“It’s like a prison camp in there,” Dorothy said. “You’d think they’d make it a little bigger just to avoid the innuendo.”
Helen moved to help her.
“I’m fine,” Dorothy said, reaching to either side of the corridor and making her way back to their compartment.
Helen realized that her arms were still extended toward her mother, as if she could somehow conduct Dorothy to a safe landing. She felt ridiculous. Her mother had eschewed help all her life, had put herself through City College by working night shifts as a secretary. After she married Helen’s father, she’d helped him open his dental practice, running his office, sometimes masquerading as his assistant when he could afford only a part-time girl. He’d died just when his practice had grown large enough to be worth selling, and even then, despite the reasonable income from the sale, Dorothy had continued to work as the office manager for the new dentist, never for a minute giving in to any maudlin emotion about another man’s filling her departed husband’s white soft-soled shoes. She never thought to remarry. “I did that already,” she said simply when Helen raised the subject, as if marriage were a step in a recipe that you would not want to repeat.
“Would you like me to read to you?” Helen asked, once they were back in their seats.
“What have you got?”
Helen dug eagerly into her bag. “Vogue. People. Neruda.”
Dorothy smirked. “That’s cheap, sweetheart.”
“You love Neruda.”
“Are we searching for my epitaph?” Dorothy said.
“That’s unfair,” Helen said, with a requisite amount of hurt in her tone. The truth was that she had thought about what to read at her mother’s funeral and had made the private decision that it would be Neruda. Though Dorothy was not a fan of poetry and its vagaries in general, Neruda was the one poet she had gone out of her way to read. But was this why Helen had grabbed the book from the shelf on her way out the door in L.A.? Was she this fumbling, this obvious? She began to put the book away.
“Read it,” Dorothy said.
“No, it’s all right.”
“I want to hear it.”
“We’ll read something else,” she said, pulling out the Vogue and reading from the cover. “‘The New Stripes.’”
“Read the Neruda,” Dorothy said flatly.
Helen checked her mother’s face to see on which side of sarcasm she had taken up residence. Dorothy smiled enigmatically; it was the same inscrutable expression Helen remembered from her youth, from, for instance, the day she’d smoked marijuana in the apartment while her mother was at work and then tried to cover it up with some ineffective incense. Dorothy had smiled then, too, saying nothing. But when Helen woke up the next morning she found a note taped to the bathroom mirror. “Smart people are not necessarily decent,” it said, and Helen felt as though her mother had reached inside her body and squeezed her heart.
She opened the book and began to read:
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, “The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.”
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She stopped.
“Mmm. Go on,” Dorothy said. Her eyes were closed.
“I’m tired,” Helen said.
Dorothy opened her eyes and studied her daughter. Helen looked down at the book. Her tears made the words into a bleary confusion of black smudges. “Oh, shit,” she said, trying to banish her sadness with ugly words, words that her mother had taught her never to use because they were public admissions that you could not find a more exact, more intelligent way to say what you had to say. “I’m so fucked.”
“Or not. As the case may be,” Dorothy said.
Helen looked up. “Ew,” she said.
Dorothy shrugged, delighted.
“Remember when you hired that Cinderella to come to my birthday party?” Helen said. “I thought she really was Cinderella. The Cinderella. Come all the way from, you know, wherever, just for my party. You made her take off her wig at the end to show me that she was just some out-of-work actress.”
“I think there is something evil about those parents who carry on about the tooth fairy and then tell stories about how darling their gullible children are. I don’t believe in it.”
“You have to believe in something,” Helen said, distractedly.
Dorothy did not respond.
“What do you believe in, Mom?”
Dorothy eyed her warily. “Is this one of these before-you-go questions?”
“It’s just a question. I’d like to know.”
Dorothy turned to look out the window. “Well, turns out I’m tired, too,” she said, closing her eyes.
The last Philharmonic concert had been a near disaster. The Brazilian pianist on the bill had canceled at the last minute due to illness and a replacement had been called in. The woman, an American, was young, but she had a good résumé, had recorded and performed with major symphonies—all the stuff of a strong career on an upward trajectory. The rehearsals had gone well, and the woman was full of humor with the conductor and the orchestra, and even with Helen, sweetly self-deprecating about her need to have the score in front of her, although she knew the piece by heart and had performed it before. “You’ll be my security blanket,” she said to Helen, who had been surprised by the intimacy of the remark; she was not usually addressed, except on issues that concerned the performance itself, the pianists explaining their particular taste in the timing of the page-turning, how close or far away they wanted Helen to sit. The piece was one that Helen had studied but never performed, and during rehearsal she felt her fingers moving lightly on her thighs. Studying the music a few nights earlier at the upright in her apartment, she had tried to make her way through it and had been pleased that she could actually make whole passages nearly coherent. Nathan had come out of the bedroom to listen to her and had applauded when she left off in the middle of a movement. She felt suddenly exposed, as though she were appearing naked before him for the first time.
“No, go on,” Nathan said.
She shook her head, her face flushing. “It’s difficult.”
“It sounded great.”
She looked at him, trying to suss out his strategy, but his face was filled with genuine surprise and pleasure. She stood up from the piano stool and went to him. He took her in his arms and she stood with him for a minute or two, realizing how refreshing it was to be with a man who did not think of her as a failure the way she imagined so many of the musicians she knew must, the way she tried not to think of herself. Nathan was good that way. He sat in the living room along with the parents and grandparents of her students on recital afternoons, clapping loudly. Afterward, he would dissect each student’s performance with her, rejoicing in the children’s small victories, wincing sympathetically at the memory of their bumbles. He took her seriously even when she found it hard to do the same.
On the evening of the concert, Helen sat in her chair by the piano, wearing one of her two black concert dresses, subdued and prudish enough not to overshadow the artist; her appearance and movements needed to be so unremarkable as to be practically invisible. This suited her, this negation. It was the only way she could think about herself in relation to music now: as its shadow, its stalker. The pianist adjusted her own deep-red gown, its sleeves netted with rhinestones that would pick up the light and accentuate the hard, swift work of her arms. She pulled up her seat and tossed her loose hair behind her shoulders. Helen always enjoyed the feeling of tense excitement right before a concert began—it was one of the few times in life when you could be sure you were on the verge of pleasure. The pianist made her opening attack with a fury that made Helen’s spine shiver. W
ith that flourish, the pianist announced to the conductor and the orchestra that she was going to step things up. She was going to make sure that the audience, disappointed by the program insert, came away grateful for the illness of the replaced performer. She would own the piece so completely that no one would remember that it wasn’t rightfully hers.
Ten minutes in, however, something happened, something imperceptible to anyone but Helen and the pianist; it was like a skipped heartbeat. The woman’s neck stiffened, and she began to peer at the music where before she had largely ignored it. Helen’s breath caught high in her chest. She felt as light-headed as she had when she called Nathan’s hotel room at a conference in Austin and heard the voice of a woman in the background, followed by Nathan’s sharp “No!”
The pianist’s first slip came midway down a page—a B-flat where there should have been an A. She kept going, and Helen was careful not to glance up; she wanted to make it appear that the mistake had passed unnoticed. But she could sense the pianist dissembling, could feel it in the disturbed air between her and the woman. The pianist was trying to muscle her way back into the closed room of her focused mind, but things kept getting worse—a fumbled triad, and then she’d had to turn a quarter rest into an eighth in order to get back on track. When the pianist reached the bottom of the next page, Helen rose into her half stand and leaned in to make her move. She caught the panicked look in the pianist’s eyes and knew that the woman was lost, that her concentration had deserted her, and that the strange alchemy by which a musician could be both inside and outside the music at the same time—both aware of the orchestra, and wholly within the space of her own soul—was ruined.
Helen turned the page. The pianist looked at her sharply and Helen knew that she had done wrong. But what could she do? It had been time to turn the page. The music was continuing, the orchestra relentlessly pushing forward. A swift glance at the woman and Helen realized that she was not angry but desperate, and that Helen was now involved in an intimate, silent dialogue with her. Helen gestured with her chin at the music, smiled in what she hoped was an optimistic way. Just go on, she meant to say. The woman had only to find her place in the line of notes and chords, and slip back in, like a girl stepping into the alternating jump ropes in a game of Double Dutch. She needed to yank her brain away from the accident, the missed notes, as Helen had had to yank hers away from Nathan’s guilty silence on the phone from Austin, and from her mother’s diagnosis, and move forward, even if there were no directions. But the woman’s anxiety only grew, and Helen did something that she knew was patently wrong in the etiquette of her job but was equally necessary: she rose fully off her seat, as she did when helping a faltering student through a recital, reached forward, and put her finger on the correct measure, then sat down, hoping that her move had been just swift and subtle enough not to draw the attention of the audience.
Eventually, the pianist found her equilibrium, and although the rest of the concerto seemed subdued to Helen’s ear, there were no more mistakes. The audience was generous; Helen stood by her seat while the conductor and the pianist responded to the loud applause, then followed them offstage, keeping her customary distance behind them. When the pianist and the conductor returned to the stage for a second bow, the pianist shot her a complicated look full of gratitude and sorrow, hatred and shame, all at the same time, and Helen was sent hurtling back to the time when she herself had been unable to make her music perfect, when she had been filled with sadness and rage and hope and the aching sense of being close, but not close enough, to beauty.
Dorothy woke up, moaning.
“Mom?” Helen said, snapping out of her drowsy reverie into full-throttle fear.
Dorothy put her hands on her breastbone. “Hurts,” she said, in a high, strained voice. Helen reached across the aisle to where her mother was now doubled over, her head on her knees. Dorothy let out a muted, inhuman bark.
“Can you breathe like that, Mom? Let me sit you up.”
She moved next to her mother and slowly pulled Dorothy’s shoulders toward the seat back. Dorothy’s face was bloodless.
“Mom?” Helen said. She was terrified and instantly filled with a grief she’d imagined lay in store for her only later, long after this trip was over, long after her mother had died. But now it seemed that the sorrow had always been there, perhaps from the very start, from the moment she was born and first saw this tiny woman who was to be her protector and guide. It had been waiting patiently. She was horrified to find that her mind had made an acrobatic leap forward, that she was already turning the moment into a reminiscence she’d tell of her mother’s last night on earth. “We were miles from anywhere,” she’d say. “We had a whole compartment to ourselves!”—as if this inexcusable luxury should at least have staved off death.
Dorothy groaned.
“Let me get your purse,” Helen said, beginning to rise from the seat. “Do you have any painkillers in there, Mom? Did Dr. Halverson give you something?”
Dorothy reached up and, with surprising strength, pulled Helen down next to her. She whispered something unintelligible.
“What? Mom?” Helen said, leaning close to her mother’s face. She could smell Dorothy’s sour breath.
“Stop moving,” Dorothy said, the words barely audible.
“There’s got to be something we can do,” Helen said.
“Why?”
Helen realized that she was holding her mother’s narrow hand in hers. She couldn’t remember the last time she had held her mother’s hand. She turned it over, and gently began to stroke her mother’s wrinkled palm in circles. “Is that good?” Helen said. “Does that help?”
“Does it?” Dorothy said softly.
Helen wondered if Dorothy was confused. Perhaps the cancer was affecting her brain. She searched her face, but could see nothing more than the mask that Dorothy had donned to barricade herself against the pain.
“It’s too much, Mom. It’s just too much,” Helen said.
“No,” Dorothy whispered, her voice barely audible above the sound of the train. “It’s just enough.”
The clinic was on the outskirts of town, and it took nearly forty-five minutes to get there by cab. The ride was more horrific than any part of the journey up to that point. Even though Dorothy had agreed to take the pain medication that Dr. Halverson had given her, simply getting her up from her train seat took Helen nearly ten minutes. Helen flagged a porter through the open window, and the young man helped her, both with the bags and with the awkward attempt to move Dorothy out of the compartment, through the corridor, down the three metal steps, and onto the platform. Helen could tell that her mother was making every effort to hide her distress, but even with her mouth set and her eyes nearly closed, her expression was stricken. Helen apologized for the jolts to her mother’s body, for the cold smack of air that greeted them on the platform, for the distance they had to cross to reach the cab stand, until she realized that what she really meant to apologize for was the fact that no amount of flinty-eyed pragmatism would help Dorothy through this moment. The fact of simply being was sometimes an unbearable mess and what was hoped for in life was so rarely reached. The shortfall between those two things was so much more fumbling and base than anything Helen could ever have imagined.
Helen held her mother as the cab bumped and buckled over the streets of Frankfurt. She wanted to yell at the driver, to try to make him understand that he had to slow down because her mother was dying of cancer, but she knew that her mother’s pain was so deep and pervasive that a gentler cab ride would do nothing to ameliorate it.
The cab pulled up to the curb in front of the clinic. Helen looked out her window. The building was far from the brewery of her fantasy. It was a genteel-looking Beaux-Arts structure squeezed between a pizzeria and a bookshop. There was nothing to indicate that anything medical went on inside it at all, no symbol of a rod and twisted serpent, not even a wheelchair ramp. Anything could have been taking place behind those beveled-glass door
s—lawyers spinning cases, lovers making arguments of their own. Helen suddenly longed to stay in the cab, to ask the driver to carry on, take them anywhere, nowhere, as long as she could stay sitting like this, with her mother nestled safely in her arms. The driver turned and looked at the women expectantly.
“Are we there?” Dorothy’s voice was raw.
“Yes. This is it.”
“What are we waiting for?”
Helen paid the driver. He got out of the car to retrieve the bags from the trunk while Helen gingerly helped her mother onto the sidewalk.
“My God, it’s cold!” Helen said, zipping Dorothy’s coat up to her neck, and then tugging her own around her as the cab pulled away from the curb. “You couldn’t have chosen a better season for this?” she teased. “I hear spring in Germany is lovely.” But she was stopped short by Dorothy’s expression. She looked overwhelmed, as though she were facing not a four-story town house but Mt. Everest, the task looming high and impossible before her. Helen realized that Dorothy had not made her baffling medical choices because she wanted to die any more than she chose to live among her withering possessions because she did not desire a future. Dorothy wanted to live. But standing here on this foreign street, she had momentarily lost her way. The path through this complicated piece of life, which must have seemed so clear to Dorothy just a few days ago, was now as inscrutable as a piece of music could be when first confronted—a wild and alien language of signs that seemed like the ravings of some madman until you put your hands on the keys and played one note, then the next, then the next. Helen saw in Dorothy’s eyes the same panic she’d seen on the face of the pianist who had been marooned in a sea of sound that suddenly made no sense.
Alone With You Page 11
