My mother was surrounded always by admirers: scholars, poets, painters, bucks, and blades. She let them all pay homage; for though she was now in low estate, she had been bred for the court, and was accustomed to the crush of supplicants. She hearkened little to the insinuations of flattery or the curtseys of obsequiousness, but returned all idle, pretty chatter in its own coin.
If she sought to leave a room, to guide me, perhaps, up to my bed, one of the scholars would cry, “But Mademoiselle, you are the bright center of our system. How may the sun, around which we all revolve, leave its planets spinning?”
And she would reply, “Sirs — you have gravity enough without me. And when I return, comet-like, to your orbit, you will welcome me all the more for my rarity and dazzle.”
They applauded her understanding and the deep science of her counter-flattery.
She would rush me up the stairs and sit on my bed. She would tap her fingers while I prayed, and seemed vexed by the number of animals for whom I asked safety. No sooner had my “Amen” flown out my mouth, drifted its way to the ceiling, and popped — she would rise swiftly, and bid me good night, rub my chin once, and rush back to the salon below.
Increasingly, I was in awe of her majesty, and did not know what I might say to please her. I fear now that I failed to engage her; that I was too sallow a character. Indeed, as time went on and I reached my seventh, and then my eighth, year, I became aware of how dull my wit was when confronted with her beauty, how drab my bearing; and so, gradually, I came to stand in relation to her as another admirer, seeking a few words, a kiss, a sign of favor. I vied for her attention only as one man of many.
She smiled upon me to chasten the others, to spurn their envious glances at me when I was taken by her up to bed.
Her spirit was so light, so luminous, so gay, that I feared how leaden was my solemnity and silence. I assayed to try my own hand at bons mots, saying to her in the morning, “You are — you are come down to the breakfast room as the — some dew on the flowers. Falling.”
She would say, “A few more years, Octavian.”
But this is the grossest filial ingratitude; there is no object in the world that should inspire greater affection and enchain the heart of man more than that wellspring of all that is sweetest, that dear first progenitor, a mother; and if I speak now in a way that makes her seem the coquette, I do so only because there is no preserving a spirit in lying about them; a portrait that improves upon its subject, that removes the moles, undrops the double-chin, suspends the sagging cheeks — that is no portrait at all, and preserves nothing for all time but a fancy. In the painting of such a likeness, the subject has slipped away, evaporated; and after death, all that is left is a canvas of someone else, a likeness of a smiling fiction, and the spirit does not hover near, and cannot speak its comfortable words.
So here, in limning her portrait, must I paint her as she was, a girl of little more than my own age now. I do not know what she felt, nor what fires burned in her bosom, what memories she entertained, what plains she saw when she dreamed, what grasses, what beasts, what faces of mother, father, sister, lover.
I know but what I saw, and that was her glittering accomplishments; and then, on some nights, some very few nights, she would come to me, and sit by my bed and watch me sleep (or attempt to sleep, as sleep was impossible with her gaze so fiery upon me). She would betray no sign of emotion; but she read my prone form like a pamphlet that contained words to save her.
Often, if I moved uneasily beneath her gaze, she would bark that I should remain still; but once, me waking to find her near, she instead begged me: “Touch my hair.”
She laid her head down upon my lap, burying her face in my chest, and I patted her head; and after a time, lying there as she clutched, I felt that I was become her mother, and she my son.