’t extreme. She didn’t feel “quite right,” just “a little off,” that’s all. She would check it out with her doctor.
When she told me what the scan had found, she was standing, white-faced in the kitchen: I can’t die now. How can I die now, Bruno?
Harry did not want to die.
I learned new terms: epithelial-stromal tumor, debulking surgery, and adjuvant chemotherapy. They debulked her, all right, scooped out as much of the cancer as they could, but it had gone to her liver. She was in stage four of ovarian cancer, for Christ’s sake, a death sentence, but the doctors murmured about procedures that just might possibly extend life expectancy and exceptional cases, although they were rare, very rare, it was true, their eyes averted or looking directly at you to show they weren’t wimps. The chemo made her pale, sick, weak, and dizzy. But the tumors didn’t shrink enough, not enough to save her.
With her fingers dug into her belly or pressed into her temples, Harry thrashed in her hospital bed, the pain blinding her, pain the morphine didn’t dent, and she howled against the fates. Her hollow face, her red eyes leaking tears, her mouth contorted, she cursed the doctors and the nurses and she cursed me, and she cursed whoever else happened to be around, in a voice that blasted like a siren through the ward. My dragon lady came back. Why are you torturing me? And the white and blue coats came running and those in them scolded her about the other patients: They have a right to some peace, too, don’t they? Harry was not the only sick person, after all. Look at Mrs. P., missing a leg, lost to a tumor. She was sicker than Harry, by God! Look at Mrs. P. She behaved herself. Mrs. P. was dying fast. Chastened momentarily and sorry for poor Mrs. P., Harry snuffled in her bed. I don’t want to die.