by Paul Auster
6
In June of that year (1978), Sophie, Ben, and I went out to New Jersey to see Fanshawe’s mother. My parents no longer lived next door (they had retired to Florida), and I had not been back in years. As Ben’s grandmother, Mrs. Fanshawe had stayed in touch with us, but relations were somewhat difficult. There seemed to be an undercurrent of hostility in her toward Sophie, as though she secretly blamed her for Fanshawe’s disappearance, and this resentment would surface every now and then in some offhand remark. Sophie and I invited her to dinner at reasonable intervals, but she accepted only rarely, and then, when she did come, she would sit there fidgeting and smiling, rattling on in that brittle way of hers, pretending to admire the baby, paying Sophie inappropriate compliments and saying what a lucky girl she was, and then leave early, always getting up in the middle of a conversation and blurting out that she had forgotten an appointment somewhere else. Still, it was hard to hold it against her. Nothing had gone very well in her life, and by now she had more or less stopped hoping it would. Her husband was dead; her daughter had gone through a long series of mental breakdowns and was now living on tranquilizers in a halfway house; her son had vanished. Still beautiful at fifty (as a boy, I thought she was the most ravishing woman I had ever seen), she kept herself going with a number of intricate love affairs (the roster of men was always in flux), shopping sprees in New York, and a passion for golf. Fanshawe’s literary success had taken her by surprise, but now that she had adjusted to it, she was perfectly willing to assume responsibility for having given birth to a genius. When I called to tell her about the biography, she sounded eager to help. She had letters and photographs and documents, she said, and would show me whatever I wanted to see.
We got there by mid-morning, and after an awkward start, followed by a cup of coffee in the kitchen and a long talk about the weather, we were taken upstairs to Fanshawe’s old room. Mrs. Fanshawe had prepared quite thoroughly for me, and all the materials were laid out in neat piles on what had once been Fanshawe’s desk. I was stunned by the accumulation. Not knowing what to say, I thanked her for being so helpful—but in fact I was frightened, overwhelmed by the sheer bulk of what was there. A few minutes later, Mrs. Fanshawe went downstairs and out into the backyard with Sophie and Ben (it was a warm, sunny day), and I was left there alone. I remember looking out the window and catching a glimpse of Ben as he waddled across the grass in his diaper-padded overalls, shrieking and pointing as a robin skimmed overhead. I tapped on the window, and when Sophie turned around and looked up, I waved to her. She smiled, blew me a kiss, and then walked off to inspect a flower bed with Mrs. Fanshawe.
I settled down behind the desk. It was a terrible thing to be sitting in that room, and I didn’t know how long I would be able to take it. Fanshawe’s baseball glove lay on a shelf with a scuffed-up baseball inside it; on the shelves above it and below it were the books he had read as a child; directly behind me was the bed, with the same blue-and-white checkered quilt I remembered from years before. This was the tangible evidence, the remains of a dead world. I had stepped into the museum of my own past, and what I found there nearly crushed me.
In one pile: Fanshawe’s birth certificate, Fanshawe’s report cards from school, Fanshawe’s Cub Scout badges, Fanshawe’s high school diploma. In another pile: photographs. An album of Fanshawe as a baby; an album of Fanshawe and his sister; an album of the family (Fanshawe as a two-year-old smiling in his father’s arms, Fanshawe and Ellen hugging their mother on the backyard swing, Fanshawe surrounded by his cousins). And then the loose pictures—in folders, in envelopes, in little boxes: dozens of Fanshawe and me together (swimming, playing catch, riding bikes, mugging in the yard; my father with the two of us on his back; the short haircuts, the baggy jeans, the ancient cars behind us: a Packard, a DeSoto, a wood-panelled Ford station wagon). Class pictures, team pictures, camp pictures. Pictures of races, of games. Sitting in a canoe, pulling on a rope in a tugof-war. And then, toward the bottom, a few from later years: Fanshawe as I had never seen him. Fanshawe standing in Harvard Yard; Fanshawe on the deck of an Esso oil tanker; Fanshawe in Paris, in front of a stone fountain. Last of all, a single picture of Fanshawe and Sophie—Fanshawe looking older, grimmer; and Sophie so terribly young, so beautiful, and yet somehow distracted, as though unable to concentrate. I took a deep breath and then started to cry, all of a sudden, not aware until the last moment that I had those tears inside me—sobbing hard, shuddering with my face in my hands.
A box to the right of the pictures was filled with letters, at least a hundred of them, beginning at the age of eight (the clumsy writing of a child, smudged pencil marks and erasures) and continuing on through the early seventies. There were letters from college, letters from the ship, letters from France. Most of them were addressed to Ellen, and many were quite long. I knew immediately that they were valuable, no doubt more valuable than anything else in the room—but I didn’t have the heart to read them there. I waited ten or fifteen minutes, then went downstairs to join the others.
Mrs. Fanshawe did not want the originals to leave the house, but she had no objection to having the letters photocopied. She even offered to do it herself, but I told her not to bother: I would come out again another day and take care of it.
We had a picnic lunch in the yard. Ben dominated the scene by dashing to the flowers and back again between each bite of his sandwich, and by two o’clock we were ready to go home. Mrs. Fanshawe drove us to the bus station and kissed all three of us goodbye, showing more emotion than at any other time during the visit. Five minutes after the bus started up, Ben fell asleep in my lap, and Sophie took hold of my hand.
“Not such a happy day, was it?” she said.
“One of the worst,” I said.
“Imagine having to make conversation with that woman for four hours. I ran out of things to say the moment we got there.”
“She probably doesn’t like us very much.”
“No, I wouldn’t think so.”
“But that’s the least of it.”
“It was hard being up there alone, wasn’t it?”
“Very hard.”
“Any second thoughts?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I don’t blame you. The whole thing is getting pretty spooky.”
“I’ll have to think it through again. Right now, I’m beginning to feel I’ve made a big mistake.”
Four days later, Mrs. Fanshawe telephoned to say that she was going to Europe for a month and that perhaps it would be a good idea for us to take care of our business now (her words). I had been planning to let the matter slide, but before I could think of a decent excuse for not going out there, I heard myself agreeing to make the trip the following Monday. Sophie backed off from accompanying me, and I didn’t press her to change her mind. We both felt that one family visit had been enough.
Jane Fanshawe met me at the bus station, all smiles and affectionate hellos. From the moment I climbed into her car, I sensed that things were going to be different this time. She had made an effort with her appearance (white pants, a red silk blouse, her tanned, unwrinkled neck exposed), and it was hard not to feel that she was enticing me to look at her, to acknowledge the fact that she was still beautiful. But there was more to it than that: a vaguely insinuating tone to her voice, an assumption that we were somehow old friends, on an intimate footing because of the past, and wasn’t it lucky that I had come by myself, since now we were free to talk openly with each other. I found it all rather distasteful and said no more than I had to.
“That’s quite a little family you have there, my boy,” she said, turning to me as we stopped for a red light.
“Yes,” I said. “Quite a little family.”
“The baby is adorable, of course. A regular heartthrob. But a bit on the wild side, wouldn’t you say?”
“He’s only two. Most children tend to be high-spirited at that age.”
“Of course. But I do think that Sophie dotes on him. She seems so am
used all the time, if you know what I mean. I’m not arguing against laughter, but a little discipline wouldn’t hurt either.”
“Sophie acts that way with everyone,” I said. “A lively woman is bound to be a lively mother. As far as I can tell, Ben has no complaints.”
A slight pause, and then, as we started up again, cruising along a broad commercial avenue, Jane Fanshawe added: “She’s a lucky girl, that Sophie. Lucky to have landed on her feet. Lucky to have found a man like you.”
“I usually think of it the other way around,” I said.
“You shouldn’t be so modest.”
“I’m not. It’s just that I know what I’m talking about. So far, all the luck has been on my side.”
She smiled at this—briefly, enigmatically, as though judging me a dunce, and yet somehow conceding the point, aware that I wasn’t going to give her an opening. By the time we reached her house a few minutes later, she seemed to have dropped her initial tactics. Sophie and Ben were no longer mentioned, and she became a model of solicitude, telling me how glad she was that I was writing the book about Fanshawe, acting as though her encouragement made a real difference—an ultimate sort of approval, not only of the book but of who I was. Then, handing me the keys to her car, she told me how to get to the nearest photocopy store. Lunch, she said, would be waiting for me when I got back.
It took more than two hours to copy the letters, which made it nearly one o’clock by the time I returned to the house. Lunch was indeed there, and it was an impressive spread: asparagus, cold salmon, cheeses, white wine, the works. It was all set out on the dining room table, accompanied by flowers and what were clearly the best dishes. The surprise must have shown on my face.
“I wanted to make it festive,” Mrs. Fanshawe said. “You have no idea how good it makes me feel to have you here. All the memories that come back. It’s as though the bad things never happened.”
I suspected that she had already started drinking while I was gone. Still in control, still steady in her movements, there was a certain thickening that had crept into her voice, a wavering, effusive quality that had not been there before. As we sat down to the table, I told myself to watch it. The wine was poured in liberal doses, and when I saw her paying more attention to her glass than to her plate, merely picking at her food and eventually ignoring it altogether, I began to expect the worst. After some idle talk about my parents and my two younger sisters, the conversation lapsed into a monologue.
“It’s strange,” she said, “strange how things in life turn out. From one moment to the next, you never know what’s going to happen. Here you are, the little boy who lived next door. You’re the same person who used to run through this house with mud on his shoes—all grown up now, a man. You’re the father of my grandson, do you realize that? You’re married to my son’s wife. If someone had told me ten years ago that this was the future, I would have laughed. That’s what you finally learn from life: how strange it is. You can’t keep up with what happens. You can’t even imagine it.
“You even look like him, you know. You always did, the two of you—like brothers, almost like twins. I remember how when you were both small I would sometimes confuse you from a distance. I couldn’t even tell which one of you was mine.
“I know how much you loved him, how you looked up to him. But let me tell you something, my dear. He wasn’t half the boy you were. He was cold inside. He was all dead in there, and I don’t think he ever loved anyone—not once, not ever in his life. I’d sometimes watch you and your mother across the yard—the way you would run to her and throw your arms around her neck, the way you would let her kiss you—and right there, smack in front of me, I could see everything I didn’t have with my own son. He wouldn’t let me touch him, you know. After the age of four or five, he’d cringe every time I got near him. How do you think that makes a woman feel—to have her own son despise her? I was so damned young back then. I wasn’t even twenty when he was born. Imagine what it does to you to be rejected like that.
“I’m not saying that he was bad. He was a separate being, a child without parents. Nothing I said ever had an effect on him. The same with his father. He refused to learn anything from us. Robert tried and tried, but he could never get through to the boy. But you can’t punish someone for a lack of affection, can you? You can’t force a child to love you just because he’s your child.
“There was Ellen, of course. Poor, tortured Ellen. He was good to her, we both know that. But too good somehow, and in the end it wasn’t good for her at all. He brainwashed her. He made her so dependent on him that she began to think twice before turning to us. He was the one who understood her, the one who gave her advice, the one who could solve her problems. Robert and I were no more than figureheads. As far as the children were concerned, we hardly existed. Ellen trusted her brother so much that she finally gave up her soul to him. I’m not saying that he knew what he was doing, but I still have to live with the results. The girl is twenty-seven years old, but she acts as though she were fourteen—and that’s when she’s doing well. She’s so confused, so panicked inside herself. One day she thinks I’m out to destroy her, the next day she calls me thirty times on the telephone. Thirty times. You can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like.
“Ellen’s the reason why he never published any of his work, you know. She’s why he quit Harvard after his second year. He was writing poetry back then, and every few weeks he would send her a batch of manuscripts. You know what those poems are like. They’re almost impossible to understand. Very passionate, of course, filled with all that ranting and exhortation, but so obscure you’d think they were written in code. Ellen would spend hours puzzling over them, acting as if her life depended on it, treating the poems as secret messages, oracles written directly to her. I don’t think he had any idea what was happening. Her brother was gone, you see, and these poems were all she had left of him. The poor baby. She was only fifteen at the time, and already falling to pieces anyway. She would pore over those pages until they were all crumpled and dirty, lugging them around with her wherever she went. When she got really bad, she would go up to perfect strangers on the bus and force them into their hands. ‘Read these poems,’ she’d say. ‘They’ll save your life.’
“Eventually, of course, she had that first breakdown. She wandered off from me in the supermarket one day, and before I knew it she was taking those big jugs of apple juice off the shelves and smashing them on the floor. One after another, like someone in a trance, standing in all that broken glass, her ankles bleeding, the juice running everywhere. It was horrible. She got so wild, it took three men to restrain her and carry her off.
“I’m not saying that her brother was responsible. But those damned poems certainly didn’t help, and rightly or wrongly he blamed himself. From then on, he never tried to publish anything. He came to visit Ellen in the hospital, and I think it was too much for him, seeing her like that, totally beside herself, totally crazy—screaming at him and accusing him of hating her. It was a real schizoid break, you know, and he wasn’t able to deal with it. That’s when he took the vow not to publish. It was a kind of penance, I think, and he stuck to it for the rest of his life, didn’t he, he stuck to it in that stubborn, brutal way of his, right to the end.
“About two months later, I got a letter from him informing me that he had quit college. He wasn’t asking my advice, mind you, he was telling me what he’d done. Dear mother, and so on and so forth, all very noble and impressive. I’m dropping out of school to relieve you of the financial burden of supporting me. What with Ellen’s condition, the huge medical costs, the blankety x and y and z, and so on and so forth.
“I was furious. A boy like that throwing his education away for nothing. It was an act of sabotage, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. He was already gone. A friend of his at Harvard had a father who had some connection with shipping—I think he represented the seamen’s union or something—and he managed to get his papers through that man
. By the time the letter reached me, he was in Texas somewhere, and that was that. I didn’t see him again for more than five years.
“Every month or so a letter or postcard would come for Ellen, but there was never any return address. Paris, the south of France, God knows where, but he made sure that we didn’t have any way of getting in touch with him. I found this behavior despicable. Cowardly and despicable. Don’t ask me why I saved the letters. I’m sorry I didn’t burn them. That’s what I should have done. Burned the whole lot of them.”
She went on like this for more than an hour, her words gradually mounting in bitterness, at some point reaching a moment of sustained clarity, and then, following the next glass of wine, gradually losing coherence. Her voice was hypnotic. As long as she went on speaking, I felt that nothing could touch me anymore. There was a sense of being immune, of being protected by the words that came from her mouth. I scarcely bothered to listen. I was floating inside that voice, I was surrounded by it, buoyed up by its persistence, going with the flow of syllables, the rise and fall, the waves. As the afternoon light came streaming through the windows onto the table, sparkling in the sauces, the melting butter, the green wine bottles, everything in the room became so radiant and still that I began to find it unreal that I should be sitting there in my own body. I’m melting, I said to myself, watching the butter soften in its dish, and once or twice I even thought that I mustn’t let this go on, that I mustn’t allow the moment to slip away from me, but in the end I did nothing about it, feeling somehow that I couldn’t.