RON KOSTAR - MRS. WU

Ron Kostar lives in Central New Jersey where he writes stories and plays music. He is the vocalist and clarinet player in the jazz swing bands Delta Noir and Wooden Swing. In the distant past he earned  a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University and taught  in the Intellectual Heritage Department of Temple University. 
He is currently compiling a book of short stories. 

Mrs. Wu
​

“Damn it!” croaked a voice from the other side of the thick, well-fortified apartment door. “Just wait a second!”

“Take your time, Mrs. Wu,” I said.

“Mrs. Wu yourself,” the voice answered back. “and woe to you , too!”

I laughed. Mom was still apparently herself, which was good, since  I had wondered whether the face I’d seen a few moments ago through the glass peephole – the one with the rheumy eyes and deep facial gouges and sunken cheekbones, the sum total collapsing into a cavernous mouth – had wondered if that was really the face of my mother.


Momentarily the door squeaked open and Mrs. Wu  stood in the doorway, her face suddenly restored to its orginal natural form by the wonders of modern density.

“How are you mom?” I asked as Mrs. Wu turned and ushered me inside.

“How do you think I am, Lewis?  I’m getting old.” Once inside her apartment, Mom collapsed in her soft chair – the only chair I remember her ever lounging in, since she was otherwise usually moving – and her stretched legs, in a not particularly ladylike way before looking up at me, her only son, and she squinted.

“It’s to be expected,” I said.

“What is?”

“Getting old,” I said. 

“Don’t get old, Lewis.”

“I don’t think I have much choice in the matter, do I mom?”

Mrs. Wu laughed but then grimaced suddenly, and reached behind her knees and grimaced more deeply, her facial lines tightening “Ouch!” she yelped. “My, my God damn legs hurt!”  she howled. And they must have hurt, since Mrs. Wu had never been much of a complainer. Mrs. Helen Wuzcsziejevski.



I remembered the night around the dinner table when the three of us – dad and Nancy and I – had given mom her name. Every night on the button, at 6 o’clock, our phone would start ringing and it wouldn’t stop until nearly 10. Patiently, Helen Wuzcsziejevski, the master teacher, would field the calls of her students’ parent, listening and interjecting and answering their urgent questions, trying to alleviate their concerns and assuage their doubts and fears, while we sat at the table eating. 

“Is Mrs Wu … there?” one of any number of voices, almost always that of a woman, would ask. “Yes, I’ll go get here,” I must have said a thousand times, as yet another mother skipped and tripped through the minefield of consonants of mom’s name in an effort to respectfully reach the ultimate syllable “ski.”


So mom seldom ate dinner with us (after preparing it), but instead sat at her desk in her study, her feet up and head thrown back and her back resting in a  swivel chair, as she patiently documented and downplayed the most recent trials and tribulations of one of her beloved struggling 6 year olds, almost always boys. 

“Ben will learn to read, Mrs Sonnfield. Don’t worry. Your son is a bright boy and one of these days it will all click. Some kids just pick it up later than others. Your little Ben may be struggling now, but he’ll get it. He’ll read.”

“Why don’t you go see a doctor, mom?” I asked now

“A doctor, Lewis? What is he going to tell me that I don’t already know?”

“Maybe he’ll give you something for the pain.”

“I’m sure he will,” Mrs. Wu said facetiously. “A pill. Pills! He’ll give me pills for the pain.”

“And they would probably kill the pain.”

“I don’t want to kill the pain, Lewis,” Mrs. Wu  said. “I’ll be dead soon enough, and that will kill the pain. Where’s Monica?”

Mom’s sudden question shocked me. 

“We broke up,” I said reflexively.

“Oh,” Mrs Wu said as all the color suddenly left her face like water spiraling down an opened sink.  Mrs Wu, my mom, looked old, she looked very old today. Even her eyes, opal blue and usually mercurial, were fixed and glazed. Mrs Wu was getting old. Old and tired. 

“When?” she asked. “When did you and Monica break up?

“About three weeks ago.”

“Your father always said Monica was the woman who was going to make you stay in one place and become an honest man, Lewis. I liked her too. You know that. We liked her. She was my favorite of the women you’ve brought home, Lewis. Has it occurred to you that you may be making a mistake?”

“No. I mean, maybe. Ahh, who says it was entirely my decision, mom?”


“Oh, I see,” Mrs. Wu said, again reaching behind her knees. “Ouch! This God damn sciatica! And they say women get it from having children! I must be an anomaly then, Lewis, because I haven’t had a child since your sister was born  twenty two years ago.”

“You are that, mom.”

“What, Lewis?”

“An anomaly.”

“Oh, don’t flatter me, Lewis, and don’t change the subject. What happened?”

“It’s a long story, mom. A long meandering, convoluted painful story that I’d rather not go into now.”

“But it’s best to …” Mrs Wu started. 

“I know, I know,” Lewis protested. “But not now, OK? Maybe later.”

“OK,” mom agreed for the time being. But then: “So what are you going to do now?

“I’m going overseas,” Lewis said uncertainly. “I’m gong to Poland, mom.”

“What?!” Mrs Wu said, shocked but not entirely shocked. “Where? When?”


“I just signed a two year contract to  teach in Krokaw that pays a million zlotys a month,” I said, and chuckled. “The department chairman said if I bring $5,000 American dollars I’ll be able to live like a king. He said I’d be able to eat steak and bananas every night, and I told him I don’t really like steak and bananas but he told me it was a Polish expression. Mrs. Wu laughed. “A Polish joke.”

“So what are you going to do in Poland?” Mrs. Wu asked seriously.

“Like I said, I’m gonna teach American Literature and learn Polish. Monica and I had some Polish friends who  lived on the Lower East and we really liked them. They were … for lack of a better word, romantic, and yet down-to-earth, and smart and lively. And sophisticated. And they’re’ a little crazy too, to tell you the truth. Like Monica’s French friends, but without their occasional  haughtiness and pretension. And ethically they’re a little more like me, like us, which is good.”

“Monica wasn’t’ pretentious.”

“No, and two out of three isn’t bad, I guess,” I said. “But I suspect she was an anomaly too.” Then: “They like to argue, too.”

“Who does?”

“The Poles do.”

“Most people who have been beat up a lot like to argue, Lewis. Argue and laugh.”
Mom laughed. “Yes, your father liked to argue,” she said. “arguing was definitely one thing he liked to do. He didn’t laugh all that much though.”


“But he wasn’t really Polish,” she continued, “and you aren’t either, Lewis. You’re American,” she said conclusively. “So when are you going to find a nice smart American girl and settle down?”

“Oh mom,” I said. 

 “No, I mean it,” Mrs. Wu, looking hard but blearily at me though eyes that I always thought looked a little Asian. Oriental, my father liked to say. And opal.  

“I’m not going to marry an American woman,” I declared.

“Why, aren’t there enough of them?” Mrs. Wu asked.

“They’re too practical,” I said. “all they want to do is get married and settle down and have kids and, lately, drive around in SUV’s and buy things. And most of them are … well, boring. They’re too pragmatic, too practical. They’re  bean-counters and ledger-balancers, if there is such a word. Homemakers. Most of them are like Thoreau in Walden without his philosophy and imagination.”

“All 50 million of them?” Lewis laughed.

“Well, most of the ones I’ve dated. 

“I’m an American woman,” Mrs. Wu announced proudly.

“Kind of,” I agreed.

Mrs Wu let out another yelp and stretched her legs. 

“Does sciatica have two ‘c’s’, or three?” she asked. 

You really should go see a doctor, mom,” Lewis said.

“That’s too practical, Lewis. Too expedient. Too much like Benjamin Franklin. We live with pain in this household. We’re Polish and Irish! And all a doctor could do is tell me what I have, which I already know, and overcharge me and then prescribe some pills. Some painkillers. For a year they gave your niece Amy pills every time she had an earache and eventually her teeth turned black.”

“Is that true?” I asked.

“It certainly is,” Mrs. Wu shot back. 

“What’d Nancy do?” I asked, not knowing this family lure.

“What else could she do? She had the child’s baby teeth pulled out and waited for the other ones to come in. Those damn antibiotics do as much harm to a person as they do good, Lewis. But the pharmaceutical companies love us old people, and kids. Them and the doctors. They prescribe us antibiotics as if they were candy!”

Knowing when to desist, or at least when  temporarily not to insist when talking to my mother, I shook my head and looked around the apartment, her home since my father had died more five years ago. Both of the rooms were sparse, the way Mrs. Wu liked it. She owned fewer things now, having given most of them away soon after dad passed; and she had always preferred open space to clutter, and her apartment looked now like she liked a home to look, with shiny wooden floors and a few thin sticks of furniture and light throw rugs and otherwise ample wall space for the sunlight and her and my father’s paintings. While most of the space in her apartment was open and unoccupied, the walls were literally dripping with canvases, with Dad’s paintings of geometrical city shapes that I always thought looked like intricate doodles or music if given visual forms, intermixed with Mrs. Wu’s portraits of people, most of whom were ruddy and outdoorsy-looking. Looking at the paintings on the walls of mom’s apartment made me think of our life first in the country and later in the city. They made me smile. 

As I sunk into my mother’s couch, the only really comfort spot in the apartment, I remembered my parents’ discussions and the heat they  generated. For hours, it seemed, sometimes entire nights, they would talk about topics like “sight” and “vision” and “reality” and “subjectivity” and, of course, they would talk about politics. And much of this heat, I thought now, had been captured and condensed in their paintings. My parents’ paintings were one and the same for me with our “happy excitable home” and their happy marriage. The paintings and their children, Nancy and I, were the palpable offshoots  of their life together, the fruit of their time on earth.  

“Do you remember when you were in third grade?” Mrs. Wu asked suddenly, breaking the silence and my reverie. “That was the year the doctors wanted to take out your tonsils. Did I ever tell you I’m not fond of doctors, Lewis?”

“About a thousand times, mom.”


“Well, you did miss around 30 days of school that year, but we didn’t let them feed you antibiotics. We fed you chicken soup and beef bullion and buttered toast, and dabbed your feverish head and hot chest with cool compresses, and after a while you got well.”

“Mom, I missed more than a month of school that year!”

“Well, so did I!” Mrs. Wu replied. “Though that wasn’t the only reason I missed all those days,” she said, blushing as she looked away. “But my point is that eventually you got well. And in your own time, not in some artificially-accelerated antibiotic time,” Mrs. Wu  added. “And it was also that year – you were seven – that you started drawing.”

“Yes,” I said, smiling.

“You suffered terrible earaches and high fevers and nightmarse that winter. And you slept-walked. Do you remember sleep-walking, Lewis?” Mrs. Wu asked. “The burning fevers and the sleep-walking?”

“I remember it in bits and pieces, mom.”

“Yes, practically every night your father and I would get up in the middle of the night and find you walking around kind of moaning and groaning and mumbling to yourself. You suffered from what they, the doctors, call ‘night tremors. You weren’t awake, not really, but you were up and walking. And mumbling. And one time you even walked out the door and into the road and into the field across the road!”

“And it was scary how you would tremble! You were just a little bit of a thing, not even 50 pounds, and your father and I led you back into the house and sat down with you at the kitchen table and doused your forehead with cold compresses, and we read to you and tried to draw you out of your nightmares. Do you remember that, Lewis?”

“Maybe a little, mom, I guess,” Lewis said vaguely. 

“And all that year we read to from a French book called The Red Balloon. Do you remember that? It’s a beautiful picture book about a Parisian boy who finds a red balloon that befriends him magically and follows him around Paris. The story has these beautiful black and white photographs of the streets and neighborhoods of Paris and the only object with color  in the photographs is this brilliant bright big red balloon. You used to love those photos, Lewis! Especially the one of the little boy standing in a long vertical French window framed by black shutters, and he’s stretching up and reaching towards the balloon. You loved that photo, Lewis! And after a while you would stop moaning and groaning and trembling and gradually you would return to the living.Do you remember any of that, Lewis?”

“Maybe a little, mom,” Lewis said. “I remember the balloon and how red it was. Yes, I remember that red. And I remember the cobblestone streets of Paris and the small shops and the funny-looking policemen, I remember that. And the grey slate roofs and the narrow alleyways, I remember them too.”

Mrs. Wu laughed and looked tenderly at me. “I just hope …” she said, but I knew where she was going, so I interrupted her before she could go any further. When  I looked at her she stopped talking, though not necessarily because I looked at her. She just stopped talking. 

Mom was naturally attractive and in her youth she had been a great beauty, though she was never one to spend time preening herself in front of a mirror. But recently my 68 year old mother had let herself go a little. A few facial whiskers, which she usually waxed off, curled up around  her chin and apparently she had been too occupied stretching and rubbing her aching legs to shave them. Mom’s stomach was bigger now, and for all intents and purposes, as age had stolen the lines and angles that I had noticed as a boy; the curves and angles that I had first associated with femininity and later with the strange and powerful and ambivalent feelings of attraction and fear if not revulsion. My mom’s body, like all summer plants and physical bodies, was gradually turning back into itself. My mother’s body which had once carried and then emitted me into the world, was slowly caving into itself. Time and the earth were, in a sense, devouring it. 

“And now you’re going overseas again, Lewis,” Mrs. Wu repeated. “What in God’s name are you going to do in Poland?”

“I told you mom, I’m going to teach American Literature and eat steak and bananas and study graphic design and learn Polish.”

“And look for an anomaly?” Mrs. Wu added.

“Maybe,” I said. “But I’m not sure I’ll even have time. I understand Polish is a difficult language, an inflected language. So I may be too busy to look for an anomaly, or I even need to.”


*****

About two weeks later mom called and asked me to come visit her. I suspected what she wanted, besides my company, which was to talk about Monica and my move to Poland. If I came over I knew there would probably be much poignant indirection that culminated in a confrontation. Mrs. Wu would get to the truth, to my truth, whatever that was, and it would be painful. In that regard, Mrs Wu was like the Father no make that the Mother of Psychology. She too practiced “the talking cure.”  She was the truth-seeker in our family, and had always been, the member who insisted  we dig into ourselves until we discovered what was true, what was real, no matter what it was or how much it hurt in the digging to find out; or what we, after finding it, intended on doing with it, if anything at all.

When I arrived at Mrs. Wu’s 95th Street apartment this time, her door was cracked open and Duke Ellington’s “Satin Doll” was playing on the stereo. I rang the buzzer, so as not to startle her, and nudged open the door; and if I hadn’t seen some  strange things from my parents over the years, what I saw would have surprised me even more. 

The few pieces of furniture that mom still owned had been rearranged, exactly from where to where I couldn’t immediately discern, but I could tell furniture had been moved and the place looked different. The living room looked more open now,  more spacious. The soft chair that mom had occupied in on my previous visit had been pushed into a far corner of the room, and now the most prominent object was mom’s easel, which had been erected in front of the high bay window. And Mrs. Helen Wuzcsziejevski was standing behind it, dabbing  a canvas with a brush and observing intently. She was standing in a splash of midday Manhattan sunlight. 

“Hi, mom,” I said. 
“Hello Lewis.”

Mom peeked from around the canvas and smiled at me, and as she did I could see she was wearing a new white cotton shift. Her silver-white hair was tied behind her head in a bun, and her face was full and flushed with color, good red color. Gone, or at least relieved, were the deep lines and crevices that marked her face during my last visit. Mrs. Wu, mom, looked ten years younger.

“What are you painting?” I asked as I approached her.

“You’ll see soon enough,” she said, motioning for me to stop. 

“I can’t see it now?” I asked, surprised. 

“Not yet,” Mrs. Wu said, “Maybe next visit.”

“Mrs. Wu!” I exclaimed, laughing. “Come on! Why not?”


“You’ll see it soon enough,” she said conclusively. 

I shook my head and turned away, perused the walls that were  covered with my parents’ paintings. But something else was different. My father’s paintings, which had usually been interspersed randomly with my mom’s, were now on a separate wall, and  were separated into two distinct groups. On the other wall I noticed a similar division of my mom’s paintings. The fact that the paintings had been moved wasn’t so unusual, as Mrs. Wu often moved paintings around the house, and  sometimes  she even painted over the original colors, dabbing at them when she felt moved to change. But there was something different about this recent change. And I sensed something important about it, something that struck me as being programmatic and perhaps even pedantic. 

“So when are you going back overseas?” Mrs. Wu asked.

“In July,” I said. 

“Hmmm, that’s only two months away,” she said, as much to herself as to me. 

Mom dabbed again at her painting. She looked happy, almost radiant; her face was bathed in sunlight, her body was evidently not hurting, and she was doing what she loved to do. Mrs. Wu, I decided years ago, was like Manhattan, and neither her nor the City ever ceased to amaze me. Off Broadway, on the Upper West Side where we lived, could be dirty and  tattered and downtrodden one day, as if it were deteriorating or atrophying; and then – wham! – the garbage trucks would roll in and haul out the trash and the spray trucks would come through and pressure-wash the streets and the shopkeepers would come out and splash some fresh paint on the tattered and fading storefronts and suddenly the city would look fresh and young again! And atrophy, IOld Indefatigable Atrophy, would sigh and retreat and recoup and start all over again. 

“How do your legs feel, mom?” I asked.

“They feel fine, Lewis,” she said, and even from a distance I could see that she had shaved them. 

“How could they be fine?” I asked incredulously.

“Oh Lewis,” she said, half-jokingly but with a little sincerity and annoyance in her voice, “You have always been so tragic!”  She laughed, though furtively, and I laughed too.

“What do you mean” I objected, “tragic? I’m just surprised your legs feel OK. And of course I’m happy for you, you just seemed to be in a lot of pain last time.”

“I was Lewis,” she said, “but now I’m OK.”

“What did you do? How did you recover so quickly?” I asked frankly. 

“I rested and read and ate chicken soup,” she said. “And I painted.”

“Oh,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“And,” she added, chuckling, “I visited an old student of mine.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Do you remember little Ben Sonnenfeld?”

“No,” I said. “Not really.”

“He was my student, let’s see, he’s in his early thirties now, that would make it – he must have been my student twenty five years ago, about the same time you were born.”

“And did his mother call and ask for Mrs. Wu and agonize over the prospect of him never learning how to read or do long division?” I asked.

“I’m sure she did,” Mrs. Wu laughed. “Most of the boys’ mothers did.”

“Why was that the case?” I asked. “I mean, why was it always the boys’ mothers?”

“Because third grade boys had trouble sitting still, Lewis, and I imagine they still do. Most of them were what my mother, your grandmother, used to call ‘antsy.” They had ants in their pants,” mom said, laughing. “And some of them even had what my grandmother used to call ‘the heebie-jeebies.” With this Mrs. Wu threw back her head and laughed out loud, her opal eyes filling with water. Mom’s eyes were clear today, clear and bright. Dad used to say she could see for hundreds of miles on a day like today, and I loved being with her when she was so quixotic. 

“So why are you really going to Poland?” Mrs. Helen Wuzcsziejevski asked when she had stopped laughing. 

“I told you, mom. To learn Polish and eat steak and bananas and, as you said, maybe meet an anomaly while picking the brains of the Polish graphic designers, who are the best in the world, as you know.”

“I know that’s what you said, Lewis, and probably to look for King Ubu, too. But I don’t believe you.”

“Are you calling me a liar, mom? I snapped defensively.

“No, not consciously, Lewis.  Not consciously. .Most people don’t really know why they do things.  They concoct reasons and stories in an effort to explain their actions, like you’re probably doing now. They can tell you what they’re doing and why they think they’re doing what they’re doing,, but it’s usually camouflage, Leis, subterfuge. And  they know it,” Mrs. Wu paused. “So why are you really going to Poland, Lewis?”  

“Just paint mom,” I said “You’re a better painter than you are a  psychologist.” I looked down at my hands but could still feel her eyes burning into me. 

“I am painting, son.” Mom dropped her brush to her side as she continued looking at me, hard. Then she looked just as hard  at her painting, and smiled sweetly. “But first I have to draw you out, ” she said. Again she dabbed at the canvas, scraped away some paint, and dabbed again. “You met another girl, didn’t you?” she said finally.

I sighed and shook my head. Looked away, then exhaled more deep breath. I knew coming into this meeting with Wu, this  concourse (as she liked to call them), that it wouldn’t be easy. That mom wouldn’t let me off the hook, and that it would come to questions like this, direct questions that would make me squirm.. I just didn’t think the difficult direct questions, and my subsequent squirming, would come so soon.. But I knew. And a part of me must have wanted to try answering at least some of Wu’s probing questions or else I wouldn’t have come.

“Yeah, I did,” I answered finally. 

“A Polish girl?”

“Yes.”

“Another European beauty?” Wu asked as she smiled up from her painting.

“Well, she is beautiful,” I said. “And she is Polish.”

“But Lewis, Monica was beautiful and …”

“We split up, mom. I told you that weeks ago.”

“I know,” Wu said, but then burrowing in. “But why?”

“I don’t know exactly why, mom,” I started, annoyed. “And anyway, you’re contradicting yourself. One minute you’re saying that people don’t really know why they do things – and I assume you include me in your sample of people – and then the next minute you’re asking me to explain why I did something that was very complicated. At least let me think about it,” I added.

“OK, Lewis,” she said. “Think about it.”

“In the meantime, Lewis, do you think it’s a good idea getting involved with somebody else so quickly?” 
I shook my head.

“Mom,” I said after a while. “You forgot to tell me about the Sonnenfeld boy.”


“Oh yes!” Mom exclaimed, smiling again, her body relaxing. “I did, didn’t I? Well, you may or may not remember that little boy Ben, the son of Jerry and Leah Sonnenfeld, both of whom, if I remember correctly, were professors at Barnard or Columbia. And Ben who, yes, did learn how to read  and actually read very well, that year. Well, Ben became a chiropractor and last week I visited his office and he cracked my back. And the sciatica pain, Lewis,” she announced, “is gone! Sciatica, by the way, only has two “c’s” in it. Ben has one of those old anatomical charts on his wall.”

“That’s great, mom!”

Then: “There’s always going to be pain, Lewis,” Mrs. Wu said, apparently not referring to her back, and out of nowhere.

“I know mom,” I said, sensing we were headed towards another showdown. “But about the other thing,” I said, gesturing, “maybe it’s like you said – that I don’t really know. Monica did some things and we argued, and we kept having more or less the same argument over and over – and then she started going back to Paris more often and finally we both just kind of agreed that things weren’t going to work out.”

“Doing what things?” Wu asked poignantly.

“She’s French mom.”

“I know she’s French,” she said.

“Well, she kept having …well, let’s say  rendevouses, and let’s add plural,” I said,  laughing nervously while looking down at my hands. 

“You told me about that before.”

“I know I told you. But after a while I really couldn’t take it anymore,” I said. 

“But you said then that she’d tell you that they – her rendevouses, so to speak, - didn’t really mean anything. And that she loved you. And that you really believed she loved you, and that you loved her. Wasn’t that enough?”

“I did,” I said, “and still do, or did, right up until a few weeks ago.. But after a while I just couldn’t take it or want to do it any more.”

“Couldn’t take what?”

“Maybe it wasn’t so much her rendevouses,” I said, “as it was her social promiscuity, for lack of a better term, mom. Monica couldn’t get enough of people. And as you know it’s not that I don’t like people, I like people well enough. It’s just that most of the time I’d rather be alone and …”

“But that was one of the reasons your dad and I thought Monica was so good for you, Lewis,” Wu said. “She got you out. If it was up to you -  and I don’t mean this as a criticism – but if it was up to you, you’d stay inside reading and drawing all the time! She got you out with people, she was artistic and eccentric, but at the same time, solid.”

“I know she got me out, mom,” I said. “but maybe she was too free,” I said, realizing something  And then I stopped, and when I did Mrs Wu looked at me again, looked at me hard, and for a while, as if she were studying me. And the pause accompanied by the hard look continued until she finally said, “So that’s why you’re going to Poland, Lewis?  Because Monica was too free?”

“I’ve always liked Polish people,” I protested by way of deflection. “I liked dad, and his friends.”  I laughed, realizing how ridiculous that sounded. “I likde Uncle Ed and Uncle John and his sisters and the rest of dads’ relatives. And grandmom and grand pop Wu were great too. They Poles are good people, mom, they’re fighters! And they’re the best graphic designers in the world and they make the most beautiful posters.  And I’ll probably get involved politically over there, mom. With Solidarity …”

“You’ve never been political, Lewis,” Wu said, raising her eyebrows. “Your father and I were, but you weren’t Lewis. You were always quiet and in your room listening to music or drawing.”

“Well, a person can change,” I protested unconvincingly. 

Then, as if out of nowhere, Mrs. Wu asked, “How’s Ed?”

Ed Wozinsky was my best friend from college, and the last time I had seen him was about three months ago. He was standing in front of a table covered with books near the intersection of Broadway and 104th Street and he told me that he, an insatiable reader and the most literary person I know – and a wonderful lively conversationalist – was selling all his books. I had asked him “Why?” and he had cryptically replied that he was just  tired of everything in his life reminding him of something I read in a book. That he wanted to life his own life, not somebody else’s. I hadn’t seen or talked to Ed since, though I had been meaning to call him and find out if selling all his books had been a good move.  

“Ed’s still crazy in a good way,” I finally aid. 

“That was another reason we liked Monica,” Mom said. “She was off-beat and verbal and literary, like Ed. The way you like people, or at least so I thought. And …”

“Look mom,” I interrupted, “I cared for Monica and I still do. It just wasn’t working out.”

“Oh Lewis, I’m sorry. I’m not saying that Monica is the only woman in the world for you or that you should try to get back with her or anything like that. I’m just saying … I’m just saying …I’m worried about you, son … Worried that you’re going to be flitting around all your life, Lewis. Worried that you’re going to be one of those people who is in love with being in love all you’re life. You’re … what, 27 now and I’m also worried that you’re trying to find a woman who will fill you up. Somebody who will give your life meaning. And now I’m worried that you’re looking for not only another woman but another country and culture to fill you up. I’m worried that you are rootless, Lewis. I’m worried about you Lewis, and though my legs don’t hurt anymore and I support Solidarity and would love to see Poland too, I’d rather you didn’t go overseas.”

“You’re not suggesting that I’m empty, are you mom?” I asked half-seriously.

“No Lewis,” she said while eying me seriously, though tenderly. “Of course I’m not saying you’re empty or shallow. We both know that there’s a lot in there,” she laughed as she pointed.. “I’m just saying that you’re a little … well, for lack of a better word or my ability to find one,” she added, smiling and shaking her head, “you’re a little mushy.” We both laughed. “And scattered.”

“I am a little mushy,” I agreed after a while. “And scattered.”

“And there’s nothing wrong with being a little scattered,” Mrs. Wu replied, “when you’re 27 years old.”

Wu set her paintbrush on the narrow easel rail and approached me. Her legs were again strong. Her body, though thick as it had been for years, was erect. The whiskers that had protruded from her chin last week were gone, and her face – her wonderful ruddy Midwestern face – was angular again, and if not architectural, the kind of face a person doesn’t have handed to them but is earned over a lifetime. As had happened many times in her life, Mrs. Wu had waned and come back together again. And today her door was open, wide open to Manhattan, the city that waxed and waned, and that somehow, remarkably, also had a way to fending off Time and decay, atrophy and entropy. Mrs. Wu was back and a part of me  expected her phone to ring and for dad  to pick it up and hear some distraught mother on the other end asking me if Mrs. Wu … (followed by a train of clanging consonants) was there, and me saying, “Of course she’s here, and available. She’s always here and available. And if I didn’t know better, much better, I’d swear she was a saint.” Nor did I know, at that time, or earlier, the true meaning of dad’s comments. Though, I’m sure that behind her smiles and grimaces, Mrs. Wu knew, knew she wasn’t.

Mom touched my should and kissed my cheek, and held me long, I thought longer, than usual.

“I’m just worried about you, Lewis. A lot of this, I think, is about growing up, part of the usual maturation pangs and process. But I’m still worried about you, son. Mothers worry.”


*****


Two weeks later, and  eager to see her painting since she had never prevented me from looking at one of her unfinished canvases before, I called Mrs Wu and asked her if I could stop by. She told me that her painting was coming along and that the following Friday evening would be a good time to come for dinner. Her voice sounded clear and confident. I circled the date on my calendar.

This time when I arrived the apartment door wasn’t double-locked but it wasn’t wide open either. It was somewhere in-between: shut, but not locked, and I could hear Mrs. Wu’s voice from the hallway. I knocked perfunctorily, opened the door and walked in. 

Mom was near the spot where I had last left her, standing in front of her easel, her back to the large sunlit window. She was too busy dabbing to notice I had come in, so I lingered near the doorway, and as I lingered  a little man dressed in a beige sports coat zipped out of the kitchen and bounded gingerly through the common room in the direction of my mother. “Sometimes it just takes a while, Helen,” the man said while moving. Mrs. Wu nodded, didn’t look up or change her expression, and then she saw me. She looked down at her painting, and then back at me.

“Hello Lewis! I’d like for you to meet my friend Sol. Sol,”  mom said smiling brightly, “this is my one and only son, Lewis. And he’s going to Poland to design posters and wrestle with the Communists and eat steak and bananas.”

Sol was short and small-boned but he had an energetic and earnest handshake  and a youngish twinkle in his eyes. His small body emanated speed and warmth. He looked me straight in the eyes and immediately started talking, and talking  rapidly, telling me how much he enjoyed “watching [your] mother’s paintings grow.” He told me that my mother was a “wonderful painter and an even more wonderful person,” and from the way mom listened and smiled, I could tell this man’s opinion mattered to her. 

“But I really do have to go, though,” the little man finally said. “I had just planned on dropping over for a minute.” Mrs Wu laughed.

“You never drop over for a minute, Sol,” she said. “You’re constitutionally incapable of stopping over for a minute.” Mom laughed awhile her friend Sol shrugged and tugged at his belt. 

On closer look I could see that Sol was a very slight man and any weight or thickness was mere illusion and projected by his wearing a number of layers of clothes.  Sol made me think  of a chair over which is draped a hodgepodge of eclectic clothes that dn’t really go together, that in fact clash, in both quality and in color. Sol was evidently a meticulous and eclectic dresser though perhaps colorblind.  One piece of his clothing was precious, and probably expensive, while another one seemed to be an afterthought. His shoes, for instance, were sleek black Italian leather and his sports coat was of fine cotton, both dear, but his pants were slick and worn, their cuffs frayed and even unraveling in places; and his off-white shirt  was more off than white. I speculated that Sol was in his mid-to-late seventies and that he bought half of his clothes at Bloomingdale’s and the other half at a Salvation Army thrift shop. He was a pleasant mercurial mess.

“Please call me,” mom said as Sol was leaving, “this weekend,” she added for emphasis. Sol hurried through the door, talking as he did, and when he was gone he left a congenial absence. 



After Sol was gone mom hugged me and planted another too long kiss on my cheek. Mom’s face was beaming, it literally glowed. Her skin was clear and full, and her eyes were shining, her back solid and straight again, as it had been when she was still teaching. She looked the best she had since dad had passed away more than five years ago. 

“Let me see your painting,” I said.

“Wait a minute,” she said, “It’s not going anywhere.”

“But you, apparently are,” she added. “Are you still planning on going overseas?”  she asked pointblank.

“Mom,” I said, “I’ve signed a contract.” Mrs. Wu shook her head and looked away. 

“Let me show you something then, Lewis.”

“The painting?” I asked.

“No, the paintings,” she said. “Plural.”

Mrs Wu walked to the far end of the common room where the walls were busy with paintings. My parent’s paintings were still divided, as they had been on my last visit, into two, no make that four distinct groups. Something, I thought,  was pre-determined here, pre-arranged. Wu had been a school teacher for twenty five years, and though she was rarely moralistic, she could be instructive and even pedantic. Today the paintings reminded me of  the sections of an outline, and I  sensed a lesson coming on. 

“Let me show you something, Lewis,” Wu said. “In fact I’m also going to tell you something I’ve never told you before, you or your sister. Something that your father and I kept from you for … well, until now,” she said. I gulped and grimaced slightly.

“Back, oh about twenty years ago, not that long after you were born, I met this man and fell completely, head-over-heels in love,” Wu started, as I  gulped again, and this time from a deeper place. My mouth suddenly felt dry, my legs cold. I blushed and looked down at the familiar veins of my hands. I shook my head.

“But I managed to carry on here,” Mrs Wu went on, “to continue being a mother to you and a wife to your father, in a manner of speaking. Though I didn’t make any effort to conceal my affair from your dad , and while I never seriously thought about leaving him, and certainly not leaving you kids, I’m sure he thought more than once about leaving me.”

“Mom, I really don’t want to …” I started, but she waved me off. “Christ!” I said. “Why do you …” 

“Anyway, for months, when I was with this man, it was if I was young again. I was aglow! I was full! I felt completely alive and very young and beautiful inside. Everything this man said and every little thing or situation we shared, seemed so important and   dramatic, and so extraordinary! And being with him made the rest of my life seem so commonplace. Being in love – in this kind of love – Lewis, was like being besieged and occupied by the Sun itself! It was like I was  put in touch with the primal source of the Universe! It was that same fluid, electric feeling I had felt when I met your father, only now it was amplified by an additional fifteen years of struggling and living. I never had and never thought anyone could have such strong … feelings, Lewis. Such powerful, all-consuming feelings. 

I looked at my mother but couldn’t see her. “I really don’t want to hear this,” I said again as I rose from my chair, but Wu wouldn’t have it. Even after I had turned around she kept talking to my back.

“This isn’t about me, Lewis, it’s about your father, and you, it’s about you. So sit down, son,. Please.” I did and she continued. 

“While I was floating around the house and the world, your dad, though in pain,, carried on with his, and your lives, Lewis. While I was out and about, floating and glowing, he stayed home with you. It was your dad,  Lewis, and not me who actually nursed you through that year of sore throats and night tremors. He who read that The Red Balloon to you. He who sat with you for hours, teaching you how to see and how to draw and how to speak, even. He was your father and mother that year, Lewis. He was both of us”.

“Your father didn’t mope around. He kept working, and living. And that’s why I wanted you to look at these paintings,” Wu said as she redirected her gaze toward the wall. 

I shook my head again and looked up at my father’s paintings, and as I did I noticed something obvious  I noticed that the two groups of paintings were noticeably different. Though all my father’s paintings were abstract, and consisted of  lines, shapes and colors, the lines and shapes in one group of paintings were much less hard-edged. They were softer and lighter and more colorful. My father’s touch in these paintings was freer and less insistent, the colors warmer and more welcoming, and some of the paintings were even muted and a little sad and vulnerable. I hadn’t noticed it until now, but the second group were deeper and better and more soulful paintings. 

“Your father kept painting and he took care of you, Lewis, and gradually that Sun that had overtaken and occupied me started to fade a little. Not go out, Lewis, but maybe break up, as if piece by piece, and disperse … And after a while I started catching glimpses of  it, that Sun in places outside myself. I started catchinglimpses of it in some of the objects and events in our life. I might see it, for instance, when your father cocked his head while he was patiently trying to explain a math problem to you. Or, I saw it in your dad’s face when he’d get all excited and passionate, as I’m sure you remember him doing, when he was immersed in some political or artistic dispute. Or, I may not have actually seen it but I certainly felt it deeply during one of those long Sunday afternoons when all four of us would lounge around the house going here and there and mingling and not doing or saying much of anything, but savoring the unspoken company of our being in the same sane, quiet and peaceful place, at the same time. 

“In a nutshell, Lewis, I started seeing and feeling many of the little ways in which I was connected to your dad and to you and your sister, and how those connections, like threads, linked me to other people and to the whole world out there and to the life we had spent years putting together extending and expanding. And after a while the big, brilliant all-consuming interior Primal Sun that had filled me broke apart altogether but I was determined, very determined, not to let it go out, so I started looking for it  in the world. And I got glimpses of it, Lewis, in the most unusual and unexpected places! 

Like in the morning while making you and your sister’s beds, I might see it flicker across the wall. Or after washing the dishes and doing what I tried to pass off as cleaning the house, I might get a glimpse of it outside the window in the colors that played on one of the neighborhood kid’s shoulder as he hurried down the street toward PS 121. Or while teaching I might see it in the face of one of my little sweethearts as he or she struggled to understand something she couldn’t quite “get,” the poor dear. Or at the end of the day, while sitting in the middle of the clutter and rubble of another school day, I might get a glimpse of It flashing across a book cover  or the blackboard  or from the tip of a rounded piece of white chalk. Or on the weekends I would might glimpse it sparkling in the sand along the road, as we drove to the Shore. I might see it! And once I started looking for it, Lewis, I noticed that it might appear any where, and that it often appeared at the most unexpected times and usually in the form of light – as discrete slivers of flickering pulsating light! Thin luminous threads of that connected me with you and your sister and your dad and with other people and with humanity and with the world in general!” 

Mrs. Wu’s eyes were moist now, and glistening. Still unable to look  at her directly, I sensed her turn and face the wall, this woman who was Mrs. Wu and my mother. But I still didn’t look at her.

“Look at those paintings!” I heard her almost shout.  “Is there any comparison?” she asked rhetorically, not expecting a response. “That’s the beautiful thing about life, Lewis. And that’s where the pain is, and often in the same place. In our  brief actual living of life, that’s’ where they both are. But look at them. Is there any comparison?” she repeated.

But I still didn’t  look at her. The hurt was too recent and too raw, so I looked down at my hands.

“I guess what I’m trying to tell you, Lewis, is that love, especially at your age, can be like a pill. Like some kind of cure-all drug,” she said, laughing a little as she wiped her eyes. “Love, or professed all-encompassing Love. The Eternal Panacea. The …”

“And you know what the New Darwinians are saying, Lewis. You read the technical journals,” she said, chuckling again. “Like your friend Ed, the bibliophile, the New Naturalists are saying that the stronger the antibiotic, the stronger the bacterial strain that rallies and evolves  in response. And Poland, as your father used to say, is a pretty strong strain. Where will you go after Poland, Lewis? China! Nepal? Tahiti? Never-Never Land?”

“What are you talking about, mom?” I said.



Stunned and suddenly very tired, I sank into mom’s soft char while she disappeared. Tears welled up in my eyes but for some reason wouldn’t stream. I heard footsteps heading toward Wu’s easel, and then they went back into the kitchen. I squeezed my eyes tightly and gradually, like the pieces of a puzzle, my father’s image came together in my mind. My father’s face – serious, but pliable, and white, almost chalky, unless he was excited. A kind face, and one that had aged thirty years  that last year.

When I opened my eyes Mrs. Wu was standing over me, looking down at me so I re-shut my eyes. Thoughts flooded my mind and routed my father’s different faces. Fragments of memories started filling  the place where the puzzle of my father’s face had been. 

“Dad and mom who conceived me one night in a cold rural bed. Mom who gave me birth and breadth and light, dad who picked me up and rocked me when the lights went out, and who once squeezed me back to life when I almost choked to death on a hard candy (or so the family legend went). Mom who gave me milk and later heartier fare and dad who raised me over his head and threw me up into the air, only to float back down in slow-motion like a goose feather (another family yarn)  into his hands. And who never, ever, let me hit the ground.”

Then the colors came – an entire spectrum of colors: bright reds and oranges and piercing yellows and provocative and lively greens, followed by soft blues and lighter softer greens and southwestern pinks and mauves and lavenders, all my favorites. And then the browns and grays and blacks passed through, and were replaced by white: only white! Pure unadulterated white, which was, as Mrs Wu used to say, the absence of color but the finest no color of them all.

“Was there anything that I hadn’t received from these two people? Did I really own anything,  and since having left home, had I become anybody?” 

“Mrs. Wu who taught me how to form and roll words off my tongue, and who later, by example, taught me how to talk to people who were not her or my father. My father who caught me when I fell while learning how to walk and who taught me how to ride a bike and, later, how to shift gears in my first car. Mrs Wu who taught me how to brainstorm ideas and organize and compose an essay, and dad who taught me how to hold a pencil and how to see and how to draw. And how to catch and throw a baseball. And how to listen to music. And how to lace my shoes and sneakers, and how to drive a …”

“Was there anything …?”  

“Mom who taught me how to bring order to chaos and how make a bed and fry an egg, and how to wash my clothes, and how to cook well enough that I could survive at least until I found a mate. Dad who taught me how to cut a 2 by 4 and hammer a nail and tear a shingle roof off a house and change the oil in a car. Mom and dad who tried to show mr by example how to reach out and care for other people, though Lord knows I …” 

“Was there anything? Any trait or inclination or gesture, of eeling, idea, opinion, or mannerism … that was mine, all mine? My nose that came directly from my father , my thick legs and roundish face inherited from  my mother’, my father’s slight frame and dark thoughts and tense mouth and solitary bent. My mother’s eyes…”

 “Oh yee Blank Slate – was there anything, and I mean anything, that was not lent to me, or not willingly and livingly begotten to me, by these two wonderful and caring and complicated and more than occasionally intrusive and annoying people? And in this vast sea of begetting, where was I? Me? Where if anywhere was that sand spit rising out of this vast sea of begetting and remembering and forgetting  that I could point to and say, without hesitation or regret, that “That is me! Me! I!”

“Let’s go out to dinner tonight,” Mrs Wu said, breaking my reverie. “I don’t have anything to eat here at home.”

“OK,” I said reflexively, forgetting why I had come and not even aware of what I was saying. 

But Mrs. Wu hadn’t forgotten. She walked back to her easel and picked up the new canvas and faced the window, her back and the back to the canvas facing me. Then she turned around. I looked at her new painting.

It was a portrait of someone I recognized but could not readily identify. Then I recognized that it was a portrait of me! Not of me in the past or in the present but of how, I assumed, my mother hoped I may become in the future. Mrs. Wu had not sped up Time in her painting by adding wrinkles, like a Time machine may add wrinkles to a face in a Natural Science Museum; but instead she had gone beneath the skin – my skin – and drawn out the contours and planes and substance that she sensed there but had not yet pushed thorough to the surface. My eyes in the portrait looked more outwardly attentive than they actually are now, my mouth more poised and confident and relaxed than my current mouth.  My face was less puffy and inchoate, and more architectonic, my cheekbones higher and more prominent, as if somehow I had earned them, them and the substantial forehead. Wu’s portrait, done in muted dark blues and mauve and reddish-browns, looked like me but at the same time it looked like more than me. It looked like...

“Come here, Lewis. Come closer.”

I moved closer and when I did the paint became crowded and busy. Details I hadn’t seen from afar now came into view. Bits and pieces of objects were mixed in the paint. Here were pieces of photographs of kids I’d gone to grade school with and there were fragments of head shot of my two favorite teachers, and slices of my early drawings. There was a piece of a photograph of me holding a flounder I’d caught at the Shore, a toothy grin running across my face like an egg yolk. And there was a fragment of a photograph of my sister dressed in her light blue Dr Denton pajamas, and a black and white shot of my favorite uncle, Ed, my father’s younger brother. 

As I looked even more closely at Wu’s portrait I saw more materials, more substance. There were pieces of grass and dirt, I assumed retrieved from our house on Nursery Road. I saw thin brown strands of hair, most likely my own, and clippings of words from newspaper headlines and theater and concert and sports billboards and programs. There were slices of photographs suggesting a familiar woods and fields, and small fragments of shells and flecks of red and gray shale probably lifted from a South Jersey creek. Somehow Mrs. Wu had worked an intimation of my college diploma into her paint, and a photograph of my first girlfriend Christina Kaminsky and a blue piece of an airmail envelope from France, Monica’s nose and eyes, and the parts of the titles of two of my favorite novels, Les Miserables and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Part of Raskolnikov’s head and a head shots of Victor Hugo and Dostoyevsky, lines and  shapes and colorful swirls from a painting by Kandinsky, and a slice, as thin as a crescent moon, of a red balloon drifting past a French window above a Parisian cobblestone street – they were there too, and more! Shards of glass, like mirrors or stained glass windows, were mixed  with dirt, real red dirt, and red ground, to stand on. They were there. All there. It was if Wu had gathered all materials and immaterials that had absorbed the slivers of light and …

After while I couldn’t look any more. I stopped and turned around. 

“It’s amazing, mom,” I said. 

“But you should move a little closer,” she said.

So I stepped closer and bent over and when I did I saw that the feint blue lines that I had thought initially were veins in my face and neck were not “veins” at all, but  words written in a tiny blue script. And I read them. betrayal ran under my left eye. Trust ran over my right brow. Then I saw and read the words anger, confidence, distrust,  forgiveness, presence, resentment, reason . I turned toward Mrs Wu and she smiled and shrugged. Life. Human. Me.

“Where do you want to go to dinner?” Mrs Wu asked. “Spanish or Chinese, or both?”

“I don’t know,” I sad. “Let’s decide once we get outside.”

“You really like him, don’t you mom?” I said as I opened the door. 

“Who?”

“Sol. The little guy in the snazzy jacket,” I said. Wu laughed.

“There’s something about him, isn’t there?” Mrs. Wu said, blushing as she smiled. “He’s funny, and I think he respects me and my work. And he’s very accomplished, Lewis, though you’d never know it. He talks about everything but himself. But it’s early yet and I hardly know him. So we’ll see.

“How are your legs, mom?” I asked as we walked down the hallway. Toward the door that would take us outside.

“My legs,” Mrs. Wu said laughing, “are fine. They’re just fine.”




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