“You worry about your kids?”
“Yeah, I worry, sometimes. But they’ve got good mothers that know how to take care of them. I’m no help at that. I finally figured that out. I’m only good at taking care of me.”
“You’re a free man.”
“That I am.”
They fell silent. A small breeze had kicked up, casting a million diamonds across the surface of Peter Lake. On the far side, a few fishermen were lazing in aluminum rowboats. Somewhere closer, a raven was croaking, another camper was chopping wood. Walter had been spending his days outdoors all summer, many of them in far more remote and unsettled places than this, but at no point had he felt farther from the things that constituted his life than he was feeling now. His children, his work, his ideas, the women he loved. He knew his brother wasn’t interested in this life—was beyond being interested in anything—and he had no desire to speak of it. To inflict that on him. But at the very moment his telephone rang, showing an unfamiliar West Virginia number, he was thinking how lucky and blessed his life had been.
MISTAKES WERE MADE (CONCLUSION)
A Sort of Letter to Her Reader by Patty Berglund
Chapter 4: Six Years
The autobiographer, mindful of her reader and the loss he suffered, and mindful that a certain kind of voice would do well to fall silent in the face of life’s increasing somberness, has been trying very hard to write these pages in first and second person. But she seems doomed, alas, as a writer, to be one of those jocks who refer to themselves in third person. Although she believes herself to be genuinely changed, and doing infinitely better than in the old days, and therefore worthy of a fresh hearing, she still can’t bring herself to let go of a voice she found when she had nothing else to hold on to, even if it means that her reader throws this document straight into his old Macalester College wastebasket.
The autobiographer begins by acknowledging that six years is a lot of silence. At the very beginning, when she first left Washington, Patty felt that shutting up was the kindest thing she could do both for herself and for Walter. She knew that he’d be furious to learn that she’d gone to stay with Richard. She knew that he’d conclude she had no regard for his feelings and must have been lying or deceiving herself when she’d insisted she loved him and not his friend. But let it be noted: before going up to Jersey City, she did spend one night alone in a D.C. Marriott, counting the heavy-duty sleeping pills she’d brought along with her, and examining the little plastic bag that hotel guests are supposed to line their ice buckets with. And it’s easy to say, “Yes, but she didn’t actually kill herself, did she?” and figure she was just being self-dramatizing and self-pitying and self-deceiving and other noxious self-things. The autobiographer nevertheless maintains that Patty was in a very low place that night, the lowest ever, and had to keep forcing herself to think of her children. Her pain levels, though perhaps no greater than Walter’s, were great indeed. And Richard was the person who’d put her in this situation. Richard was the only person who could understand it, the only person she didn’t think she’d die of shame to see, the only person she was sure still wanted her. There was nothing she could do now about having wrecked Walter’s life, and so, she thought, she might as well try to save her own.
But also, to be honest, she was furious with Walter. However painful it had been for him to read certain pages of her autobiography, she still believed he’d committed an injustice in throwing her out of the house. She thought he’d overreacted and wronged her and was lying to himself about how much he’d wanted to be rid of her and go to his girl. And Patty’s anger was compounded by jealousy, because the girl really did love Walter, whereas Richard isn’t the sort of person who can really love anyone (except, to a touching degree, Walter). Although Walter undoubtedly didn’t see things this way himself, Patty felt justified in going to Jersey City for such consolation and payback and self-esteem bolstering as sleeping with a selfish musician could provide.
The autobiographer will skim over the particulars of Patty’s months in Jersey City, admitting only that her scratching of her ancient itch was not without its intense if short-lived pleasures, and noting that she wished she’d scratched it when she was 21 and Richard was moving to New York, and had then gone back to Minnesota at summer’s end and seen if Walter might still want her. Because let it also be noted: she didn’t have sex one single time in Jersey City without thinking of the last time she and her husband had done it, on the floor of her room in Georgetown. Though Walter no doubt imagined Patty and Richard as monsters of indifference to his feelings, in fact they could never escape his presence. Regarding, for example, whether Richard should make good on his commitment to help Walter with his anti-population initiative, they simply took it for granted that Richard had to do it. And not out of guilt but out of love and admiration. Which, given how much it cost Richard to pretend to more famous musicians that he cared about world overpopulation, ought to have told Walter something. The truth is that nothing between Patty and Richard was ever going to last, because they couldn’t help being disappointments to each other, because neither was as lovable to the other as Walter was to both of them. Every time Patty lay by herself after sex, she sank down into sadness and loneliness, because Richard was always going to be Richard, whereas, with Walter, there had always been the possibility, however faint, and however slow in its realization, that their story would change and deepen. When Patty heard from her kids about the crazy speech he’d made in West Virginia, she despaired altogether. It seemed as if Walter had needed only to get rid of her to become a freer person. Their old theory—that he loved and needed her more than she loved and needed him—had been exactly backwards. And now she’d lost the love of her life.
Then came the terrible news of Lalitha’s death, and Patty felt many things at once: great sorrow and compassion for Walter, great guilt about the many times she’d wished Lalitha dead, sudden fear of her own death, a momentary flicker of selfish hope that Walter might take her back now, and then great sickening regret for having gone to Richard and thereby ensured that Walter would never take her back. As long as Lalitha was alive, there’d been a chance that Walter would tire of her, but once she died there was no hope at all for Patty. Having hated the girl and made no secret of it, she had no right to console Walter now, and she knew it could only seem monstrous of her to use such a sad occasion to try to worm her way back into his life. She tried for many days to compose a condolence note worthy of his grief, but the chasm between the purity of his feelings and the impurity of her own was unbridgeable. The best she could do was convey her sorrow secondhand, through Jessica, and hope that Walter would believe that the yearning to comfort him was there in her, and that he might see how, having sent no condolence, she could then never communicate about anything else. Hence, from her side, these six years of silence.
The autobiographer wishes she could report that Patty left Richard immediately after Lalitha died, but in fact she stayed another three months. (Nobody will ever mistake her for a pillar of resolve and dignity.) She knew, for one thing, that it would be a long time, possibly forever, before somebody she really liked would want to sleep with her again. And Richard, in his stalwart if unconvincing way, was doing his best to be a Good Man now that she’d lost Walter. She didn’t love Richard a lot, but she did somewhat love him for this effort (although even here, let the record show, she was actually loving Walter, because it was Walter who’d put the idea of being a Good Man into Richard’s head). He manfully sat down to the meals she made him, he forced himself to stay home and watch videos with her, he weathered her frequent downpours of emotion, but she was forever aware of how inconveniently her arrival had coincided with his reawakening commitment to music—his need to be out all night with his bandmates, or alone in his bedroom, or in numerous other girls’ bedrooms—and although she respected these needs in the abstract, she couldn’t help having her own needs, such as the need not to smell some other girl on him. To absent herself and earn s
ome money, she worked evenings as a barista, making exactly those coffee drinks she’d once ridiculed the idea of making. At home, she struggled hard to be funny and agreeable and not a pain in the ass, but before long her situation became rather hellish, and the autobiographer, who has probably already said far more about these matters than her reader cares to hear, will spare him the scenes of petty jealousy and mutual recrimination and open disappointment that led to her parting with Richard on not very good terms. The autobiographer is reminded of her country’s attempts to extricate itself from Vietnam, which ended with our Vietnamese friends being thrown off the top of the embassy building and shoved away from the departing helicopters and left behind for massacre or brutal internment. But that is truly all she’s going to say about Richard, except for one further small note toward the end of this document.
For the last five years, Patty has been living in Brooklyn and working as a teacher’s aide in a private school, helping first-graders with their language skills and coaching softball and basketball in the middle school. How she found her way to this wretchedly paid but otherwise nearly ideal job was as follows.
After she left Richard, she went to stay with her friend Cathy in Wisconsin, and it happened that Cathy’s partner, Donna, had had twin girls two years earlier. Between Cathy’s job as a public defender and Donna’s at a women’s shelter, the two of them together earned one decent salary and were getting one person’s decent night’s sleep. So Patty offered her services as a full-time babysitter and instantly fell in love with her charges. Their names are Natasha and Selena, and they are excellent, unusual girls. They seemed to have been born with a Victorian sense of child comportment—even their screaming, when they felt obliged to do it, was preceded by a moment or two of judicious reflection. The girls were primarily focused on each other, of course, always watching each other, consulting each other, learning from each other, comparing their respective toys or dinners with lively interest but rarely competition or envy; they seemed jointly wise. When Patty spoke to one of them, the other also listened, with an attention that was respectful without being timid. Being two years old, they had to be watched constantly, but Patty literally never tired of it. The truth was—and it made her feel better to be reminded of this—she was as good with little kids as she was terrible with adolescents. She took a deep ongoing delight in the miracles of motor-skill acquisition, of language formation, of socialization, of personality development, the twins’ progress sometimes clearly visible from one day to the next, and in their innocence of how hilarious they were, in the clarity of their needing, and in the utter trust they placed in her. The autobiographer is at a loss to convey the concreteness of her delight, but she could see that one mistake she hadn’t made about herself was wanting to be a mother.
She might have stayed much longer in Wisconsin if her father hadn’t gotten sick. Her reader has no doubt heard about Ray’s cancer, the aggressive suddenness of its onset and swiftness of its progress. Cathy, who is herself very wise, urged Patty to go home to Westchester before it was too late. Patty went with much fear and trembling and found her childhood home little changed from the last time she’d set foot in it. The boxes of outdated campaign materials were even more numerous, the mildew in the basement even more intense, Ray’s towers of Times-recommended books even higher and more teetering, Joyce’s binders of untried Times Food Section recipes even thicker, the piles of unread Times Sunday magazines even more yellowed, the bins of recyclables even more overflowing, the results of Joyce’s wishful attempts to be a flower gardener even more poignantly weedy and random, the reflexive liberalism of her world-view even more impervious to reality, her discomfort in her oldest daughter’s presence even more pronounced, and Ray’s snide jollity even more disorienting. The serious thing that Ray was now disrespectfully laughing at was his own impending death. His body, unlike everything else, was greatly changed. He was wasted and hollow-eyed and pallid. When Patty arrived, he was still going to his office for a few hours in the morning, but this lasted only another week. Seeing him so sick, she hated herself for her long coldness to him, hated her childish refusal to forgive.
Not that Ray, of course, was not still Ray. Whenever Patty hugged him, he patted her for one second and then pulled his arms away and let them wave in the air, as if he could neither return her embrace nor push her away. To deflect attention from himself, he cast about for other things to laugh at—Abigail’s career as a performance artist, the religiosity of his daughter-in-law (about which more later), his wife’s participation in the “joke” of New York State government, and Walter’s professional travails, which he’d read about in the Times. “Sounds like your husband got involved with a bunch of crooks,” he said one day. “Like he might be a little bit of a crook himself.”
“He’s not a crook,” Patty said, “obviously.”
“That’s what Nixon said, too. I remember that speech like it was yesterday. The president of the United States assuring the nation that he is not a crook. That word, ‘crook.’ I couldn’t stop laughing. ‘I am not a crook.’ Hilarious.”
“I didn’t see the article about Walter, but Joey says it was totally unfair.”
“Now, Joey is your Republican child, is that correct?”
“He’s definitely more conservative than we are.”
“Abigail told us she practically had to burn her sheets after he and his girlfriend stayed in her apartment. Stains everywhere, apparently. The upholstery, too.”
“Ray, Ray, I don’t want to hear about it! Try to remember I’m not like Abigail.”
“Ha. I couldn’t help thinking, when I read that article, about that night when Walter got so exercised about his Rome Club. He was always a bit of a crank. That was always my impression. I can say that now, can’t I?”
“Why, because we’re separated?”
“Yeah, that, too. But I was thinking, because I’m not going to live long, I might as well speak my mind.”
“You always spoke your mind. To a fault.”
Ray smiled at something in this. “Not always, Patty. Less than you might think, actually.”
“Name one thing you ever meant to say but didn’t.”
“I was never very good at expressing affection. I know that was hard for you. Hardest for you, probably. You always took everything so seriously, compared to the others. And then you had that terrible luck in high school.”
“I had terrible luck with how you guys handled it!”
At this Ray raised a warning hand, as if to forestall further unreasonableness. “Patty,” he said.
“Well, I did!”
“Patty, just—just—. We all make mistakes. My point is that I do have a, ah. I do have affection for you. A lot of love. It’s just hard for me to show it.”
“Tough luck for me, then, I guess.”
“I’m trying to be serious here, Patty. I’m trying to tell you something.”
“I know you are, Daddy,” she said, breaking down in somewhat bitter tears. And he did his patting thing again, putting his hand on her shoulder and then drawing it away indecisively and letting it hover; and it was clear to her, finally, that he could be no other way.
While he was dying, and a private nurse came and went, and Joyce repeatedly, with contortionate apologies, slipped off to Albany for “important” votes, Patty slept in her childhood bed and reread her favorite childhood books and combated the household’s disorder, not bothering to ask permission to throw away magazines from the 1990s and boxes of literature from the Dukakis campaign. It was the season of seed catalogues, and she and Joyce both gratefully seized on Joyce’s sporadic passion for gardening, which gave them one common interest to talk about, instead of zero. As much as possible, though, Patty sat with her father, held his hand, and allowed herself to love him. She could almost physically feel her emotional organs rearranging themselves, bringing her self-pity plainly into view at last, in its full obscenity, like a hideous purple-red growth in her that needed to be cut out. Spendin
g so much time listening to her father make fun of everything, albeit a little more feebly each day, she was disturbed to see how much like him she was, and why her own children weren’t more amused by her capacity for amusement, and why it would have been better to have forced herself to see more of her parents in the critical years of her own parenthood, so as to better understand her kids’ response to her. Her dream of creating a fresh life, entirely from scratch, entirely independent, had been just that: a dream. She was her father’s daughter. Neither he nor she had ever really wanted to grow up, and now they worked at it together. There’s no point in denying that Patty, who will always be competitive, took satisfaction in being less embarrassed by his sickness, less afraid, than her siblings were. As a girl, she’d wanted to believe that he loved her more than anything, and now, as she squeezed his hand in hers, trying to help him across distances of pain that even morphine could only shorten—could not make disappear—it became true, they made it true, and it changed her.
At the memorial service, which was held in the Unitarian church in Hastings, she was reminded of Walter’s father’s funeral. Here, too, the turnout was enormous—easily five hundred people. Seemingly every lawyer, judge, and current or former prosecutor in Westchester attended, and the ones who eulogized Ray all said the same thing: that he was not only the ablest attorney they’d ever known but also the kindest and hardest-working and most honest. The breadth and height of his professional reputation were dizzying to Patty and a revelation to Jessica, who was sitting beside her; Patty could already anticipate (accurately, it turned out) the reproaches that Jessica would be leveling at her, afterward, and with justice, for having denied her a meaningful relationship with her grandfather. Abigail went to the pulpit and spoke on the family’s behalf, attempted to be funny and came off as inappropriate and self-involved, and then partially redeemed herself by crumbling into sobs of grief.
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