Elegy on Kinderklavier (27 page)

At the end of October I had to get one of the nurses to help me paint Haim's face with orange, white, and black because he wanted to be a tiger. He insisted on waiting until the last second before the hospital Halloween party to put the paint on, in case “someone who really knows how to do it comes on the ward.” As the play specialists took the kids from Pediatric Oncology around trick-or-treating to the various nursing stations, I watched Charlie's latest message. It was from the square in front of St. Mark's Basilica in Venice. It was longer than usual, almost four minutes. It began with an old, hawkish woman in a long, weathered fur coat singing with an open hatbox in front of her. Her voice was high, vibrato-rich, operatic. DO YOU KNOW, she warbled shrilly, stumbling on the syllables, not looking at the camera, THAT I LOVE YOU SO MUCH?

The camera panned out to the rest of the sprawling square, which was gray and empty in the faltering autumn sun. It seemed to be afternoon, and there were hardly any tourists. The many groups of pigeons shrugged in the cold. I sat there in Haim's empty room with the laptop on my lap and watched the clip again and again, eventually closing my eyes and listening to the long stretch after the woman stops singing, the digital roar of the wind gusting against the camera, thinking of the camera's closeness to Charlie's face and trying to hear, in the long space of ambient noise and quiet, the sound of her breathing. I had to stop when Haim wheeled himself back in, crying. His chewing ability had been gradually deteriorating and finally, in one of his first denials, it meant that he couldn't have any of the Tootsie Rolls he had been given.

By Thanksgiving, when Charlie did not show up, I decided to let Haim watch the videos. Because I didn't know how much longer we'd be allowed to leave the hospital, Haim and I went to his favorite restaurant, a tacky Italian chain imported from America. I told him about the videos, and asked if he wanted to see them. He thought
about it for a minute, poking at his chicken parmigiana, and then said that he'd like to watch them. When we got back, Haim was already very tired but we set up the projector anyway, and he held it on his stomach, watching the string of clips silently several times through, until he was asleep.

Every once in a while another of Charlie's paintings would sell and I would get an international money order from her with a strange remitter's address. Because of this, I knew she must be telling her dealer, the one who handled her paintings and finances here in London, where she was staying each time she moved. I knew that if I went down to his gallery in Chelsea, he would probably tell me where she was, and I could do almost anything; I could even go to wherever she happened to be at that moment and confront her, could bring her back, or, at the very least, get a real telephone number with which to speak to her.

But I understood, watching the clips with Haim, strung back to back on an eternal digital loop, that the entire point of this was to avoid speech. That had been her great indictment of me every time we argued, that I made every little thing that should be a four-minute conversation into a forty-minute argument (things which, I knew, in her mind should really even be a forty-second back and forth), that I talked too much, was rude, cut her off in midsentence. “It's an arrogance,” she said. “You think you know what I'm going to say, but you don't. You have to think that, because otherwise you'd have no choice but to see that you're really just afraid that I'm going to say something both true and diminutive about the way you are.” Of course all of this was true. I wanted to keep her bright, quick mind from leaping forward, beyond, with its terrifying ability to articulate with an almost autistic disregard the quintessence of someone as a person. There're some things, I often thought, that you can't ever unhear. Most of the time when she said things like this, I told her that
I thought it was petty, that I thought we should be talking about more important issues. “What's a petty problem?” she said. “What else is being married?” And so the video clips were also a rebuke, a punishment. The only way she could live without me talking. The only way she could get me to shut up.

The day after Thanksgiving Haim wanted to watch the videos again. He ended up watching them several times a week, the whole time taking a small stack of secretive notes, as if the clips contained an intricate system of subtle clues with a hidden message only for him. Who were these videos meant for, really? Had Charlie just assumed that I would show them to Haim as they came? I'd told him about where she was after I received each clip, but I hadn't really explained and he had, self-protectively I think, not asked many questions. I didn't want him to see that adults could be this way, that they could be so wrong about what love is.

It had been a mercy, anyway, for Charlie that when Haim got sick I didn't want to talk about it. “Some people talk,” Charlie used to say when we argued, patiently, like she was explaining it to a child. “And some people live.” But during those long months of the holiday, I thought about how it was dying that was really the anti-speech. The great authors in their twilight produce books that grow shorter and shorter, and nobody has much to say about a child with a terminal brain tumor watching the first snow of the year collect on his windowsill. The story refuses to assemble itself. Dying defeats all plot. What would I possibly have had to say to Charlie, even if we did talk?

On the first night of Chanukah I found out one of the nurses on the ward had been giving Charlie information. I had assumed somebody was. I thought about complaining, putting a stop to it. People should have to earn information about the terminally ill, I thought. People should have to come here and stare into the face of it. I didn't
want her to come swooping in if things got bad all of a sudden, as if she'd been here all along. I just wanted her to come home.

The mothers were here by then. I'd set them up in a small flat that they could share near the hospital when they visited. They were both quiet, nervous women, and for most of our marriage they had harbored a congenital dislike of each other, but they had been united in the cause of a sick grandchild and were mostly glad, now that we'd put an ocean between our little family and them, for the chance to see Haim. The nurses and the other families, who, of course, all knew my and Haim's story, knew about Charlie leaving, were glad to see the mothers around, and gave me big, knowing grins every time they saw me. I couldn't talk to any of them.

And Haim through all of this? It was hard to know what Haim thought during the holiday and when he thought it. He was quiet most of the time, kept his questions to himself. It helped that we'd started on a new therapy, one of the clinical trials, and it seemed to be working, keeping the size of the tumor stable, though it required a brutal course of infusions, and a host of medicines to counteract its side effects. Right at the beginning, as he was being prepped for one of the scans that would start the trial, he said, “So Mom's not going to be back for a while, huh?” As if she was late returning from getting takeout. It was so unexpected, I almost laughed.

It has crossed my mind that Charlie's holiday was not the same thing for Haim as it was for me. Haim understood the sadness of it, for sure, but what is betrayal to a (at the time) seven-year-old? And she did come back, eventually. Do you know that I love you so much that I will show you the world that you cannot see, it might've meant to him, and he might be too young to ever understand the sad miscalculation of that, that the world he could not see was the one where he didn't have an unstable mother who would leave him to die because she could not bear to watch it happen. At the very least by the time
the holiday was over, Haim seemed to have aged years, though it was unclear, like everything else, how much of it was due to me, Charlie, the holiday, or his new body.

Charlie came back the day after Christmas, as if that timing meant anything. Haim had gone into respiratory distress, and been rushed down to the PICU. This was the episode where we figured out he would have to sleep with a bi-pap machine from now on. The mothers had been exiled out to the lounge a floor below the PICU, and I was with Haim. One of the nurses told me later that Charlie had just walked into the ward, leading two men who were helping her with a large crate, then dismissed them. The nurse had come in and told her where Haim was, offered to take her down to me in the PICU, but Charlie politely refused. The nurse said Charlie waited in the empty room until she heard Haim was going to be OK, then, before the mothers or I could return, she left. It was two days later, when Haim was back on Pediatric Oncology and doing better, that she came in while he feigned sleep, and I watched her try to reclaim his body from the distortion of flesh.

When Haim and I finally came back to the room after he'd been released from the PICU, we found a present. Standing to the side of the space where Haim's bed was to be rolled was a shiny, red piano-in-miniature. Both Haim and I stared at it. It had a small red bow on its top, the letters
kinderklavier
spelled out in fancy, golden cursive along the side. It was of a certain size, an in-between scale, not small enough to be a toy, not large enough to be a piano. Haim's body, bloated, voluminous, could not have even sat at it, let alone played it. There so close to Haim's pillowy hands, the miniature keys looked impossibly exact. It was too small for Haim to play, too much an imitation of an instrument for us to play for him. It had only three octaves, the tuning nothing if not approximate. What, I thought, could be suitably played on such a ridiculous thing?

It's now been six months since all of that happened. The story of time, when it is limited, when it is measured in the expansive quality of a child's experience, is impossible to tell. Time is the story, in a way. The relentless march of it. I never imagined this time I'm living through now during Charlie's holiday, never thought of it any more than when, in the moments of my worst anger, I tried to imagine what it would be like to divorce her, to greet her on her return, if it ever came, with the papers. But I never imagined what it would be like six months after she came back, never realized that yes you have to live each dramatic moment of your life, but then you have to live the day just after it, and the one after that.

Charlie comes to the hospital pretty consistently now. Twice Haim has had emergencies, been rushed to the PICU, and twice more Charlie has disappeared. But twice she has come back, each time staying away only a week or so, returning when Haim stabilizes. “At this point, I feel like I'm doing more harm than good if I stay,” she says, and I don't point out to her how ludicrous this is because I know that she knows it, that she is saying this just to bridge the gap, just to speak, to tell me that these times won't be like the holiday, that she will no longer disappear into silence. She's also given me the international cellphone I hold in my hand now, and though she hasn't today, she usually answers it. The times she has answered, I haven't asked her to come back. I've tried to keep my voice even, tried to dryly just tell her the medical details, what's going on. I would still probably be too angry to talk to her on the phone when this happens, but honestly, I'm just too tired.

She came back to me that night after the holiday ended. I could hear the key turning, the door to the flat opening in the dark, as I lay in bed and pretended to be asleep. This was the last question I had, the only one seeing the kinderklavier had not answered.

Of course, later we'd argue, my feelings about things swinging wildly, the memories of bitter lines of thought that I'd strung together
in the long, lonely hours sitting in Haim's room surfacing, reanimating me with anger.

“You think I don't know what this makes me?” she said, on one of the nights the mothers were staying with Haim, in order to give us “some time to talk some things out.” “You think I don't see how everyone in that hospital looks at me, you think I don't know what even my own mother thinks of me?”

“And Haim,” I said. “Let's not forget him. How does he look at you?”

Charlie exhaled, frustrated. I don't know if she could even hear that I was trying to be cruel.

“He looks at me like I'm his mother, he looks at me like he loves me just as much as I love him; he's our little boy, I know he is, I know that, but what am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to say? That I'm a good mother? That I'm the kind of woman who can stand there and watch this thing, this little thing that is my whole heart, flesh of my flesh, that is years of our life, suffer and seize and bleed and die? I'm not that woman, I can't do it, and do you think I don't know that there's something wrong with me, that there's something wrong with me that I can't fix, something so wrong with me that I didn't even know it was there until the clearest possible situation, until he needed me the most and I couldn't even look at him? You think you're the only one that's suffering because you stayed, because there's nothing inside you that keeps you from watching that, but here I am: I have a little boy but I can't be a mother, can't even deny that there's something completely lacking in me.”

Here she paused, bit a fingernail, looked out the window.

“And the thing is, the really tortuous thing is, Haim's the only one who doesn't look at me like that, he's the only one who looks at me like that deficiency isn't all I am. He's the only one who even looks at me like a human being—the irony being, of course, that I'm not,
that I'm the opposite, inhumane by anyone's standard. But maybe that's something about children, especially maybe terminal children. Maybe they are the only ones capable of true mercy. Maybe he can look at me and sense that I am fucked up, but still his mother—still
want
to be his mother. Maybe he can sense that the whole reason I had to leave was because I love him, because more than I couldn't stand the thought of having to see the worst things happen to him, I couldn't stand the thought of it happening and him looking up at me at maybe, I don't know, like his last second of consciousness and seeing my pure horror, this panicked horror instead of love, this thing that I can't hide.”