The Book of Stone. Jonathan Papernick
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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