by Lee Siegel
We lived in a modest split-level, at the top of a dead-end street that ran up a hill. A split-level is just that; not two floors, but one floor split into two. Neither is an actual floor since they are separated by a staircase consisting of a mere three steps. A split-level is really two halves of two different houses.
I had picked up the names for different types of houses by hearing my father talk about them. My father loved the terminology of real estate. Leopold’s death had forced Ann, Monroe’s mother, to sell their white Mount Vernon colonial, and selling real estate for a living later offered my father the illusion of controlling parcels of the precarious physical world. The fact that he was a mostly ineffectual realtor made no difference. Music came too easy to him. A little boy who allowed his dog to be taken from him, who permitted his father to leave him forever, didn’t deserve an easy time of it. Sweating, laboring, forcing himself against his nature to sell real estate was the way my father punished the little boy that he had been. Leopold, in fact, had been a realtor.
You enter a split-level house through a brief foyer that runs into the kitchen, which overlooks the backyard. To the right of the foyer is the living room. Situated perpendicularly to the living room, and connected to it, is the dining room. The bedrooms are off a short hallway to the left of the foyer that begins at the top of three steps. My brother’s bedroom was first, on the left, across from the pink bathroom he and I shared. My parents’ bedroom, with their own bathroom, was farther down, on the right side, at the end of the hall. My bedroom was at the very end.
I went downstairs and my parents introduced me to their guest and to his attractive blond wife. I have forgotten their names. They were warm and pleasant to me. I must have been wearing my favorite pajamas. Red with black piping, they consisted of a button-down shirt and loose pants. The picture of a panda bear with its mouth open, probably meant to indicate a yawn, appeared on the shirt pocket. I never changed them. The pajamas must have smelled of sweat, sleep, and dried urine. He’s adorable! the special guest’s wife exclaimed. My mother fluttered over me and my father smiled. I made my way back upstairs to my room.
Once there, I turned off the light and jumped loudly into bed. My brother banged on the wall in protest. He seldom spoke because he had inherited my father’s stutter. In his mysterious nighttime chamber, he worked out the first stages of his destiny in coins, then drums, then weights and martial arts.
I lay still in my bed. After a few minutes I quietly opened the door. I made my way past the pink bathroom on one side, and my brother’s den on the other. Carefully I perched at the top of the stairs. That was the place from where I would customarily eavesdrop on my parents.
I recall hearing my mother talk and laugh, and the guest and his wife talk and laugh. My father, who never drank, was mostly silent. Alcohol probably would have pushed his emotions out of him like rain melting snow off a roof in heavy chunks. A drink or two and all his pain would have tumbled down. But one sip of wine made my mother giddy.
Finally the evening took the turn for which I had been waiting. The two couples moved into the living room for “cake and coffee.” The plastic had come off the green silk sofa that my mother had saved for years to buy. Two armchairs, newly reupholstered with gold-embroidered, dark blue velour, stood on either side of the sofa. When I heard my parents and their guests rise from their chairs, I withdrew to a spot in front of a closet that was at a ninety-degree angle to the pink bathroom. I could sit there, hidden from view, and now and then snatch a glimpse into the living room.
I could barely make out what they were saying, or make sense of what I heard, but I saw them clearly enough. My father and the special guest’s wife faced each other from across the room in the rehabilitated chairs. The special guest and my mother sat at either end of the green silk sofa. At one point, the guest bent his glossy head toward my mother as if he couldn’t hear her. She emitted a laugh that had been loosened by the wine and laughed again. With a playful smile, he bent his head once more. My mother rose and sat down beside him.
Sitting with their knees touching, my mother and the special guest talked in hushed whispers, broken by regular intervals of shared laughter. My father and the special guest’s wife sat in their armchairs, on either side of the sofa. After a while, my father fell silent, his eyes cast toward the floor. As an adult he often grew silent when in younger years he would have stuttered. I wondered why he wouldn’t look at my mother or try to join their conversation. He sat there awkwardly fingering his glass of what I assumed was ginger ale.
By contrast, the special guest’s wife sipped her drink in comfort. She gazed around with an air of superior detachment at my parents’ tentative approximation of middle-class culture: a copy of Renoir’s Woman at the Piano that hung on the wall across from the large picture window; two oil paintings that my father’s mother had given to my parents and that had been placed over the sofa: both, from different perspectives, of a narrow street winding through an old city until it disappeared into the shadows. The twin pictures depressed and frightened me when I was a boy.
The broad, soft chest that I laid my head on, Leopold’s gold-plated watch, twice beloved, by Monroe and by me, the long, beautiful, fragile-strong fingers on the hands that applauded me with happy ignorance of the sport I was playing—my father’s bulk rested inert on one of the embroidered armchairs while my mother bent her head toward the special guest, crossing and recrossing her legs until her skirt slid up the middle of her black-stockinged thigh.
My father took these social gatherings at face value. He enjoyed my mother’s exertions in the kitchen and the meals she cooked. He was grateful for her outgoing manner. It distracted people from his timidity. Her extravagance even endowed his diffidence with a flattering possibility—if Monroe’s wife is so intense, Monroe must satisfy her nature somehow.
My father thought these evenings could win him friends. Perhaps that misperception was why he didn’t have any. No, Dad! Protect yourself! Harden yourself! Gird up thy loins! Your special guest is a coldhearted son of a bitch who wants to rip you to pieces. He wants to eat you. He wants to devour you and then slip his hand, with its diamond ring and gold watch, between Lola’s legs. And all the while his wife, perfectly composed, even cheerful, will be pretending, with that freshly acquired air of cultural superiority, to be interested in the name of your upholsterer.
* * *
Growing up without money, my mother entered Hunter College, part of the city university system, determined to become a teacher. She needed a way to make a living. But like many people drawn from a young age to a vocation that is never realized, she kept the possibility of being an actress alive even as it was becoming more remote. The waiting itself became a comforting habit.
Our happiest times as a family were those occasions when we assembled a little band, with my father on piano, my brother on drums, me playing the electric bass guitar, and my mother singing. My mother closed her eyes and belted out the songs with a gutsy, Shirley Bassey voice that bounced back and forth between the narrow den’s thin walls: “What Kind of Fool Am I” and “More” were favorites, along with some ballads that she and my father had written together.
Slowly, gradually, she reduced her theatrical aspirations to make them fit into the life she was living. I never saw her teach, but from time to time, other kids who had been in one of her classes told me how much they had enjoyed her, though whenever anyone began to talk about her as a teacher, I wanted to run away rather than risk a glimpse of my mother through someone else’s eyes that might have made me cringe.
* * *
My mother was part of a wave of first-generation American women, the daughters of mostly European immigrants, who found work in public education after the war. They had to support themselves while they looked for husbands or helped their parents out. In rare situations, a steady income was necessary for those women who had chosen an independent life.
In my mother’s case, she lived at home with Menka and Rose, contr
ibuting to the household expenses. She met my father on a blind date. She waited for him while he went off to the Korean War, where he served in the artillery. Upon his return, they got married. A few years later, they moved first to a garden apartment in Bergenfield, New Jersey, a working-class suburb, where I arrived, and then to the split-level house in Paramus, a mostly lower-middle-class borough with some pockets of modest affluence, about twenty-five miles northwest of Manhattan.
My father never graduated from college. For years I believed him when he said that he had gotten his bachelor’s degree from the City College of New York. After he lost his job, my mother told me that he had been lying. When I confronted him with what she had said, he turned away. I didn’t pursue it. He looked too wounded by the exposure of his lie. I could not bear his wounded look.
* * *
Money was a good part of the reason that my father gave up music for real estate. On the most basic level, he could not make enough money with his music to support a family. But there were emotional forces driving him, too. Though not Hollywood-obsessed like my mother, who sat sobbing through the Academy Awards every year, my father had his own movie playing in his head. Leopold had had some success as a realtor before he died. If my father felt that he deserved to fail as punishment for his father’s death, he was also driven to follow in Leopold’s professional footsteps as yet another sacrifice to his father’s memory.
My father worked at Albatross Realty. After a few years, fortune smiled on him, and they elevated my father to vice president. For the first time, my parents were flying high. We undertook a series of, for my parents, extravagant vacations, each one more exotic than the last: Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; and, the ultimate destination, the Virgin Islands.
My brother cured his stutter on that last trip. Slipping out of the hotel room he and I were sharing, which was adjacent to my parents’ room, he walked out onto the terrace joining the two. He returned with what would become a permanent grin. He had seen my parents having sex, and in some sort of reverse trauma he never stuttered again. He simply stopped talking altogether, except for talking when he had to, and making snide remarks, through that strange rictus of a grin.
My father, in the manner of a man of leisure, took up a hobby: photography. Suddenly he went from being someone worked on by the world to someone recording the world. His creative gifts had given him, beneath the insecure withdrawal, a touch of aristocratic confidence. There was the way he handled those sharp turns at high speeds with such aplomb when racing slot cars, for example. In that glorious season of his life, his innate gifts, which had been buried under all his flaws and misfortunes, bloomed.
Our house itself took on, in my eyes, magical dimensions. Not long before, I had seen Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet on public television, and though I had trouble understanding the play, I had absorbed the movie’s enchanted chiaroscuro through my pores. Now the new atmosphere of happiness and fulfillment transformed the split-level into a castle, with long corridors, stone walls, battlements, and a keep, out of which came, late at night, my parents’ laughter.
Meanwhile, my father’s newfound contentment was imposing a tariff on his fate. In hindsight I can see the catastrophe coming.
Nature had given my father beautiful hands. The sight of them enriched your impression of him. They were the hands of a born pianist—he had perfect pitch—and playing piano was where he found all the pleasure in his life.
One Saturday afternoon when I was about twelve, sitting in the kitchen having lunch, I heard my father scream. It was an anguished, horrified, animal shriek. Trying to put up a shelf in the garage, my father had hit his thumb with the hammer. The nail was shattered and his thumb swelled to the size of a pinecone. I heard the scream, and I saw him run up the stairs to my mother in the living room with a look of astonished helplessness on his face.
The second portent occurred a few summers later. I wasn’t home at the time. My father was mowing the lawn. At one point, he noticed that the lawn mower was no longer cutting the grass evenly. Tilting it over, he saw that a wad of leaves had gotten caught in the blades and he decided to remove it. Incredibly, he did not turn the lawn mower off first. He thought that if he was careful, he could catch hold of the edge of the clump of leaves that was sticking out of the blades and tug on that to get the whole thing out. The lawn mower lopped off the tip of one of his fingers.
When I got home, he was sitting in the living room, in one of the gold-embroidered, blue velour armchairs, his hand bound with surgical tape. The mound of bandages wrapped around his finger made it look like an animal’s paw. It was weeks before he was able to play piano again.
* * *
“Money,” wrote the Dutch philosopher Spinoza in the seventeenth century, “has presented us with an abstract of everything.” Money embodies the power to purchase and to own. It is the consummate medium for the human desire to possess: territory, objects, even other human beings. Money puts everything within reach. The problem then becomes how to acquire money.
Since the essence of being human is to desire, and money is the universal medium of desire, then every exertion, or enervation, of intellect, will, and emotion eventually becomes an economic event. That is why the back of the dollar bill has a picture of an all-seeing eye suspended over a pyramid. All creation submits to the dynamic of money.
Freud famously believed that the way you have sex is a revelation of your personality. I would amend that. Your relationship to money is also a revelation of your personality. The way you handle money and the way you have sex are mutually illuminating.
Yet I have often wondered if money is a natural feature of human existence. Would there be the equivalent of money in any world, in any universe, the way there must be the equivalent of oxygen anywhere there is human life? Or is money as the abstract of everything an artificial abomination that human beings must contend with, weary generation after weary, beleaguered, exasperated, fed-up, infuriated generation?
Albatross had my father on what is known as a draw. I don’t know anything more about the arrangement than that. I don’t know if all the brokers were on a draw, or if my father had any choice in the matter of how he was paid. All I know is that the company paid my father a certain amount of money every week against his future commissions. The idea was that he would pay back the money that had been advanced to him out of the commissions he received from the deals he closed.
This worked for a while. Like the Platonic form of Beauty, from which is derived our instances of mundane, earthly beauty—a painting, a full moon, a face—my father’s and therefore my parents’ happiness derived from the Draw. The Draw recalled a novel I read as a boy about a magical “wild-ass’s skin,” which allows its owner to fulfill his wildest dreams but shrinks after each dream is fulfilled. In my father’s case, the more he depended on the Draw to live, the more it shrank his life.
* * *
I once felt the power of the Draw the way Moses felt God’s power in the heat of the Burning Bush. In the mid-1960s, when I was about seven or eight, I emerged from my bedroom in the middle of the night, intending to make my way to the pink bathroom to relieve myself of excess water.
The castle was still. Not a sound was there in the long, stony corridor. I heard nothing except, now and then, the sound of clinking coins emanating from the bedrooom of my brother, the younger prince. He liked to remove his ducats from the slots in their folders at night to count them. Outside, the courtyards, the stables, and the woods beyond were silent. The servants were abed.
My bedroom, that of the eldest prince and heir to the throne, lay at the end of the corridor. The stronghold where my king and queen slumbered was situated next to mine. I slipped out of my chamber. As I was turning around after gently closing the door, I nearly bumped into the king as he was exiting the royal boudoir.
His face was red and sweaty. His features were slightly distended. Stretched across his face was a smile that I had never seen on him before. It wa
s a frank and uncomplicated expression of pleasure, rooted so deeply and confidently inside him that when he saw me, he didn’t flinch or draw back in surprise.
He was so absorbed in the cause of his smile that he encompassed me in its warmth. He glanced at me while still smiling, but smiled right past me, as if our near collision was part of the flow of his current happiness.
I looked down and saw that the boxer shorts he always wore to bed had something like an outstretched hand beneath their front. He turned away, still smiling to himself, and proceeded to the pink bathroom. My mother must have been using the one in their bedroom. I returned to my room tense and bewildered.
* * *
The Draw brought out my father’s and mother’s natural endowments. Our little band convened and played more often. Monroe and Lola composed more and more songs. The Draw hovered over Monroe and Lola while they made love.
The Draw resembled the force of love itself: binding, expanding, rooting. It projected the illusion of permanence onto a crumbling, uncertain world. It was like Athena casting an aura over her favorite warriors on the Trojan plain.
The Draw was exactly that: a drawing-out. It extracted the excellent and rare qualities of my parents that circumstance and serendipity had all but obliterated. Of course their own human weaknesses contributed to the obstruction of their gifts. Yet I have always wondered if my father’s infirm will and lack of confidence would have had a different outcome if money had not been the means by which they produced their effect. My father’s guilt and self-doubt would have obstructed him in any universe. But whatever forces of character and circumstance determined my father’s relationship to money, money was the decisive factor in everything that came to pass. In a universe—or a society—where money was not so gravely consequential, would his personality have destroyed his life?
Perhaps Monroe could not be blamed for taking, and taking, and taking the Draw, even as his commissions dried up. To finally be what he wanted to be was the most normal circumstance in the world. If the Draw was what made it possible for him to be happy and to support his family, then, in his eyes, the Draw was a natural condition. Lola, who for the first time began to accept the place where she found herself in life, even if it was composing songs and performing them at home, embraced her husband’s faith in the future.