She narrowed her eyes and grinned at me. “You think it’s my epileptic, hypergraphic, euphoric, angel-feeling self coming out?”
“Something like that,” I said.
“I live with it all pretty well, you know, considering,” she said, and spread out her arms. “Give me a hug.”
I moved closer to Inga on the sofa and put my arms around her. I could feel the tiny bones of her shoulders as I embraced her. When I let go, she turned her head to the window that looked out at the next building. After a few moments, she said, “Kierkegaard never recorded what his father’s secret was. We may never know about our own father. I’ve had all kinds of fantasies about it, making up stories in my mind, thinking that they saw a woman die or found a corpse in the woods. I’ve even thought of murder, that they saw something terrible. . . . Pappa would never have stayed silent about a crime, would he? I can’t believe that.”
The small white house jutting upward from the wide fields around it came into my mind, and then I found myself closer, watching my grandmother pull open the flat door to the root cellar as we descended into the dark guided by her flashlight. I had always liked its smell of cold, damp earth. The odor of a grave, I thought suddenly.
“And then she looked him up again four years later at Obert’s,” Inga continued. “And then—there’s Harry, and now the business of a stepmother. He would have burned the letter. That’s what I keep thinking. He would have burned it, Erik. He might have left us a key to his past.”
Unknown keys.
I left White Street around seven, and despite the cold rain that fell on the street, I took note of the lengthening day as I closed the heavy door behind me. That’s when I saw a woman with red hair in the middle of the block. She was walking toward Broadway with a large bag over her shoulder. I paused to watch her, distinctly aware of my growing alarm that it was the same woman I had passed on the stairs, the journalist from Inside Gotham. But I couldn’t be sure. She walked quickly with her head lowered, her umbrella poised at an angle for maximum protection, moving along at the brisk, determined pace of someone on a mission.
APPROACHING MY HOUSE, I saw Eggy through the illuminated window. Wearing pink pajamas with the saccharine image of a cat on them and a small towel draped over her head, she was bunny hopping across the floor of the living room. As she left the ground, she squeezed her eyes in concentration and her mouth tensed into a wide, flat grimace. She was jumping for her life. As I passed, I realized that I hoped she would see me, but she didn’t. Trudging up the stairs with my briefcase, I suffered a feeling of intense sadness, and I was startled to feel my eyes moisten as I opened the door. I spoke to my mother on the telephone at some length that night. She told me that she was restless, unable to concentrate or read or organize her closet. She reached out for my father in her bed every night to check on him and was surprised to find no one there. She talked about his death again, how he had looked when he died, and about the kind of gravestone she wanted for him. She asked me some questions about bills she had to pay, and as I listened to her talk, I heard the vulnerability in her voice, a quaver that hadn’t been there before. Before we hung up, she said to me, “And you, my dear Erik, how are you?”
“I’m hanging in there,” I said.
The words echoed in my head—“hanging,” a man suspended in space, “in there.” In where? I thought. Not here, but there, somewhere else. The word brought back Dale Plankey, who had hanged himself one spring day in the tenth grade, the day he didn’t get on the school bus. One of my old patients, Mr. D., had found his father hanging from a belt in the basement. He was seven at the time. My thoughts continued, jumbled and inchoate, along this macabre line as I ate alone, and then, rather than read an article on the neurobiology of depression, I drank an entire bottle of red wine in front of a movie I didn’t watch and then listened to the cars passing on Garfield Place, the noisy laughter of teenagers wandering by in desultory groups, the distant sound of a television from the house next door. By the time I threw my woozy, tormented self into bed, I was pushing away thoughts of Sarah, hearing the voice of Genie screaming at me, “Mr. Perfect! Mr. Good and Perfect! You’re an asshole!” and thinking of my father’s fugues. As I dropped into sleep, I was walking with him, in him, aware only of my feet as one and then the other slammed into the gravel, moving fast into the blackness on Dunkel Road, our road, without a light anywhere, just the flat expanse of the cornfields on either side.
ON DECEMBER 6, 1944, my father wrote to his parents from New Guinea. We have come back to where we landed for some rest. I write this letter in a tent and it is raining. The next day the men of the 569th received their first mail delivery from the States. Among the letters was one from a friend of my father’s at Martin Luther College. A high school football injury had kept Jim out of the military.
Lars,
Howard Lee Richards died of wounds received in action on October 17, 1944. He parachuted into Southern France on “D” day plus 2, after being in Italy for two months.
He leaves these eternal comrades: Lars Davidsen, John Young, and Jim Larsen. Write! Jim
I found a place to hide, my father wrote, and I cried until I could do it no more. In the same mail delivery, he had received a letter from Margaret. At the top of the page, she had penned Corinthians 12:9: “for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly will I rather glory in my infirmities.”
There is no way I can now untangle the crosscurrents of emotions that assaulted me throughout the night that followed. I tend not to believe in stories about sudden changes in attitude due to this or that single event. I do, however, believe in preconditioning—explosives that accumulate bit by bit over time, and then along comes the igniting spark that claims all the credit. The news of Lee’s death was by itself more than I could handle. Paul’s definition of grace both mocked and comforted. “The death of each day’s life,” as Shakespeare called sleep finally came my way. I woke to a strange calmness. I had, with no conscious effort on my part, somehow divested myself of an endless accumulation of trivial concerns. There was a new sense of freedom. I became a better soldier, or so I like to believe. Lt. Goodwin, a college-educated officer, may have been the first to detect a change. Standing by as we clambered over the railing of the ship that would take us to Luzon, he had a cheering word for each. When he spotted me, he said, “Here comes the stoic.” He called me nothing else after that. At the time, I had only a vague notion of what the term meant.
JANUARY 21, 1945. Somewhere in the Philippines. This is my second letter. Finding time for letters is difficult. During the day we are always moving—at night we have no lights.
MIRANDA WAS BREATHLESS, and as she spoke, she fixed her eyes on mine. “I need a favor,” she said. She was standing outside my door at seven o’clock on a Wednesday evening. Behind her at the bottom of the stoop, I saw Eggy dressed in her pajamas and a heavy sweater. The girl was hugging a doll to her chest and her cheeks were shiny with still-drying tears. “I’ve called my sisters, and they can’t. Something’s come up,” Miranda panted, “and . . . and I need someone to stay with Eggy.” She turned her eyes away from mine. “I’m sorry to bother you, but it’s urgent. I wouldn’t ask otherwise.”
I nodded and said, “Will you be gone long?”
“No, it shouldn’t be too long. I, I have to take care of something.”
I looked down at Eglantine, who seemed to have shrunk since I last saw her. It may have been her stillness that made her look smaller. The habitually bouncing child had frozen. “Do you mind staying with me while your mother is out?” I asked her.
She stared up at me with huge eyes. Her bottom lip was trembling uncontrollably as she nodded.
“You’re unhappy that she’s leaving.”
Another nod.
“You and I have had some nice conversations before,” I said. “If you don’t want to talk to me, you could draw, and I have some books here you might like.”
Miranda walked down the steps and knelt in fron
t of her daughter. I didn’t hear what she said, but Eggy took her mother’s hand and allowed herself to be led up to the door. After giving the miserable child a quick hug, Miranda fled. As soon as the door was shut, Eglantine began to howl, “Mommy! Mommy!” The doll fell to the floor as she put her hands on either side of her small, contorted face and sobbed, jerking her head back and forth in a rhythmic motion that matched her desperation.
I squatted and reached out to touch her shoulder in a gesture of comfort, but the little girl batted my hand away and wailed more loudly, her voice rising to a scream as she rushed into the living room and threw herself onto the sofa.
I decided to wait. In a loud voice I told her that I would be very close—sitting at the table in the dining room if she needed me.
As I listened to the child weep, I stiffened myself against the sound, helplessly wishing she would stop. After several minutes, her sobs subsided into a lower register, and then they were replaced by a series of loud sniffs. A minute after that, I heard the sound of her light steps and then saw her standing in the doorway. With swollen pink eyes and two transparent lines of snot running from her nostrils to her mouth, she stared at me, and as she stared, she sniffed involuntarily. Her head and chin convulsed with each inhalation.
After several more seconds of silence, she announced in a small but dignified voice: “I don’t like it when Charlie calls me Egg Yolk.”
“And who is Charlie?” I asked.
“A boy in my class.”
The turn had been made, and after that we were comrades united by that misfortune known as waiting. Eggy drank three glasses of juice, wolfed down a chocolate that was a month old, a banana, a blueberry yogurt, and half a bowl of cereal, retrieved Wendy, the doll, who was scolded harshly for numerous infractions, drew four pictures of very sad mice and then a big cheerier picture of a woman she identified as a Maroon and her great, great, great, great, great grandma, took a tour of the house that she pronounced “big as a house,” listened rapt while I read three stories from Andrew Lang’s The Olive Fairy Book, and chattered in every pause between activities. Her breath-filled flute of a voice kept me company with reports of kindergarten betrayals. “Alicia said she wasn’t my friend anymore. I was sad, but guess what? She forgot! Charlie’s bad. He punched Cosmo. The teacher had to pick him up by his shirt.” The evening was also punctuated by moments of worry about her mother. Several times I watched her face wrinkle into an expression that forecast tears, but they didn’t arrive. Instead, Eggy let out a great sigh that was followed by an exclamation, which, despite its sincerity, was tinged by a theatrical quality: “Oh where, oh where could my dear mommy be? Oh where, oh where, Mommy, my dear?”
Where indeed? I began to think around eleven o’clock. By then, we had settled into the library in front of Top Hat, watching the gray figures of Fred and Ginger spin, waltz, and kick. I had given Eggy a pillow and a blanket, not because she was staying overnight, I stressed, but because it was more comfortable for the movie. At one o’clock, Top Hat had melted into Kitty Foyle, and I was still on the sofa, sleeping child beside me, growing increasingly agitated as I listened for the bell, hoping that I hadn’t been derailed by those lovely eyes, that Miranda hadn’t abandoned me for the night as she lay in the arms of a lover or, God forbid, that she had left Eggy altogether, but that seemed impossible. I didn’t know much about Miranda, but I had seen her often enough with her daughter to dispense with this thought, and then I began to think of the sinister stranger and the photographs. How long do you wait before you call the police? But exhaustion defeated me and, when the doorbell rang I jerked to attention, noted the time, three o’clock, and ran downstairs.
Miranda stood in the doorway squeezing her right hand with her left as blood ran over her fingers. Without saying a word, I grabbed both of her hands, and after finding the gash on her right index finger, led her over to the kitchen to rinse off the blood, while she insisted it was nothing and I shouldn’t bother, and where was Eggy? I bandaged the finger with gauze and tape, and then, emboldened by my hours spent doing the favor, I placed my hands on her shoulders and told her to sit. To my surprise, she did.
“It’s late,” I said. “I don’t know what happened to you or what’s going on, but the evening was hard for Eggy, and rather tough on me, too. You dragged me into this, and I think some kind of explanation is in order. If not now, then tomorrow.”
Miranda sat with her bandaged finger lying on the table in front of her. Before we walked upstairs to remove Eglantine from the sofa, she turned to look at me. “It’s a long story,” she said. “Too long. But I want you to know that tonight I didn’t have a choice. I really didn’t.”
“And your finger?”
“Collateral damage,” she said with a weak smile.
“SOMETHING’S GOING ON with Mom,” Sonia said, “something weird.” The final word of her sentence was muffled as she bit into her sandwich. She gazed up at me for an instant and then studied her plate as she chewed. “I found her crying the other night when I came home, and she refused to talk about it.”
“Your mother can cry,” I said. “I mean, it doesn’t always take so much. She’s been working very hard, and I sensed she might crash if she wasn’t careful.”
Sonia nodded. “There’s something else, though. I think it’s about Dad.”
“Really?”
“Last night she watched Into the Blue, but she didn’t just sit and watch it to the end, she kept rewinding to a few of the scenes over and over again, and I could see she was all agitated and upset. The thing about Mom is that she’s pretty open with me now. If I ask her what’s going on, she tells me. This or that got her down or whatever, but she was really vague about why she kept looking at this scene between Edie Bly and Keith Roland. It didn’t make any sense. . . .”
“Your father wrote the screenplay. Maybe she wanted to hear the lines.”
“Five hundred times?” Sonia put down her sandwich and began twisting a long piece of hair with the fingers of her right hand. I’d seen her do it before, a tic, and as I watched her, I suddenly remembered her lying in her mother’s lap, a large contented baby sucking on her bottle and idly turning her fingers in Inga’s long blond hair. Sonia spun the strand of hair and talked on. “So something’s going on, and she’ll probably tell you. I’m a little worried about what’s going to happen to her when I leave.”
“Did you choose Columbia to be close to your mother?”
Sonia’s face colored deeply and she released her hair. “Uncle Erik! That’s not fair. I like the city. I love it, and Columbia’s a great school. I don’t want to spend the next four years in some backwater.”
“You’re both worrying about each other.”
“Mom’s worried about me?” Sonia regarded her half-eaten sandwich. She had her mother’s beautiful mouth, the very same full lips Inga had when she was young. The boys must be going crazy, I thought, and felt some pity for those nameless adolescents who sat near her in class.
“She told me you have nightmares,” I said.
“Everybody has nightmares,” Sonya answered. “It’s normal.” She looked away when she said this, and I noted her reluctance to meet my eyes.
“That’s a tough word, normal,” I said.
She turned back to me and grinned, “I bet you say that to all your patients.”
Sonia’s evasions didn’t surprise me, and yet I felt a new confidence in her. She spoke very intelligently about her long poem “Bones and Angels,” and about her ambition to write. She wanted to take Russian so she could read Marina Tsvetayeva and Anna Akhmatova in the original. When I asked, she confessed that there was no boyfriend in the picture. She had admirers but no one she liked, and although she sighed deeply, I sensed that she wasn’t ready to love anyone, not yet. She, too, had silent ghosts inside her, and she guarded them carefully. I didn’t say that I hoped I would find them in the poem, but I asked to see it when she was ready. My niece hugged me hard before we said good-bye on Varick Street,
and as I watched her walk east on her way home, I noticed that she bounced a little. That lift in her step was new, and it made me glad.
As I walked toward Chambers Street and the number 3 train, I thought about Max and Into the Blue. I had admired the film, and it returned to me in bits and pieces throughout the subway ride and the whole of that warm, brilliant, budding Saturday afternoon. He had written the original screenplay for the independent director Anthony Farber and an unknown actress, Edie Bly. I wondered what had happened to her. She had appeared in a few small independent American movies, and then she had vanished. I remembered sitting next to her at a dinner Inga and Max gave before shooting began. She had short dark hair, a pretty heart-shaped face, and an insouciant, slightly reckless air that was well suited to the character she played: Lili. And then I saw her enormous face in profile on the screen as she tilted her head back for a kiss. Beautiful women kissing and being kissed. What would the movies be without them?
The story Max wrote was about a young man, Arkadi, who arrives by train in a nameless city that looks a lot like Queens—was Queens, in fact. He wanders into the streets and soon discovers that every time he turns a corner, the inhabitants are speaking another language. Some of the languages in the film are real; others are gibberish. He begins searching for work, but no one can understand his English, and they chase him away. Three men dressed in red shout nonsense at him and point to his clothes, howling with derisive laughter. He is wearing ordinary blue jeans and a T-shirt. Not long after that, he sees the back of a woman in the street. She turns her beautiful head, smiles at him, and disappears into a crowd of people in yellow. Seconds later, he is beaten bloody by a group of strangers in green. After a series of further misadventures, Arkadi is taken in by a friendly, deaf innkeeper, who gives him a room and work as a janitor. While he’s there, the colors of the inn change slightly. One morning the carpet is bluish, the next day greenish, the following day a more yellow-green. He records his thoughts in a journal heard in voice-over while he goes about his days mopping, dusting, and changing linens in the dark and shabby rooms. Although the rooms contain objects, clothing, and papers that he presumes belong to residents, he never sees a single one. In the evenings, he studies a book on sign language, which the innkeeper has offered him as a gift. There is a shot I love of his hands in shadow against the wall, as he forms the alphabet of the new language. His daily shopping rounds in the streets, however, are inevitably punctuated by some menace. Gangs of young men in various colors roam unchecked by the police. He decides that there is a mysterious color code that must be penetrated in order to understand this new city. The other alternative is that he is going mad, and the viewer isn’t sure which theory is correct. Arkadi spots Lili in a tenement window. She looks down at him, smiles, then pulls down the shade. He sees her from a distance buying oranges in a grocery store. Again, she meets his gaze and smiles, but when he nears the store, she is gone. He notices her photograph in a camera shop, buys the frame with the picture in it, and puts it on his bedside table. The photograph, however, is only one of her several incarnations. Each time Arkadi sees her, the young woman looks a little different: her makeup, her hair, her clothes, her posture change from one sighting to another. On his day off, Arkadi wanders into the streets and spots an art gallery. When he walks inside, he finds seven large paintings displayed not on the wall, but on the floor. He looks down at them, and the viewer understands that something momentous has taken place. When the camera pans the canvases, it becomes clear that all the paintings are identical: seven portraits of Arkadi himself writing in his journal. He looks up and sees the beautiful girl walking toward him. She smiles, and their strange love affair begins.
The Sorrows of an American Page 7