laughed, but he wasn’t capable. “A Jewish mother who doesn’t want her son to become a lawyer, a judge?”
“There’s so much you don’t understand about your father. And for that, I am so thankful. I would have taken you with me. I tried once. Do you remember the time when you were twelve and we went down to Florida and you met Papa Julius?”
“You just wanted the painting, to add it to your rogues’ gallery.” Stone had gone to see her painting of Papa Julius years later on a break from college, at Abigail Schnitzer’s first showing at the Whitney, entitled American Portraits at the End of a Gun, which included his grandfather, Julius Stone; John Hinckley Jr.; Bobby Seale; Bernhard Goetz; and the “Son of Sam” killer, David Berkowitz.
“You’re nothing but an opportunist, and now you expect to swoop in and take on the mantle of mother of the year.”
“I don’t know how he found us, but he did and he brought us home. He hadn’t spoken to Julius in years. I don’t know how he figured out we were going to see him. But he knew. Matthew, he said he’d kill me if I tried to run away with you again.”
“And you believed him?”
A vein trembled in her neck. Her voice wavered, no longer the confident, flat tone.
“The year I left, I sent you a birthday card, a Chagall painting of a mother and child. I’m sure you never got it, because a couple of weeks after I sent it, I was out in San Francisco staying with friends from graduate school, when one of your father’s associates, some Midwood lowlife, showed up at the apartment where I was staying and said if I ever tried to contact you again, he would shoot me in the back of the head and throw me in the bay. He pressed the gun to my skull. I still feel it. And he meant it, Matthew. I had never been so scared in my life—not for me, but for you—because I was beyond helping you. I had to leave you on your own with him and you would have to fend for yourself.”
“So you are some sort of tragic hero. Is that the way you imagine it?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Do you know what it was like growing up, learning about your mother through the newspaper and through her paintings? Every time your paintings turned up in a gallery I went. I wanted to see if there was a sense of sadness in your paintings, something that showed me you cared, that you had lost something precious, something to explain the unexplainable. You ran out on me and your career took off, and now you want me to forgive you. Did you remarry? Have kids? Run out on them too?”
“Matthew, enough. You’re being cruel.”
“You know what? Get out! Do you know how many times I pictured a reunion with you? I expected it to be the happiest day of my life, but you know what? I feel worse. Seeing you just makes me wish I was never born.”
“Don’t say that.”
“You’re in no position to tell me what to say. I want you to leave.”
She sat still, at the end of the mattress, her eyes unblinking as she looked at Stone. “Oh, Matthew, I’m terrified to death for you.”
“Good,” Stone said. “Now you know what it was like for me all those years, not knowing where you were. When I managed to find out about a show, I’d call the gallery but no one had an address for you, not even for your own son. I guess you didn’t want to be found.”
She stood up and said, “I did your laundry. You might want to shower and put on some fresh clothing.”
After she left, Stone emptied his wallet in search of the Xanax prescription from Dr. Xiao but couldn’t find it. He looked all around his room, in his bed, and in the kitchen garbage but could not find the prescription. Had his mother plucked it out of his wallet and flushed it down the toilet? He needed something, but he had nothing he thought could calm him down, so he took a shower.
Beneath the burning-hot water he reconstructed his memory of the only time he’d met Papa Julius. After a horrible fight with the Judge, his mother had packed a suitcase and flown to Florida with Matthew. He remembered thinking she was taking him to Disney World and the Judge would meet them there. Instead, they arrived at his grandfather’s humid apartment, thick with the smell of illness, where he lived alone overlooking a verdant golf course. His mother shook his grandfather’s hand, and Matthew noticed she was trembling as she said, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Stone. It’s an honor.”
“Don’t charm me, Abi. You got me.”
Matthew was surprised to discover his grandfather was so frail and so small. His thick hair had gone white, his bare feet were purple, and he wore a pair of striped pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. A blurred tattoo of a pair of dice crept out of the sleeve and onto his forearm. At first Matthew was afraid, seeing this little man walk toward him, cognac glass in hand.
“How ya doin’, kiddo?” Papa Julius said, and splashed the drink in his face. But it was a trick glass, something found at a joke shop, and Papa Julius was laughing as the golden liquid splashed around beneath its clear concave top. “You gotta be quick,” Papa Julius said, shaking Matthew’s hand. “Hey kid, nice to meet you. I’m your grandpa.”
He thought his grandfather looked kind, like someone he’d throw a baseball around with all afternoon.
“Okay Matty, go watch TV in the guest room. I’m going to paint your grandfather.” Stone recalled the disappointment he felt, being sent away so soon after arriving. He just wanted to be near his grandfather, to watch him move, to hear him speak. He sounded like someone out of a movie with that thick Brooklyn accent, like a Bugs Bunny wiseguy. Matthew pretended to go to sleep as he’d been told but instead stayed up listening to his mother and Papa Julius talk, her voice soft and respectful, his good-natured and full of laughter. He listened to the low murmur of their voices until he fell asleep.
Matthew awoke late at night to the sound of Papa Julius coughing in his bedroom, phlegmy coughs rising from somewhere deep inside his small frame—the sounds of the dying. Matthew was afraid something was the matter, but he stayed in his bed until the coughing stopped and then fell back to sleep. He never saw his grandfather again, after that visit. But he did see the painting years later at the Whitney; Papa Julius sat back on a tattered blue couch, arms spread wide on the high back, his wrinkled face worn from a lifetime of violence, his pajama shirt open at the neck. He looked sly, streetwise, as if he were calculating his next move. There was pathos, humanity, even humor in the portrait as he stared down Death, his final adversary. His mother had captured something so elemental in Julius that Matthew had stood before the painting of his grandfather feeling his entire history had been spread across that canvas.
The shower was not the least bit soothing, exhaustion rippling throughout Stone’s entire body. His hands and feet tingled and, no matter how much he scrubbed, his skin still itched all over. He found Pinky in his room, popping security tags off a rack of dresses with a flat-head screwdriver. “Why did you let her in?”
Pinky looked up from his work and said, “She’s your mother.”
“Not anymore. She hasn’t been my mother in a long, long time.”
“Oh, Jesusfuckingchrist, get over it, you crybaby.”
Stone wanted to lunge at Pinky and throttle him right there on his bedroom floor, but he knew he was too weak right now to do any significant damage. “How did she know where to find me?”
“I figured you
