There was one hitch, however: Giovanni, who delighted Ms. Harris’s appetite for wit—He’s something, isn’t he? Oh, what a strange boy! — insisted that an obscure singer, Lucy Starlight, open for him on these twenty tour dates. Lucy who? Ms. Harris asked. Bernard laid his hand on her elbow, whispering in her ear. “Why then it’s settled,” she said. “A boy needs his toy.”
The day Mama was to arrive, I took a cab to Central Station and waited under its canopy. I wore an old pair of jeans and a suede jacket, an outfit I had owned for years, so as not to betray Mama with some new look. And yet, while waiting, I adopted a posture of cavalier world-weariness: shoulder against a lamppost, legs crossed, hands buried in my jacket pockets, a kind of cowboy’s pose I never would have assumed in Sea View.
In front of me, as I waited, unfolded a tableau of arrival and departure common to any airport, bus terminal, or train station, any depot where travelers stricken with luggage ship off or dizzily return. Families hailed taxis and picked at the luggage-loaded arriver until he carried no bags. Many kissed and patted and hugged, and it was always so clear, just from the tension and grip, whether the hug meant hello or goodbye. A stranger in that scene looked amazingly like my mother, craning her neck in the timid way one searches for someone in public. “Mama!”
She smiled. I couldn’t believe it. It had been just seven months, but Mama was years older. That can happen: in a month, a week, going to the kitchen for a glass of wine, a person can age fifteen years. Maybe the trial had done it. Her hair, shoulder length, was stippled with gray. Her cheeks puffed and pouchy. Yet her eyes were the same. We hugged.
Amazing how easily you forget the only things that matter, I thought, as we motored uptown to the Restless Sailor Inn. Right there, in the vinyl backseat, Mama. “The train ride was just fine! Just fine! Oh, you don’t know how good it is to see you.” She rested her head on my shoulder. I put my arm around her, an action I’d performed for the first time with Lucy. “This trial, Giovanni, beat the life out of me. Jesse Unheim, that little prick — excuse me, Giovanni, you know I don’t like to curse.”
“I had dreams about him. He—”
“Why didn’t you come? Just a couple days you could’ve come. You know how lonely I was?”
“Mama, I—”
She slapped my thigh with zest. “I know, I know. You have your precious Lucy here.” She wagged her finger. “And we’ll get to the bottom of that.”
I knew she would calm down once we had her settled in her room, which in no time we had. She took it all in — the brocaded wallpaper, the plastic flowers, the heavy maroon comforter — with the same head-swirling attention she gave the busy city streets walking to Leaning Tower, the Italian restaurant where Max awaited us. All the while, she stayed close, laying her head on my shoulder, frisking me with those eyes.
Dinner was a play of two voices: Mama’s and Max’s, the latter reporting all the perks of city-wide success Giovanni had been too modest to include in his letters — how, for instance, a TV star and a famous lawyer had recently volunteered — the former exclaiming, “Oh my!” and “Of course!” and rubbing my back. Talk plowed over the expected fields of conversation: revenue (increasing by the week), the upcoming tour, the cities we’d visit, the generous patronage of Marguerite Harris, who, as it turned out, was hosting a major fête at her town house that following Saturday, Mama’s last night in town.
Over the course of dinner Mama drank three martinis, performing the usual program of memories (my unappreciated genius growing up in Sea View, my old performances for her). Then she started in on me. “I’m angry with you,” she said. “I was all alone up there. Have you forgotten your mama already?” It went on for a while, with Max smiling queasily and Mama wagging her finger at all the sins in the air.
She drank so much, I had to help her into the cab and guide her by the elbow through the hotel lobby, up the old whirring elevator, and, after a brief burlesque of keys, into the room. I helped her onto the tightly made bed. She motioned with her hand for me to lean in, and when I did, kissed me on the lips. “Ah, here we are, still in life.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“We’re gonna find this Lucy’s thread…”
“Yes, Mama.”
“I guarantee it!”
“Rest, Mama.”
“I tell you, you know… your father used… when he was…”
“Mama?”
But she was snoring.
• • •
“Oh, Giovanni, let me.”
Lucy and I sat on one side of the table, Mama the other, the three of us at a tea shop downtown. On the train ride there, two kids with baseball mitts had tugged on my sleeve with an autograph request. I obliged, signing their mitts with my standard, “You’re the star.” Mama had watched it all, looking offended by joy.
“Isn’t he just delightful?”
“Mama, please.”
“He’s a strange one,” Lucy said. “That’s for sure.”
“Strange. Is that a good thing to be these days?”
“Of c-ore-se,” Lucy said in an ironic voice.
“‘Of course,’” Mama said. “I liked the way you said that.” I felt something under the table: Mama kicking me. “And you’re going on tour together. Exciting.”
“Yeah, well, I was the tax. They wanted Giovanni, they had to pay for me.”
“Oh, I don’t believe that.”
“Believe it,” Lucy said.
“No, it’s,” I said, “it’s not true.” A sore spot. When I first came back from that meeting with Marguerite — tipsy after some mandatory drinks with Max — and delivered the news to Lucy, she refused to go. We argued. I’m not your sidekick is one of the things she said. I had to beg, make a whole jokey campaign of wanting her.
“What do you sing?” Mama asked her.
“Oh, I don’t know if it really fits into a type.”
“How would you describe it?”
“I don’t knoooow.”
“If forced, how would you?”
“If forced?” Lucy made a pained expression. I felt Mama again under the table. “Lounge songs, I guess.”
“What about?”
“Giovanni! I didn’t know I’d be interrogaaated!” Lucy laughed. “What are they about? I don’t know.” She asked me, “What are they about, Giovaaaanni?”
“Well, Mama, they’re… really, they’re excellent….”
Over the course of our brief sit-down, we each had two teas. Many times I’d imagined Mama and Lucy meeting, and every time they talked their way into each other’s hearts, and we realized we were family. Only now that we were seated together in a kind of stunned trio did I realize how stupid that was. As Mama and Lucy tiptoed verbally on a heightened, high-wire form of small talk (discussing, eventually, Jesse Unheim as well as the scene at the Communiqué), the afternoon recalled more and more that first, nauseating dinner with Max when there was no room, really, for me to be anyone. Yes, between Mama and Lucy, I shuttled in tone between two Giovannis — the bold, strange lover and that thread-hunting boy — and not knowing what to say or how to say it, kept ordering new hot teas and downing them too quickly, kept going to the bathroom to escape, feeling like I might at any moment shout out something wrong.