The Sorrows of an American

by Siri Hustvedt

  Occasionally, my mother woke to Inga’s short cries or to the sound of her restless feet padding down the hallway and would get up to lead her back to her room and sit by her bed, soothing her or singing to her until she fell asleep. She would always step quietly into my room afterward and put her hand on my forehead. I would pretend to be asleep, but my mother knew I wasn’t. She would say, “Everything is fine now. Sleep.” Inga and I didn’t talk about the visitations except when they were happening, and it never occurred to me that my sister was either sick or crazy. Over time, doubt infected Inga, and she came to recognize that her nervous system had probably played a role in calling the spirits, but the experiences are a part of who she is and their influence can’t be ignored. In another era, I might have been the brother of a saint or a witch.

  A COUPLE OF days after I saw Miranda through the window, I noticed a paper clip with a rubber band attached to it lying just inside the inner door that separated my part of the house from the rental apartment. I thought little of it until a Q-tip bound with red thread was slipped under the door the next night, followed by a piece of green construction paper on the third, which had been inscribed with three large teetering letters: a W, an R, and an E. After that cryptic message, it seemed clear that these offerings had been made by Eglantine. On the fourth night, as I sat with my notebooks open before me, I heard scratching from the hallway. I walked toward the sound and saw that a key tied with a piece of yarn was being pushed under the door.

  “A key,” I said. “What a surprise. I wonder where these presents are coming from?”

  From the other side of the door, I could hear the child breathing loudly, then Miranda’s voice. “Eggy, what are you doing up there? It’s your bedtime.”

  THAT SATURDAY, I saw mother and daughter on Seventh Avenue, walking hand in hand down the street as I was leaving the hardware store with the nails I needed for the bookshelf I was building. I quickened my step and called out to them.

  Miranda nodded at me. Then she smiled. The smile made me absurdly happy.

  Eggy stared up at me. “Mommy says you’re a worry doctor.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I went to school to become a doctor, and I help people with their worries and other problems.”

  “I have worries,” she said.

  “Eggy,” Miranda said. “Everybody has worries.”

  This wasn’t what Eggy wanted to hear. She looked at her mother and frowned, “I’m telling Dr. Erik.”

  She remembered that I had asked her mother to call me Erik. “You know, Eggy,” I said, “you’re welcome to knock on the door and come in and visit me. I like presents, but I like to talk, too.”

  I heard Miranda sigh. In that sound was a world. I thought of her long workdays and the evenings alone with her energetic five-year-old. I realized then that I had never seen her with a man. When I turned to look at her, Miranda met my eyes for a couple of seconds, pressed her lips together, and looked down at the sidewalk. I didn’t know what to make of it. For a second I saw the ferocious drawing again.

  “Are you walking home?” I asked her.

  She looked up, apparently recovered from the small spasm I had just witnessed. “Yes, we were at the park and then picked up some groceries.” She lifted the bag in her hand.

  Just minutes later, we found the photographs. There were four lying on the house steps when we returned. At first I mistook them for the flyers or menus that appear regularly outside Brooklyn houses. Prepared to discard them, I bent over and saw four Polaroids of Miranda and Eggy in the park. Miranda was tying Eggy’s shoe near the swings at the playground. Across Miranda’s bent torso someone had drawn a black circle with a line through it. I muttered some low exclamation and picked up another picture, which must have been taken only minutes later. Miranda was pushing Eggy on a swing, and this time the crossed-out circle was drawn across the mother’s face. The two others were similar recordings of the innocent outing, each one marked by the peculiar sign on another part of Miranda’s body. My first impulse was to hide the pictures from both of them. What good this would have done, I have no idea. I felt a desire to protect them from whoever the photographer might be, but it was too late. Miranda was beside me, looking down at the pictures, and Eggy was jumping up and down asking to see what we were looking at.

  “Just throw them away,” Miranda said in a low voice.

  “Do you know who took these?” I asked.

  She looked me straight in the eyes, her mouth tight. “Put them in the garbage.”

  “I’ll throw them away inside,” I said. “Miranda, have you found any other pictures—or things?”

  “What are they? Let me see! Let me see!” Eggy said.

  “They’re nothing,” Miranda replied. She gave me a warning look, and I understood that I had stupidly launched into a subject not to be discussed in front of Eggy.

  The four photos were in my right hand. I closed my fist and crumpled them on the spot. Before we parted, I said again that if they needed anything, they should let me know. I gave her my hand, and when she took it, her fingers felt ice cold against my skin.

  I DISCOVERED LISA’S last name through Ragnild Ulseth, the second daughter of old Mrs. Bakkethun, a close neighbor of our grandparents. When I dialed the number, I felt some trepidation. Although Ragnild would certainly remember me, I recalled the sympathy card she had sent my mother after my father’s death. The note had been written in a shaky hand explaining that her current health made traveling to the funeral impossible. She must have been well into her eighties. She answered the phone with a creaky but determined voice. “You’re Lars’s son, how nice. How nice.” I made small talk for a couple of minutes before getting to the point. I didn’t mention the contents of the letter but told her that my sister and I wanted to identify my father’s correspondents if we could. “Do you remember a girl named Lisa? Fredrik thinks she worked for the Brekkes.”

  “Oh, dear me, yes. I remember. I’m as right as rain in my mind, you know, it’s the rest of me that’s falling apart, and better to ask me about the old days than about yesterday. Yesterday can fly right out of my head, but not times from way back. You must mean Lisa Odland from Blue Wing. Was with the Brekkes maybe a year and came to us time and again. I was a little sorry for the girl, had a scar on her neck, but otherwise wasn’t bad looking really, a bit on the heavy side. They said she was wild, but I wouldn’t know about that. I never saw it. She was stubborn, if you ask me, and sad. Didn’t say much. Her parents came from somewhere in the Dakotas, I think, and moved to Blue Wing. There was some talk of trouble back where they came from. She disappeared, oh let me see, it must have been sometime in the summer of thirty-seven, but she turned up again in South St. Paul at Obert’s Lunch to see your dad. He was working there on Sundays as I recall.”

  “To see my father?”

  “I had it from Obert himself,” she said. “It’s funny. I didn’t know that Lisa was close to your dad. We all knew her, but she hung back, so we couldn’t count her as a friend, if you see what I mean.”

  “Obert, my grandfather’s cousin.”

  “Yes.” Ragnild’s voice softened. “They’re all gone now. Hardly anybody left. With your dad’s passing, well, it was sad, that’s all. He was a good man.”

  “Yes, he was,” I said, almost in a whisper. It wasn’t the words she spoke as much as their sounds that moved me. The rhythm and music of another language haunted her speech, just as it had haunted my father’s.

  “Do you know anything about Harry going to jail?” I said.

  Ragnild made a noise into the phone. “Poor man, he drank. It might have been on account of the drinking.”

  EGGY BEGAN TO pay me visits. She knocked at my door about once a week, and our encounters were quickly ritualized. She would open the lock from her side, and then lead me to the sofa for a talk. I heard about dragons and dinosaurs and a cat named Catty that ran away and never came back and about her Wendy doll, a bad girl, who needed regular punishing. On occasion, she gave in
to scatology and unleashed an excited barrage of it into my ear. “The witch.” She paused and breathed hard. “The witch, when she wasn’t looking, ate her broom. It tasted awful. Then she found two people dancing on her hat so she pooped on them, and cooked them up in a sandwich.” This was followed by hoots of laughter. I heard about her nightmares, a monster with “long, biting, angry teeth” that invaded her kindergarten classroom and a windstorm in the garden behind “our house” that crushed the chairs to bits and pulled off her arm, but she put it back. “Mommy works in an office with books,” she said, “but she’s really an artist. Shhh, she’s working. We have to be very, very quiet.” She talked to me again about her father. “My daddy is away in a special place. He took his car there when I was little and he can’t come back anymore. It’s too far.” Eggy wagged her head back and forth and then fluttered her fingers on her chest. “Ahhh!” she wailed, then stopped abruptly and squinted at me. “He’s so tiny now I can’t even see him.”

  I recognized the oddness of the friendship. Eglantine had sensed that I was a man who would listen to her. It was my job, after all. As “Dr. Erik,” I served as a worry closet. Worry spelled WRE. At the same time, I was careful to avoid the trap of ad hoc therapy. Eglantine was not my patient.

  “DATE!” INGA YELLED. “I’m almost fifty years old, and you want me to date? The word itself is offensive. I have a date. I’m going on a date.” She turned her pale face to me. “I’ve had dates. What I want is a man. My body aches because it’s hardly touched. I’m starting to feel rigid, wooden. But the idea of gussying myself up and having dinner with a stranger just seems awful to me now. How am I going to arrange it anyway? Put an ad in the New York Review of Books?” Inga raised her palms to stop me from speaking. “Six-foot, cranky, hypersensitive, aging, still mourning widowed writer with philosophy degree seeks kind, brilliant man, twenty-five to seventy, to love and be loved.” Near the end of the sentence, she looked down and I saw a liquid gleam in her eyes.

  “Oh Inga,” I said, and opened my arms. She fell forward into them but didn’t cry. She let me embrace her for a little while and then pulled away.

  “Don’t die,” she said to me. “That’s all I can say to you. Don’t you dare die. When Pappa died, I thought about Mamma right away. She’s not so young. I want her to live to be a hundred, a hundred and five, and be just as good as she is now . . .” Inga paused. “You know, I’ve been reading both Max and Pappa these days, trying to find them in the words, trying to explain my husband and my father to myself, but there’s something missing, and I don’t mean their bodies. They had a quality in common, something obtuse and unknowing. I think that’s what drew me to Max—that hidden and oblique shadow I recognized without ever knowing what it was.” She paused. “Do you remember when it started, the walking? Do you know when he disappeared for the first time?”

  I heard the door click softly shut in my mind and felt the ache and fear that accompanied it—a memory in my body. “When we were small,” I said. “I don’t remember that he did it; it was later. I think I was twelve or thirteen the first time I realized—the time when he didn’t come back until morning.”

  “Mamma didn’t want us to know. He never took the car. Do you think he just walked and walked for hours?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I think he had to flee. Emotions would build up in him, and then he couldn’t stay. I don’t know where he went.”

  Inga looked at me. “I remember hearing him leave. I was lying in bed wide awake because I’d seen it at dinner, that brooding, cut-off, distressed look in his face. It’s strange,” my sister continued. “Taking a walk, even at night, even if you’re upset, is such an innocent thing, and yet it was so secretive, so thick with feeling that it became terrible. I never knew what caused it. It never followed an argument with Mamma or anything like that.”

  “There was a moment in medical school when I thought Pappa might be a fugueur.”

  “A fugueur?” Inga said smiling. “On a fugue?”

  “Yes, it got a lot of attention in the nineteenth century, and it’s still diagnosed as dissociative fugue. I’ve never heard of it happening to a woman. It’s always men, who suddenly run off and vanish for hours or days or weeks, even months, and then wake up somewhere without remembering who they are or what happened to them. It’s extremely rare, but I did see one case years ago when I was a resident at Payne Whitney. A man was brought in after a bad fall on the street. He had broken his elbow and had several contusions, but no head injury. They fixed him up, but he didn’t have identification and told the staff he couldn’t recall anything prior to a month earlier, and he didn’t seem to care. They sent him over to us in psychiatry. Eventually, they discovered that his wife had filed a missing persons report in South Carolina four weeks earlier. When she came in, he didn’t recognize her.”

  “What did you do for him?”

  “There aren’t any drugs for it, just talk. His wife had taken the long bus ride up to retrieve him, and although she’d been warned, she took it hard. It turned out that he had been humiliated. The owner of the garage where he worked had forced him to crawl out the door in front of his co-workers while the man held a wrench over his head. It seems it was a repetition of his father’s brutality. When he went home to his wife, she called him a coward. He left the house in a rage and disappeared.”

  “He came back to himself?”

  “Yes, within a week.”

  “My brother, the genius.”

  “I wasn’t the attending physician. I just followed the case, and even without therapy most people have spontaneous recoveries.”

  “But Pappa knew who he was.”

  “Yes, but I can’t help thinking that it was another form of fugue, one we haven’t named.”

  She nodded. “He always wanted to be so good to everybody.”

  “Too good,” I said.

  “Too good,” Inga repeated. It was a Saturday evening on White Street. The overhead light illuminated my sister’s delicate features. I thought she was looking a little better than she had. The lines around her mouth looked less deep, and the skin under her eyes had lost its blue tinge. The conversation took place after dinner. Sonia had gone out with a group of schoolmates. We sat in silence for some time after that, an intimate, ruminating silence that is possible only with very old friends, and we drank another glass of wine.

  “Well, here we are,” she said finally. “Erik and Inga, a couple of kids from the boons living in New York City, full-fledged, card-carrying urbanites who’ve nearly lost our Minnesota accents. Our father was born in a log house on the prairie. It’s positively mythical.”

  I didn’t answer for a couple of seconds. There was a blazing image in my mind—a picture of something I’d never seen. “It burned,” I said.

  “What?”

  “The log house. It burned to the ground.”

  “Yes, that’s why they moved to the house that’s still there, your house.” Inga’s smile was ironic. “Out there, standing empty.”

  THE PHOTOGRAPH WAS lying outside the gate that led to the garden apartment when I returned from work. It had been a long day, and on the way home in the subway I had finished reading an article and was musing over its implications when I saw the image, which was lying face up on the ground. As I leaned over to look at it, I recognized Miranda’s face at once, but the black-and-white photograph had been altered. The irises and pupils in Miranda’s eyes were missing. I looked into the blank spaces and suffered an uncanny feeling of recognition, then lost it. I turned the paper over, wondering if there was a message. I noticed the sign I had seen on the earlier pictures, a circle crossed with a line, nothing else.

  When I laid the image down on the dining room table, I had a visceral memory of one of my patients hurling a photograph at me as he yelled at the top of his lungs, “Fuck them!” I hadn’t thought of Lorenzo for a long time, but looking down at the empty eyes in the picture, I recalled his tirades during sessions and how I had braced myself for the ve
rbal assaults before he arrived. I left those sessions feeling as if I had been physically battered. Lorenzo was twenty-three. His parents had brought their son to me and were paying for his treatment. There were several cases of bipolar disorder in his extended family, and I worried that he might be showing signs of it. I considered prescribing lithium, a very low dose, but when I mentioned it, he objected violently to taking any drug, and not long after, I realized that Lorenzo was lying to his parents and using me as a pawn to justify his behavior: “But Dr. Davidsen says it’s all right.” I ended the treatment. Lorenzo had sent the picture he threw at me to his parents with a single change. He had taken a razor blade to the photograph and scratched their eyes out.

  Someone was stalking Miranda, and I guessed it was a person she knew. Unlike the earlier Polaroids, which were probably taken surreptitiously, this was a full-face portrait, the kind of photograph people usually pose for. The mystery person had either taken the picture or had somehow gotten access to it. The only thing I felt certain of was that the sender wanted to disturb the recipient. It was an overtly aggressive act, and this made me think the perpetrator was a man, but I knew I could be wrong.