The Enemy

ordered a fine red wine. But my mother ate nothing and drank nothing. She just watched us. There was pain showing in her face. Joe and I ate, self-consciously. She talked, exclusively about the past. But there was no sadness. She relived good times. She laughed. She rubbed her thumb across the scar on Joe’s forehead and scolded me for putting it there all those years ago, like she always did. I rolled up my sleeve like I always did and showed her where he had stuck me with a chisel in revenge, and she scolded him equally. She talked about things we had made her in school. She talked about birthday parties we had thrown, on grim faraway bases in the heat, or the cold. She talked about our father, about meeting him in Korea, about marrying him in Holland, about his awkward manner, about the two bunches of flowers he had bought her in all their thirty-three years together, one when Joe was born, and one when I was.
    “Why didn’t you tell us a year ago?” Joe asked.
    “You know why,” she said.
    “Because we would have argued,” I said.
    She nodded.
    “It was a decision that belonged to me,” she said.

    We had coffee and Joe and I smoked cigarettes. Then the waiter brought the bill and we asked him to call a cab for us. We rode back to the Avenue Rapp in silence. We all went to bed without saying much.

    I woke early on the fourth day of the new decade. Heard Joe in the kitchen, talking French. I went in there and found him with a woman. She was young and brisk. She had short neat hair and luminous eyes. She told me she was my mother’s private nurse, provided under the terms of an old insurance policy. She told me she normally came in seven days a week, but had missed the day before at my mother’s request. She told me my mother had wanted a day alone with her sons. I asked the girl how long each visit lasted. She said she stayed as long as she was needed. She told me the old insurance policy would cover up to twenty-four hours a day, as and when it became necessary, which she thought might be very soon.

    The girl with the luminous eyes left and I went back to the bedroom and showered and packed my bag. Joe came in and watched me do it.
    “You leaving?” he said.
    “We both are. You know that.”
    “We should stay.”
    “We came. That’s what she wanted. Now she wants us to go.”
    “You think?”
    I nodded. “Last night, at Polidor. It was about saying good-bye. She wants to be left in peace now.”
    “You can do that?”
    “It’s what she wants. We owe it to her.”
    I got breakfast items again in the Rue St.-Dominique and we ate them with bowls of coffee, the French way, all three of us together. My mother had dressed in her best and was acting like a fit young woman temporarily inconvenienced by a broken leg. It must have taken a lot of will, but I guessed that was how she wanted to be remembered. We poured coffee and passed things to each other, politely. It was a civilized meal. Like we used to have, long ago. Like an old family ritual.
    Then she revisited another old family ritual. She did something she had done ten thousand times before, all through our lives, since we were first old enough to have individuality of our own. She struggled up out of her chair and stepped over and put her hands on Joe’s shoulders, from behind. Then she bent and kissed his cheek.
    “What don’t you need to do?” she asked him.
    He didn’t answer. He never did. Our silence was part of the ritual.
    “You don’t need to solve
all
the world’s problems, Joe. Only some of them. There are enough to go around.”
    She kissed his cheek again. Then she kept one hand on the back of his chair and reached out with the other and moved herself over behind me. I could hear her ragged breathing. She kissed my cheek. Then like she used to all those years before she put her hands on my shoulders. Measured them, side to side. She was a small woman, fascinated by the way her baby had grown into a giant.
    “You’ve got the strength of two normal boys,” she said.
    Then came my own personal question.
    “What are you going to do with this strength?” she asked me.
    I didn’t answer. I never did.
    “You’re going to do the right thing,” she said.
    Then she bent down and kissed me on the cheek again.
    I thought:
Was that the last time?

    We left thirty minutes later. We hugged long and hard at the door and we told her we loved her, and she told us she loved us too and she always had. She stood there and we went