One evening I came home to find my mother sitting ready in her coat and hat, waiting for me to go to Jersey City with her. Grandmother Whittaker had been picked up. It was late when we reached the city hospital of which I retain only an impression of dim lights burning. and rather shadowy people moving about quietly and speaking in low voices. We were ushered into the insane ward. It was a vast room filled with cots. On each cot lay, or sat, women in all stages of dementia. Their clothes had been taken away. They wore shapeless hospital wraps. The hair of some was hanging in wisps about their cheeks. Others stared into space with dull eyes from deadened faces. At the sight of a man (myself), all the women sat up and fastened their empty eyes on me.
Grandmother’s cot was in a far corner. She was perfectly composed and never more charming. “I am delighted to see you both,” she said. We did what we could to reassure her. What had happened was commonplace enough in such cases. My grandmother had been staying at a Y.W.C.A. About two o’clock in the morning, “they” (there is always a “they”) had driven a spike through the ceiling and began to pump gas into the room. In her terror, my grandmother had run down to the street in her nightdress and tried to board a street car.
We took Grandmother home and gave her a room. “You will have to stay up tonight,” my mother said to me. “She may try to kill us all.” The family settled into sleep. I sat downstairs, reading. Presently, I heard bare feet patter down the stairs. Grandmother began to throw open windows and doors. I closed them. She threw them open again. “They’re pumping gas in here,” she said, “the house is full of gas.” I tried to explain to her that, if there were any gas, I would notice it too. Finally, I got her back to bed. I went back to reading. Ten minutes later, she was throwing open the doors and windows again. This kept up all night. For years, in addition to our old tensions, this dark, demoniac presence sat at the heart of our home.
Usually, her movements were almost soundless and she seemed to be able to move with abnormal swiftness. She would be standing beside you before you knew she was there. Winter and summer, she wore a long sealskin coat in the house. For long periods, she would be quiescent. Then a spell would come. She would float downstairs, take a knife from the kitchen and sit by the window in my mother’s bedroom, where she knew that she should not go. There, muttering and growling, an ominous figure in her sealskin coat, she would rock back and forth, the knife clutched defiantly in front of her. “You will have to take the knife away from her again,” my mother would say. My grandmother was quite powerful and there was usually a sharp scuffle before I got the knife. I suppose nobody ever sleeps quite peacefully in a house where a woman sometimes wanders around with a knife.
Except for these sallies, and her shopping trips to the village, Grandmother spent most of her time in her room. She always kept her door locked. Behind that locked door she cooked. How she cooked was long a mystery. We learned to disregard the smell of burning wood, and the more frightful culinary smells, that drifted through the house. But once the smell of burning was so strong that my mother knocked on Grandmother’s door and asked if anything was on fire. There was complete silence. My mother was afraid that something had happened to Grandmother. “You will have to break down her door,” she said. I put my shoulder to the door and burst the lock. As I plunged into the room, Grandmother was waiting for me just on the other side. In her most gracious voice, she asked: “Did you want to see the little contrivance, dear?”
The little contrivance was a tiny oven made of a tomato can with the top cut out. A small stoking door had been neatly cut in one side. Through it, Grandmother fed a little fire with old match sticks, splinters of wood and scraps of paper. On top a pan of water was bubbling. The can rested on a hearth of two bricks which she had carried unnoticed to her room. Before the pathos of such ingenuity, I withdrew abashed.
All day long, and often much of the night (for she slept very little), my grandmother talked to herself. Much of what she said could not be made out, but the sound was insistent, like the sound of a sewing machine that never stops, and it had the same disturbing effect on the nerves. When her monologues were intelligible, they were uttered in the same beautifully modulated voice, with the same precise eloquence as in the past. Often she relived the years of her social life, interrupting the flow of reminiscence to touch off with a few blistering words some character, whom she did not like. One of her favorite targets was John D. Rockefeller, Senior. In a voice of withering pity, she would dilate on the havoc of his personal appearance, his diet, his general decrepitude, his religious interests. She would mimic his singing of a hymn, squeaking in an intentionally cracked and quavering voice:
“Ro-o-o-ck of A-a-ages cle-eft for me-e-e.”
Then would come a swooping laugh, intended to annihilate Mr. Rockefeller and his world, and her favorite lilting clincher: “Oh, Mama, what people!”
My father was an even better target than John D. Rockefeller, and handier. My grandmother developed several artful ways of tormenting him. Sometimes, when he got home tired from work, she would be waiting for him just inside the front door—a startling enough experience in itself. She would stand perfectly still, gaze intently at him, and say in a tone of abysmal pity: “Oh, that depraved face!” I have seen a look of something like murder pass across my father’s face, which was of all faces the mildest and least depraved.
My grandmother’s door was almost opposite my father’s. Both doors were kept constantly shut. When my father was resting of an evening, my grandmother would stand just behind her door, and in those withering tones that had an almost toxic effect on a normal mind, would take derisive inventory of his appearance, his habit of walking or standing, or various other failings, and what she imagined, or pretended to imagine, were his depravities. My father would stand this for long periods. But sometimes it would get too much for him. He would fling himself out of his own room in a berserk rage, and hurl himself against her locked door. From the other side, she would shout mocking defiance. There would be a sound of splintering wood, a crack as the lock snapped, then cries. For Grandmother was a courageous woman, and she was always waiting to defend her stronghold with the scissors which she kept handy for such occasions. I would rush in and throw, or wedge, myself between them. The small scars on my hands are where the scissors missed my father and caught me.
For years, such scenes were a regular part of our life and they took place in an appropriate setting. My mother had begun to remodel our house and her plans were on a fairly heroic scale. My brother, working steadily and with great skill in his spare time, was never able to complete them. The house in which my grandmother became a brooding presence was itself rather spectral. Part of the back was torn out for two stories and rigged with scaffolding. For years it stood open to the wind, rain and snow. Even the habitable part of the house was sometimes piled with bags of cement, lumber, pipes and tools, which crowded the worn furniture in such a way that access to the kitchen, the one relatively clear room downstairs, was often by runways through these stores.
When my brother went to college, he left that unresolved chaos.
XXXVII
My brother was eighteen or nineteen when he left for Colgate University. He set out gayly, for he went with a group of his fellow high-school students who were his close friends. Unlike me, he had been very popular, for he was a smiling, candid, uncomplicated boy. He had been on the baseball and track teams.
Throughout our early boyhood, my brother had been a shadow that, in the way of older brothers, I tried to shake off. “He worships you,” my mother would say, “how can you be so mean to him?” For a long time I was not aware of any particular feeling for him. He was simply someone who belonged, someone in the order of nature, like my mother. Actually, the tie between us was close and tender, woven of all the hours and days of quiet, intimate, unquestioning association. The most observable tie between us was that we thought the same things were funny. Neither I, nor anyone else, knew how close we were until, when I was about ei
ght years old, I came down suddenly with scarlet fever. My brother was whisked away to Philadelphia. That night, as I became delirious, I repeated over and over: “Where is my brother? I want my brother.” “You would never think,” I heard my mother saying to the doctor the next morning, “that he ever noticed him.”
I did not notice him when he came back, either. We spent long hours over the years playing a game we never tired of—drawing plans for the farms we would have when we were men. They were to be in the South, on a river so that we could irrigate. We used to lay off fields of yams, peanuts and cotton. Aside from that, we had little in common. At school, he moved with a crowd of younger boys whose names I scarcely knew. He took part in most sports from an early age. From the time he could read, and unlike me, he learned to read slowly, he studied books of carpentry, plumbing or physics. He seldom read anything else. My mind was entirely closed to him, and his to me.
In character, too, he was wholly unlike me—not so good-natured, but much livelier, much more active but not nearly so strong, in all ways more alert, likable, and without that reserve, reflective and observant, that made people react from me. In appearance we were so unlike that people often refused to believe that we were brothers. By the time he left for Colgate we were almost strangers.
From college, he wrote my mother regularly. He had not been there long when she told me that she was worried about him. He had failed to make a fraternity which his close friend and room-mate had made. My mother thought that this had hurt and shocked him in some very deep way. I laughed. It seemed to me incredible that anybody should be upset about a fraternity. But I am now convinced that my mother was right and that I was wrong, that this social rejection to which his sociable nature made him vulnerable, for which nothing in his past prepared him, and which he lacked the human resources to resist, was the starting point of his disaster.
To my surprise, for we never corresponded, I received a letter from him. He was not at the college. He had taken to the road and had got as far as Buffalo. He was rather pleased with himself and his adventures on the way. With a pang, I grasped that he felt that we had much in common. He went back to college and I wrote at once, urging him to stay there and not to think of leaving, for I was not so sure of my own course that I wanted to see anybody else follow it, and I was completely sure that what might be right for me was not right for my brother.
When my brother got home for the Christmas holidays, I came in one night to find him sitting in the kitchen with my mother—an almost unrecognizably white-faced, taut-lipped boy, arguing desperately, but, with the natural courtesy that almost never failed him, that life is worthless and meaningless, that to be intelligent is to know this and to have courage to end it. His appearance and a few minutes of conversation was enough to tell me that this was not a schoolboy pose, that this crisis was real and terrifying. My mother was frantic. As soon as she could get me alone, she said: “You must talk to him and find out what is wrong. You’re the only one who can.”
I took him for a long walk. My brother, who never discussed anything with me, was bursting with talk. My brother, who never read anything, had been reading voraciously—Rabelais, Montaigne, Voltaire, Diderot. Of the modems, he seemed to have read only Anatole France and Thomas Hardy. All his reading, more jumbled and more immature than mine had ever been, added up to one certainty: the folly of life, the need to end it. He did not yet talk about ending his own life.
“Look around you,” he said, “look at people. Every one of them is a hypocrite. Look at the world. It is hopeless. Look at religion. Nobody really believes in that stuff, even the people who pretend to. Look at marriage. Look at Mother and Jay. What a fraud! Look at the family. Look at ours! And children! It’s a crime to have children.”
I tried to argue with him that the answer to the wretchedness of life was not death, that life itself was not evil, but that what men had made of life was evil, that struggle was the answer to evil, and that all strength and all virtue lay in struggle. I was speaking as a Communist.
“What for, what virtue?” he wanted to know. “It’s stacked against you from the start. What’s the use of struggling when everybody has to die, anyway?—good and bad, in a grave where you rot, simply rot.” (I am not quoting him exactly, of course, but piecing out things that I remember with a paraphrase of his violence.)
I said: “The Communists have found a way out.”
He simply laughed at me. “What way?” he asked. “What are they going to do that the others don’t do? What do they want that the others don’t want? They’re just like the others, only they have invented a new way. There is only one decent way.”
In my desperation, I heard myself saying a surprising thing. I said: “The kingdom of God is within you.” The phrase came back from my own struggle.
“That’s junk,” he said and laughed the flat, unhappy laugh with which he had punctuated the whole conversation. I was trying to face the world with the mind and will. He was facing it with loathing. It was an organic loathing. Between the two attitudes was a difference in kind. There was no way for them to meet or for us to communicate. I saw that the one person on whom he had counted for understanding was failing him. We were back in that morning of our childhood when he had stood on the porch in the soft rain, calling me, and I did not go.
“We’re hopeless people,” he said by way of ending the conversation. “We can’t cope with the world. We’re too gentle. We’re too gentle to face the world.” He was to say it many times.
By the time his vacation was over, he had withdrawn from me, and I, feeling the baffled hopelessness of helping him, had withdrawn from him. He went back to college, not gayly this time.
XXXVIII
I do not remember exactly when my brother came home to stay. I do not believe that he completed his freshman year. For a time, I scarcely saw him. He slept most of the day and was gone most of the night. When I did see him, he was pleasant, but uncommunicative. He had nothing more to say to me. But he was no longer excited. He was very quiet.
One day I came in and found him lying on the old couch, where we had suffered the toothaches of our childhood. His eyes were open and he was staring at something ahead of him. His face was pinched and white. After a while, he raised his arm and pointed to the old print that still hung at the end of the couch: Il Conforto—Death, the Comforter.
Then he asked slowly without looking at me: “If I kill myself, will you kill yourself with me?”
I said: “No.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“You are not going to kill yourself,” I said.
He laughed meanly. “You’re a coward, Bro,” he said.
XXXIX
My brother went back to remodeling the house. All day he worked steadily, apparently cheerfully. He finished the long, tedious job of moulding the baronial ceilings. He put in a new bathroom, laid the tiles and did the plumbing. He finished building the fireplaces, framing oblong panels on them, which my father, with an unusual burst of homemaking, filled, in one case, with a droop of autumn leaves against a turquoise sky, and in the other, with a swirl of pink roses or peonies in an archaic vase.
My brother also built himself a workshop behind the house. It was a little house in itself with a gabled roof and a fireplace of its own. He piped in gas from the main house so that he could use his workshop after dark. He moved in a couch and sometimes slept there, surrounded by his tools, his pipe wrenches, vises and dies. My mother was paying him regular wages, which he certainly earned, for he was a first-rate workman.
One day my mother said to me: “Your brother is drinking.” I said: “I don’t think so.” “I know,” she said. She told me that he had been drinking for some time, that now it was becoming a habit. She knew how and where he spent his nights, the names of his friends and that girls were involved. She knew the details of his most intimate life. I was horrified that she should have to hear such things and shocked that he should dream of telling them to her. I saw that he was a man
in his actions, but a child in his relations with his mother.
“You must go with him,” she said, “and watch over him. I do not know what he is going to do next. But I am afraid that he is going to try to kill himself.” She wept “What have I done that was so wrong?” she said. “Oh, God, what have I done? I only tried to love you both.”
XL
I was still working in the New York Public Library. I took to going home directly after work. My brother would meet me at the Lynbrook station. One of his friends had an old car in which the whole crowd—there were five or six young fellows about my brother’s age —would make a circuit of the Long Island speakeasies. Prohibition was in force, but clandestine bars were everywhere, and I sometimes stood at them beside most substantial citizens.
My brother’s evenings usually began at a little store with the lower half of the show windows painted or blinded. Behind the store was a backroom. Here a mousy Greek, with graying hair, served a home-brewed wine. It was red, watery, sour, rasping and very heady. The backroom was dense with tobacco smoke, warm, and, on cold nights, cozy. It was filled with the murmur of voices talking Greek and sometimes a rough French—a lingua franca of the Levant. The talkers, who sat around the walls, like the proprietor, were chiefly Greeks. They were very quiet and never spoke to any of us or paid the slightest attention to us.
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