love her own aura of exotic strangeness, her dusky Italian skin and sharp, large-featured face.
There she could lose track, occasionally, of the facts of her life. She was not the mother of a girl with a mortal illness. She had not spent her youth on a harsh-tempered, uneducated man who'd left her for a fat secretary with canary-colored hair. She did not live modestly in a vast, empty house. She did not wait on some of the women with whom she had once hoped, and failed, to become intimate.
When she went to Boston she was a woman in a good hotel. In her pocketbook she carried a slim golden pencil, a black enameled tube of lipstick from France. She was there to meet her son, a strapping man in jeans and a tweed jacket.
Billy (she'd learned to call him Will to his face) met her in restaurants or stores, or called for her at the Ritz. On many of her visits she didn't even see his apartment. A certain formality prevailed during her trips to Boston. She left her life to come to this city and, in a sense, Billy left his life, too. He put on a jacket and his most presentable shoes and rode the subway to a part of Boston almost as foreign to him as it was to her. They were tourists together, They walked the streets emanating a proud, defiant anonymity. Boston had its dappled brick and limestone, its self-centered fury of commerce, its windows full of merchandise. Mary placed her hand in the crook of Billy's elbow and spoke to him of pleasant, everyday things. So much lay undeclared between them. She knew about him, although he'd told her nothing and she'd never asked a direct question. She couldn't quite date her knowledge. She couldn't have said that in the spring of 1980 or the fall of 1982 or at Christmas the year he turned thirty, she'd realized her son was homosexual. She thought she could remember not knowing, but if she tried to take herself back to a time when she hadn't known, her memory reversed itself and she believed she had always known, even when he was a baby. Her recollection of innocence existed only on the periphery, like another person sensed but not yet seen. When she turned to look—when she tried precisely to locate a Mary who'd believed her son loved women and would someday take a wife—what she saw was infected with what she knew, and the very image of herself with a heterosexual son vanished as if that Mary had never existed at all.
She let it be a fact, remote and serene as Boston itself. She let it live quietly in her and did not contemplate the particulars. She and Billy had an unspoken arrangement. He called for her, arrived nicely dressed. He talked about his work, asked after his sisters, listened a good deal more than he spoke. He resembled, at times, a shy suitor. There were even moments when he reminded her of Constantine as a young man: Constantine the day laborer in the best clothes he could afford, his English less than fluent, treating her with courtly patience because he was dazzled and because he did not understand half of what she said and because he had surprises—his temper, the business between his legs—stored up for after they were married. She didn't think about Billy's surprises. She let him buzz from the lobby. She took him to stores and bought new clothes for him, firmly producing her charge card in answer to the protests they both knew he offered as ritual. She took him to dinner in nice restaurants, let him listen noncommittally to her own conversation. It seemed a form of respect, a way of showing their love for each other.
It had worked that way for years. As far as Mary was concerned it would continue for years into the future. She could picture herself as an old lady, precise and solemn in a dark suit, known to the staff at the Ritz, arriving every few months to be met by her son, gone gray himself, a handsome and solid man with a well-trimmed gray mustache and skin creased and burnished like fine leather. They would walk through the Public Gardens together. They would have dinner at quiet little restaurants where she would continue, with the serene, childish impertinence of age, to insist on paying.
It seemed a decent way to grow old alongside her