look at the manuscript he handed her and there would be nothing written on
it at all, and she would feel like crying, but she’d say—Oh, you’ve written
it very well, it’s very good, isn’t it!— and she would smile. Every single
time she went he would pester her to read the manuscript to him, so she
starts reading the blank paper to him. It occurs to her to tell him stories of
her own, making it seem that she’s reading the manuscript. That’s the main
idea behind my father’s novel. The mother tells the boy about his
childhood. No doubt the crazy boy thinks he’s having his mother read some
sort of record of his memories, something that he wrote himself—that’s
what he thinks he’s listening to. His eyes sparkle with pride. His mother has
no idea whether or not he understands what she’s saying, but every time she
comes to see him she repeats the same story, and she gets better and better
at telling it—it begins to seem like she’s actually reading a story of her
son’s. She remembers things she had forgotten. And the son’s memories
grow more beautiful. The son is drawing the mother’s story out, helping
her, changing the story—there’s no way of telling whose novel it is,
whether it’s the mother’s or the son’s. When the mother is talking she’s so
focused she forgets herself. She’s able to forget that her son is mad. As long
as her son is listening to her with that complete concentration, there’s no
way of knowing if he’s mad or not—he could very well be mad and sane
both. And at those times the souls of the mother and the child fuse together
—it’s like the two of them are living in heaven—and the mother and the
child are both happy. As she goes on reading to him it begins to seem that
her son might get better, and so the mother goes on reading the blank
paper.”
“That’s the one called What a Mother Can Read, isn’t it?—one of your
father’s masterpieces. An unforgettable work.”
“The book is written in the first person—the son is the ‘1’—but some of
the things he remembers about his childhood actually happened to my sister
and me when we were small. He just had it all happen to a boy. . . .”
