The Summer Without Men

her face I read relief that she was not alone, not alone yet. She promised to see her doctor and kissed us both before we left.
    Later that evening, I saw the multicolored bruise my mother had sustained on her side when she rescued her friend from the floor. The walker had somehow been involved and my mother must have banged into it hard. “You mustn’t mention it to Abigail,” my mother said. She said it several times. I promised several times. We sat together in the living room and I felt the hush of the building, nearly silent except for the sound of a distant television.
    “Mia,” she said, not long before I left her. “I want you to know that I would do it all over again.”
    My mother sometimes behaved as if I had access to her thoughts. “What, Mama?”
    She looked surprised. “Marry your father.”
    “Despite your differences, you mean?”
    “Yes, it would have been nice if he had been a little different, but he wasn’t, and there were so many good days along with the bad days and sometimes the very thing I wanted to change about him one day was the thing that made another thing possible another day that was good, not bad, if you see what I mean.”
    “Such as?”
    “His sense of duty, honor, rectitude. What made me want to scream one day could make me proud the next.”
    “Yes,” I said. “I understand.”
    “I want you to know how good it’s been to have you close, how happy I’ve been. I’ve had fun. It can be rather lonely here and you have been my happiness, my comfort, my friend.”
    This rather formal little speech made me glad, but I recognized in the hint of ceremony the ever-present pinch of time. My mother was old. Tomorrow she might fall or be stricken suddenly. Tomorrow she might be dead. When we parted at the door, my small mother was wearing flowered cotton pajamas. The pants ballooned around her tiny thighs and stopped just above the knobs of her scrawny anklebones. She was holding a liver-colored hot water bottle in her arms.
    *   *   *
     
    Daisy wrote:
     
Dear Mom,
     
I saw Dad for lunch and he didn’t look so good. He had stains all over his shirt, smelled like an ashtray, and he hadn’t shaved. I mean, I know he often waits a couple days, but he looked like he hadn’t shaved in a week, and even worse, I thought he might have been crying before he saw me. I told him he looked bad, like a clochard, but he just kept saying he was fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. Mr. Denial. Any thoughts? Should I keep trying to get him to talk to me? Send out a detective? It won’t be long now, Mamasita, before I see you!
     
Big kisses from your own Dazed-and-still-disappointed-in-
     Daddy Daisy.
    *   *   *
     
    I replied:
     
Your father couldn’t have been crying. He only cries at the movies. But do check on him.
     
    Love, Mom            
    *   *   *
     
    I had known Boris for perhaps a week when he took me to Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn at the Thalia on Ninety-fifth and Broadway. There is a moment in the film when the young heroine, played by Peggy Ann Garner, walks into a barbershop to retrieve her dead father’s shaving mug. It is an affecting scene. The girl adored her drunken, sentimental father, with his false hopes and impractical dreams, and losing him is a massive blow. I don’t believe Boris sniffed, although he may have, but for some reason, I turned to look at him. The man beside me oozed tears in two heavy streams as the liquid dripped steadily off his chin and onto his shirt. I was so astonished by this display of feeling, I politely ignored it. Later, I came to understand that Boris responded far more directly to the indirect; that is to say, his real emotions surfaced only when mediated by the unreal. Time and again, I had sat dry-eyed beside him while he snuffled and wept over actors on a big, flat screen. I had never, ever seen him cry in the so-called real world, not for Stefan, not for his mother, not for me or for Daisy or for dead friends or for any human being who wasn’t made of celluloid. That said, I was shaken by the oddly frightening thought that Boris had changed, that if he hadn’t met Daisy immediately after a movie (which seemed unlikely since he worked all the time and had mostly watched films on DVD in recent years) the Pause might have altered the deep structure of Boris’s character. Was he crying over her, the Frenchwoman searching for new neuropeptides? Had the wall come down for