The Sorrows of an American

by Siri Hustvedt

  “Does he . . .”

  “He could be Max’s, but there’s no glaring resemblance. I found myself studying the poor kid for signs. But if he really is Max’s . . .”

  “What’s he like?”

  “A little shy and remote.”

  “How old?”

  “Nine.”

  “And the letters?”

  “I’ve offered to buy them.”

  “So they exist.”

  “She showed them to me—or rather, the envelopes. It’s Max’s writing. There are seven of them, and even though she was straight with me and hard on herself when she talked about the affair, there’s something she isn’t telling me. I can feel it.”

  “How?”

  “She’s stepping around something, but I don’t know what it is.”

  “Do you think it’s in the letters?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What would you do with the letters if you had them?”

  “When I was really angry, I was going to burn them, but if she lets me have them, I’ll wait until we’re all dead, then they can go with his papers. I’m afraid to read them.”

  “It would be hard not to,” I said. “And Henry?” I added gently.

  “He wanted to know if there was anything in the letters that would contribute to his book and decided to ask her directly. He didn’t really expect her to tell him but thought it was worth a try. He kept it from me so I wouldn’t be hurt. He knew it was a sensitive subject. While Henry was explaining his reasons for seeing Edie, I believed him. Afterward, though, I began to have doubts.” Inga closed her eyes. “The explanation makes sense. I just think it may be more complicated. . . .” Opening her eyes, she said, “You know, he never refers to his ex-wife by her name.”

  “What does he call her?”

  “The Ogress, the Harpy, the Succubus.”

  “Pretty hostile.”

  Inga nodded and adjusted her position on the bed. I felt light-headed again and leaned back in my chair. From outside, we heard a train whistle and the rumble of wheels. The Great Northern. I remembered the words inscribed on the freight cars as they rumbled through town. From her expression, I could tell that Inga was listening, too. “I miss my father,” Inga said. “I miss Pappa.”

  “Tomorrow,” I said, “we’re going to bury him. We’re going to bury his ashes.”

  THAT NIGHT, I woke with a fever and the dim sensation that I had been working to pry open a huge metal box with my fingernails, a troubling dream-remnant that infected the unfamiliar, darkened room. A couple of seconds lapsed before I understood where I was. Then I hauled my aching body to the bathroom, downed a couple of Tylenol, and gulped lukewarm water from the tap. For a while I shivered in the too-short bed, and then, somewhere between full wakefulness and sleep, I listened to my own internal voice as if it didn’t quite belong to me anymore and watched the metamorphosis of colors and forms in that strange theater behind my closed eyelids. The hallucinatory content of the next hour was probably caused by a combination of the virus or infection inside me and the fact that I had been rereading parts of my father’s memoir before going to bed. I dozed, then woke, then, nearly asleep again, I saw an amputee clomping down a long corridor on his stumps. The image forced me awake and I sat up in bed, my heart beating, the dwarfed figure burning in my mind. As my fear subsided, I understood that I had seen some half-conscious version of my grandfather’s brother, David, the family’s oldest son, born after Ingeborg, the dead baby girl my grandfather said had been buried in a cigar box.

  After leaving the farm in 1917, David wandered west and made his way to Washington State, where he somehow managed to fall under a railroad car and sever his legs. Nobody knew how the accident had happened. He wrote asking for money, and my grandmother sent her inheritance, or part of it. Twelve hundred dollars? Yes, it was at least that, a loan to buy prosthetic limbs. It was never repaid. The rest of her money disappeared in the thirties when the bank went under. I closed my eyes and felt my thoughts move elsewhere. A memory from years before: my patient Mr. J., rolling up his trouser leg to show me the prosthesis. “What woman could take this?” I thought about carrying Dum’s leg to the sink, about limbs discarded in hospitals, about field hospitals. In Iraq now, I thought. The name Job came to mind. “He was Job at the end,” my mother had said, “so many things had gone wrong with him.” The image of my father at his eightieth birthday party, the man in his wheelchair, attached to a traveling oxygen tank, his bad leg stiffly stretched in front of him, hearing aids in place, his reconstructed nose wrinkling under his glasses as he smiled, surveying his audience before he began to speak. “I read a small ad in the newspaper not so long ago,” he said, “that went like this: ‘Lost cat. Brown and white, thinning fur, torn left ear, blind in one eye, missing tail, limps on front right foreleg,’ ” pause, “ ‘answers to the name of Lucky.’ ” They laugh in the large room, the April light brilliant in the windows. My father goes on with the speech.

  David returned to the farm in 1922 with artificial legs, a cane, four inches missing from his former self. I saw the house, the fields. Forsaken. The word arrived as if by its own volition. Then tuberculosis. I saw the small one-room shanty David built for his dying brother, Olaf, to isolate the contagion. Later, they would add the little structure to the house as a summer kitchen. When I closed my eyes, I saw blood on a towel, not brown and dried but a brilliant red. I shifted under the covers, turned the hot pillow, and wondered if I should get a cold cloth for my head, but the light shining through the door from the bathroom, only steps away, now seemed distant. Too far. David had spent 1926 in the Mineral Springs Sanitarium. Had I ever seen it? A building came to mind. No, I was inventing it. Then David disappeared, left for reasons unknown. I’m so tired, I thought, and began to lose track of the story. I remembered the sound of my father’s footsteps, unlike anyone else’s; strange that we recognize the rhythm of a person’s walk. The noise of the door as it shuts. “You cannot take the path until you become the path itself.” My father had jotted this quotation from the Buddha in a notebook. In the morning, Lars had not come back. I saw my mother getting into the car to look for her husband. “Dear Lars. Kjære Lars.” I’m bruised, the internal narrator was saying, and I steered myself back to David. There had been a cousin, Andrew Bakkethun, who bumped into David in 1934 in Minneapolis and they spent the evening together. The next day, Andrew had offered to drive David “down home” for a visit, but he said no. Andrew had then carried the news to my grandfather. My father was twelve years old and had no memory of his father’s brother. I imagine them in summer, in the little kitchen, seated at the table with the oilcloth over it. Flypaper hangs from the ceiling with tiny black corpses trapped in the yellow glue. It fascinated me, that curling paper. My grandfather listens to Andrew, a vague figure in my fantasy who wears a hat with a brim. The boy Lars is there, too, listening to everything, and he watches his father excuse himself, stand up, walk out of the room into the little addition, and push open the flimsy screen door that bangs shut behind him. He found some chores that needed to be done in the barn, my father wrote, where I suspect he gave private expression to the grief he felt. We do not cry where others can see us.

  In January 1936, an article appeared in a Minneapolis newspaper about the death of a person known as “Dave the Pencil Man.” The family wasn’t certain that the Pencil Man was their David, but my grandfather borrowed money to make the trip to Minneapolis. January 28, 1937. Today is a year ago since Dad was up in the cities to identify uncle David after hearing he was dead. As I recalled my father’s entry in his diary, I began to sweat, and the sheets turned clammy. I lay still for some time, then, feeling more awake, I turned on the small porcelain lamp beside the bed where the memoir lay on the table. He no longer had his artificial limbs. Instead, he wore a form of elongated shoes. They were custom made, bulky and cumbersome, but sturdy enough to last a lifetime. By inserting his stumps into these, he actually walked on his knees, perhaps with reasonable com
fort because they were warmly lined and well padded. He made a living selling pencils in the Minneapolis business district, on the street, and in the lobbies of office buildings. He had a room in a working-man’s hotel.

  Dave the Pencil Man Perishes from Cold

  For years he has been known simply as “Dave the Pencil Man,” the crippled yet cheerful figure who struggled along the sidewalk daily on Washington Avenue. Dave’s legs were severed at the knees. They knew how old Dave was when he sang out to a group of his friends, “I’m just eight years older than England’s new King Edward.” That made him forty-nine. That was just about all the information Morgue Keeper John Anderson had Friday when he set about locating Dave’s relatives. Thursday afternoon Dave struggled through the door of the Park Hotel, 24 Washington Avenue South, numbed by cold. He died there. Hotel employees knew him as David Olafsen. There was one penny in his pockets, the sum total of his earthly goods, aside from the few pencils yet unsold.

  I read the little article a couple of times, as if I could learn something. The reporter had managed to suffuse my great-uncle with a Dickensian aura, the grotesque but good-natured cripple who hobbles in the street and repeats his signature phrase. And although the writer’s confusion about the cause of death was probably an honest mistake, his choice of freezing must have summoned in his readers the heartrending conclusion of Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl.” David died of heart failure. After washing my face and changing into a dry T-shirt, I scribbled some further notes, and then it came to me: another entry my fifteen-year-old father had made in his diary in 1937: June third. I plowed and dragged today. King Edward and Mrs. Wallis Simpson. All inner worlds have their codes. My father hadn’t suddenly developed an interest in the doings of English royalty. The distant monarch, who had given up his throne, was bound in a boy’s mind to another equally invisible, but far more important figure, one who happened to share a birthday with the king: his vanished uncle, cut off at the knees, the man who dragged himself forward in his specially made shoes on Washington Avenue in Minneapolis as he hawked his pencils to the businessmen who bent over to hand him their pennies, the man who had caused his beloved father to grieve alone that day in the barn.

  WE WERE THE only people in the small graveyard beside Urland Church. The weather was cooler than the day before, and a wind ruffled my sister’s black skirt as she stood and looked out in the direction of the farm. My mother had brought ivy geraniums to plant after the grave was filled, and she squatted beside them to remove a few brown leaves. Sonia wandered past the stones, reading the names, and Uncle Fredrik stood in his dark suit with his hands in his trouser pockets, looking at that moment as if he were a man in a photograph. Tante Lotte sat in her wheelchair beside him, hunched over in her seat. Her narrow, flaccid face, surrounded by fluffs of white hair, had the confused look that had become familiar to me. The minister and Rosalie, the two officials of our party, hadn’t yet arrived. Behind the small figures of my family in their sober attire was the broad vista of corn and soybean fields, the naked strip of road that ran to the horizon, and the woods to my right. No visible water. It was the emptiness that struck me then, and the realization that physically nothing had changed since I was a boy. There were no additional buildings or developments; the traffic was as thin as ever. Two or three cars passed while we waited. The white church with its classic steeple had gained a rather peculiar front entrance, but that was all. In winter, when there was no foliage to obscure it, I would have seen my inheritance: a white farmhouse on twenty acres of land.

  After Pastor Lund arrived with Rosalie and the small box that held my father’s ashes, we gathered near the deep square hole that had been dug in advance. Lund was a plump man with a bald pate and a vaguely suspicious manner. As he read, he looked over the top of his hymnal at Inga and me a couple of times, as if he were expecting us to object. The pastor had wanted my father’s soul. I knew that. He had come to his sickbed with shared immigrant stories, Lutheran dogma, and Holy Communion, no doubt aware that however interested my father was in points of theology, his beliefs ran mostly in a secular direction. There was no fanaticism or intolerance in Lund. Like a long line of Lutheran ministers I had known before him, he was well-meaning if somewhat narrow in his views and comfortable in his faith without being smug. At the same time, it had always impressed me that in the hands of men like Lund, the strange, bloody, and wondrous Christian story inevitably turned rather drab.

  When it was time to lower the box into the ground, we realized that we had no means of doing this, no rope or pulley or other contraption. We began to discuss the possibilities. The interruption in the ceremony disturbed Tante Lotte. Dumb since her arrival, she began to ask in a loud voice, croaking with anxiety, “Did you say ashes? But who is it?” When she was told, she shrieked, “Rubbish! My brother Lars? He’s overseas. We had a letter last week.” Then her face wrinkled as if she were searching for some lost word; her head dropped forward, and she began to play with the buttons on the front of her cotton dress. It was decided that I, as the tallest member of the family, take the job. I lay on the grass, grabbed the box firmly in my hands while Inga and Sonia held on to my legs, and reached into the hole. The full length of my arms and a good part of my upper body descended into the grave. I remember the sight of my hands clutching the smooth mahogany box, the odor of the dirt, and the pale roots that protruded from the earth walls on either side of me. I let the object fall the final inch. This was my father, I said to myself in awe, my father. And then, still in the hole, I felt afraid.

  Except for the rustling branches in the trees to the left of us, there was no noise. Then came the dull sound of dirt hitting the box.

  “Forasmuch as it has pleased Almighty God of his great mercy, to take unto himself the soul of our brother; we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

  I’ve retained a few more images from the day, sun-baked visual fragments of the family: the small clods of dirt on my suit jacket, Inga’s swimming blue eyes as she knelt by the grave, the knot in her hair undone by the wind. Sonia’s clenched fists as she walked to the car. The silent Fredrik pushing his sister in her chair over the uneven ground as her head bobbed. My slender mother in her brimmed hat kneeling beside the open grave, her hands patting around the geranium roots. The vast indifference of a cloudless sky.

  “IT WAS HARD for him that you grew up,” my mother said. “When you left home, it was more difficult for him than for me.”

  We were paging through family albums when she spoke, examining the photographs of my young father and mother. Sonia, bored by our old stories, was enlivened by the snapshots of her baby self and her parents. I watched her trace an image of her father with her index finger as she sat with the book open on her lap. There were pictures of Genie, too, smiling and pretty, the lost family member. The sight of her now seemed unreal. I was married to her, I thought. We were married. And as the four of us dredged up old stories, both pedestrian and mythical, I found myself thinking about what Miranda had said, that in our dreams we live a “parallel existence.” There had been nothing particularly unusual about this comment, and yet during my trip to Minnesota I was plagued by the thought that I was in a dream, wading forward through heavy air in a distorted landscape. I had a briefcase full of papers on affect and the brain but was unable to read them. My life had suddenly slowed down. Without patients and the constant pressures of a daily routine, I realized that my perception of time had been skewed. Despite the new “developments” on the outskirts of town, filled with towering houses that sat on tiny, nearly naked lots, and the arrival of Mexican workers, which had significantly broadened the selection in the local supermarkets, Blooming Field didn’t look much different and remained a catalyst for memories, some explicit, others dim, but these too felt dreamlike and unreliable. The fever that had come and gone in a single night seemed to have left a residue in my head, a vague throb that made me sleepy, and I often found myself dozing. In this curi
ous state, I welcomed the outing to Walter Odland in Blue Wing, whatever might come of it.

  My mother’s indifference about Lisa and her mysterious letter did not surprise me. My father’s early life had overwhelmed him. By becoming a historian of his own immigrant past, he had found a way to return home again and again. Like countless neurologists, psychiatrists, and analysts I know who suffer from the very ailments they hope to cure in others, my father had relieved the raw sore inside him through the work he had chosen. He had archived innumerable diaries, letters, newspaper articles, books, recipes, drawings, notebooks, and photographs of a dying world. He had analyzed the organization of parishes, country schools and higher education, immigrant novels, stories, and plays, and the ongoing language debates that riddled those communities. His was an illness that besets the intellectual: the indefatigable will to mastery. Chronic and incurable, it afflicts those who lust after a world that makes sense. My mother had been a champion of my father’s work, but the injury that generated it had given her pain, too, not because she had been allowed to see it or dress the wound, but because he had kept it carefully hidden. I knew my mother would listen to the story of Lisa, if we were able to uncover it, but she did not have to pursue it. “There are so many things,” she said, “that we’ll never know.”