Читать книгу The Book of Stone - Jonathan Papernick - Страница 13

5

When the morphine hit this time, it struck hard, and Stone found himself pinned to the bare mattress, straining for breath, staring at the ceiling, his vision doubled. He drifted in and out of consciousness, and when he tried to call Pinky, his throat was so swollen a beastly sound not resembling any language he knew tumbled from his dried-out mouth. His hallucinations were worse this time around as well. His mother’s face appeared from a great distance, as if he were lying half drowned at the bottom of a swimming pool and looking up through a vast stretch of rippling water. She blurred into a dreamy soft focus and called to him, “Matthew, Matthew, do you hear me?” Of course he heard her; she was part of his imagination. He saw Pinky’s face appear, lengthened as if through a warped fun-house mirror, telling someone there was no fucking way he was calling 911.

He heard his mother’s voice again: “Take him to the hospital, you have to take him to the hospital.”

“Have you heard of the Rockefeller drug laws?”

Everybody these days was listening to “The Rockafeller Skank.” Everywhere he went, he heard that song—it had even been playing quietly on the radio in the limousine on the way to his father’s funeral. Yes, Stone thought, the funk soul brother. And now he was dancing, dancing upside down on the ceiling, spinning a gorgeous treble clef, arms around its tapered waist. Pinky and his mother stood way below him, staring up at him with their arms spread wide as if waiting to catch him. But he wasn’t going to fall, he was never going to fall; he could fly, he could fly if he wanted to!

He is six years old and his mother has taken him to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to stroll through the greenery. They walk through the Rock Garden, the Children’s Garden, the flaming purple Bluebell Wood, and through the entire cross section of the Native Flora Garden, where they stop along a ledge of limestone. Everything is fever bright and vivid as an oil painting. He hears Pinky’s voice underneath everything, solemnly intoning the word Draconian, rolling it around on his tongue as if he’s never said the word aloud before: “They’re fucking Draconian.”

“Here is the bladdernut tree, and there the butternut and the angelica tree,” his mother tells him.

Matthew grips his mother’s hand, feeling some import in her words but not understanding the meaning. “If you can name it, you own it. It becomes part of your life, part of your world forever. Nobody can take that knowledge away from you. If you don’t have a name for something, how do you think about it, talk about it?”

Somehow Pinky’s voice is still there, but Matthew hasn’t even met him yet, and he’s saying, “First offense possession. Class I felony,” and Matthew has no idea what that means so he points out into the middle distance instead.

“What’s that?”

“Slippery elm.”

“Yuck.”

In the Herb Garden she identifies Conium maculatum, which is poison. “Stay away from hemlock.”

She shows him lavender, rosemary, mint, and thyme and explains their various healing qualities.

“Time?”

“Thymus vulgaris. It means ‘courage’ in Greek.”

“Courage.” Matthew rolls the word around his mouth like a cat’s purr. “It smells good.”

On their way home, Matthew points to a tall, leafy tree, its graceful leaves palmlike, almost tropical, swaying languidly in the spring breeze.

“What’s that?”

“That’s an ailanthus tree.”

“Why would they call it that?”

“It means ‘tree of heaven.’ I read about it as a little girl. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”

“Can I climb it?”

“No.”

“Why not?” He stamps his feet, raising his voice in bitter objection. “Please, please. I want to climb the tree of heaven.”

Now Pinky’s voice is back, saying, “He’ll fucking go to jail—do not pass go.”

But Matthew can’t figure out why he would possibly go to jail for climbing the tree of heaven. Maybe it’s like the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but even Adam and Eve didn’t go to jail; they were just sent out of the garden, and Matthew has just left the garden with his mother. The bark is smooth and she has to boost Matthew up to the first branch so he can climb to the yawning Y of the next branch. The leaves are smooth and tear-shaped, tapering out in the end to a fine point. He can see the tops of cars passing by. His mother looks small, girlish, standing below, her face tight with worry. The canopy is fuller above him and he wants so badly to climb where the leaves are thickest; beyond is heaven after all. I can fly, he thinks. All the way to heaven.

“Don’t go any farther,” his mother calls.

“One more branch.”

“No. Come down right now.”

Matthew moves to climb higher up the tree when his foot slips against the smooth bark and he tumbles to the ground below, hitting his head on the recoil.

“Oh my God. Are you all right?” his mother screams. She places her hands under his head and kisses him on the forehead.

“I’m fine,” Matthew says, more embarrassed than hurt. He’s taken worse in the schoolyard. He is a big boy, after all, and he has climbed the tree of heaven.

“Are you sure? Do you need to go to the hospital?”

“I wanna go home.”

“You know I love you and wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Okay. Let’s don’t tell your father about this. It will be our little secret. Deal?” And she extends her trembling hand to shake.

Matthew knows it is a mistake to shake her hand, to betray his father, but he reaches out and takes her hand in his. “Deal.”

STONE’S HEAD THUMPED and the air smelled of vomit. Somebody was in the room with him, but his eyes, still unfocused, couldn’t make out the figure sitting in a chair at the end of his mattress.

“Matthew, I was so worried about you.”

That voice, that voice was so familiar yet so alien at the same time. It was the same voice he had just heard in his dream, the same voice that had comforted him and nurtured him as a small child before it had disappeared from his life. He ached all over and his clothing stuck to his body. Stone reached behind his mattress for the pill bottle but his blind hand found nothing except street grit tracked onto the floor.

“If you’re looking for the pills, you’re not going to find them,” the voice said. “I flushed them down the toilet. They are all gone.”

Stone was unsure whether he was still in the grips of delirium. How could his mother possibly be here, now, after almost fourteen years? How could she even find him? And why would she come now after staying away through crisis after crisis in which he had no one to turn to? He sat up on the mattress, the room rotating around him. Was this really her, and not a figment of his imagination? Was this the woman who brought him into the world, the woman who ran away? He didn’t even know what to call her after all this time: Mom? Abi? Bitch? Coward?

“The pills are gone, you’re not getting any more.”

He looked at his mother’s face and saw no warmth, nothing—it was too late for that. She had missed too much of his life. Her face had hardened with the years. But though her skin was tanned and worn, she was still pretty. It was still the same face he had known as a child.

“What are you doing here?”

“You need help,” she said. “You look terrible.”

“But what are you doing here? How did you know where to find me?”

“Matthew, I’m here. That’s what’s important,” Abi said. “You need a mother right now. Someone to take care of you.”

Stone regarded her for a moment, unsure how to respond. This was not motherly love, this was remorse speaking, and Stone had no intention of helping to alleviate her guilt. She was dressed in black and muted grays in the Banana Republic style, with its timeless lines, its clean cut eschewing fads and trends. She looked like the consummate New Yorker—urbane, cynical, confident—and it struck Stone that perhaps she had never even left New York but had been living across the river all this time, painting her pictures while he struggled to keep himself together.

“I wish it was you who died instead of him.”

“I don’t blame you for hating me,” she said, staring down into her lap. “But I’m here now, and I want to help you. I just want you to know you are not alone.” His mother raised her eyes, but they were black pools, showing nothing. “Will you forgive me?”

This was the most power Stone had held in years: the power to destroy his mother was hanging on those four meager words. He noticed she had stray gray strands in her shoulder-length hair that had once been as black as sticky summer tar. “I just want you to understand I always loved you, and I hurt every day I didn’t see you. I’m your mother, Matthew, and you are my only son. How do you think it feels?”

There was a bucket of vomit beside the mattress, and Stone leaned over and retched into it. He knew there were disgusting strings of saliva hanging from his chin, but he didn’t care. “So you’re some kind of martyr now. I’m not going to feel sorry for you.”

“I don’t want you to. I just want to explain. Maybe we can find a way to start all over again.”

“Why now?”

“You know what kind of man he was.”

“So you’re here to dance on his grave. Is that it?”

“He was a very willful man, very powerful. He had strong ideas about how the world was supposed to be, and I crossed him.”

“So now you come crawling back to me.”

“It was the hardest thing I ever had to do. Leaving you.”

“Then why did you do it?”

Stone would not dare admit out loud that for years he had expected her to walk through the door and hold him in her arms. He had been safe with her, comforted, and then without any explanation, she was gone. She had disappeared from Stone’s home, his life, but not from life, the life out there. He read about her periodically in the Arts section of the Times, touted as one of the most important American figurative painters of the second half of the twentieth century. She had last appeared in the paper three years earlier, when the National Gallery in Washington had purchased her work for its permanent collection.

“I was afraid of you becoming like him.”

Stone almost laughed, but he wasn’t capable. “A Jewish mother who doesn’t want her son to become a lawyer, a judge?”

“There’s so much you don’t understand about your father. And for that, I am so thankful. I would have taken you with me. I tried once. Do you remember the time when you were twelve and we went down to Florida and you met Papa Julius?”

“You just wanted the painting, to add it to your rogues’ gallery.” Stone had gone to see her painting of Papa Julius years later on a break from college, at Abigail Schnitzer’s first showing at the Whitney, entitled American Portraits at the End of a Gun, which included his grandfather, Julius Stone; John Hinckley Jr.; Bobby Seale; Bernhard Goetz; and the “Son of Sam” killer, David Berkowitz.

“You’re nothing but an opportunist, and now you expect to swoop in and take on the mantle of mother of the year.”

“I don’t know how he found us, but he did and he brought us home. He hadn’t spoken to Julius in years. I don’t know how he figured out we were going to see him. But he knew. Matthew, he said he’d kill me if I tried to run away with you again.”

“And you believed him?”

A vein trembled in her neck. Her voice wavered, no longer the confident, flat tone.

“The year I left, I sent you a birthday card, a Chagall painting of a mother and child. I’m sure you never got it, because a couple of weeks after I sent it, I was out in San Francisco staying with friends from graduate school, when one of your father’s associates, some Midwood lowlife, showed up at the apartment where I was staying and said if I ever tried to contact you again, he would shoot me in the back of the head and throw me in the bay. He pressed the gun to my skull. I still feel it. And he meant it, Matthew. I had never been so scared in my life—not for me, but for you—because I was beyond helping you. I had to leave you on your own with him and you would have to fend for yourself.”

“So you are some sort of tragic hero. Is that the way you imagine it?”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Do you know what it was like growing up, learning about your mother through the newspaper and through her paintings? Every time your paintings turned up in a gallery I went. I wanted to see if there was a sense of sadness in your paintings, something that showed me you cared, that you had lost something precious, something to explain the unexplainable. You ran out on me and your career took off, and now you want me to forgive you. Did you remarry? Have kids? Run out on them too?”

“Matthew, enough. You’re being cruel.”

“You know what? Get out! Do you know how many times I pictured a reunion with you? I expected it to be the happiest day of my life, but you know what? I feel worse. Seeing you just makes me wish I was never born.”

“Don’t say that.”

“You’re in no position to tell me what to say. I want you to leave.”

She sat still, at the end of the mattress, her eyes unblinking as she looked at Stone. “Oh, Matthew, I’m terrified to death for you.”

“Good,” Stone said. “Now you know what it was like for me all those years, not knowing where you were. When I managed to find out about a show, I’d call the gallery but no one had an address for you, not even for your own son. I guess you didn’t want to be found.”

She stood up and said, “I did your laundry. You might want to shower and put on some fresh clothing.”

After she left, Stone emptied his wallet in search of the Xanax prescription from Dr. Xiao but couldn’t find it. He looked all around his room, in his bed, and in the kitchen garbage but could not find the prescription. Had his mother plucked it out of his wallet and flushed it down the toilet? He needed something, but he had nothing he thought could calm him down, so he took a shower.

Beneath the burning-hot water he reconstructed his memory of the only time he’d met Papa Julius. After a horrible fight with the Judge, his mother had packed a suitcase and flown to Florida with Matthew. He remembered thinking she was taking him to Disney World and the Judge would meet them there. Instead, they arrived at his grandfather’s humid apartment, thick with the smell of illness, where he lived alone overlooking a verdant golf course. His mother shook his grandfather’s hand, and Matthew noticed she was trembling as she said, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Stone. It’s an honor.”

“Don’t charm me, Abi. You got me.”

Matthew was surprised to discover his grandfather was so frail and so small. His thick hair had gone white, his bare feet were purple, and he wore a pair of striped pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. A blurred tattoo of a pair of dice crept out of the sleeve and onto his forearm. At first Matthew was afraid, seeing this little man walk toward him, cognac glass in hand.

“How ya doin’, kiddo?” Papa Julius said, and splashed the drink in his face. But it was a trick glass, something found at a joke shop, and Papa Julius was laughing as the golden liquid splashed around beneath its clear concave top. “You gotta be quick,” Papa Julius said, shaking Matthew’s hand. “Hey kid, nice to meet you. I’m your grandpa.”

He thought his grandfather looked kind, like someone he’d throw a baseball around with all afternoon.

“Okay Matty, go watch TV in the guest room. I’m going to paint your grandfather.” Stone recalled the disappointment he felt, being sent away so soon after arriving. He just wanted to be near his grandfather, to watch him move, to hear him speak. He sounded like someone out of a movie with that thick Brooklyn accent, like a Bugs Bunny wiseguy. Matthew pretended to go to sleep as he’d been told but instead stayed up listening to his mother and Papa Julius talk, her voice soft and respectful, his good-natured and full of laughter. He listened to the low murmur of their voices until he fell asleep.

Matthew awoke late at night to the sound of Papa Julius coughing in his bedroom, phlegmy coughs rising from somewhere deep inside his small frame—the sounds of the dying. Matthew was afraid something was the matter, but he stayed in his bed until the coughing stopped and then fell back to sleep. He never saw his grandfather again, after that visit. But he did see the painting years later at the Whitney; Papa Julius sat back on a tattered blue couch, arms spread wide on the high back, his wrinkled face worn from a lifetime of violence, his pajama shirt open at the neck. He looked sly, streetwise, as if he were calculating his next move. There was pathos, humanity, even humor in the portrait as he stared down Death, his final adversary. His mother had captured something so elemental in Julius that Matthew had stood before the painting of his grandfather feeling his entire history had been spread across that canvas.

The shower was not the least bit soothing, exhaustion rippling throughout Stone’s entire body. His hands and feet tingled and, no matter how much he scrubbed, his skin still itched all over. He found Pinky in his room, popping security tags off a rack of dresses with a flat-head screwdriver. “Why did you let her in?”

Pinky looked up from his work and said, “She’s your mother.”

“Not anymore. She hasn’t been my mother in a long, long time.”

“Oh, Jesusfuckingchrist, get over it, you crybaby.”

Stone wanted to lunge at Pinky and throttle him right there on his bedroom floor, but he knew he was too weak right now to do any significant damage. “How did she know where to find me?”

“I figured you told her,” Pinky said, lighting a cigarette and offering one to Stone. “And you were sick as shit. Three days.”

“She was here for three days?”

“She was afraid you were going to die. But you rode it out. Now move on. And stay off the fucking opiates. You want to wake up dead?”

It dawned on Stone that Pinky was not his friend at all, but rather his enemy, and he asked him, “Who told you to bring me to the bingo hall?”

“Say what?”

“You heard me. Who told you to bring me to the bingo hall?”

“You are fucking paranoid, you know that?” Pinky’s face showed no recognition he knew what Stone was talking about, and Stone worried he had imagined the whole conversation with Seligman, that his scrambled mind had met with him under the influence of morphine and not as he remembered, in Seligman’s SUV near Atlantic Avenue. But he had seen him; he knew he had seen him.

“Does the name Zalman Seligman mean anything to you?”

“Is that supposed to be a name? Because it doesn’t sound like a name to me.”

“You know who he is,” Stone said. “You are a terrible liar.”

“And you are the worst roommate I’ve ever had. Now, you can either shut up or get the fuck out of my place. I’m letting you stay here out of the goodness of my heart, and you are nothing but a pain in my ass.”

Stone went back to his room, locked the door, and draped himself in his father’s robe. Surrounded by his father’s books, he thought, the flesh dies, but the property lives on. That is our legacy. But this inheritance was not silent like an armchair or sideboard; these books continued to speak, all Stone had to do was listen. He pulled a book out of the pile. A yellowed, torn envelope with Israeli postage, addressed to Walter J. Stone, had been folded as a bookmark. The return address was from Abba Eban at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The envelope was empty.

Stone found a package of his father’s cigarettes, opened the flat cardboard pack, and placed a Nat Sherman between his lips. The smoke curled in the air and danced before him, spinning up into the light and dissipating. He picked up a copy of The Power Elite, written by one of the Judge’s professors at Columbia. It was inscribed in faded blue ink: “To Walter, Prestige is the shadow of money and power. Best of luck.”

The cigarette failed to calm his racing heart—he was still feverish, his nerves vibrating. The whispering got louder, sharper with each book he opened, and, like a lens coming into focus, Stone was viewing his father in a way he never had in life. He picked up Othello and turned to the pages his father had used to humiliate him all those years ago. He read: “Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost / my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of / myself, and what remains is bestial.”

His father was speaking to him through his books, and with each word Stone began to understand the enormity of his betrayal. He had been instrumental in destroying his father’s carefully constructed reputation. He was guilty, there was no doubt. Proof of Stone’s disgrace lay before him and condemned him. Stone determined to make good on his sins. He would read all his father’s books, piece him back together like a child’s jigsaw puzzle, and solve the mystery of the man he could never please.