by Lee Siegel
* * *
Kindness, theoretically speaking, begets kindness. The next time you are standing behind your overloaded cart on line at the supermarket, invite the quiet, thoughtful young man waiting behind you with a bottle of Coke and a Snickers bar in his hands to go ahead of you. When he bursts into the movie theater where you are sitting with your wife and children, shooting people in their seats with a semiautomatic rifle and seven handguns, he might recognize you and allow you and your family to live. People often remember the nice things that you do.
Alas, cruelty responding to cruelty is more of a certainty than the reciprocity of kindness. The push on the playground or in the bar provokes a counterpush. Onerous terms of surrender at the conclusion of a war guarantee a second war. A slight, once embedded in someone’s mind, metastasizes into rage. The pendulum of getting what you give has a bright side, too. Daring all might lay, after an excruciating period of suspense, the world at your doorstep.
Energy spent is always energy exchanged. The action in the Garden of Eden, even if it was lying around all day looking at the sky, had to have a reaction. God would have eventually cursed Adam and Eve and their descendants with the punishment of laboring in the sweat of their brow even if Eve had not disobeyed Him. You have to pay up sooner or later.
As it turned out, waiting for Adam or Eve to defy Him and display their autonomy as persons was a stroke of genius. God was saying: for this good thing, autonomy, you have to trade another good thing, autonomy in a different degree. Thus was born the eternal law of something given, something taken; something taken, something given.
My father proceeded as if that law did not exist. In this, he was one of two things. Either he was a child, a blind, clueless, Eden-person, unaware that, as a poet once wrote, “in dreams begin responsibility”; obligations accrue; debts must be paid. Or he was—absurd as it sounds given his mildness, defenselessness, and incompetence in practical matters—a descendant of Lucifer, the angel who rebelled against any trade-off or exchange that would diminish what a person truly was.
* * *
In the 1970s, the interest rate for borrowing money reached the highest levels in American history. With no money available to people who needed to take out loans to buy a house, the real estate market collapsed.
Of course the wealthy could still purchase a house without a mortgage loan. Through the blessing of inherited wealth, for example, something similar to the Draw continued its elevating influence, though the exchange of energy in the case of inherited wealth—something given, something taken; something taken, something given—is obscure.
But for everyone else, the great uplifting that had powered America after the Second World War, thanks in part to the GI Bill, which had enabled my parents to buy their house in the New Jersey suburbs, came to a halt.
Interest rates went up. Male erections came down. Women who depended on men for pleasure and procreation went unfulfilled. The fate of tens of millions of men and women hung in the balance as President Nixon tried to persuade his chairman of the Fed to substantially lower interest rates.
The president’s efforts were unsuccessful. By the mid-1970s, the birth rate in America was the lowest it had been in modern times. The tools Nixon put in the hands of his Watergate “plumbers” were like the president’s own desperate attempt to keep himself at full mast. When I see footage of the American flag being taken down over the American embassy in Saigon in 1975, I think of Nixon, Watergate, birth rates, and my father.
The commissions stopped coming, yet my father took, and took, and took the Draw. Either he felt life owed it to him, or he felt that he owed it to himself and to his family, obligations and/or consequences be damned. One way or another, he had unconsciously devised a catastrophic revenge on the little boy who lost so much without lifting a finger to stop it. Within a few years, Monroe accumulated fifty thousand dollars in debt, which is equivalent to about three hundred thousand dollars now. When he couldn’t pay it back, and after a couple of years of lowering, raising, and then again lowering the amount of the Draw, Albatross fired him.
* * *
Monroe returned from work on the day he was fired from Albatross and sat down to dinner at our kitchen table as usual. I was about sixteen. Because my mother was quiet, we all ate in silence. My father must have given her the news earlier in the day, or in private, upon arriving home. Nathan, who rarely spoke by that point, usually sat in such a slouching way, darting his eyes around, that you felt he was communicating something, if not actually taking part in the conversation. But that night his posture and expressions were neutral.
We finished dinner, still without speaking. My father was eating the grapefruit my mother had wordlessly served him for dessert when, all of a sudden, he began to weep.
I had seen him cry before, every year in fact, on the Jewish High Holy Days, as he stood in the synagogue to say Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, for Leopold. Throughout the ten-day span of that holiday, he wept intermittently. He would run downstairs every couple of hours, even in the middle of the night, to check on the flickering Yahrzeit candle he had set up on the kitchen counter in memory of Leopold, to see if the flame had been extinguished. It was like making sure his beloved Rex was still tied to the tree. His annual spells of weeping made me shrink even more from him. But I associated his displays of emotion with the pathos of the holiday, so I was not overpowered by them.
That night, however, I sat aghast as I watched the tears roll down his cheeks. Grapefruit was my father’s favorite dessert. He relished eating it. Now his face was wet from the grapefruit’s juices and from his tears.
My mother went to him and put her hands on his shoulders. Monny, she said, using his nickname, everything will be all right. Then, as if feeling that she had fulfilled her function or satisfied an obligation, or perhaps experiencing the same startlement and revulsion that were sweeping over me and my brother, she stormed upstairs in a hint of the histrionics that she would fall victim to, and indulge in, for the next few weeks.
* * *
Most real estate companies that have their employees on a draw rather than a salary are prepared to eat their losses. For whatever reason, Albatross came after my father for the money.
Maybe it was too large a sum for them to simply write off. Maybe my father had overstepped a boundary and they were getting even. Maybe he had crossed someone there. (The seductive man with the corrugated hair!) It could have been that Albatross itself was endangered and they were attempting every recourse they could to stay afloat. But for whatever reason, Albatross pursued my father with implacable force. Unable themselves to collect the money my father owed, or to get it through the efforts of a court officer once they had obtained judgment against him, they passed the debt onto the sheriff’s office in Bergen County, New Jersey.
The doorbell rang one afternoon a few months after my father’s breakdown at the dinner table. A stranger was standing there when I opened it.
Now it was not Bill the Mechanic, with his rheumy green eyes, who smelled pleasantly of grease and motor oil, and who flirted with my mother in a high, squeaky voice. It was not Larry the Butcher, who also smelled of his work, of the fresh meat he delivered in crisp brown paper, and who was too shy to flirt with my flirtatious mother. Instead he spoke to her with a knowing, leering smile that was the way he concealed his shyness when dealing with female customers.
Nor was it my favorite presence at the door, Dr. Etra, who came to the house whenever I had one of my annual attacks of flu or bronchitis. His iodine smell meant that effective protection had arrived. Dr. Etra was short and rotund with a beefy face. He looked like Fiorello La Guardia in the pictures I had seen of him. When pneumonia raised my temperature to just over 105 degrees, and I felt that I was hovering outside my body, and that my skin had the sensitivity of an open wound, he stood a few feet from my bed, speaking in low tones to my distraught mother and father. Passing in and out of consciousness, I clung to the sight of his solid stockiness, his baggy bla
ck pants flooding his oversize black shoes. The heat had made my mind grow hands, beautiful hands with strong fingers, and with the new prehensile warmth growing out of my throbbing brain, I hung on to Dr. Etra’s bulk and pulled myself away from the oblivion that was enticing me toward it.
These figures were reliable people in our suburban life. They were creations of economic relationships that grew into half-business, half-personal relationships. They were both the guardians and the fruit of our stability. The stranger standing before me that sunny spring afternoon in a long white raincoat was an abrupt break with everyday reality. He was the product of a broken economic relationship with the world.
He slowly took his hand out of the pocket of his raincoat and showed me his badge, which identified him as a Bergen County sheriff.
* * *
Like many American boys, especially at that time, I had absorbed into my conception of myself the idea that, on some level, I was a law-enforcement officer. Deep down, I felt that I was the typical cop or detective of American popular culture. At war with his superiors, he had to break the departmental rules in order to enforce the law.
The cops of movies and TV, and also the sheriffs of Westerns, were really ingenious versions of American adolescents who, in their minds, were at war with their mothers and fathers and had to break the family rules in order to enforce the laws of romance, gratification, adventure, Musketeerian solidarity, and so forth. At the age of sixteen, I wanted to belong to society; I wanted to belong to everything, everywhere; I just wanted to belong in my own intractable way—all the more intractable for my discomfort about being, deep down, open to everything and everyone. On the small or big screen, the appearance of a badge signified to me that the person brandishing it had, so to speak, invented his own conformity. The real badge being flashed at the top of our front steps had the opposite effect on me. It was a denial of my actual life.
The sheriff processed me with hard, hooded eyes. With a smirk, he brushed past me into the castle without telling me why he was there or waiting for me to invite him in.
I started to tremble. An encounter with power has an effect similar to a car accident. All at once, it wakes you up from the daily slumber of familiarity and routine, and it causes you to feel that you are inhabiting a dream.
To change the terms of your existence: that is real power. What the sheriff’s badge and his twinkling, apathetic eyes meant was that everything that mattered to me was of no importance out in the world.
He went past me along our short foyer into the kitchen. He walked with a slow gait, taking his time, glancing into the living room to his right and then up the three steps down the hall toward the bedrooms on his left.
These places had grown to giant dimensions for me. His scrutiny made them look puny. The castle, with its turrets, and long hallways, and winding staircases, and mysterious bedchambers, dissolved into a white split-level house on a dead-end street that was separated from a car dealership and hissing Route 17 by a decaying gray stockade fence.
As for the sheriff, well, he was no Wyatt Earp or Matt Dillon—they were real lawmen. This man had a drinker’s veined, bulbous nose and pink splotches on his pasty white skin. Not to mention that smirk. Real sheriffs, that is to say, Hollywood sheriffs, never smirk.
The stranger walked right past me. He moved along the foyer with a brutish intimacy. Years later I hated it whenever a cop who had pulled me over for a traffic infraction adopted a sudden intimacy with me and called me by my first name. School-yard bullies use your first name to mock you. The sudden intimacy of the police aims to obliterate the familiar emotions that you depend on to structure your life. It is a threatening intimacy meant to demolish the sympathetic bond on which genuine intimacy is based. “Tell me, Lee, why were you going eighty miles an hour in a forty-miles-an-hour zone?”
I followed the sheriff as if he was the new master of the house. In fact, new terms of ownership were what his deliberately unhurried gait implied. Our home was his if that was the course the law decided to take. It was obvious that my father did not have the money to repay Albatross. So the firm demanded his assets. These, aside from his shoes and clothes, consisted of the split-level house that my parents had bought in the first flush of parenthood and economic success, as they moved out of their rented apartment in Bergenfield. The court had sent the sheriff to serve my father notice that it had a legal right to seize the house on behalf of Albatross.
The sheriff entered the kitchen and continued to look around. He took in all our major appliances. This included our refrigerator, onto which my mother, a walking compendium of treacly sentiment, had stuck one of her favorite inspirational tidbits: “I once had no food to eat / Then I met a man who had no teeth / I once had no shoes to wear / Then I met a man who had no feet.”
The cop had preserved his smirk, in much the same way that Nathan had preserved his grin. Seeing him turn his smirking face toward the poem whose vulgar sentiment made me wilt whenever I saw it was too much for me. I could not endure the shame I felt.
I decided to attack him and, if necessary, to kill him.
Everything happened in a blur. He turned toward me and began to speak. A crow made its raucous sound somewhere. Out of the kitchen window I could see a dog bounding in freedom across the backyard, his leash flying behind him. I grabbed the sheriff by the lapels of his raincoat. He punched me in the face. I pushed him into the refrigerator and gripped his neck with my hands. Wrapping my fingers around his neck, I began to press on his throat. “Say you’re sorry, you little prick,” I said. He tried to knee me in the groin, but I placed my leg alongside him and flipped him over it. He hit the ground with a thud. “That poem has a lot to teach us about life,” he said, as he struggled to raise himself off the floor. I thought for a minute. I replied, “The creation of art has nothing to do with the inability of the artist to fufill an obligation unworthy of his exceptional gift.” I then drove this important point home by walking behind him and kicking him in his balls just as he was getting on all fours to lift himself off the ground. He shot forward, his head slamming into our aging dishwasher. His lifeless body slumped to the floor. Now I had to figure out how to dispose of the corpse. I knew Nathan needed money to buy some more rare coins. If I gave him twenty dollars, he would probably help, though I wasn’t sure. You could never tell what mood Nathan was in.
As all this action was unfolding deep inside my head, the sheriff asked me where my father was. I was still trembling. I don’t know, I said.
Where is your mother, he said softly.
Out, I said. Food shopping.
He regarded me with his hard, hooded eyes.
Where is your father, he said.
He’s out, I said.
Where, he said. He didn’t ask questions. He made statements that demanded answers. But he did it in a soft voice.
He’s out working, I said. He teaches. He teaches piano. He’s out giving a piano lesson.
The sheriff took a white envelope out of his raincoat pocket. He now spoke in such a low tone that I thought I heard kindness in his voice. I began to imagine that another form of protection had arrived, that he was there to help us keep our collapsing household from falling completely apart. All that TV and movie watching had instilled in me a demented romanticism. His low and gentle tone meant only that he had attained the apex of his power in his little visit to our home. He did not have to go to any effort to destroy us.
What’s your name, he said. His smirk had given way to a travesty of a smile.
Lee, I said.
I’d like you to do me a small favor, Lee. I have to hand this envelope to your father myself. That’s the law. He gave a faint shrug, as if to say, “The law is as much a pain in the ass for me as it is for you.” Then he continued to smile into my eyes, as if to say, “I bet you wish that was true.”
But, he said, if he’s not here, I can’t give it to him, Lee. Do you understand that.
Yes, I said. I do.
Good boy, he said.
You just tell your father that I was here, okay.
I nodded. Okay, I said.
He smiled one last time, walked back down the foyer without waiting for me to lead him out, and left the house.
My mother came home carrying bags of groceries. I helped her put them away. After that I told her about the sheriff. She gave me a pained look, to show me how much my father was making her suffer. Then she rubbed her hand up and down my upper arm. Don’t worry, she said. Everything is going to be all right. Yeah, yeah, she sighed to herself so that I would hear her. Her eyes began to moisten.
These days she wanted only to win me to her side, partly to hurt my father, and partly because, even in her wildest furies, she still felt a sentimental attachment to me.
* * *
That autumn, a few months after the sheriff’s visit, I was playing basketball in our driveway. My friends and I had put up a backboard and hoop. Though I could not dribble the ball to save my life, I was a fair shot. I spent hours shooting hoops well into the night, when I turned on the naked bulb that years before someone, I had no idea who, had wired to the front of the garage.
I had just come back from school. My mother wasn’t home. Because my father’s income from his piano lessons and the few performing gigs he and his trio were able to get was not enough to support us, she had returned to the elementary schools as a substitute teacher.
She usually had three- or four-day stints at a time. The Paramus Board of Education would call her early in the morning to tell her that she was needed and to ask if she was available. She always was, unless she was sick as a dog, which was not an infrequent occurrence for either of my parents. They were both chronically depressed and often down with a cold or the flu. On the mornings when my mother got the call informing her that there was an opening, she roused herself from the heavy, underwater slumber of those depressed people who sleep too much rather than too little, shuffled downstairs, and, gradually, after one cup of coffee that was mostly milk, and a bowl of cereal, went off to work.