My Mistake
Page 21
This is exactly what all my recollections, and now this domestic archeology, have established about myself—my formation, my education, my profession, my writing, my character. I daresay, like many if not most of us, I’ve been honest, conscientious, lazy, dishonest, direct, faithful, unfaithful, stoic, self-pitying, open, limited, wise, ignorant, confident, vindictive, forgiving, cowardly, brave, generous, selfish, “and et cetera,” as my son used to say.
Still, if we give our lives any thought, especially when we’re drawing nearer the end of them, we try to marry the opposites into a coherent whole. A life story that comprehends and supersedes its contradictions and says Ecce Homo, or maybe Echhh Homo—almost certainly both.
Finally, I give up on the idea of any sort of thorough archival research—at the Library or here in these drawers and closets and file cabinets and boxes. Facts and more facts lurk in them numerously, but in enterprises like this, facts have as much and (more important) as little bearing on the truth as memory does.
On the strength of a note that William Shawn wrote to me on his dying day and that his son Wallace Shawn found among his parents’ effects three or four years ago and sent to me, I finally ask Wallace if he will have lunch with me and talk about his father. This is what the note said (Shawn must have been ill, and I must have written to him):
Dear Mr. Menaker:
Thank you for your kind and friendly letter. As you might guess, it was extremely pleasant to hear from you. I hope you can work out a happy arrangement with the new people. I hope, too, that you will play an important part in shaping the magazine’s future.
Warm regards,
William Shawn
Wallace told me in an email that he remains fascinated by his father. As do many of us who lived during Shawn’s long—overlong—New Yorker reign. Someone needs to write a book about such commanding figures and their after-effects on those of us who fall under their spell, evil and/or otherwise—the long-term bosses who work their way into our limbic systems, causing postmortem dreams, fantasies, grudges, and gratitude for the rest of our lives. Especially dreams. Someone I know, who at one point was Shawn’s designated successor—one of five or six of Shawn’s jukes in the direction of stepping down—has told me recently, in a moment of uncharacteristic emotional self-revelation and vulnerability, “I hate Shawn. I still dream about him.”
Wallace and I meet at a good Greek restaurant on Seventh Avenue and 55th Street. We conversationally circle around his father for half an hour, talking about what we have been up to recently, his acting, my time at Random House, and then we get to the point. I tell Wallace what he already knows, that his father and I didn’t get along, and that the note he sent to me at almost literally the last minute struck me as a wonderful gesture of conciliation, especially since I had learned so much about editing and writing under his father’s influence. “His main example was to read like a child—very curiously and carefully,” I say. “But with the full intellectual sophistication of a brilliant adult. He asked questions that sort of nagged at the back of your mind but never came forward until he asked them. Like the way kids will ask, ‘But why did Hansel and Gretel’s father marry such a horrible woman after his wife died?’”
“With you,” Wallace said, “I think he just wanted to make something right, and that’s why he wrote to you. I think he felt that he had made a mistake. That’s something he almost never admitted. And he needed to set it right. But he didn’t send it, because he died soon afterward.”
“I’m glad you found it, and thank you for sending it to me,” I say.
Then I say, “I’ve always had some trouble with authority, except for a few people—William Maxwell—”
“Oh! Mr. Maxwell!” Wallace says.
I tell Wallace about calling his father at home one evening and his mother talking me into reading to her the risqué passage in one of Pauline Kael’s columns—Mrs. Shawn’s saying that it was OK to read the passage to her, now that I was married.
Wallace smiles. We go on for a while—the lunch lasts more than two hours. It has knit—unpicked—some bones. Maybe for both of us.
Seventy and a half
I am sitting at my desk in our house in the country on a gray October day amid the atmosphere and physical artifacts of what, I realize more and more fully as I work on this book, is a rich and strange family history. And in turn the work on this book has grown more urgent after the diagnosis, last spring, of recurrent lung cancer. I have to decide, soon, after five sessions of chemotherapy, about further treatment. Radiological treatment versus more surgery.
The Workmen’s Circle cup bestowed on my grandfather by that organization for running his textile factory in New Jersey on Socialist principles presides over the dining room, on top of a piano. An antique squeeze-box that Uncle Enge played sits on a dresser in one of the bedrooms. With a bigger accordion, he called those square dances in the lodge of the camp he ran down on the lake, where I spent my summers as a kid and then, as a teenager, waited on tables. The tables—long, plain, sturdy—were on a porch overlooking the lake, Lake Buel, named after Samuel Buel, who in the nineteenth century saved a drowning man there. My handsome brother smiles at me from a black-and-white photograph—above a small bookcase near this computer I’m working on—taken for his graduation from Dartmouth, in 1959. In the bookcase, between an anthology of New Yorker short fiction about New York City, which I published at Random House, and a paperback edition of Don DeLillo’s Underworld stand a first edition of John O’Hara’s A Rage to Live, also published by Random House, in 1949, and a pamphlet called “Hard Hats and Hard Facts,” by the head of the Communist Party in the Fifties and Sixties, Gus Hall. On a table near the front door is a stereopticon with a box of double-image stereographs—of the Grand Canyon, of the Amazon, of steam locomotives—that go along with it. Mexican barro negro (“black clay”) pottery, from my uncle’s winter trips to Mexico, fills the shelves of the sideboard in the dining room. (He and my father, who traveled in “Souse” America for business and some kind of low-grade Communist espionage, taught me a lot of Spanish.) A photograph of my grandfather Solomon, as a young man with burning, Revolutionary eyes, is propped on the wall on top of a picture of my six uncles as strapping young men standing in front of a hay wagon, looking like Young Soviet Farmers. Old books of home remedies for cancer—their provenance no doubt being Mr. Downs—gather dust in bookshelves next to urns straight out of Poe containing ashes of divers relatives who I imagine are silently judging what goes on here. A chest of drawers on the balcony above the kitchen holds 78 rpm albums, and hundreds of photographs, including one I have just found of my father and mother standing in front of an old station wagon, with me and my brother in front of them, and Timmy, my uncle’s dog, in front of us. Sheet music from the Twenties and Thirties with Art Nouveau illustrations in a wooden box, along with old issues of Sing Out!, the folk-music journal from fifty, sixty years ago.
Just down the road, on the land once occupied by my uncle’s boys’ camp, lies a development called To-Ho-Ne Shores, after my uncle’s camp. The developer named the road that loops through it Peter Menaker Road. (“You’re proud of that?” a Southern country musician once asked me. “Hell, around here we’re so inbred that it would be embarrassin’.”) And just today I took Maxwell for a walk on that road, all but deserted now that the summer is over. We ran into a couple walking their dog, a black Lab puppy, and she and Maxwell tore up and down the road and across the lawns of now empty houses, and the couple wanted to know all about my family—the history of the place where they live.
And the New York of the Forties and Fifties feels, in retrospect, just as rich and romantic. The nation and its culture seemed robust and coherent. Only 140 million people. Joe DiMaggio in center field, Roosevelt on the radio, Communists and Red-baiters, new forms of jazz, King Solomon’s Mines in movie theaters, frozen vegetables, pea shooters. That blond girl on top of me. One evening, at 290 West 4th, there was a knock at the door and I opened it and ther
e stood a truly ugly man. My parents had sublet the top floor of the brownstone to a Welsh children’s-book author named Ruthven Todd. The ugly man asked for Mr. Todd and went upstairs to visit. The ugly man, a “boily boy” by his own description, was Dylan Thomas.
Even Fortune magazine had its romance. I often visited my mother’s office on school holidays and threw paper airplanes out the window of the Empire State Building. She worked with John Kenneth Galbraith and Walker Evans and Dwight Macdonald and James Agee. She also knew the Ashcan artist Reginald Marsh, who did covers for Fortune. As I’ve said, I believe she had an affair with him. There is a watercolor by Marsh in my apartment in New York of my mother modestly raising her skirt and wading in the ocean at Point Pleasant, New Jersey. Its inscription reads, “Mary Grace, at the shore, 1929.—R. Marsh.” There is that other Marsh in our living room—a painting of a garbage man with a broom and a white trash bin on wheels at a Greenwich Village corner—hanging like a high-culture reprimand above the flat-screen TV. We lived first at 50½ Barrow Street, in the Village. It was around the corner from Chumley’s, a bar that had been a speakeasy and was hard to find—no sign. When it was a speakeasy, my handsome, charming, feckless Marxist father proposed there to my WASPy Bryn Mawr Classics-major mother.
I sit at the desk and remember: blackouts, which were practice for German air raids, and dim-outs, to save power and to keep ships in the harbor from becoming submarine-target silhouettes. My mother berating my father for bribing a butcher to get more meat than rationing allowed. FBI men—tall, rectangular, behatted—coming to talk to my father. High tension in the house. The sliding doors between the living room and dining room rumbling closed. That very tall FBI man named Tom McDade taking off his jacket and my staring at the huge gun in the shoulder holster he wore. His leaning over to me, from what seemed like a high, thin altitude, and asking me if I wanted to hold the gun. Tom found that my father’s involvement with the Party was largely romantic and ineffectual, and I believe kept the House Un-American Activities Committee from calling him to testify. He became a friend of the family and built a house near my uncle’s house, now my house, and his son and his family come up here to this day. When I was about fourteen, Tom showed me how to shoot that gun. It felt as heavy as an anchor.
I look at an old and out-of-tune upright piano. My father’s side of the family had a musical gene. Uncle Enge learned how to play the piano from watching others do it. He could do it while being held upside down and backward to the keys. (He was short.) My father played the mandolin. I guess I inherited the gene, because at seven or eight I would sit in the living room listening to Beethoven symphonies broken up by the dropping of one of the stack of 78 rpm records on top of another, and I would get furious if I was disturbed. The interrupted music was bad enough. I took piano lessons and was good at them but insisted on stopping after a while. My mistake. I did learn to play the guitar a little from Enge and then in college. Folk music abounded in the Village in the Forties, especially at the Village Vanguard. Josh White, Leadbelly, Pete Seeger—who first didn’t and then decades later did remember Enge—alone and with the Weavers, appeared all the time. I didn’t understand it then, but Leadbelly taught me something about race and music that I didn’t know and wouldn’t really hear again until I found early rhythm and blues on the radio and then Bo Diddley.
When I was a kid, my mother, the Fortune editor, sometimes had to go out to Chicago to talk to one of the company’s executives, whom I knew only by the name Fitz. I now feel certain that there was something going on. When she died, I found a stack of letters tied up in red yarn on the high shelf of her closet with a note on the top saying, “Please destroy.” They were lyrical love letters in elegant handwriting—“When I think of you, my lovely Mary, my heart thrills with excitement and I wish you were in my arms”—and I bet they were from Fitz, though none were signed. I threw them out—I was sure I threw them out, that is, until they surfaced again in one of the boxes when we moved from one apartment to another in New York. I don’t know where they are now. Everywhere I turn these days, especially when I am here in the country, and the earth is thawing, and Maxwell, in many ways a puppy still, full of beans, has his nose down to it, appreciating its chilly aromas, and I wait for the results of some scary tests, I think of my mother and her lover and how quickly we and what we do and say and whom we love all come and go.
My hair has grown thicker and curlier, the way it was before I started chemotherapy, and after I finished the subsequent stereotactic body radiation therapy, more than eight months ago now. It has been close to a year of treatments for the four malignant nodules in the lower lobe of my left lung. I’m not sure there is anything left to be said or even thought about cancer and its world, but, well, write what you know, and anyway, the experience of serious illness is always as varied in its complexities as its victims: the violent leg cramps at night after treatment with cisplatin, when you feel demons in the back of your thigh tying the muscles there into Ashley’s stopper knots, the manic episodes caused by steroids administered to lessen the toxic effects of chemotherapy—I bought this computer when I was first on steroids (when my wife took them for hearing loss, she tried to buy an apartment)—the awkward and moving moments of support and renewed friendships, the discreditable angry suspicion of charity that accompanies gestures of fence-mending, the beautiful nurses with their expert IV techniques and their $10,000-a-dose, ten minutes’ worth of pemetrexed, the endless repetitions of full name and date of birth, the nausea suppressed by superb new medicines (Emend—$310 for three pills—and ondansetron), the pure and purely random luck of being able to afford the best doctors and hospitals, the learning, finally, of patience, which is what must be the reason for our being called “patients,” the weirdness of surgeons with their scrawled third-grade-level drawings of what they’re going to cut out of you, the huge, futuristic radiology machines with rotating round cyclopean “eyes” that look like white sunflowers from another planet and whose radiation not only targets lesions in the lung and conforms to their shapes, thus sparing healthy tissue, but by means of instant feedback moves in order to adjust for breathing, the claustrophobia of some of those machines, especially the whole-body obese-cannon-like PET scanner, which takes almost an hour to ferry you through its noisy tube, halting for minutes and minutes and minutes at a time while one benzo or another just barely keeps panic away, the Pandora “stations” you request during radiation sessions (choose Hank Williams, I say), the recognition that ultimately, like the rest of us, the doctors sometimes don’t know what they’re doing, the botching that is almost bound to happen at one point or another—in your case, a second percutaneous needle biopsy (through your back and into your lung, to sample a lone nodule slightly removed from the others), which led to a pleural effusion, fluid outside the lung, which held up radiation therapy because with the fluid sloshing around outside, the nodules weren’t stable enough to target, and which, when it was aspirated—by a handsome doctor from India who tucked his tie in between two of his shirt buttons, thus precipitating a huge crush on the part of your wife, who actually wanted to watch the needle go into your back—turned out to be six ounces of stuff that looked like cherry Kool-Aid, the question of when to tell your kids about what’s going on, the insurance paperwork, the small vacations, like sabbaticals, between treatments, the alternating mortality depression and exhilaration, the latter, according to your therapist friend, proceeding from the unconscious conviction that you now have finally been punished enough for your sins, the increased recklessness of your discourse, the taking of taxis when you could easily take the subway or a bus, the miserliness you often feel about giving time to help others.
Some common perplexities: how to respond to the searching “No, really, how are you?”s after you’ve already answered “OK,” the medical conversations in advance of which you write down and then during which ask every possible question, only to have seventeen more, proceeding from the answers you’ve just gotten, occur to you
after you leave the doctor’s office, one “How long?” after another from you, the interpretation, even by non-hypochondriacs, of lumps, bumps, sore throats, headaches, backaches, and rashes as possible metastases, the effort to keep up with new scholarly journal articles, of which you understand maybe fifteen per cent, the belief in statistics when they’re in your favor and their dismissal when they’re not.
And then there’s the intense cherishing of the spring when it comes—it is in full swing as I write this, with cherry blossoms in Riverside Park which look like white and pink lace from far away—the effort to forgive enemies, the savoring of sweets and other dietary easements, the dear children, your own and others’ but especially your own, the gratitude for their virtues and the gratitude for their flaws, the simultaneous detachment from and appreciation of the quotidian, the intensified appreciation of great literature and good crappy movies, the strengthened fellow-feeling with the soil as you turn it over for planting, accompanied, paradoxically, by heightened wonder about abstractions: consciousness, will, randomness, time, the existence of anything rather than the far more logical nothing. Almost more than anything else, the sudden and almost absolute inconsequentiality of most daily decisions—whether to start the dishwasher now or later, accept or decline an invitation, watch The Good Wife or that other thing on AMC, cancel a dentist appointment, forswear steak for salmon, finish reading a book, let the dog off the leash, wear the same shirt again, allow a tepid friendship to dissipate, fill the car with gas when the tank is half empty, shop, cook, or order out, worry about the stock market, file for an extension, seek others’ good opinion in small transactions, return a call, work out, sleep in, man up, lie down, give to, accept from, go before, follow after, think through, act on, let lie.