THE STORY, BEFORE it came out as a story, was preceded by rumors of its existence that spread from west to east via phone and fax lines. Then little excerpts from it appeared in various publications. And then the Story itself appeared in a well-known and highly reputable national magazine.
It was simply called “Leila,” subtitled “An American Tragedy.” Later it would be expanded and published as a book bearing the same name but a different subtitle: Leila: A Love Story. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the original story and of the book would eventually receive his second Pulitzer Prize, this time in the field of biography.
But for the time being, March 1991, it was still a magazine story called “Leila,” but it was about Saul and Billy as well, and their tragic love triangle.
The story had everything in it, as one critic put it, except murder.
When the magazine story came out, Saul decided to flee town. To flee from the phone calls he was getting. From the publicity the story was generating. From the celebrity status he was acquiring. But most of all to flee from the terrible temptation to become the simplified and sanitized and slightly glorified Saul Karoo the story said he was and the public took him to be. Even Dianah, who hadn’t spoken to him since Billy’s death, called him on the phone and was ready to forgive him after she read the story. He fled from her forgiveness as well.
He had no destination in mind, but he had a suitcase and a passport when he arrived at Kennedy Airport.
He stared at the names of cities, domestic and foreign, for which the airplanes of airlines, domestic and foreign, were bound.
For hours, no destination presented itself to him and he hung around the airport, a vagrant in desperate need of a voyage to somewhere.
And then, a destination finally appeared to him. He would flee to the city where he was born (Chicago), to the house where he was raised, and to the woman (his mother) who had given birth to him.
The March he left in New York was not the March he encountered in Chicago. A late winter storm had blown in from the west and it took two hours by cab, through swirling snow, to get from O’Hare to Homerlee Avenue.
He recognized the neighborhood, the street, the house, but not his mother when she opened the door. Nor did she seem to recognize him. Not until he said, more as a question than a greeting, “Mother?”
“Saul?” she replied, in the same interrogative tone.
They stood there in the doorway, both bareheaded, she squinting up at him, he looking down at her. The falling, swirling snow fell on both of them in equal measure. The snow covered Saul’s thinning gray hair and his mother’s recently dyed and incredibly black hair.
As black, he thought to himself, as my black Remington typewriter in my office on West Fifty-seventh Street.
Finally, his mother moved back and aside, pulling the door, and Saul, changing the suitcase from one hand to the other, stepped inside.
The preliminary conversation between mother and son flowed rapidly. There was an eagerness on both sides to maintain the sounds of their voices for as long as possible without a pause. And so, in this preliminary conversation, a lot of ground got covered.
The weather was a real mess, they both agreed.
Terrible day for travel.
Did he know (he didn’t) that they had closed O’Hare Airport? She had just heard it on the radio before he arrived. His must have been one of the last flights allowed to land.
Since he never came to visit her (not since college) just to see her, but stopped by on his way to somewhere else, she asked where he was going.
He considered, but not for long, telling her the truth. That he had come here to seek shelter from the world. Had, in fact, come just to see her. But he was afraid to tell her this.
And so, instead, he told her that he was on his way to Los Angeles. And as these things have a way of doing, as soon as he told her where he was going, he knew that he would go there.
“Business of some kind?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Movies?”
“Yes.”
In the semipause that followed and threatened to expand into a fullfledged silence, they both turned their attention to the snowstorm outside as seen through the windows of the dining room.
“It just keeps coming down,” he said.
“Shows no signs of stopping,” she pitched in gamely.
But the silence, like some age-old malady for which there was still no cure, returned and settled upon them.
They tried to shake it off, but their combined efforts fell short.
“I guess I better go unpack,” he said, sighing as he rose to his feet, as if unpacking were a full day’s job waiting for him.
“Where do you want to sleep?” she asked, as she always did.
“In the den,” he answered, as he always answered.
“The sheets are clean. They’ve been on the bed for some time, but they’re clean. I’ll get you some towels.”
On his way down the stairs to the den in the basement, suitcase in one hand, towels in the other, his mother’s voice followed him from the top of the landing. The farther away he went, the louder she talked so that his impression of the volume of her voice was of something constant, like the speed of light.
“I already ate. I have dinner early these days. I didn’t know you were coming, otherwise I would have waited. But I’ll warm up some stew for you. Or I can make you something else if you don’t want stew. It’s lamb stew. It’s very good. But I can make you something else if you want. I have some …”
“Stew sounds great,” he shouted back. “I’ll be right up.”
In the wood-paneled (knotty pine) den in the basement, which went by the name of “guest room,” Saul went through the charade of unpacking.
Charade, because he never unpacked when he came here. He unzipped the long zipper of his suitcase and laid open its contents, but that was as far as he ever got.
He stared at the contents of his suitcase as if both the contents and suitcase belonged to someone else.
In his sudden decision to flee form New York, he had thrown things inside it without thinking. He had no idea what he needed because he had (at the time) no idea where he was going.
Shorts. Socks. Shirts. He fumbled with these items without removing them, taking inventory. A sweater. He had brought along a copy of the magazine with Leila’s story, his thinking being that if he took it with him, it meant he wasn’t really running away from it. The magazine lay inside the folded sweater.
In addition, and as a kind of counterweight to the story, he had also brought along a copy of the videocassette of the Old Man’s film, the Old Man’s version.
Saul had kept the cassette hidden in the closet of the spare bedroom in his apartment, so that when Leila was there she would not stumble upon it accidentally.
Why had he taken it along with him?
He had no idea. Maybe he was afraid that in his absence his apartment building might catch on fire and the videocassette would perish. For all he knew, it was the only copy left of the film as it was when it was a work of art.
The cassette lay there among his shorts and socks.
He sat down on the edge of the bed on which the wide-open suitcase lay and was suddenly tempted to lie down himself and go to sleep.
But the lamb stew was being reheated upstairs. The acoustics of the house were such that he could hear his mother’s footsteps drumming a beat on the kitchen floor above his head.
He couldn’t understand it. His mother had become a shriveled-up sparrow of a woman, but her feet landed like bricks when she walked. Judging from the sound, you’d think she was dropping her feet from the height of her waist. Something to do with old age, perhaps. Lack of muscular control, or something like that. Or maybe the result of living alone in a big house and wanting to hear herself passing through.
This thought and the memory of the way she looked when she opened the door, with the snow falling on her head, looking up at him, and the thought that in all probability this would be the last time he saw her alive, the last time he heard her footsteps pounding patterns on the kitchen floor, all this, and something else too, which he could not put into words, caused him to breathe a long-imprisoned sentimental sigh and to say softly, but out loud, “Oh, Mother. Oh, Mother of mine.”
She called him from the landing.
“Saul. Stew’s ready.”
“Coming,” he replied.
Saul sits at the dining room table, eating his lamb stew out of a deep soup bowl. His mother stands not far away and watches him eat.
It was still light when he arrived and now it’s dark. Through the windows of the dining room, illuminated by streetlamps and the headlights of passing cars, he can see the snow falling, swirling, accumulating.
“It’s really coming down,” his mother says, which is what he was going to say.
“Looks like it’s going to snow all night,” he says instead.
“You think so?”
“Sure looks like it.”
The TV, which had been on in the living room when he arrived, is still on. He knows if he weren’t here, his mother would be there watching it.
The lamb stew is terrible. He can’t figure out what makes it so terrible, its tastelessness, or some subtle taste that it has. But something is terribly wrong with it.
She goes back from looking out the window to watching him eat.
“How is it?”
“The lamb stew? It’s wonderful.”
“There’s plenty more.”
There was a time, Saul thinks, when his mother was a wonderful cook and an immaculate housekeeper and a woman who took great pride in her appearance.
Now she is no longer any of those things.
Saul wonders, as he eats his lamb stew, if she is aware of this decline or not.
Signs of neglect are everywhere. You don’t have to look for them to see them. You have to keep looking away in order not to.
His silverware and his soup bowl contain remnants of former meals upon them.
The dishtowel his mother is now worrying with her hands as if it were a rosary is filthy. The furnace keeps coming on and each time it does, the air out of the registers blows little clumps of lint across the floor. Little lint creatures scurrying about like mice.
The House of Karoo, Saul thinks to himself.
He drains the dirty glass of water and his mother, eager for an activity, almost snatches it out of his hands and heads toward the kitchen sink to refill it.
Although he has enough unresolved problems in his life to last him several lifetimes, he casts a scholarly glance at his mother’s departing feet and attempts yet again to figure out how it is possible for this wisp of an old woman to make such a racket when she walks. And on slippered feet.
The closest he can come to an explanation is that his mother snaps her feet downward at the last split second prior to contact with the floor, the way a baseball slugger snaps his wrists to crush a grand slam home run. Impossible to see with the naked human eye.
She stands by the sink, glass in hand, and lets the water run, feeling it with her finger.
Saul looks at her, at his mother, in profile.
At the dirty bathrobe she is wearing. Bought in some tourist shop in Santa Fe during a trip she and his father took over a decade ago. Geometric Indian pattern on it. The patterns and the colors were once distinct. Now they are a smudge. It fit her once. Way too big now.
Her hair, dyed black, has no discernible style but is instead a collection of several different hairdos on a single head. Parts of it were Afro. Part looks like a black beret.
And still she stands there, letting the water run. Has probably forgotten what she came there to do. Mesmerized by the sound of the running water. Thinking her thoughts, the nature of which he will never know.
The sounds of the house go on around them. The furnace comes on, first the whoosh of the flame, then the whine of the fan. The fridge kicks in. The sump pump in the basement comes on. The TV set in the living room drones, the water in the kitchen sink drips.
And then, suddenly, his mother comes back to herself. Shudders a little as if waking up from a daydream and recollects what it was she came to the sink to accomplish.
She fills the glass with water, turns off the tap, and heads back toward him.
Maybe it’s the gesture, leading with the glass of water and holding it out toward him long before he’s in position to take it, that brings back the memory.
The memory of the finger she carried toward him with a splinter inside it.
The way she looked.
The way he responded.
It all comes back.
“Thank you,” he tells her and takes the glass of water from her hand. “Thanks, Mom.”
He uses the word “Mom” cautiously, mumbling it, as if testing the waters of its meaning, if any, for him.
In a surprise move, having stood while he ate, she now sits down at the table next to him. It’s as if she forgot herself, as if she sat down by mistake, but having done so feels she had to remain there for some obligatory minimum amount of time.
He eats his lamb stew and wonders if she’s looking at him. Since his arrival, the longest sustained eye contact between them was out there in the falling snow when they both failed to recognize each other.
He washes his lamb stew down with the water she brought him and feels both the temptation and the terror to look at her.
Her proximity is paralyzing.
With the proximity of her body, he detects the scent of her old unwashed flesh, but it’s not disgust he feels at the nearness of her, it’s terror.
The cause of which is?
He doesn’t know. Who knows what he would see in her wrinkle-wrapped eyes if he dared to take a really good look at them?
The temptation to look persists, like some physical pain that the proximity of her body brings into being. But he conquers the temptation, though not the terror, and does not look.
He finishes his lamb stew.
“Would you like some more?”
“No, no, thank you,” he says, puffing out his cheeks and patting his stomach. “I’m stuffed. It was great.”
She snatches up his soup bowl and his silverware and his empty glass and goes to the kitchen sink to wash them.
He remains seated in his chair. His mother, having washed the dishes, is now standing next to the kitchen countertop, her hands upon it, her fingers softly drumming.
They talk, making brief eye contact every now and then, because at this distance they’re safely out of the range of each other’s eyes.
The talk, initiated by his mother, is of teeth. Hers. His. His father’s.
“I just can’t get used to my dentures. I’ve had new ones made several times. The ones I have now were adjusted by experts, but they still don’t feel right.”
He’s afraid she plans to take them out and show them to him, but she doesn’t.
“Some people are lucky,” she goes on. “Your father, for example. The first pair he got was all he needed. That was that. Forgot he was wearing them half the time. I had to remind him to take them out at night, or else he would have slept with them. I know of plenty others like that. But not me.”
She shakes her head, defiantly proud of her trouble, as if, in her opinion, the better class of people never gets used to wearing dentures.
“They just don’t feel right. Never did. And never will. I’m wearing horseshoes in my mouth. That’s what it feels like.”
They both smile.
“What happened to you?” she asks him.
He’s puzzled by the question.
“To your teeth,” she asks, alluding to his broken teeth by running a finger over her own.
“Oh.” He nods, understanding now. “These here. I chipped them while eating something.” Then shrugs, as if to minimize the importance of the event.
She seems to know nothing about the fatal car crash. The story from which he’s fleeing doesn’t seem to be a story she has heard, and he’s not about to tell it to her.
“They have bonding now,” she tells him. “I hear it’s real simple and easy and doesn’t hurt. You should get your teeth bonded.”
“I will.”
“Got to take care of your teeth while you have them.”
“I know. I will.”
In the ensuing silence, he sees a tense alertness taking hold of his mother’s entire little body. She hears something. Some signal. Some call. And, as if in response to it, she starts to lean forward, poised for departure.
He quickly comprehends the nature of the call.
Theme music is playing on the TV in the living room, for a show she wants to watch. She has probably been looking forward to it for hours.
The least he can do is to let her watch it in peace, he thinks.
“I better turn in. I’m tired,” he says and heads toward the door leading down to the basement. His mother heads toward the living room and the TV set. They pass each other.
“Good night, Mom.”
“Sleep well.”
He catches a look in his mother’s eyes as she goes past him. The TV show is pulling her toward it, as if it were an irresistible lover, and her old eyes seem to shine brighter in anticipation of the tryst.
He took a shower in the basement, using the same little surfboard-shaped piece of soap that was in the soap dish the last time he was here … almost three years ago. The soap was hard as a little river rock and he had to work a lot to get it to lather.
No brilliant thoughts came to him in the shower except for the vague realization that he should have been further along by now.
Further along in what?
In his life? In his dealing with his mother? In something? In everything?
All of the above.
Further along in general.
Standing totally naked in the half-finished basement, he dried himself with the towel his mother had given him.
He observed the various pieces of furniture and the appliances that had once been upstairs and were moved down over the years.
The old upstairs fridge and the old gas range were down here now. As were the old upstairs dining room table and chairs. Along with the old upstairs living room rug.
Like some government in exile, he thought, walking barefoot to the den, carrying his shoes and socks in one hand, his clothes in the other.
There was a small bookcase in the den (made of knotty pine, like the paneling) with about thirty old hardback volumes in it. Sinclair Lewis. Upton Sinclair. Booth Tarkington. Carl Sandburg. Others. The Great Books of the Midwestern World, his father had called this collection in a moment of rare humor.
Saul considered doing a little reading in bed, but he couldn’t think of what he wanted to read, so he turned off the lights and felt his way in the darkness toward the bed.
No, the darkness of the den was not haunted by the ghost of his father. The den, the whole house, in fact, was haunted by an absence of ghosts.
The queen-size bed with the too-soft mattress had once been the upstairs bed of his parents. He crawled under the covers only to realize that he had left his suitcase on the bed. It stayed there like the presence of another body next to his.
The layout of the basement was such that the living room where his mother now sat watching TV was right above his head. He could hear the laugh track of the show she was watching.
In the darkness of the den, the sound of that laugh track acquired the quality of some deity, or a chorus of deities, responding in an aloof but uproarious fashion to the private thoughts he was thinking.
His thoughts were about stories. Stories in the plural. And stories in the singular. Stories in general. Specific stories.
The story of Leila and Billy and him.
(Laugh, laugh, laugh, the soundtrack laughed above his head.)
Leila’s whole life was there. In the magazine in the suitcase next to him.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author had interviewed not just her mother but her old friends and relatives in Charleston and her friends in Venice. Saul, who knew her, knew none of these people. The writer who didn’t know her and had never seen her knew more about her than he did.
The same seemed true of Billy. The writer had gone to Harvard and talked to Billy’s friends (Saul knew none of them) and the resulting profile of Billy was more coherent and detailed than the Billy Saul had known.
And although the writer had never met Saul, the character of Saul that emerged in the story, supported by opinions and quotes from numerous sources, was far more satisfying and made much more sense than the character he knew.
(Laugh, laugh, laugh.)
The story of the three of them (right there in the magazine in the suitcase next to him) was a marvel of simplicity and grace and was made to seem somehow inevitable, as all good tragedies are.
A girl of fourteen gives up her child for adoption. Almost twenty years later, the man who adopted her child, now separated from his wife, meets her in Venice. The man is an almost legendary rewriter of flawed screenplays and fixer of flawed films. He has come to Hollywood to work on a film directed by Arthur Houseman who, because of ill health, was unable to finish the job himself. Leila, after years of struggling to make it as an actress, is the star of the film Saul has come to fix. He falls in love with her. Eventually, he introduces her to his adopted son Billy, a freshman at Harvard. Neither the woman nor the boy, nor Saul himself, know that they are mother and son. Leila and Billy fall in love. They have an affair that they keep secret from Saul. On their way to the premiere of her movie in Pittsburgh …
(Laugh, laugh, laugh.)
What Saul loved about this story of their story, as written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, was the absence of any unresolved mess in either the story line or in the principal characters the story portrayed. An almost architectural sense of proportion permeated the entire magazine piece, everything balanced by something else and nothing left hanging in midair.
The story never bogged down. It had a beginning, a middle, and a tragic but satisfying end. At the conclusion of the story was the sense that the story was over.
It was so well written and so well constructed, it made much more sense to Saul than the story he had lived through.
The public story put his private experience of it to shame. It made him wonder if he shouldn’t adopt it as the authoritative version of the events and the people in question.
He had fled from New York precisely because the temptation to do this was so great, but he now wondered (in the darkness of the den) if his flight from the temptation was just a brief postponement of the inevitable.
The thought of acknowledging and being acknowledged as the person in the magazine story seemed like the answer to the problem of living his life. Even his own mother, he was sure, were she to read that magazine story in his suitcase, would have a much better idea of who he was than she did now.
With just a minimum of practice he could become in private, in his own eyes, the person he was now reputed to be in public. The contradictions of his existence would vanish along with the pain of privacy.
(Laugh, laugh, laugh.)
In the living room above his head, the sitcom his mother was watching segued smoothly into another.
If only some Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist could be found to do a profile of his mother, he might be able to discover who this woman was who had given birth to him so many years ago. With his whole heart he wished to read that profile.
Oh, Mother, he thought.
Oh, mother of mine.
(Laugh, laugh, laugh.)
He could not even tell, as he started drifting off to sleep, what he meant by that flowery invocation of his mother.
Did the invocation mean to convey pity for her, or was it a plea of some kind, for help of some kind, from a son who was afraid of dying a death of some kind?
(Laugh, laugh, laugh.)
He woke up early the next morning, it wasn’t yet seven o’clock, and he meant to get out of bed when he heard the rolling thunder of his mother’s footsteps above his head.
Whatever little delight he may have experienced in being, for once, an early riser, was stomped to death by the sound of his mother’s feet. Judging by the rhythm of those stomping feet, she had been up for quite some time.
So he stayed in bed, bemoaning the demise of the good deeds he’d had in mind upon waking. He had intended to sneak upstairs to the kitchen and make coffee. To have a cup or two alone, and then, when his mother stumbled out of her bedroom, he was going to tell her: “Good morning, Mother. Coffee’s ready.”
The thought of going up there now and having her say, “Good morning, Saul. Coffee’s ready,” was too much for him.
He stayed in bed. He tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t. His mother started getting telephone calls. (At this hour, he thought.)
There was an extension in the den, not far from his bed, not far from his head, so that each time she got a call the whole den reverberated with ringing. In addition, there was the gallop of her feet as she ran (or so he imagined) to answer the phone.
He almost screamed the next time the phone rang. He jumped out of bed.
His mother was on the telephone when he snuck out the back door. She must have been talking to some hard-of-hearing old crony of hers, because she was shouting at the top of her lungs.
“I’m a tough old broad,” she was shouting and laughing as he shut the door behind him.
It was still morning, not exactly the crack of dawn to be sure but well before noon, and Saul Karoo was out in front of his mother’s house shoveling snow with an old snow shovel he had found in the garage.
It was getting warmer. A bright sun was shining on last night’s snowfall, and in the reflected heat and glare Saul, squinting and sweating, was shoveling away for all he was worth.
It was, as late March snows tend to be, wet and heavy, one of those snowfalls much beloved by agronomists who love to translate them into acre-feet of water.
It was hard work shoveling this stuff, but hard work was what Saul sought. He was desperate to disengage his mind, and the only way he could think of doing that was to put as much stress on his body as he could.
He attacked the snow in his mother’s front lawn with an almost vengeful fury, but without any discernible pattern. He shoveled away in one spot. And then he spun around and shoveled away in another spot. At times, he seemed to be trying to kill something with his shovel. At other times, it looked as if he were digging for a lost set of car keys buried in the snow.
Hopping from spot to spot, resembling occasionally a man involved in hand-to-hand combat with himself, he didn’t so much clear away the snow as leave behind numerous craters in it.
His hands on the long wooden handle were so close together that the grip he was using was far more appropriate for a large stick used to whack a snake to death than for shoveling of any kind. But he didn’t seem to notice or care. He simply didn’t want to think about anything. Not his life. Not his mother’s life. Not the story in the den. Nothing.
This stunning display of a man devoid of any physical grace or dexterity but wielding a snow shovel with fury offered an illuminating glimpse into the paradox of modern life. Here he was, this modern man, this Saul Karoo, trying to get away from his highly developed mind and lose himself in a body that had been a lost cause for decades.
His old mother, watching through the large picture window in the living room, was perplexed, to say the least, by the image of her son in the throes of frantic shoveling.
Being an old woman, she had become over the years an expert of sorts on the ways to avoid lower back problems. Observing the manner in which her son shoveled, all back and no legs, she feared a major lower back spasm in the making. She saw crushed disks. Cracked vertebrae. She saw her son in traction. A cripple.
So she rapped on the large picture window to get his attention. When he at last looked up at her, she mimed shoveling snow with her arms and bending at the knees while doing so.
She continued to do this for about twenty seconds while he stared at her dumbfounded.
He had no idea what the hell she was doing, what all her arm-flapping and knee-bending meant. It looked like a strange little dance she was performing for his benefit.
Not knowing how else to respond, Saul smiled at her and nodded approvingly, as if complimenting the dance recital of a five-year-old.
He changed course, however. To get out of her line of sight, he started moving backwards, shoveling alongside the house, heading toward the backyard.
The combination of physical exertion and the rising temperature began to exact its toll on his body. His armpits and crotch were damp. Sweat poured down his face, and his head steamed like a large cabbage in a pressure cooker.
He shoveled on, his arms getting weaker and heavier. With each successive scoop there was less snow in the shovel.
He didn’t want to think, but as the mechanics of his body began to break down, his mind picked up the slack and began shoveling thoughts at him.
Who was she? he wondered.
Who in the world was this woman he called his mother?
This was not a rhetorical question but a genuine inquiry into the matter.
He took a couple more swipes at the snow and then, sweating, squinting, panting, came to a complete stop at a point in the backyard roughly equidistant from the house and the garage.
Who were all those people who called her on the telephone this morning?
What did she mean by saying, and to whom did she say, “I’m a tough old broad”?
And that strange, high-spirited laughter that had accompanied her statement, where did that come from and what did it mean?
Now that he thought of it, although he didn’t want to think at all, but now that he thought of it, he had never heard his mother laugh like that before.
Was this laughter of hers a lifelong trait he had somehow managed to miss till now, or something she had developed in recent years?
Leaning on the handle of the snow shovel for support, he stood, totally spent.
His postmeridian shadow lengthened slowly across the unshoveled snow while he stood thinking about his mother.
The more he thought about her, although he didn’t want to think about her at all, but the more he thought about her, the larger his ignorance of her seemed to grow. If someone were to put a gun to his head, he could not possibly write her story. He had known this woman longer than he had known anyone else on earth, but he had not a clue about what her story was.
The only thing he could say about her, with any degree of accuracy, was that she was old and still alive.
Could she, he wondered, say more about him than that? That he too was old and still alive?
Lost in contemplation of lifetimes and story lines and the extent to which one had nothing to do with the other, he remained standing in the fallen snow until his mother appeared in the back door and called him inside for lunch.
Saul is sitting at the dining room table, in the same chair where he sat the night before. And he’s about to have the same dinner again, only now it’s lunch, because the same aluminum pot of lamb stew is on the stove, being reheated yet again.
“You might as well finish it off,” his mother says, her back turned to him as she stirs the stew slowly with a long wooden spoon.
“One thing about lamb stews,” she says, “and stews in general, is that the more times you reheat them, the better they taste. But you want to make sure to reheat them on a low flame. The lower the better. That way it heats up just right, without burning the pot or wrecking the taste.
“I add a little water sometimes,” she says, “depending on the thickness of the broth.” She bends over the pot and sniffs. “Mmm, smells good.”
Saul is not hungry, but even if he were ravenous, he would rather eat rocks than go through the ordeal of dumping that lamb stew into his stomach.
His mother moves around the house. She comes and she goes. She stirs the stew with a spoon and leaves. To go to the living room. To peek out of the window and see if the mailman is coming. Then all the way back, her feet hammering on the floor, back past him to the kitchen to check on the stew again. And then all the way back to her bedroom at the opposite end of the house. For what purpose he doesn’t know. Maybe to peek out the window and see if the garbage trucks are moving up the alley to pick up the garbage.
It’s a long house from one end to the other, with various rooms and closets running off a single corridor. When he sees his mother returning, at a distance and backlit by the daylight from her bedroom window, she looks completely wrinkle-free. Like some anorexic teenage girl with weird hair. And then, as she keeps walking toward him, time, in its time-lapse way, turns her into a wrinkled old crone.
Now there’s a story, Saul thinks and looks away from her.
“Almost ready,” his mother announces.
“Stews,” she says, “should always be served piping hot.”
The furnace comes on. The air blows out of the louvered registers. Little dustballs roll across the linoleum floor, unseen by her but seen by him.
Like tumbleweeds through a ghost town, he thinks.
The House of Karoo, he thinks.
Who will live here when she dies? he wonders.
Oh, Mother. The unspoken words speak of their own accord in his mind.
He has no nostalgia for this house, where dustballs now roll across the floor. Nor can he summon any genuine filial affection for this woman in a faded bathrobe, his mother. And yet the refrain “Oh, Mother” goes on and on in his mind.
He is old, she is old, but there is something about that “Oh, Mother” in his mind that seems eternal and ever young.
He has followed her with his eyes as she moved around the house and he is watching her now as she stirs the stew again.
She lifts up the wooden spoon to her lips and slurps some stew broth through her dentures.
“I think it’s ready,” she announces.
She opens a drawer and clatters out a ladle. She looks at the bowl of the ladle, blows something out of it, and then starts ladling out the stew into his dish.
Then, bearing the steaming plate of stew in both hands, she walks toward him. A little gnome of a woman, with sledgehammers for feet.
When she crosses some imaginary line and her eyes get too close to him for comfort, he looks away.
The loose sleeve of her Santa Fe bathrobe brushes his shoulder as she places the lamb stew on the table in front of him.
The scent of her old unwashed flesh mingles with the scent of the stew steaming upwards toward his nostrils.
His stomach heaves, contracts.
“Would you like some salt and pepper?” she asks him.
What he would like is a bilge pump to roll in and suck the lamb stew out of his dish, but he accepts her offer.
She totters off and then totters back, holding two identical stainless steel shakers, one in each hand. They look like chess pieces. Rooks.
“There,” she says, and places them on the table.
And then she totters off again. Not far. But far enough away not to be on top of him.
She seems to know that it bothers him, the nearness of her body.
She seems to know on which side of the imaginary line she should be.
Sweating like a stevedore, he reaches for the salt and pepper shakers and sprinkles some of each on top of his stew. As it turns out, both the salt and pepper shakers have salt inside them. But he says nothing. What’s there to say? Not even a sprinkling of crushed cigar butts could make the lamb stew any more inedible than it already is.
She just stands there, intent on watching him eat.
He can see her out of the corner of his left eye. He sees the fingers of one of her hands worrying the fingers of the other. He sees, or thinks he sees, the skin around the corners of her mouth move in tiny spasms. Like someone swallowing little fragments of sentences.
She is on the other side of the imaginary line, but she might as well be sitting on his lap.
He eats some lamb stew, unable to distinguish the taste and texture of overcooked vegetables and potatoes from the taste and texture of overcooked meat.
He wishes she wouldn’t watch him eat.
He wishes she had to go to the bathroom.
He wishes she would get one of her phone calls.
He wonders why it is that she got all those phone calls early this morning and now nothing.
Maybe, he thinks, that is the way with old people. They check up on one another, in rotation, first thing in the morning, to make sure they are all still alive.
Something about that phrase “still alive” causes his mind to wander.
He doesn’t want to think, but he’s thinking and he can’t tell if his thinking is leading him away from the matter at hand or toward it.
Nor can he tell what the matter at hand is.
Something is still alive.
Oh, Mother, he thinks, but his mind is a muddle of mothers. It’s like water on the brain, only he’s got mothers on the brain.
Not just his mother but mothers in general.
He’s awash in mothers.
Mothers of all kinds. Birth mothers. Adoptive mothers. Fourteen-year-old mothers. Old mothers. Mothers, like his mother, who will never be mothers again. Mothers, like Dianah, who was a mother no more. Mothers who miscarry the life within their wombs and mothers with barren wombs. Mothers of the stillborn and mothers of the unborn.
And suddenly he, Saul Karoo, sweating over his steaming plate of lamb stew, feels overcome with kinship and something like love for them all. For all those mothers.
For he too …
He starts crying, averting his face from his mother’s eyes so she won’t see.
For he too …
He starts sobbing, blubbering, shoveling spoonfuls of lamb stew into his mouth in order to distract his mother from his unforeseen breakdown.
He too, wombless though he is, he too has known the motherlike yearning to give birth to something living and new.
Has known, within the limitations of his gender, that feeling of fullness and expectation.
But never the joy of deliverance.
His life has been all gestation and no birth.
Oh, mothers, he now blubbers to himself, have mercy on me. Mothers, you life-givers of the world, have mercy on me please. I want to be a life-giver too. Sullied of soul and old and wombless though I may be, there is still something within me as yet unborn clamoring for birth.
This seemingly obvious fact, that he is still alive, and that his own mother is still alive, strikes him now as miraculous.
And before he can stop to think, before he can even plan his next move, he is moving.
He starts to slide off his chair, his arms flapping every which way as he lands upon his knees on the linoleum floor. There, gathering his body together into a figure of a sloppy-looking supplicant, he turns toward his mother.
Kneeling before her, his hands pressed together as if he were pleading, he starts to speak.
“Mother,” he says, looking up into her eyes, “forgive me, please.”
Unprepared for her son’s extravagant display of emotion, she had instinctively stepped toward him when she saw him sliding off the chair, thinking God knows what was happening, thinking that he was perhaps having a heart attack like his father and wondering if her lamb stew was responsible.
Now that she sees that he’s all right, that he’s alive and well, but kneeling there in front of her, looking right into her eyes and pleading for forgiveness, she is positively horrified.
She would have known how to respond to his sudden death, but she does not know how to respond to this.
A dead son is still a son and she would have known what to do, but this man down on his knees in front of her does not seem like any son of hers.
Who is he and what is he doing?
Having stepped toward him when he fell out of the chair, she now steps back. The horror she feels only grows when he, sliding across the linoleum floor on his knees, comes toward her like a cripple without legs.
“Saul,” she says, “what are you doing? Get up. Get up.”
But he keeps creeping toward her.
She has backed up as far as she can go. He has backed her into a wall. She stands there shivering, looking trapped, the distance between them narrowing as he creeps on toward her on his knees.
“Oh, Mother,” he cries again and again.
As old as she is, and as totally inexperienced in scenes of this sort with her son, she starts to understand what is happening.
Something real is creeping toward her.
The first real moment between herself and her son is heading directly toward her.
He is looking up at her. Her child. Her son. This old man, pleading with her.
And she pleads right back at him, like some helpless old woman confronted by a mugger. She pleads with him to abandon his assault. Let us not have something real now, she pleads with him with her eyes. I’m an old woman. A widow. I haven’t got much longer to live. Please, spare me this moment.
He sees her eyes, he comprehends their meaning, but he can’t help it. The momentum of the moment is moving him toward her.
He, down on his knees, may look like an overwrought sentimental buffoon, but there is nothing sentimental in what he sees. He sees her with brutal clarity.
The dead dentures in her mouth. The lusterless cheap black hair dye. The perm-burnt, pubiclike quality of parts of it. The anal-like wrinkles around her eyes. And the eyes themselves, small, smeared, full of cataracts.
She could be any old woman.
She could be anyone’s mother.
And this is precisely what moves him so. That she could be anyone’s mother, even his.
“Oh, Mother,” he says.
And taking her reluctant hand, so small and cold and old, he kisses it and says:
“Mother, forgive me, please.”
It is not lost on him that the hand he kissed is the very hand with the very index finger where a splinter once lodged, nor is it not lost on her.
She remembers the incident of the splinter. His repugnance of her pain.
His response hurt her. But this hurts even more. This is truly horrifying because it implies that everything could have been different between them. That this love she now sees could have been there all along.
She is too old to change. To start again. To suddenly start loving again. What is even harder to accept is that she is loved. It’s too much to ask of an old woman. It’s almost merciless.
He can see the horror in her eyes and the hope that this moment will pass. She wants her old son back, not this loving one who is down on his knees looking up into her eyes and holding on to her hand.
He also knows that the forgiveness he seeks is too all-encompassing to be given to a single little old woman in a faded bathrobe.
But although all does not go as he would have wished, all is not lost either.
Some little wriggling life is engendered between them.
And something else too.
Looking up into her eyes, he catches the moment.
A briefest of glimpses is all that he is granted, but it suffices.
In that one single peek through her unguarded eyes, he sees that the collected memories and moments of a single day of her life, of anyone’s life, if fully explored, would surpass in volume the collected works of any author who ever lived. Whole wings of whole libraries, if not whole libraries themselves, would be needed to house a single day of anyone’s life, and even then that life would surely be shortchanged.
And yet, he thinks, down there in his suitcase, among his T-shirts and shorts and socks, in that magazine is Leila’s story. And Billy’s. And his own as well.
Life, it seems, is not meaningless but, rather, so full of meaning that its meaning must be constantly murdered for the sake of cohesion and comprehension.
For the sake of a story line.
And then the peephole passageway to his mother’s private universe vanishes from view, or she chooses to close his access to it.
Her eyes, through which he saw what he saw, are once again the eyes he knows, defiantly guarding the unknowable on the other side.
He is still holding her hand and she wants it back. He lets it go.
Her way of dealing with what has just occurred between them is this. She does not pretend that something didn’t happen. She just cannot talk about it now. She will incorporate it into her life, but not now, not in front of him. These things take time. And although she probably has little time left in her life, these things still take time.
She walks past him, through the kitchen, and walks all the way back to her bedroom, shutting the door behind her.
He rises slowly, feeling little flutters of pain in his lower back.