“He was fun,” she said, “a real entertainer, the kind of person who made everybody laugh, who liked to tell stories, dance, get high.” Her voice had changed. The inflection was more personal. “I’m telling you this because you’re involved now. He’s put you in the photos.” She turned her eyes on me, and I couldn’t help noticing their size and shape again, how they defined her entire face. “He could be so kind and considerate. He liked to buy me presents, take me out to dinner, and he loved to talk about art. We’d go to Chelsea and walk around, and he was so sharp about it all, what was hot and why. He’s as white as you are, but he comes from a mixed background. His grandmother was half black with some Cherokee blood, which made him ‘a black guy in disguise,’ he said. You know, a single drop of blood.” Miranda gave me an ironic smile. “That’s the American way.”
I looked at her, and she met my gaze. Her eyes held mine until I glanced away. It’s a hard thing to continue to look a person in the eyes, and I felt her steadiness as a challenge. Rather than say anything, I waited.
“Well, despite precautions, I got pregnant.”
“Eggy’s father,” I said.
“Yes.” She looked at me again, and this time her eyes were mournful.
“He was happy at first, or said he was. And then, after a while, he started hinting about an abortion, not for his sake, you know, but for mine. And then, finally, he told me he didn’t want the baby. I said fine, I’d have her alone. I was twenty-eight years old, and I wasn’t going to stop it. My parents backed me up, and I moved in with them.” She paused again. “Without them and my sisters, I couldn’t have managed.” Miranda brought her legs up onto the sofa and clutched her knees to her chest. In a low voice, she said, “He wants her now. He wants to see her now.”
“And you don’t want that?”
She shook her head. “He didn’t sign the birth certificate. He abandoned her. That was it for me.”
“He’s changed his mind. But why does he do it this way, by leaving the photos? It’s hostile.”
“I’m not sure he sees it that way. That’s how he is. My mother would say he’s ‘inappropriate.’ That was part of his attraction—a spirit of insurrection. He never did anything in the normal way. He’d wear a clown nose to an opening or a T-shirt with a quotation from some art critic that would get people talking. When he was introduced to someone, he’d blurt out a wacky comment or do a little dance and then shake hands. Some people hated it; others were charmed. You know, he couldn’t just walk into a room, he had to make sure people were looking at him. He liked to pretend that he wasn’t ambitious, that doing his work was what mattered, but he spent a lot of time making connections and getting himself noticed without it seeming like that’s what he was doing. And he always had a camera. He’d usually ask people, if he had no choice, but not always. He loved snapping famous people. Half artist, half paparazzo. He’d sell the shots, too.”
“New York is full of people like that,” I said. “In every field. In medicine, clown noses may be rare, but not self-promotion.”
“I know,” Miranda said. “After I got pregnant, I think I lost my prop value.”
“What does that mean?”
“I felt that he didn’t want to be seen with me anymore. I was his pretty, smart, black girlfriend. My pregnancy was bad for his image.”
“Did he say that?”
“He didn’t have to. Even after it started to go wrong between us, he took pictures all the time. I’d wake up and he’d have the camera on me. I’d be working, and he’d take pictures. We’d be fighting, and he’d grab the camera, a documenting maniac.” She closed her eyes for an instant, as if to get her bearings, and when she opened them she looked directly at me. “That day, when you took care of Eggy, he showed up. Nearly every day for a month, I found pictures of me and Eggy or just me from when we were together, and I knew eventually he’d come in person. My number is unlisted, so he couldn’t call. He rang the bell, and I found him standing outside with a gigantic stuffed horse. He looked kind of pathetic. It was awful. I pulled him onto the sidewalk and told him he couldn’t just waltz in and say, ‘Hi, I’m your dad.’ I promised to see him at his apartment that night. Everybody in the family was busy, so I came to you. As soon as I walked through his door, he started taking my picture. I felt like he wanted those photographs more than he wanted to talk to me. Finally he put the camera away, and we talked. He says he wants Eggy in his life, but he doesn’t say how. He doesn’t want to talk about money or visiting or anything. It’s all about him.”
“What about Eggy? Does she know about any of this? What have you told her?”
Miranda lowered her knees and sat back in the sofa. “I told her the truth as gently as I could: that I was living with her father, became pregnant with her, and that even though her father is a good person, he wasn’t someone who was ready to be a real father to her. It’s like it didn’t sink in. She makes up all kinds of stories. He’s invisible. He’s in another country.”
“He’s in a box.”
Miranda shook her head and smiled.
“Are you afraid of him or just annoyed?”
Her eyes were fastened to the wall. “No, I’m not afraid. He’s not a bad person, just immature. . . . I don’t know.”
“Is there something you’re not saying?” I asked. The words popped out of me, and I worried that she would find them aggressive.
Miranda turned her head toward me. “Isn’t there always something people don’t say? You’re a psychiatrist. Isn’t that your job, figuring out what people aren’t saying?”
“I’ve never thought of it like that,” I said. “It’s a process, a process of discovery.”
Miranda fell silent. “Jeff was in therapy for a while. Then he stopped.”
“That’s his name?”
“Yes, Jeffrey Lane.”
“Why do you think he took Eglantine out of the photographs?”
She shook her head, but I watched as her face convulsed slightly and two tears appeared at the inside corners of her eyes. They didn’t fall. I reached out and touched her right hand, which was resting on her knee, and then withdrew.
“He took out your eyes, too,” I said.
“He loved my eyes,” she said in an unsteady voice. “He always talked about my eyes.”
“You have beautiful eyes.” I could feel my face flush again as I spoke, and I turned to look at the windows. The shades were drawn and there was nothing to see.
“You like me, don’t you?” she said abruptly.
“Yes.”
“But you hardly know me.”
“That’s also true.”
We were silent for several seconds after that, and I realized that I didn’t mind, because Miranda conveyed no awkwardness. We might have gone on talking if Eggy hadn’t appeared in the doorway. With her arms extended and her fingers splayed, she had frozen in a bow-legged stance. The tragic expression on her face was worthy of Ophelia. She looked from her mother to me and then gasped out the words “I peed!”
“It’s all right, Eggy,” Miranda said calmly. “Don’t worry.”
“I’ll go,” I said.
Before leaving, I squatted in front of the little girl and said, “It used to happen to me.”
Her eyes widened. “When you were a little boy?”
“Yup,” I said. “Back in the olden days.”
Miranda burst out laughing.
MEMORY OFFERS UP its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn’t a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words. I knew that, simply by coming into my life, Eglantine had begun to push me backward into the rooms of my childhood, which in spite of my analysis, I had kept closed—or rather left open just enough to see a crack of light or inhale a musty odor now and then. But that night I traveled into the boy’s body, and I heard the crackle of the stiff rubber pad under my sheet when
I moved in bed and woke to the warm urine flooding my legs, soaking my pajamas and bedclothes. I felt myself lapse into heavy sleep again, like a drugged person, brought to consciousness later by the chilly cotton against my legs and the keen, sour smell. Like Eggy, I had gone to my mother when I was five and six, but later I would bundle up my pajamas and the sheets and stuff them in the hamper. I’m too big, too big, I would say to myself. My father caught me only once as I scooted out of the laundry room. He was emerging from the bathroom, and I saw his looming figure in the half light. My shame made me want to run, but I froze in front of him. He placed his large hand on my shoulder for a moment, turned, and walked down the hallway without saying a word.
WHILE I WAITED for Mr. R. to arrive for his session, I noted my growing irritation with him. Mr. R. had been late five times in a row. As I looked out the window of my office at the building across the street, I remembered his term from the last session: self-reliance. I had thought of Emerson, but he hadn’t mentioned the philosopher. The word had come up three times. Mr. R. had had an old mother and an even older father. They had both worked long hours, and Mr. R. had learned to rely on himself.
When he entered, he was breathless and full of explanations. Yet another person in the office had let him down right before it was time to leave. He grinned as he settled into his chair. When I pointed out that lateness had become a pattern, he held his hands up, palms toward me, as if he were warding off an attack, and said, “It was unavoidable.” Then he began a minute description of his secretary’s incompetence. He went on for quite some time in an agitated manner, but after about five minutes he seemed to talk himself out and grew quiet. He then asked me to remind him of the last session. He often forgot. After I had told him, he again stressed his independence as a child. He had even learned to make his own meals. Then he said, “What I’d really like to know right now is what you’re thinking. You sit there calm, cool, and collected, but what are you thinking?”
“I was thinking,” I said, “that while I was waiting for you today, I was feeling frustrated, a little angry as well, and then I thought about your parents’ workdays and what it must have felt like for you to wait and wait for them to come home.”
Mr. R. gave me a surprised look. He examined his hands, which were resting on his thighs. Then he let them drop limply onto the seat of the chair, his eyes on his lap. After a long pause, he lifted his face to mine. His mouth was stretched into a flat, tight grimace, and the skin between his brows bore two deep wrinkles of distress.
For the first time, I liked him.
He remembered his mother’s exhausted face, her legs stretched out in front of her after she fell into a chair. “ ‘Not now, not now. I’m too tired.’ She always said that.”
Just before the end of the session, he was looking at the wall behind my desk and I saw his eyes stop on the small rug from Turkestan that hung there. “It’s new,” he said, “isn’t it?”
“No,” I said, “It’s been there since we began almost a year ago.”
“Well, what do you know?” he said. “What do you know?”
MY SISTER REFUSED to tell me what had happened in the park. All she said was that she felt sorry for Burton and that it made her sad to know that he was worried about her. When I mentioned that Sonia was worried, too, and that she had deduced the problem had something to do with Max, Inga fell silent. I held the telephone receiver for several seconds, waiting for her to speak. “Erik,” she said, “I can’t talk about it. I just can’t. I promise you that as soon as I can, I will. But pressuring me won’t help.” I let the subject go. She launched immediately onto another topic, what I call voluble defense, explaining eagerly that she wanted to give a dinner party while our mother was in town, that she was fretting about the menu, that she had banished a potential guest on account of his vegetarianism, that she would never make “that damned eggplant thing again” if she could help it. “Mamma needs some fun, and she needs meat.” And then, without hesitation or thought, I blurted out the sentence, “I’d like to bring someone, if that’s okay.” Inga naturally said yes. I asked her about Walter Odland then. “I never called back,” she said. “I’ve meant to try again, but I’ve been distracted. You could try, you know.”
“I’m ambivalent about the whole thing,” I said. Before we hung up, I saw the small white house in the country again with its dark windows. I feel guilty, I thought. Is it my guilt or does it belong to someone else?
ABOUT TWO WEEKS after our landing, I had an experience that I find difficult to recall or to discuss, my father wrote. It is the only wartime experience that returned to me in troubling ways by reliving it in dreams. Four of us were bouncing down a rural lane in a jeep. Lieutenant Madden was one of the four. We spotted a Japanese officer a distance away. We knew this because he carried a samurai sword. His manner was strange. When he became aware of us, he scurried for cover in an effeminate, short-step-tip-toe fashion. He then crouched down in some foliage, yet far better coverage was nearby. We boxed him in and then moved slowly forward. The poor devil was quite visible from all sides. He didn’t move. I hoped that he would be sensible and rise with his hands up. He had taken on what seemed to me to be a position of prayer. In a matter of moments, four carbine barrels would be nudging him into action. That would bring him out of his trance. Then came two rapid shots. He didn’t make a sound. He rolled over to one side, ever so slowly. There were a few twitches as if he wanted to stretch himself and that was all. Our lieutenant had done it. None of us had noticed that he had stopped and had taken up a cover position, which was the proper thing to do. “He was going for a grenade, for God’s sake” was his explanation. There was no grenade. There was a pistol, a Japanese Luger, but the holster cover was firmly clasped shut.
It is pretentious to claim to know what one was thinking in moments like this. I may have expected a humane outcome and then come apart when the reverse happened. I may have felt that you do not shoot people while they are praying. His praying position had a powerful impact on me. I became quite deranged and by soldier standards behaved badly. I lashed out at the lieutenant, saying he ought to be shot, too. I was led from the scene and slapped about a bit. I came to my senses and felt shame for what I had done. The lieutenant told us that he believed our lives were at risk. He himself might have survived a grenade, but not us. He could live, he said, with what had happened but not with what could have happened. The Japanese officer had surely become addled from earlier experiences and may have roamed for days without detection. How did he get separated from his unit? An officer at that? Why did he hide and yet not hide? The experience hardened me. About six months later, when I was in Japan, I began to relive the sorry spectacle, often just when I went off to sleep.
My father said the man “crouched” in the grass and then took on a position that made him think of prayer. I imagine him on his knees, beseeching heaven, asking for mercy. He may have had his hands clasped together. Then came the shots. Harris, on top of me. Rodney Harris without his head. Intrusive memories. Fragments. These are the pieces that won’t fit. Sonia’s cries at night. My grandfather’s nightmares. I knew that research was confirming what I had always felt was true in my patients: their memories of war, rape, near-fatal accidents, and collapsing buildings aren’t like other memories. They are kept separate in the mind. I remembered the images from PET scans of PTSD patients and the colored highlights showing increased blood flow to the right brain and to the limbic and paralimbic areas, the old brain in evolutionary terms, and decreased flow to the left cortical areas, the language sites. Trauma doesn’t appear in words, but in a roar of terror, sometimes with images. Words create the anatomy of a story, but within that story there are openings that can’t be closed. By then, my father had seen many dead bodies, but this one was different. Beyond combat. I beg of you. Help me. The man had not fought back, had not gone for a grenade or a gun. I wondered if the frightened officer had reminded my father of another man who had fallen to his knees, begging for another
chance, or maybe the man’s humble, frightened position was itself a visual metaphor that summoned what Lars Davidsen couldn’t put into words.
“THERE WAS NO wind the day Lars died,” my mother said on the first night of her visit. “And it was snowing. It came straight down in large, slow flakes, hour after hour. For a while in the early afternoon, before Inga came, I was alone with him. He wasn’t conscious anymore. I held his hand, rubbed his arms and his forehead. During that time, I felt someone enter the room behind me. I thought it was a nurse, but when I turned around, no one was there. It happened three times.” My mother shook her head slowly. “I wasn’t at all frightened by it,” she said. “It was just a fact.” Her pale hands were folded in front of her as she sat across from me at the table, her large blue eyes intensely focused. “Lars couldn’t have gone on the way he was. I know that. He couldn’t have. Still, it’s strange. The strangest part about his death is that I can’t tell him things. If I’m out and have a conversation with someone, I still think, Oh, I have to run back and tell Lars, or Lars will love hearing this, and then I remember he isn’t there to tell.” My mother smiled thinly. I noticed that her eyes had turned inward. A moment later, she reached for me and took my hand in both of hers. As long as I can remember, she has taken my hand like that, and once she has secured it, she strokes it a few times before she lets go.
The Sorrows of an American Page 9