There was morning activity at the psychiatric hospital, and David waited for a moment in the hopeful light of Adeline’s ward before being able to make out which bed was hers. The hospital echoed with hustle — the hopeful chirping sounds of trays, the shoes of the nurses whispering along the floor.
From a distance, David observed his mother, her thin hands picking at the sheets. She lay, her gray hair in a tousled aureole, staring at nothing. David was shocked to see her thin, frowsy face and form; he had never before seen his mother so untidy.
Before he knew it, David found himself kneeling beside her bed. “Mother,” he said. Adeline did not respond. Bitterness flooded his throat. There was dust under the iron bed, and parings of nails and scraps of adhesive. Disgusted, David got to his feet. “It’s me, David,” he said, clearing his throat.
Under the iron bedstead, a thin, flattened heap of bones, an imagined watching skeleton shifted slightly. What was that rustle that only David seemed to hear? Perhaps Adeline heard it, too, for she stopped her endless fingering of the sheets and held out one hand to David. As if blind, her hand walked about his face. “Michael?” She queried vaguely. “Is that you?”
David felt the impatient anger welling up in him. He knew he shouldn’t have come. “No, it is I, Mother. David,” he replied.
“Remember how you use to love my clothes?” said Adeline longingly, ignoring his self-identification. “Sit down, my darling boy,” and she pulled him to her side on the bed. David sat down reluctantly. The familiar hatred for her welled in him, but he tried — no, willed himself — not to show it. “I loved to see you dress up in my clothes,” Adeline said again, and a smile came to her ravaged face.
“No, Mother, that was not me,” David said cruelly.
But Adeline seemed not to hear. “They always said you looked like a girl, like me. Remember, my darling?”
David uncrossed his legs, standing up. “I just came to see you, Mother, but I cannot stay. I must get back to work.”
“Oh no,” cried Adeline suddenly. “Please don’t go. Stay with me awhile. Please.” Tears came into her eyes.
“Self-pity,” David thought disgustedly.
“I am so alone here,” she said. But it was too late for personal revelation. David deliberately looked at his watch.
“I must go, Mother,” he said again as cruelly as he could. He hated himself for his moment of weakness. How had he ever thought he could find tenderness with her?
Anger, deprivation, and mourning threatened to rise to his eyes, too, as he felt his brother’s presence among the dead.
“But where is Michael, then?” Adeline asked thinly, as if reading his mind.
As David did not answer, she quavered again, more loudly, “Where is my Michael, then?”
“Lie,” the ghost of Michael whispered. “Lie!”
“He’s fine, Mother,” said David weakly.
Disgusted by the answer, Adeline turned her face away.
David sat down again. “Mother, listen to me.” He gripped her hands as if to breathe his own life into hers. “You must try to think of something else. You must try to live.” Adeline gave no sign that she had heard him. Leaning forward, David hissed into her ear. “You must, for Father’s sake. You owe at least that to him.”
“Don’t speak of what I owe him,” Adeline retorted, suddenly catching fire in fury. “What do you know of it? How dare you presume to tell me what I should and should not do!” It was the old Adeline for a moment, imperious, arrogant, impossible. David did not know whether to laugh, be relieved, or feel angry about how difficult his mother could be.
“I have every right,” he said. Her eyes flashed and a bit of life came into her skin. “It’s selfish of you to keep on like this,” he continued.
“How dare you say this to me, David,” she retorted, proving that she had recognized him all along. “You! David! After everything that’s happened.”
“Especially after everything!” David responded. “Exactly.” He was impatient with her, did not approve of her, had never approved of her, he realized in an instant. He was too practical, disliked her airs and aspirations. It was Michael who had been close to her, the girlish one, the artistic hope of the family. Michael had loved dressing up in Adeline’s lace things, had loved the smell of perfume and flowers. Michael had Adeline’s nervous, delicate temperament, her love of music. David, the practical one of the family, was Herbert’s son. In that moment, David saw and accepted this. Darkness fell away from him; his old jealousies over his younger brother’s relationship with Adeline slid off him. They fell to the floor and his shoulders straightened, lightened.
“Let it go, brother,” Michael breathed from the dead space beneath the bed. “This is good.” Deftly, Michael scooped up the dark, useless pieces of David’s discarded weight, and with a thin, bony hand, he carefully piled them alongside the heaps of dust he had collected.
As if sensing this, Adeline’s mood suddenly changed, and she sat up in her bed. “David,” she said, addressing him directly and patting his hand, “I am so happy to see you.” She spoke to him now as one lucid person to another. “Sit down. I have something to tell you.” David sat tentatively again, and she looked into her remaining son’s eyes as if seeing him for the first time. “It is so good of you to come.” David waited. “You have always been so good, my dear David,” said Adeline directly to him. “To all of us.”
“She sees me! She knows who I am!” David’s heart grew wings.
“Thank you, David,” whispered Adeline, as if the effort of clarity had exhausted her strength. She sank back after giving this benediction, and David’s eyes glistened.
“Mother,” he said, this time respectfully, and raising her small hands to his lips, he kissed them.
“Did your father tell you the news?” asked Adeline. “The wonderful news?”
“No,” David said, waiting for her to go on. Or to lose the thread of her speech.
“The Tolstoi Quartet,” she said. “They are here in New York.” David did not tell her that he already knew this. “And when I am better, I am going to play the Schubert piano quintet with them in Carnegie Hall. Think, David, Carnegie Hall!” Adeline’s eyes shone. “So you see, my darling, I must practice. A lot.”
David realized that what he had seen when he first entered Adeline’s hospital room, the unending restless movements of Adeline’s hands on the sheets, were the movements of a pianist’s hands upon a keyboard.
“Do you remember your part?” he asked.
“In fact, I remember most of it. I am surprised,” she said proudly. “But I have asked your father to get the score for me, as I must rehearse. There is not much time to lose.”
David thought of the Tolstoi Quartet, that brave group of aging men. How fondly they had treated him, walking into the family house, carrying their instruments ahead of them. Frankly, David had been bored when the music started, and he had amused himself by watching the people in his mother’s living room. His brother, for example, who was taking it all in with large, rapturous eyes. David was frightened for his kid brother when he saw that swooning look. How could they ever communicate? Was it possible two such different souls could be brothers?
Allied with Herbert, his father, outside that soft, delicious circle, David felt as his father often did. Foolish, loving, practical, a taken-for-granted balance to the family.
The Tolstoi Quartet, like everyone else, not seeing the tensions, treated both boys as one. They smiled at David/Michael tenderly, nearsightedly as they left. “Such fine boys,” they said vaguely as Herbert and Adeline stood at the doorway, thanking them. Herbert paid them handsomely. “Good night.” The cries fluttered back into the apple-scented garden. David saw the family house in Vienna, solid, bourgeois; the garden, the garden wall, the street, the streetcars running on curved tracks, taking him and his brother to school each day.