Dear Seth,
Hortense and I discussed your problem and we both believe that it would be impractical for you to live with us. Both of us work all day and you would be without adult supervision for too many hours. We both agree that you need to get away from your present situation and we think the best solution is for you to attend a boarding school. The tuition is really beyond our means (our vacation on the Cape last summer was our first in four years!), but we believe that the financial sacrifices on our part would be well worth it. Choate or Andover would be excellent choices. Let us know what you think. By the way, your mother called me three times last week to insist that Eddie did not punch you in the nose. She modified her story, explaining that you and Eddie were playing and that he accidentally fell on you. I have no comment except to say that the whole situation is bizarre.
Love,
Dad and Hortense
Eddie hadn’t actually punched me. One Sunday near the end of August 1969, Eddie and I had been sitting next to each other on the couch watching baseball. He had been in his bathrobe all day, hadn’t shaved, and was in his usual posture, bent forward, one hand on the channel dial, changing back and forth between the Yankee and Mets games. I told him to quit it, that I had already missed hundreds of pitches. He replied that this was his house and that he could do whatever he wanted. I told him that this wasn’t his house. He was living here for free.
“You little snot-nosed brat,” he said, putting his face right in front of mine. “You’re one word away from a serious bruising.”
“Word,” I said.
Suddenly he was on me, placing me in a headlock. I tried to bolt, but he fell on top of me with all his weight. I landed on my nose and blood spurted everywhere. I failed violently under him, calling him a “goddamn gorilla.” My mother came out from her bedroom. “Oh stop this,” she cried. “The two of you, just stop this!” Eddie let me up, and I put my hand to my nose. At the sight of my blood I became enraged and punched him in the mouth, bloodying his lip. I could see in his eyes that he was frightened of me, and I became wilder, punching him two more times in the face before fleeing down the steps and out the door. I walked the streets for about an hour. My nose felt like it was wadded up with cotton, and an intense pain pinched me between the eyes. My cheeks were scraped red where his beard had scoured against me.
The next day I woke up with two black eyes and my nose still hurt. My mother took me to the emergency room of the hospital. She told the doctor on duty that I had tripped and fallen. A week later, I had surgery to repair my broken nose. I left the hospital looking like a raccoon—a white cast over my nose and two black eyes. When the kids in the neighborhood and at the town pool asked me what had happened, I told them I’d had brain surgery.
I had gone along with the lie my mother had told the doctor in the emergency room, but after my surgery I realized my broken nose was my ticket out. I wrote my father a letter telling him that Eddie had punched me and broken my nose. I added that my mother and Eddie fought constantly with each other and I was afraid Eddie would get violent with me again. I said I wanted to come live with him, reminding him that the school year began in a week and it would be great if I could start the term in Cambridge.
Returning the ten-year-old letter to the box, I knew that Sarah was right about our father: He would never change. He was going to her graduation because all she expected from him was the five thousand dollars he owed her for going to Rutgers. He wasn’t coming to my graduation because I expected him to love me unconditionally.
MY MOTHER WAS WAITING for me at Newark Airport. The moment I caught sight of her—inhaling deeply on a cigarette, a distraught look in her eyes—I knew that Sarah had told her about Hortense.
I bent down to kiss her, but she didn’t bother to say hello.
“God give me strength to get through this weekend,” she sighed.
In the car, she lit another cigarette.
“Mom, we’ll be home in thirty minutes. Can’t you wait until then to light up?”
“Look, Seth, I’m going through a very traumatic time right now. You don’t know how upsetting it is to me that that woman is going to be at my daughter’s graduation.”
She began to cry, and I decided I would rather deal with the cigarette fumes than my mother’s hysteria.
The next morning we drove to New Brunswick. Seamus sat in the front. I was lying down in the backseat, trying to nap, but in my mind I kept repeating to myself, How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home. I had been up until five in the morning writing an English paper for my brother on As I Lay Dying. Seamus was an excellent student—he had been admitted to Brandeis—but his strengths were science and math. He was diligent and bright enough to do well in his English courses, but he was thoroughly stymied by As I Lay Dying. The night before, I had tried to discuss it with him.
“Doesn’t the family in the book remind you a little of us?” I had asked him.
“Us? You don’t really think we’re as strange as the family in this book.”
“Think of your name. Seamus Shapiro. That’s as strange as any of the names in the book. Jewel. Vardaman. Darl.”
“You always exaggerate things.”
“I know, but that’s what helps me understand the book.”
“Maybe I’m too literal to understand literature.”
“See? We’re like the family in the novel. All the siblings are different. Cash is literal and responsible, just like you. I’m a combination of Jewel and Darl. Angry, romantic, overly vulnerable.”
I could see that Seamus was processing this information.
“Does that help?” I said.
“Actually, it does.”
“So, we’re also like the Bundren family because we can’t communicate our deepest feelings to each other.”
“I don’t agree with that.”
“All right. Think about this. Dad is like Addie. He’s not present, but he’s still a powerful force in our lives. We still define ourselves in relation to him.”
“I don’t agree with that either. Dad is more like the father in the novel. Self-centered. Not very honorable. I don’t think of Dad as our family anyway. You, Sarah, me, and Mom. That’s our family unit.”
I told Seamus that maybe it would be easier if I just wrote down some of my ideas and then he could use them however he wanted. At nine o’clock, I sat down at the same desk I had avoided all through high school when I had homework. By five in the morning, I had written twenty pages about siblings and parents, language and loneliness. When I finally did go to bed, my mind was so revved up that I couldn’t fall asleep. Lines from the book kept pulsing through my head, viscerally as a beating heart. I realized this was the way I read, and I forgave myself a little for “Two by Two.”
In the morning, I showed Seamus what I had written. For the first time that I could recall, my younger brother expressed admiration for me.
“I’m amazed at how well you understand this book,” Seamus said. “It was incomprehensible to me.”
I found myself feeling amazed too, amazed that Seamus and I had grown up in the same apartment, experienced the same two parents, but had turned into such completely different people. He had directly told our father all the things I had always wanted to say myself, but Seamus had been more adult about it than I could ever have been. I had expressed years of pent-up hurt by telling Hortense to go fuck herself.
Seamus asked me if I thought it was ethical to use what I had written for him.
“It’s fine,” I replied, “as long as you just use the ideas and don’t copy any of the sentences.”
“Are you sure?”
“I was writing it for you, Seamus, not for a class. I was thinking of you when I wrote it; I was thinking of our family, so the ideas are just as much yours as mine.”
RUTH CHAIN-SMOKED THROUGHOUT the long drive to New Brunswick. She had her window down, but the wind just blew the smoke into the backseat. I thought: My mother is a fish. My mothe
r smokes like a fish.
The commencement exercises at Rutgers were huge, and I wondered if we would even see my father. Sarah had told Ruth where to meet her after the ceremony; perhaps, thinking strategically, she had told our father to meet her at another location. Afterward, as we walked to the spot Sarah had designated for our meeting, I could see that my father, Hortense, and Francois were already there, standing with Sarah. Ruth spotted them a second later. “Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty,” she sighed.
As we approached, I could tell that my mother was trying to summon tears. She held out her arms and embraced Sarah for a long time. When she pulled back, her eyes were indeed damp and her mascara a little smudged. “I can’t believe my baby girl is a college graduate!” Then everyone stood around doing their best to avoid eye contact. Hortense and Francois were standing a couple of feet behind my father. I noticed that Hortense had written Merde! all over the commencement program. Francois was wearing blue-jean overalls with a tie-dyed T-shirt underneath. His golden waves of Pre-Raphaelite hair fell to his shoulders. He was ignoring all of us, reading a paperback book—Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.
Finally my mother turned to my father and extended her hand.
“Hello, Elliot. How are you?”
“Very well, Ruth. Thank you. Would you like to say hello to Hortense?”
“I’m standing right here if she’d like to say hello to me.”
Elliot stepped to the side. “Hallo,” Hortense said. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” Ruth replied. “I have much to be proud of.” Then she said to our father, “Aren’t you going to say hello to your sons?”
He gave Seamus and me a tight-lipped smile. “Hello, boys.”
“Hello, Horty. How are you?” I said to Hortense. Sarah glared at me, but Francois’s lips had curled into a smile.
“I see you brought some light reading for the commencement,” I said to him.
“This whole commencement thing is so pseudo,” Francois declared.
“You mean like your pseudo farmer’s clothing?” I asked.
Our father erupted into laughter; we had the same high-pitched, obnoxious laugh. Francois gave him a malevolent look and then banged his copy of Notes from Underground down on our father’s Leica.
“Watch it!” our father said angrily.
“Oh, no! Did I harm the Holy Orifice?” Francois replied.
Hortense began speaking to her husband in very fierce French. I noticed tears sliding down her cheeks from beneath her enormous sunglasses.
“All right, Sarah, we’re leaving now,” our father announced.
“You mean we’re not all going out to lunch together?” I said.
“Why? So you can write a story about it?” my father answered.
“What story?” Ruth asked. “Seth, did you write a story?”
“No, I didn’t write a story,” I said.
“Then what did your father mean?”
“Nothing. He didn’t mean anything.”
“All right, Sarah,” our father repeated impatiently, “we’re going.” He handed her an envelope. “Congratulations.”
Then he turned around and walked away with his wife and son.
Sarah looked at me. “You two are just like each other.”
“Who?” Ruth asked. “Who is just like each other?”
“Nobody,” Sarah replied.
“Seth is nothing like your father, if that’s what you mean,” Ruth said.
I resisted reminding my mother of all the times she had taunted me by saying, “Elliot Shapiro! Elliot Shapiro! You’re just like him.”
“I feel so sorry for their child,” Ruth said. “I tell you, I must have done something right with the three of you.”
Sarah said she was famished and wanted to go get some lunch.
“Oh, before I forget,” Ruth said, searching around in her purse, “I have something for you from the Zelmans.” She handed Sarah two envelopes. When Sarah opened the second, she spent about a minute reading the letter inside it, then her eyes welled up and brimmed over with tears.
“It’s from Aaron,” Ruth whispered to me.
Later that afternoon, as we were returning to the car after lunch, Sarah held me back for a moment and asked me if I could spend the night. Her roommate, Carrie, had moved out, she explained, and she didn’t want to spend the night alone in her room in a half-empty dorm.
Ruth looked upset when we reached the car and I told her I was staying with Sarah.
“How are you going to get home?” she said.
“The bus.”
“When did you plan this?” she asked us.
“About a minute ago,” Sarah answered.
“Nobody tells me anything,” Ruth sighed.
That night, after we had turned out the lights to go to sleep, I asked Sarah what Aaron had said in his letter. I knew she wanted me to stay so we could discuss it.
“He said that he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about me for the last two years and he hopes we can get together.”
“Do you still think about him?”
“All the time.”
“So why don’t you give him a chance?”
“I can’t get past the way his father sexually manipulated Mom.”
“So? That doesn’t mean he’s like his father.”
“He loves his father.”
“I love Dad, but that doesn’t mean I’m like him.”
“Maybe so,” she said.
“Did Dad give you the five thousand dollars?”
“Yes. It was in the envelope he handed to me.”
“Go to Italy and invite Aaron to join you.”
“That sounds too nice.”
“I have a graduation present for you.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, I hereby give you permission to be happier than Mom without feeling guilty about it.”
She was silent for a few seconds. Then I heard her quietly crying.
“Thank you,” she finally said. “That’s a very nice present.”
“Do you really think I’m like Dad?”
“No, but you try to be. It’s very strange. Why would you want to be like him?”
She was right. My sister had created a self by becoming the inverse of our mother: She was pragmatic and kept her feelings to herself. I hadn’t created an identity so much as I had mastered an impersonation of my father—the sound of his voice, his speech rhythms, his mordant sense of humor, his discipline. But that’s all it was—an impersonation of someone I could never really become. I might have been conscious of being under Bellow’s spell when I wrote “Two by Two,” but I hadn’t realized the extent to which I had also been creating a character of whom my father would approve. If Isaac, my protagonist, wasn’t very likeable, it wasn’t because I had been trying to create a complex character; it was because I was trying to invent a version of myself—scientific, studious, emotionally detached—that my father would love.
In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don’t know what I am.
TWO DAYS LATER, back in Chicago, I found Rachel sitting alone at our regular table in the dining hall. I took it as an encouraging sign and approached the table with my tray.
“Can I join you?”
“If you want.”
I sat down and Rachel asked me about Sarah’s graduation.
“Stranger than you could imagine.”
She gave me a small smile; I decided to test the temperature between us.
“Francois banged my father’s Leica with his copy of Notes from Underground.”
Rachel was laughing now.
“I’ve missed you,” I said, and extended my hand across the table. “Do you forgive me?”
“No.” Then she took my hand and said, “But I’ve missed you too.”
“Friends?”
“Yes. Friends
.”
That night we shared a bed again, and I read to her from As I Lay Dying. Before turning out the lights and going to sleep, I confessed that I had slept with another woman. Rachel thanked me for telling her.
“You’re not upset?” I said.
“No. We had stopped seeing each other. You had every right to go out with another woman.”
How could she feel so betrayed by my story but apparently feel nothing when I confessed that I had slept with Bella? I had told myself that I was confessing to Rachel because it was the right thing to do, that I didn’t want us to have any secrets between us. But hearing her reaction, I admitted to myself that I had told her about Bella because I had wanted to see if she was capable of sexual jealousy.
Two weeks later, Rachel and I sat next to each other in Rockefeller Chapel for the commencement ceremony. As I paged through the program, I noticed that it listed all the prizes awarded to undergraduates, and I prayed that my mother wouldn’t see that I had won the Chandler Prize. Rachel had told her father and stepmother to meet her at the corner of Blackstone and Fifty-ninth Street and her mother to meet her at Kenmore and Fifty-ninth. She would see her mother immediately after the ceremony and then go out to lunch with her father and stepmother. We would go out to dinner that night with our mothers and Sarah and Seamus.
When we came out of Rockefeller Chapel, Ruth, Sarah, and Seamus were standing right out in front. Ruth was smiling, but she didn’t look happy.
“You didn’t tell me you won a fiction prize!” she exclaimed.
“It’s not a big deal,” I said.
“So am I going to get to read this story?” She sounded thoroughly aggrieved.
“Sure,” I said, and then introduced Rachel to my family.
“Very nice to meet you,” Ruth said.
Rachel told me she needed to go meet her mother. She kissed me on the lips and said she would see us later.
My mother stared at me.
“Is she your girlfriend?”
“It looks that way.”
She turned to my brother and sister. “Did either of you know your brother had a girlfriend?”
Sarah admitted that she did; Seamus said it was news to him.
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