Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind (14 page)

Of course, hope is a fine friend but not a sufficient one. Gerald needed the stars to smile on him and stars are most indifferent to wishes no matter how many children send their twinkling voices upwards toward the heavens. A painting of his, a nude classmate sitting on the edge of a bed, was selected for a show in a small gallery in St. Albans but it was not noticed by the one critic who did make it to the opening.

Fear took hope's place. He started to refer to himself as a starving artist. He was not starving but he was badly in need of attention. Gerald took stock. Enough was enough. He needed to be careful for Ryan's sake. Not that Ryan needed his father for economic safety but Ryan needed a father he could respect, a man of the world, like Gerald's father, who had had a chauffeur drive him to work each day. Above all else Gerald did not want to disappoint Ryan.

His mother smiled at him when he took out his phone and showed her photos of his child. Her smile was vague. Gerald had wanted more, more enthusiasm, more affection. But his mother had never been the sentimental kind. She allowed Lily to sit on her pillow, to knead her blanket, to sleep under the sheets, but she was not overly fond of any activity that might cause stains on a dress or a carpet. When he brought Ryan himself to visit her on a Sunday afternoon, she seemed to wake up, staring at the child. She asked for tea and cookies and she offered them to Ryan. What should she say to the child? What games could she remember? She wanted to give the child something special. She asked for her jewelry box and she opened it and gave Ryan a necklace to have for his own. When he tried to put it back in the box, she stopped him, No, no, that's for you.

Later, Gerald took it from the child who protested with loud tears, and returned it to its rightful place.

Gerald took over his mother's finances. He paid the bills online. He paid the help each week and he made sure that all accounts were current. He spoke with the lawyer his father had used and he spoke with the tax accountant. Perhaps, said the lawyer, your mother would be more comfortable in a home, an assisted-living facility, where she might benefit from the stimulation of others. Also, said the lawyer, the medical care might be better. In case, you know, the lawyer waved his hand, unwilling or unable to name the calamities that might lie ahead.

Gerald considered the lawyer's advice. It would be easier if his mother's care was not subject to the vagaries of a visiting nurse, or a second maid, or the kindness of the cook who had been with the family long before Dr. Berman began to have trouble naming the foods she wanted for dinner. But there was the problem of the apartment itself, the wonderful rent-controlled apartment. It was Gerald's childhood home. If his mother vacated the apartment it would go on the market at current rental prices. Gerald decided to move back into his own bedroom. If he stayed in the apartment for a sufficient number of years while his mother still lived there he could stay forever at the low price, less than he was paying for his studio. The lawyer meant well enough but his mother would have to stay and he would move in with her. One of the rooms he could make his studio. One day management might pay him a significant sum to leave the rent-controlled apartment and he could live somewhere far away. He understood the value of the large rooms, the pantry, the cabinets that had been built in, the view of the park, the subway down the block, the high ceilings, the uniformed doormen.

Gerald was now fond of country music. All through the rooms the sound of Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash thundered. In the hallway, in front of the now unused office, a long metal shape reached almost to the ceiling. It was a tree he had created from parts of an abandoned automobile. It seemed to have crystal tears emerging from its red trunk that had once been a fender of a Camry. Dr. Berman kept telling the aide to remove the tree. The aide agreed again and again but the tree was there, Gerald's tree of life. Take it away, Dr. Berman said, she spoke her desire in a whisper and then in a scream. But Gerald paid no attention to the request, no matter how many times it was repeated.

He played his music as loudly as possible to soothe the thing in him that ached all night long and went stomping around after midnight. There were sparks of hope. A gallery owner had complimented him. There was a group show that had not yet eliminated him. There was always hope, bruised, bent, but rising up again and again.

Sometimes when Gerald came home in the afternoon and opened the door he smelled the stale air of the apartment and also the faint but clear scent of urine, also ammonia used to eradicate that very smell. Sometimes Gerald smelled even less pleasant odors. His mother had begun to resist the changing of underthings.

She used her nails to attack. She used her voice to demand and order the caretakers to leave her alone. She threatened to fire them. There was no use in trying. If clean things were left by her side so she could put them on herself, she simply put them on over whatever was soiled underneath. The odors made their way through the layers of clothing. The night aide left her alone. The morning aide tried to coax or divert her attention with chatter and sometimes she succeeded but often she did not. Some days skirts and blouses were pulled on over nightgowns and on top of several of the awkward and dreadful napkins she wore all at once. Some mornings she was washed and some mornings she refused. It had come to that.

Gerald discovered that unpleasant smells were worse when first encountered but then within a half hour the mind or senses grew accustomed to them and he was easily able to ignore the odors that followed his mother in her restless wanderings from room to room.

He lay in his childhood bed listening to Tammy Wynette yearning as he once yearned but perhaps not for the same thing.

Gerald took an extra long time in the shower each morning. All his clothes went to the cleaners after one wearing. He used a strong aftershave. He worried that some odor would cling to him, embarrass him.

What he wanted to do was become a recognized artist. He wanted his work to be worthy of respect and envy and dollars, many dollars, so many that they would support him and Ryan forever after, perhaps on a Caribbean island with palm trees, white sand, and a turquoise sea, casting white spray on a nearby jetty. Tourists would come to see his work and they would want to purchase it and he would let them, sometimes, if he liked them.

In the meantime he breathed in the air filled with the smells of incontinence. He kissed his mother good morning and he brought her a glass of milk in her bedroom as she settled in for the night.

If the owners of the building should decide to convert their property into a tenant-owned entity—well then, the pot of gold at the end of that rainbow would become his and his alone.

Yes, Ryan was a child of divorce and Dr. Berman, at other moments during her long practice of psychiatry, would have made certain dire predictions based on that fact, but he was a sweet cheerful boy with trusting eyes and a love of Thomas the Tank Engine, who slept with him in his bed whether he was with his mother or his father. Two days a week he spent with his father in the rambling apartment opposite the park. On those days his father took him to the playground and to the zoo where they watched the penguins diving in a tank. Gerald held the child's hand and promised him that one day he would buy him an airplane of his very own. He bought Ryan a drum set and seemed not to mind the loud noises that went on and on as Ryan thumped and jumped about.

The nights Ryan slept over in the small bed that Gerald had installed in the fourth bedroom, Gerald stayed home. He watched videos with Ryan until the child fell asleep in his lap on the couch. Often he lay down with Ryan and stroked his hair and patted his arm as the hours of the night went by. In her bedroom his mother lay under her covers, dreaming. Could she recognize herself in her dreams or were they too fading, turning gray, pale, and indistinct? Or were her dreams nightmares in which the falling of things crushed her bones again and again? In the morning she forgot her dreams.

The caretaker slept on a wide plush chair in Dr. Berman's bedroom. Gerald had taken the large oak dining table and sent it along with the chairs to an auction house. He sold the cabinet that held the silverware and the sconces that had decorated the walls. In the room he put a climbing gym for Ryan and a toy box and a tricycle and he decorated the room with posters of the Giants and the Jets. In the room he used as a studio the carpet was gone, the walls were covered with sketches and blank paper and spots where Gerald had splashed paint or dripped down or simply swiped at space as he thought his wordless thoughts.

When Ryan looked up at his father he saw the muscles he might have one day. When he was at his father's house he played with his football, tossing it under the furniture and fetching it back again and again.

The housekeeper had her own room but she was not always there anymore. It was hard to tell if she was doing her work or was just pretending.

Dr. Berman's friend Louise still came to visit from time to time. Louise believed that her friend was pleased to see her. Sometimes she would say Louise's name. Once Dr. Berman asked after Louise's daughter. Louise brought chocolates and sometimes flowers. The apartment where for over a quarter of a century psychoanalysts had gathered after meetings, come to dinner when arriving from Rome or Paris or Switzerland, was now filled with echoes as if in another dimension, an invisible party went on and on, someone ridiculing someone else's attempt at an explanation of the mirroring of some cathexis or other. Someone was complaining that someone else was overrated and someone was trying very hard to please the elders of the congregation, to impress and to shine. Now the walls were dingy and the carpet worn. Gerald was avoiding the expense of repair. Once every two weeks the hairdresser came. Gerald could not bear to see the dull gray roots emerging from his mother's scalp. He saw death coming with each quarter of an inch of stiff hair.

Louise also suggested to Gerald that his mother might do better in a home where her condition was understood. Perhaps some companionship would improve her spirit. Gerald wanted his mother to stay just where she was.

She wants to stay here, he said.

Real estate, said Louise.

Yes, thought Gerald.

When Gerald thought of Ryan, he knew he had to be clear about his goals, sharp of mind, free of drugs, and only on the nights when Ryan was with his mother would he drink and then in front of the television, watching late night shows, he would float like a jettisoned boat cushion on the waves of a dark ocean, all through the long night, no shore visible, sky without stars.

A woman in his class invited him to show two of his paintings with her and four friends. They were going to have an open house at one of their studios in downtown Brooklyn.

Would he join them for dinner on Saturday night just to see if the chemistry would work? Yes, said Gerald. His mother's aide would babysit for Ryan for a few extra dollars.

Gerald wore his non-paint-splattered jeans. He put on a dark blue sweater that Adrienne had once said made him look like a movie star. He shaved carefully. His blue eyes, his mother's blue eyes, were clear. He was ready. His mother was sitting at her small table in the room that had once been her office. She had insisted that this table be set with her best silverware each evening and the candles lit promptly at seven o'clock as they had been whenever she was home, not going to meetings, not teaching a class, not going to the theater or a benefit or a book party. The white tablecloth now had some rips in the corner. The aide covered these with a napkin.

Outside, the darkness fell over the park and the lamplights shined on the occasional dog walker wrapped in scarves and down coats. Behind them the Time Warner building shone its white light and the Empire State sent its blue needle up to the moon.

Ryan was in his bed. His father had told him he would be back later. But suddenly later seemed too late. His grandmother's nurse had gone into the kitchen and was eating her own dinner. His father had not read him a bedtime story. He had forgotten and Ryan had not asked for it. His father was in a rush to get somewhere. But now, in his dinosaur shirt, his blue pajama bottoms, he was unable to sleep. He felt strange, was he hungry? He thought that perhaps that was it.

He opened the door to his room. He thought he might phone his mother. He wanted to hear her voice. Go to sleep, little moose, she would say. He knew the number of her cell phone by heart, but he wasn't supposed to call for no reason. Did he have a good reason? He thought not. The hall was dark. A light reflected from an open kitchen door let Ryan see the path to the main entrance and from there he could see that his grandmother was sitting at a table, a glass of wine in front of her.

Dr. Berman, he announced, I'm here, as he walked toward the table. He didn't want to call her Mom, as his father did. Everyone else in the household called her Dr. Berman, so he thought he should too.

Dr. Berman was startled out of her reverie. Her father had kept a bottle of brandy in his office, which he kept hidden under a pile of newspapers. She preferred sherry, Bristol Cream. In her thoughts there was the sound of thunder and rain on the windowpanes. There were owls in the house. Had there ever been owls in the house? Of course not, but Dr. Berman kept seeing owls. One was sitting on her father's knee, its cold yellow eyes staring at her. She pressed her hands against her face. She knew certainly there had never been owls in the house. Dr. Berman, said Ryan again, and he tugged at her sleeve so she would see him. She looked down. She saw him. Who are you? she said. She used her official voice, a reprimand, a dismissal, a threat, a voice of authority drawing a line, a line that must not be crossed.

You know, the child answered.

Tell me again, she said.

Ryan, he said.

She looked him over carefully. Who sent you? she said.

No one, he answered.

Why are you here? she asked, her voice steady, even.