“And what is?”
“Well, how would I know?” He drank his egg cream. “Ah! You don’t know what you’re missing. Purist.”
“I don’t like a lot of bubbles. It’s a pretty grim hypothesis. It doesn’t sound like Eros struggling against Thanatos at all. Just between the right kind of death and the wrong. Or maybe between premature death and timely death.”
“Aha!”
“Come on, George. You don’t really think that’s what the whole struggle is all about?”
“I think maybe it’s a case of semantics. The will to live, the will not to die … So how is that, Vivian?”
She nodded beatifically, immersed in her book.
“Did you like your trip out West?” he persisted.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m reading.”
“I beg your pardon, ma’am. By the way, Lydia, I must tell you about this terrific woman I just met. She’s into child abuse. You know what I mean … she doesn’t do it, she works with people who do.”
Perhaps I had good instincts, but I had good circumstances too. It would have taken someone more perverse than I to resist them. A few months after that terrible night, Victor found a teaching job; we moved uptown, overlooking trees and river, and closer to Juilliard. To our devoutly middle-class parents it was still a slum, with its flamboyant street life, its shabby and chic patches side by side like a homemade quilt, but to us the place was Eden. It had an elevator. Space. Light. Air. The best things in life were rent-controlled. The mothers in our new neighborhood were tireless activists; we found an array of cooperative nursery schools and play groups. I stepped out into the world to see what was happening. Everything! Amid assassinations and bouts of public grieving, city people were fleeing to fantasy communes in the hinterlands, suburban children abandoning home for the city streets. Everyone was getting high and everyone was in wondrous costume. The world was a rough carnival, where cops and kids exchanged rocks instead of flowers, while in the wings, in the jungle beyond, war raged. And all the time this had been fermenting I had been … I didn’t know what to call it. Was I too old to put on a costume and join the parade? When I saw women my age marching with babies slung on their backs I was ashamed of how I had spent nearly four years. “You’ve no cause for shame,” said Gabrielle. “You were … sick. It comes from the situation.” She spelled out the ideology for me. “Weak,” I corrected. “All right, weak. Weak is a kind of sick.” Is it? But I would never be weak again. “That’s absurd,” Gaby said. “It’s like vowing never to be sick again. You’d be better off vowing to resist the dynamics of the nuclear family.” “Words, words.” I laughed at her. “I will never be sick again.” She shook her head and laughed back at me.
I rejoined the trio when Henrietta Frye moved to California. Rosalie introduced me to musicians; the phone began to ring. I flitted from group to group—like our President, I would go anywhere and do anything, only he didn’t. Humble second beginnings, and late, but this time I felt I was constructing something. “Your career,” my mother called it, and she stayed with the children, cooked a week’s worth of dinners and froze them, while I was out rehearsing. As the war ground on, we flourished. Victor was happy. I no longer made him sick, nor was I too tired to move. Quite the contrary.
The preceding years, with their wretchedness, became a blur, as though they had passed in some drugged twilight sleep; I suppressed the details. But I knew their texture and color, stony and dun, and I puzzled over how I could have managed motherhood so badly, been so strangely helpless. Why on earth hadn’t I practiced in the evenings, or at least studied scores or listened to records? Too tired to listen to a record? I didn’t understand. Why hadn’t I found some women to exchange babies with a few afternoons a week, in order to work? Crazy! Ah, if only I had it to do over again! How much better I could do now! My permanent record card need not show an abject failure. I would repeat the course and pass with flying colors, have that shameful F blotted out.
“Have you lost your mind completely?” Victor’s tone made other diners turn and stare. Out to dinner! Something unthinkable a year and a half ago. It was Simon’s, the local pub near the university with the suit of armor in the entryway, where we used to meet before we were married, for those orgies of food and mutual evasion. He gave his wily, amorous smile of then, but confident now. He had me. “You’re a most irrational woman. You actually like to court disaster. We finally have a fairly normal life and you want to start that whole mess all over again?” Not a statement, nota bene, but a question, open-ended. In his rising inflection was a quaver of interest. Victor was a child-lover, and a lover of happenings.
“I’m sure it wouldn’t be that way again. I’m different now. You weren’t so terrific yourself either. Buying coloring books! Anyway, now we could really enjoy it. All those things that passed me by. I can’t even remember. You know, first word, first step, like in those baby books.”
“You do have a short memory! Have you forgotten the time you locked yourself in the bathroom to slit your wrists? I don’t want to see you do—”
The waitress arrived, in her rimless glasses, leather miniskirt, and beads made out of dried lentils.
“The steak, please,” said Victor.
“And how would you like it?”
“Dripping blood.”
“Dripping blood. Very good.” She made a note on her pad and turned to me.
“I’ll have the same.”
“Also dripping blood?” Her suave, narrow mouth began to curve, unwillingly. A student, no doubt, maybe at Barnard.
“Dripping blood, yes.”
“Would you like anything with it?”
“All the perfumes of Arabia,” said Victor, and the girl began to giggle. Like Nina in college. So proper, so ripe to lay aside propriety.
“I was not going to slit my wrists,” I said as soon as she left. “I just wanted to be alone. It was the only room in that apartment that had a lock on the door.”
“You were so. I remember your words distinctly. You said you’d had enough. You wanted to get it all over with.”
The couple at the next table had ceased their conversation and were frankly hanging on our words. I felt like turning aside to them with an explanation, as in a Brecht play. “Talk is cheap. I didn’t mean that. I’m not the type. I wanted to scare you.”
“Well, you did. It was unforgettable.”
“I’m sorry. I won’t do it any more.”
“Oh Lydia.” He put his hand over mine and tapped several times. “This is pretty dumb, you know.”
Althea and Phil were cranky babies (small wonder), but Alan was the jolly kind a father could bounce around in the air or sit on the back of a bicycle and display to friends in the park. A showpiece. He took lengthy naps, during which I practiced. Our dovetailed schedules, Victor’s and mine, were masterpieces of cooperation, whether from fear or feminism or some mingling of the two hardly mattered. Victor worked on with his calm persistence though the public rewards were typically meager: a few weeks in a gallery, a few reviews, a few sold, then back to solitary labor. But I saw his paintings forever ramifying, complex and convoluted now, like his life. They showed city crowds, the trees and river and ships seen from our windows, skaters and ballplayers in the park, and the children and me, over and over, all with the early respect for the inner signs, and the sinuosity. He was growing in vision, I in proficiency. Way in the distance I spied the limits beyond which I would not pass. I would be excellent, not great. Not entirely because it was too late, or because half my mind was on children. Because my gift itself was not infinitely expandable, as a precious few are. I accepted it. I was happy and the limits still far off. I was willing to keep getting better, knowing I would never get best. What I could do was play with delicacy and make fine discriminations of tone and texture, and with so much practice those skills seeped through me. It would have been indelicate indeed to pine for genius, while simple gifts abounded; I understood why people loved babies—first word, first st
ep. Only domestically did I learn to be lax and inefficient. So lax that under the cold stars Vivian was conceived. Get rid of it? Ah, we couldn’t. We gloried in it. Four! Piquant, original. We could handle anything now.
Just as the carnival cavorted with war in the wings, our sprightly family comedy, too, was performed in the shadow of death. First my father, shocking us by keeling over at his desk in 1969, he who could never be rushed into anything, who had to be the last man on the beach at the close of day, and then Edith. But she was going slowly, slowly. Bone cancer was her license to relax, maybe what she had waited for all her life: finally she said what she thought. Her mannerly evasiveness, her patina of refinement, were cauterized away by the searing pain, exposing unsuspected qualities, strata of rock beneath the surface vegetation: fortitude, penetration, a pragmatism of the emotions. Long-secreted nuggets of her self—her Jewish upbringing, for one thing—wound their way up to split the surface and greet the light. Her face was transformed, hollowed to the bone. The charming, pampered, obedient face gave way to a stark, shrewd old Russian Jew, incarnation of her forebears. So that watching Edith die, her bones settle into sand, was not only wrenching but inspiriting, like watching a birth or a resurrection.
Phenomenal, but it was also taking forever. “Why so long?” Edith griped. “Can’t you … uh … She flicked her head sharply towards her husband and made a swift, beckoning, peasant’s gesture with her fingers. “Grease the doctor’s palm a little, eh?” Paul gasped. He had never heard her talk that way. “Do everyone a favor, Paulie?” He couldn’t. “How long can this drag on?” Victor whispered in bed. “It’ll be over soon, dear.” “Oh sure, soon. And then what? Two more to go?” He was so bitter and angry. “No, no,” I whispered, “they can’t all be as bad.” Still, we knew it was in the course of things, the grief we were born for, unlike …
“Be good,” this new, toughened, skin-and-bone Edith said to Victor from her hospital bed. His mouth fell open, he was so startled. “Stay good, I mean.” Later, close to the end, drugged and barely awake, she said something to him in Yiddish. This too was very simple. “Zeit gezunt, mein kind,” I repeated for him at home, when he asked. “Be well, my child. No, more like stay well.” The most common phrase, I told him. People said it every day—they didn’t have to be dying. I must have heard it a thousand times from my grandparents. But for Victor, in that language, and from her, it was the first time. He wept, and Vivian, who was almost two, climbed up onto his knees.
Edith had always liked to soothe, to smooth. She left us money to soothe her leaving, money we might have had earlier but for our insane pride. We moved into a bigger apartment in the same patchwork neighborhood. Victor rented a studio in SoHo and his paintings grew larger. I hired men to do the housework, young actors and singers, mostly, who whistled as they worked and were charming to the kids. I felt a barbaric, utterly shameless thrill watching men scrubbing bathroom tiles or prancing around with a feather duster. Oh, there was no denying now that we were in the cozy middle class. No more playing poor. Hadn’t we earned the comfort, though? Not only by labor but by suffering? And suffering right. Everyone suffers; the important thing, the experts say, is knowing how to “handle” suffering. (“… two handles, one by which it may be borne …”) Except in their unnaturally hushed offices they call it pain. Suffering is too tactile a word for them to bandy about—you can feel what it means when you say it. Eventually you might learn to handle it so well that there would be no pain too devastating for you to overcome. So it seemed.
I did do better the second time around, with the second pair, as I promised. And even now, God almighty, after everything, I still feel a twinge of childish pride. I told you so. Okay, Lydie, clutching your exemplary report card to your milked-out breasts, you did do better, you did fine, no one can dispute it. But you lost them.
I lost my children because I was unworthy of them.
Oh Jesus, Lydia, what kind of primitive horseshit are you throwing around?
No, no, just listen! You don’t understand. I don’t mean because I was working day and night; that part is okay. Acquitted. And not because I let them go on the bus. Acquitted. But with those first two … I was a sadistic, self-pitying bitch.
But you know all about—
No, no, never mind the reasons or the justifications. I’ve heard it all from my friends; their logic is unassailable; I bow down to it; I stand explained. Nevertheless, that is what I was.
Okay, smartass, then why weren’t the first two taken?
Aha! God moves in mysterious ways. His wonders to perform. “Because it was done for you and prescribed for you, and in a manner had reference to you, originally from the most ancient causes spun with your destiny.”
I also hear the dying voice of Edith croaking to me, an Edith not as she was or even became, but beyond herself, pushed still further back into her ancestral past; an old Jewish lady with a heavy accent and Yiddish intonation, but she still retains a certain Upper East Side savvy. Croaks: So this, Lydia, after all your hemming and hawing, this is the conclusion you come to? What are you, meshugah? This is your life, all your nice accomplishments and you’re drowning in guilt? Vey is mir! Plus with up there someone spinning threads like a fairy tale! You, on purpose, they picked out? What’s the matter, you don’t believe in accidents? You think you can be the boss of this life? All right, so maybe once in a while you thought it would be nice to be free. Since when is that a sin? Even your smart friend, what’s his name, you know, the psychiatrist, psychologist, what’s the difference, the one who I never liked the way he looked at you, a married woman and to my son, even him and his modern ideas didn’t teach you anything?
No, Edith. I think I was not meant to be a mother. I trespassed into the wrong myth.
Oh dear, she says, resuming her usual voice and diction. Oh dear, oh dear.
Zeit gezunt, mein kind, she whispers, and sinks back into her grave.
I lost my children because … Ah, at last it comes! Because I did not want them in the first place. Not for themselves. For me. To prove a point. Because they, those two, were an experiment in pride. And you mustn’t experiment with human lives! Everyone knows that! Mustn’t, mustn’t! Stand up against the wall so I can smack your face. Back and forth and back and forth with a flick of the hand, the gifted, experienced hand. Mustn’t play games, Lydia!
Still, the experiment was a success. The operation was a success, but the patients …
One of the most beloved and talented girls in our class in college died eight years after graduation, trying to save her child. I read about it in The New York Times. I lay on a blanket at Jones Beach reading the paper while Victor splashed around in the surf with Althea and Phil. It happened in a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts: the four-year-old boy had found a cigarette lighter upstairs. Before the firemen arrived she had run up the flaming staircase to roll him in a bedspread and toss him out a window. The child was saved, but she died of burns and asphyxiation. Steffie had done well after college. Done good, that is. She was a lawyer of some repute. Deep in the South, Birmingham, Selma, she accompanied voters to the polls, talked protesters out of jail, defended activists. Even in college, we had known she would serve good causes and serve them well.
“Look at this,” I said to Victor when he came back to the blanket. As he read, I dried the children, squealing and jumping (alive!) under the towels.
“How awful. But which one was she? I don’t remember any Stephanie Rosenberg.”
“Of course you do. Steffie Baum, then. She was the small, very pretty one who wore her hair a different way every day and had a lot of boyfriends? She used to sneak out at night. We thought she was very daring. She sang in Gilbert and Sullivan—Patience, in a blue gingham dress, don’t you remember?” I was starting to cry, rubbing my eyes with sandy hands.
“Oh! Of course. She was almost the valedictorian but someone else got it in the end.”
“Yes, that’s right. That’s her. She went out with your friend Ray Field
ing for a while. She wrote an article about the slums around the college and that we should pay attention, and she got the Service Award. She also loved Mallomars. And she never slept with George, either. She had to really like them.”
“This is terrible,” said Victor, and he sat down on the blanket. “Wasn’t she the one who got all those Patient Griselda poems printed in the paper?”
“Yes …” I looked around. “Where are they? Oh Lord, they’re in the water again.” We leaped up.
When we got home I called Nina and Gabrielle, and George, who had sung but not slept with her. They had seen the article too, two and a half inches on the obituary page. I talked on the phone all evening, about Steffie Baum, now Steffie Rosenberg that was. And about that awful child. Careless, disobedient wretch, to kill his mother.
Steffie, how I envy your fate. Why wasn’t I given a chance to be a hero and save them? I would have, just like you. Even though I wasn’t as useful or as large-spirited as you, still, I swear I would have done it too. And not for pride, either. For real. For it was real. It became real. I became it. I too would have gone through the fire to pull them out, dammit. But then, you were always a step ahead.
Bed
VICTOR AND I NO longer make love. We lie side by side chastely in the new king-sized bed. Like brother and sister, yet brother and sister side by side each night might not be so chaste as we. I don’t like the new bed—too large, ostentatiously large. It was Victor’s idea. He is not ostentatious, he simply wants to sprawl. He would like to make love sprawled at an angle, feeling an expanse of usable space around him. Only when we were discussing a new bed two months ago did he reveal these yearnings. “Do you mean to tell me you felt cramped for over nineteen years and never said so?” He became mock-pensive. “No, I wouldn’t put it like that—cramped for over nineteen years. That would be overstating it. But as long as we have a big enough room now … Wouldn’t you like to feel space around you?” “I don’t care about space at those moments. Why don’t you go ahead and pick whatever sort of bed you like, love, and I’ll lie in it.”
Disturbances in the Field Page 28