Philip Richmond learned the tremendous news in early June. He kept it to himself for as long as he could. When he finally broke it to his mother a week later he was carefully casual about it. She had a heart condition. Her face went blank for a second and then rallied bright and smiling as it had to.She said how thrilled she was for him and made him go into all the details. A few minutes later, out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed her secret gnawed expression.
But then she was on the phone, bright and smiling again, sharing the tremendous news with friends and relatives. It took hours. Phil heard her say, repeatedly, that Phil had been appointed for the coming school-year as lecteur at the Sorbonne, Paris, France. She went into the details: how every year two graduate students, one British, the other American, were appointed by the Sorbonne English Department to do translation classes. The teaching load was so light that the lecteurs had plenty of time to do research, in his case, a Ph.D. thesis on an aspect of Henry James' relation to Europe, she didn't remember exactly which aspect. He would also be doing a series of lectures on Edgar Allen Poe.
She reminded them, unnecessarily, that a professional review had published a paper of his on Poe ('White vs. Red: An Aspect of Color Symbolism in the Tales of E.A. Poe'). She'd ordered twenty copies the year before and mailed them to those same friends and relatives.
For days after, when Philip caught her with the familiar gnawed expression she reacted as though he'd caught her coming out of the shower and she would instantly clothe her feelings with a decently bright expression. Their longest separation had been summer camp and even then she'd visited him every Sunday.
“It's just for a year,” he said once.
She looked offended at the remark. How could her son think she wasn't totally delighted at the tremendous news?
“It's about time you had a little independence at your age,” she said. He went on with it anyhow.
“I'll write all the time. Maybe you could come over next spring and visit me in Paris.”
“You know I'm seasick just looking at a glass of water.”
She didn't even allude to the possibility of flying.
Still, flying was an unavoidable subject of conversation between Philip and his widowed mother when they debated the way he would get over to France in August. It was airliner, the sensible choice of 99% of American travelers, versus just plain liner, her archaic but prudent choice. There'd been the Titanic, of course, but long ago. She knew that radar could detect icebergs nowadays.
Who traveled that way in the year 1969? he argued. Nowadays everybody flew. Liners were for old people bundled in plaid covers like mummies in deckchairs. He was twenty-four, after all. His main argument was the extra expense involved and, like her, seasickness.
But she knew his illnesses better than he did himself. She assured him he'd never suffered from seasickness and damn the extra expense. She never once referred to the risk involved in flying although that's what it was all about, as he knew and as she knew he knew.
Her flight phobia dated back to July 24, 1944 when she was informed that her fighter-pilot husband, Philip, had disappeared over the Pacific on a volunteer mission. She was bearing his child at the time. Although tempting fate that way practically invited miscarriage or malformation, she decided to name it, if a boy, Philip. Philip II emerged on schedule and normally formed. He turned out to be a quiet studious boy, not at all tempted by rough sports that could maim or kill.
“He's always in the clouds,” his mother would say to her friends. She meant simply that her bookish son wasn't closely aware of things going on about him, but sometimes it sounded to Philip like an ironic comparison with his father whose lost kingdom had been the clouds. Ruggedly handsome with clear fearless eyes and square chin and shoulders, his father stood enshrined in his mother's bedroom with posthumous medals in open plush-lined cases before the photo.
Normally Philip didn't mind or even think of the difference between them. His father was remote and unreal, a winged mythological hero who had challenged the sun and been brought low by it (a yellow rising sun, soon to set, it turned out). Or, alternatively, one of those happy-go-lucky heart-ravaging Air Force heroes you saw in old Hollywood films, roaring into the wild blue yonder and crash-landing out of it to clasp the lovely heroine at the end.
It was only when confronted by desirable girls that the second Philip, slight, apologetic and owlish in strongly corrected glasses, sometimes regretted that he didn’t take after his father, but nothing urgent about the regret: the way, on awakening, you faintly regretted impossible powers exercised in a dream.
His mother often joked about her protective attitude.
“I know I’m one of those terrible possessive mothers you read about,” she would say.
“Not at all, Mother,” he would say.
She would say: “I was joking, Phil. You’re so serious. You take everything so seriously. Myself, if I didn’t have a sense of humor, thank God for that, life would be too terrible.”
