Somehow you grew up, went to school, graduated, and set off to seek your fortune, and what I have since thought of as ‘The Great Glooms’ never returned with any marked force, though I feared their return, as now, every day when I woke and every night before I slept—and you turned into as fine a son as any man might be lucky enough to have.
Let me note something else that contributed to the fading away of my missing year, and I note it not to deprive you of credit for having helped me—us!—come to a better place, but to put what happened, and how it happened, into a somewhat larger context. I had, perhaps a year before the night on which you fell, come under the spell of Primo Levi, who, as man and writer, had become my hero. As you know (how proud I was when you chose several of his books, beginning with If This Is A Man, for book reports in high school), he wrote about his experiences in Auschwitz and journey home from Auschwitz, but also about myriad other matters: his career as a chemist, his family, other people’s vocations, his friendships, his beloved city of Turin.
It has occurred to me of late—when I have, happily, been able to give freer rein to my ruminative disposition—that the slight lessening of depressive pain I began to experience may have come from reading, not about Levi’s life as victim, survivor, and witness, but about his views on suicide, along with what in him is so life-affirming (to use an apt if banal phrase): his fierce ability to see the differences in other people—their particularities and idiosyncrasies—in a time when they were put to death because they were judged, as Jews, to be no different, one from the other.
Though, of course, they were also exterminated because they were just that: other. We always fear, and despise, whatever we perceive as different from who we are, and in this, he has explained, we are not that different from animals, who are much more intolerant of members of their own species than they are of those of other species. Thus, anti-Semitism, he has suggested, is simply a horrific example of a more general phenomenon.
But suicide—what about suicide? There were, I was surprised to learn from Levi, few suicides in the camps—and generally, Levi notes, fewer suicides in wartime than in times of peace. His reasoning as to why this was so appears in a self-interview that I came across a few evenings before the night on which you fell, and long before—inexplicable, profoundly disturbing mystery!—he fell down a stairwell in a self-willed act I trust neither of us will emulate—one that ended his life in the place he loved: the house in which he’d been born and, before and after Auschwitz, had lived.
Yet some years before this, Levi wrote that he considered suicide a distinctively human act (we had never seen evidence that animals committed suicide), and that because, in the camps, human beings, both victims and oppressors, tended more toward the level of animals—of animality—it was the business of the day—essentials—that ruled: what you were going to eat and if you were going to eat, how cold it would be, what you would wear against the cold, how heavy was the work and of what kind, et cetera. In short: you thought, if ‘thought’ is the right word, of how you were going to make it through the day and into the evening and through the night. There was, simply, no time to think about killing yourself.
So I became busy. I began exercising regularly. I began preparing, in earnest, for the book I would write about Henry James as Irishman; I began making notes for new stories and novels; I began planting a garden, and learning carpentry; I began seeking out women who would make suitable helpmates for me, and loving (step-)mothers for you. I began cooking meals regularly, breakfast and dinner, and planning vacations, and asking my department chair if I could teach new courses that would require I put myself to school in the work of authors (Cather, Wharton, Howells, Dos Passos, Beckett) with whom I had, until then, only cursory acquaintance. I took tennis lessons, joined a co-ed softball team, took a course in auto repair, and searched out (in vain for the most part) lost cousins, aunts, and uncles. I painted rooms, repaired furniture, built bookcases, created file systems, learned to do my own taxes, and to play the piano.
Not all at once, of course, and after a while—when the demon of depression seemed to have increasing difficulty finding his way back into my daily life, I began to let some of the new activities fall away. But this happened over the course of several years, and I mark what has, until this moment, been its definitive departure (though daily wariness remains), from the third month of my third marriage—to Janice Fullerton, whom you will recall as perhaps the most animated and lively of my wives, though herself—the aphrodisiacal cue and clue to my infatuation and our romance?—a lifelong victim of depression, which, in the glory days of falling in love, departed, only to return when a bit of the bloom, as was inevitable, began to wear off the rose of our bliss.
Janice never became suicidal—her condition was more like a ground bass, or low-grade hum—a Baroque ostinato I came to think I could actually hear, and some twenty-one months after our wedding, she left us, saying it was simply not fair—not fair!—can you imagine?—that it was not fair for anyone to have to live with someone so plagued with sadness, and with such labile changes of mood. (Why, she would write in a note a month or two later, should we have to live and ride on the nauseating sine-curve of her feelings?)
I tried to talk her out of leaving (I truly loved her, as, in fact, I loved all my wives, along with a good number of my girlfriends; my capacity for falling in love, and staying in love, being one of my more consistent capabilities), and with medications (not then as effective as they are said to be now), and some psychotherapy, she did return to her happier and more stable self for a while. Her will to be a miserable, unloved, unworthy, abandoned child, however, proved ultimately stronger than medications, therapy, or us. In the cartons of correspondence that Seana has acquired, you will, if interested, find some four to five dozen letters from Janice. She never married again, never had children, and always inquired about you, Charlie. I believe she missed you more than she missed me, the fact that you were and were not her (only) son creating complex, and somewhat anguished attachments, not to you—no guilt, Charlie, please, please!—but to parts of her earlier life that held a power over her against which all efforts, ours included—tolerant and loving though we both were—proved helpless.
But to the end of ending this meditation, let me return to what made the difference: to Primo Levi’s life and to his thoughts about suicide, and thus to your life—to what I saw in your eyes, and believe I sensed of your happy prospects on the night of your fall.
I had, then as now, the highest hopes for you, Charlie, and I trust you won’t confuse these hopes for expectations. Of the latter, I have none. Let me explain: When I first read Triangle, brilliant and wonderful as I found it, what was most wonderful (Mister James my guide yet again) was the mind of the writer writing it. For no matter its faults, and this goes for Plain Jane as well, what shone through was the presence of a unique, supremely intelligent mind—an idiosyncratic voice and shrewd sensibility informing a well(-enough) made tale.
What also came to mind when I read Triangle, and again when I’d finished reading Plain Jane, were words a friend (Mrs. Cadwalader Jones) wrote in a letter to a friend of hers after she’d come upon some early stories by Henry James. The stories were pleasing, and well enough made, she wrote. What had impressed, though, was some other quality—what Seana has, and what you have, son. What had impressed was that the stories were informed, despite their undistinguished quality as stories , by a remarkable and remarkably unexpected singularity of mind—a quality of mind so rare it had, taking her by surprise, moved her utterly. It is so difficult, she wrote (in a sentence with which I’ve always hoped—no: intended!—to end this letter)—it is so difficult to do anything well in this mysterious world.
When I finished reading my father’s story, I put it back in the envelope, then gazed out the window past Seana, who was fast asleep, and watched my reflection flicker on and off among passing trees, houses, and cars while imagining that I was falling, again and again, and that Max was catching
me again and again, and I wondered: had it really happened? Had he really dropped me once upon a time, and had he really thought of killing the two of us, and had a look I gave him really served to stop his fall? I could recall the look on his face when he had me on the changing table—or I thought I could—and when I saw him bending over and wiggling his nose against mine to make me laugh, I pictured Trish lifting Anna into her high-chair, and I wondered too: had we really inhaled Nick’s ashes? And then, looking at Seana, whose mouth was open in a nearly perfect oval, but with no sound coming from it, I wondered if it were really true that she and I were together, and that we cared for each other in a way that—if I weren’t afraid it would make her take flight—I would have told her could, in my opinion, be called love?
I thought, too, of how, when we made love, she would hold to me almost desperately, her nails digging into my shoulders and back, and how afterwards, without apology, her face against my chest, she would weep softly.
Seana didn’t wake until the conductor announced that we were approaching the 125th Street station stop, Harlem, in New York City.
She tapped on the envelope. “So what do you think?” she asked.
“I miss him,” I said.
“Meaning that for you this year of mourning will be a missing year?”
“If you say so.”
“He was my dear friend and mentor, yes, but he was your father,” she said.
“That’s true.”
“Though he surprised us by dying too soon, didn’t he?”
“He surprised himself more,” I said. “If, that is—and I guess I’m thinking the way he does in the letter—in his story—if, that is, he could know somehow—could have known—that he’d be gone sooner than he thought he’d be. He was looking forward to a longer life.”
“Sixteen years of it.”
“When you were going through his stuff,” I asked, “did you find any pictures of him with my mother?”
“A few. I put them aside, in case you asked.”
“I’ve seen lots of pictures of her,” I said. “He’d show them to me when I was a kid and asked about her, but I never saw any pictures of them together. She was very beautiful, though not the way you are.”
“How am I beautiful, Charlie?”
I shrugged. “I never think of you as pretty,” I said.
“Neither do I. So…?”
“So my mother was pretty the way lots of movie stars can be pretty,” I said. “You’re beautiful.”
“The difference?”
“I think I would have grown tired of looking at my mother after a while, but I know I’ll never get tired of looking at you. The more I look at you the more mysterious you become.”
“I’ll take that.”
“It was the same when I first met you, though I certainly couldn’t have put my feelings into words back then.”
The conductor announced that we were being held in the 125th Street station momentarily, but would be moving shortly. Seana took A Missing Year from me, put it into her overnight bag, set a different envelope on my lap.
“Another gift from your father,” she said. “I’m not certain he intended you to see this, but when he presented me with his stuff—his archive, we’ll call it—he said nothing about any restrictions.”
THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A DEAD SON
(with apologies to Wallace Stevens)
I
Among twenty sleepless hours
The only thing moving
Was the black eye of my heart.
II
I was of three moods,
Like a man
In whom there are three brains.
III
My son whirled in the autumn winds.
He was a sliver of the dark dream.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a child
Are none.
V
I do not know which to prefer
The beauty of drowning
Or the beauty of hanging,
The child breathing
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled my sorry heart
And barbed-wire fencing.
The shadow of my son
Crossed, to and fro.
The dread impulse
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable woe.
VII
O meagre men of Massachusetts,
Why do you imagine dead children?
Do you not see how the son
Walks around the corpse
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble sentiments
And clouded, inescapable glooms;
But I know, too,
That the son is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the son fell out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many bloodless circles.
X
At the sight of my son
Lying in a green light,
Even the angels of mercy
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He crawled over Manhattan
In a stoned stupor.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his son
For himself.
XII
The train is moving.
The son, bound, must be lying on its tracks.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing blood
And it was going to snow blood.
My son slept forever
On the iron bed.
In Brooklyn, when we came up from the subway and stood at the corner of Church and Nostrand Avenues, Seana said she was pleased—and relieved—to find that the Lincoln Savings Bank, where she’d had a savings account when she was a schoolgirl, was still there, across the street. As miserable as our childhoods might be, yet the objects of our childhood remained precious to us, didn’t they? she said. And the loss of these objects, she added a moment later—places, things—people too, sometimes—no matter the years gone by, could still wound us.
An A&P and an Ebinger’s Bakery were long gone, she said—they’d been there, on the other side of Nostrand Avenue, all through her childhood—and so was a corner cigar store, and a poolroom that had occupied a floor above the cigar store, where the tough guys in the neighborhood—Italians for the most part—had hung out, and where she’d sometimes hung out with them.
We walked along Church Avenue, where stores, their brightly lettered marquees advertising goods and services, were all West Indian except for a new Starbucks coffee shop, and a Rite-Aid drugstore where a theater—the Granada—had been. At Rogers Avenue, I pointed to part of an old trolley track, like a silver rib, showing through the street’s pot-holed surface a few feet from the curb. My father had set most of Prizefighter in this part of Brooklyn, and in the book the hero had hitched rides on the backs of trolley cars, had loved to watch sparks fly from the overhead electrical wires that supplied juice to the trolleys, and to watch the motormen, at this corner, switch trolley routes by using long poles—like the kind pole-vaulters used, he’d written—to move cables from one overhead line to another.
We came to a narrow side street that ran next to the Holy Cross church—Veronica Place—and Seana told me the house in which she’d grown up and where her mother still lived, was down this street, four houses in, which was something I already knew (Max had pointed it out on one of our visits), but I didn’t say so. She asked if we could walk a while longer, said she was more nervous—anxious—than she expected to be. Then she started talking, her words coming fast, about Julius Caesar, and how Max, who’d taught a Shakespeare seminar she’d taken, had pointed out that the main character in the play named for him dies halfway through, and that one way of understanding the play was to consider how and why, though never physi
cally present in the play’s second half, Caesar remains the play’s major character, its controlling presence.
“Like my father dying halfway through my life?” I said. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”
“It crossed my mind,” Seana said.
“I’m exactly half his age—half the age he was when he died,” I said. “Thirty-six to his seventy-two. Did you realize that?”
“No.”
“Neither did I. Not until now.”
We passed the Holy Cross schoolyard, where some black guys were playing basketball, and I remembered my father telling me about older guys he’d played with here when he was a boy, some of whom had been caught in the point-fixing scandals of the early fifties. One of them had made a cameo appearance in Prizefighter—a black guy kicked out of college and banned for life from professional basketball—and whenever someone asked why he wasn’t playing in the big time, he’d answer: “Because I work in the Minit-Wash now, washing down cars, you know? That’s how come I got such clean hands. Yeah, me, I got the cleanest hands of any fixer around.…”
The Other Side of the World Page 22