Jacques Servin

My mother sits bolt-upright as I enter her room, her hands crossed, her eyes on the ceiling. On the table in front of her is an unfolded napkin covered in neat, loopy script. She lifts a hand as I enter to shush me.

"I'm sorry," she says to the ceiling.

As my eyes follow hers, a phrase forms in my mind: "I'm forcing myself to observe."

Over a decade ago I watched Chris and Don, a movie about writer Christopher Isherwood and his much younger lover, artist Don Bachardy. In the last scene of the film, Chris has just died with Don at his side. Don imagines Chris asking him: "What would an artist do?" Don knows the answer: "I must force myself to observe." And so, for the next several hours, he draws his lover's corpse.

My mother asks the ceiling a question, distress in her voice. "The blue one?"  

I decide that she's hearing my father, frustrated at her undiagnosed confusion, as he was in his final few months, telling her what to wear.

"Your mind's playing tricks on you," I say. 

That brings her back. "Do you know who it is?" she asks me.

"No, I don't hear it. Who do you think it is?" I don't mention my father.

She turns to the ceiling and asks, her voice a half-octave higher, "Who are you?"

A few seconds pass. "Who is it?" I ask.

"Interloper," she says. "Way upstairs." She points to her head with a shrug.

I laugh. She laughs. I hear in her laugh an awareness that this might not be real. She hears in my laugh, I think, reassurance that it's not a big deal. It feels good to laugh with my mother, to be able to laugh with my mother, for whatever ferkakte reason.

When my mother goes to the bathroom, I pick up her napkin and read:

Henri worked quite late almost every evening—and yet the young children continued to fend for themselves and each other. They never fought, and went quickly and quietly to school each day. They (the kids) never asked us adults for Kleenex or peanuts or breakfast because they felt very much at home. And Jacques grew up the same; being an older kid he continued to have a lot of other kids to play with.

I'm an only child, so I'm startled to read about other children. It takes me a minute to decide that they might be my father's last caregiver's children. At the time, my mother often thought that Billie was stealing my father; now, apparently, it was some kind of commune.

When my mother returns, I ask what the writing's about.

She reads a few words of the napkin. "I don't know."

"It's your writing."

"Oh, so it is."

She reads a bit more.

"I didn't write it," she says.

I frown.

"I really didn't. Henri… what's the word?"

"Dictated?"

"Yes. Henri dictated it to me."

But it isn't my father's style, which I've gotten to know pretty well as I translate his wartime memoir. Also, he was never the least bit confused about how many children he had: never more than, nor less than, one.

When I rewatch the final scene of Chris and Don, it turns out there's no "forcing myself to observe," the line I thought I remembered. Rather, in that last scene, a now-elderly Don tells us that while Chris was dying, he drew Chris at least once each day, meticulously documenting the changes. When Chris finally died, Don simply did what he had to, and kept on drawing and drawing and drawing