Jacques Servin

My mother is sitting upright, eyes on the ceiling, hands in her lap. On the table in front of her is an unfolded napkin covered in neat, looping script. 

She lifts a hand as I enter, to shush me.

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

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

A decade ago I saw Chris and Don, a movie about the writer Christopher Isherwood and his much younger partner, the artist Don Bachardy. In the final scene, Chris has just died with Don at his side. In Don's mind, Chris asks 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 Chris's corpse.

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

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

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

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

"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 later I ask who it is.

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

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 must be my father's last caregiver's children. At the time, my mother often thought Billie was stealing my father; now, I guess, it's 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."

I frown. "It's your writing."

"Oh, so it is," she says, and reads a bit more.

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

I frown again.

"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 the camera that while Chris was dying, he drew him at least once every day, meticulously documenting the change in his life partner's body. When Chris died, Don says, he just did what he had to, and kept drawing and drawing and drawing.