I spent some time telling her stories about the kids; last Sunday we couldn’t come visit her because Carlo had to get them back to the city before dinner, so there had been negotiations in the days before that, and as I had tried to mediate, I’d suggested that we all meet at lunch, for once, but Carlo and my mother had discouraged me by raising a bunch of objections. I had suggested that they talk directly, but my mother would never call Carlo, and Carlo must have forgotten.
In the opposite corner of the room stands the Schiedmayer upright with a score open on the stand, and I stare at the notes (illegible at this distance) while talking to my mother, like someone on TV reading from the teleprompter: facing one way but with my eyes elsewhere. I tell her what we did on Saturday and Sunday, how much the kids ate, how much we played; I tell her that Filippo speaks so well, and that Momo is so lovable; I tell her that Filippo will always be the best student in his class (some might call him pedantic), that Momo is as sharp as a six-year-old (some might call him a nuisance). And everything I say makes her nod, with her head still bent over the gray tweed jacket, and she traces the genealogies of their personalities — the virtues this one gets from his grandfather, the defects that one gets from his great-aunt — partly because she’s understood by now that there won’t be any more grandchildren: Carlo has done his bit, ruinously, and I won’t ever do mine, to avoid ruining anyone else.
And her eyes keep producing tears that she blots with a white handkerchief balled up in her fist, using quick, precise, repetitive swipes, trying to make it look like a casual, distracted gesture. We sit in silence for five minutes, and then I get up and step out of the room and glance down the hall toward our bedrooms and see the usual shadows, the space just wide enough for two men supporting a third man between them, repeating that gesture for all time. In the living room the French doors are open onto the balcony, the white curtain swollen with air, but the house isn’t sailing, it’s not a boat setting off into the future: it has arrived at its final destination and it has docked forever. I go out, lean my elbows on the railing, and look at the narrow street without sidewalks and the stage set of identical façades, white two-story houses that look like a child’s drawing. A woman passes with shopping bags, raises her eyes, sees me, and doesn’t greet me; even though I think I recognize her, she doesn’t know who I am, or knows who I am but doesn’t like my mother. And, anyway, what am I doing out here on the balcony in this cold that feels like autumn, if I’m not even smoking? A dog goes by, not hurrying, and doesn’t raise his head; a minibus goes by, its windows flashing a deformed reflection of the street, the doors, the ground-floor windows, the parked cars, the dog.
I trace the events that brought me here, to figure out where I made a wrong turn, where my map was wrong. (1) This morning, the examination of my wardrobe, triggered by a vague worry about how I should dress for dinner at the Renals’; (2) the need to bring a pair of corduroy pants to the dry cleaner and have a button sewn back onto the only decent and presentable jacket I have, the gray tweed; (3) the trip to the cleaners and the notions shop in the mall.
The original button must have been sewn on badly, I think, or it must have gotten tugged unexpectedly without my realizing it, on one of the few occasions when I wore the jacket (until last year I could button it easily). In the notions shop they had offered to sew the button on, which is when I thought of asking my mother to do it: it gave me an excuse to touch base with her, better than a hasty phone call would be. Now that I’m here on the balcony with the same dog going past again, now that I have to go back in to my mother, I’m not so sure it was a good idea.
She never cried in front of us: she wasn’t the type, and when she was troubled — not necessarily angry — but if she was upset by some news, by a phone call or a letter, she didn’t fling herself into a chair or a bed and break down; she just kept behaving in a way that seemed normal at first, except she didn’t talk (or talked less than usual) and gave us harsh, icy looks, and the implicit message was “You have no right to fall apart if I don’t.” Now she cries all the time — with me, not with Carlo, not with the grandchildren, whom she rarely sees and who wouldn’t know what to do … I don’t know what to do either, I don’t know how to comfort people and share their pain, I’m clumsy at funerals, I shake the hands of the bereaved as if I’m congratulating them, and I’m incapable of consoling friends who’ve been dumped by their lovers (not that they often ask me to).
Everybody cries. Maybe even my mother cried, when she was young, but the fact that she never let this be seen (she only let us see her being confident, authoritative — not authoritarian — calm, equitable, moderate, silent in her joy, silent in her anger; her silence was completely different from my father’s silence, and this still astonishes me: we were born to a pair of very different silences, and we were three very different children) meant that her children were forced to learn to ape emotions elsewhere, outside the home.
My mother never knew how to sew on a button; she didn’t — doesn’t — know how to cook; she cleans the house energetically but without paying attention; she irons badly. She’s famous in the family for these deficiencies: she’s considered an artist, and her sisters refer to her as “the artist” without rancor, simply because for many years she gave private piano lessons (even before my father’s bankruptcy, but afterward her income became more important), even though she never graduated from the conservatory because when she was twenty she married my father, who was ten years older.
I think about these things mechanically (I often think mechanically about them) while I watch her, bent over my jacket; after ten minutes’ work, the button she has sewn on looks like a chunky, shortstemmed mushroom, and what’s more, she has used thread that’s too light. I think about what she must have thought when I showed up at the door with the button in hand. She must have understood it was just an excuse. She cries.
I saw my father cry only twice. This doesn’t mean I never saw him in tears: he was a master at keeping his tears balanced on the rims of his lower lids, reabsorbing them, drinking them back with his eyes, as if he were crying on the inside. But there was no doubt that he cried, that this was his way of crying, and he cried only when he lost something important. (I didn’t see him, or I don’t remember him, when his parents died, because my grandfather was already dead when I was born and my grandmother died when I was three years old, but I’m sure that in both cases he cried that way.)
The first time I saw him cry was when he understood that he’d lost his business. In his office above the small factory, he was standing behind the desk and talking on the phone; it was one of those old gray desk phones, and the cord from the handset kept twisting up and forcing him to lean forward slightly, almost deferentially. I heard him repeating, “Thank you, thank you, I’m grateful, very grateful, you’re rescuing me, you’re very kind, thank you.” I remember the words very clearly for one simple reason: my mother was there too, standing between the door and the desk, between me and my father, and she was shaking her head vigorously, disapprovingly, and her disapproval was so theatrical and violent, her condemnation so strange (because my parents never argued, never: I never heard them fighting about anything serious or decisive, or for any frivolous reason) that it made my father’s words interesting — the banal phrases, the thanks (even that phrase “you’re rescuing me” could have been simply an expression, a rhetorical exaggeration, unusual though it was coming from my father, who never uttered a word that was fashionable or affected). My mother seemed to want to say that you should never thank anybody, ever, for any reason.