The Liar's Wife

by Mary Gordon

  And from time to time, with no regularity, so that it was nothing we could plan for or expect, Old Ladislaw came and asked if he could sit and watch us. I could see that it filled some large emptiness in him, just to watch us, and after a while we stopped offering him food. It was just something that happened: Old Ladislaw rang the bell, he was shown into the dining room, he took his chair at the side of the room. And watched us. Watched us eating an ordinary dinner, an ordinary happy family.

  And then one day he said that he was going home. Going home to Lithuania, to his family. He was going to leave us a car, to thank us for having been kind to him. “A jalopy,” he said, pleased at his use of the American. My brother and I were thrilled.

  We never heard of him again. From time to time during the War, and afterwards, in the Cold War, I wondered if his family were safe, if they were alive … if they were Jewish. It’s another thing that I will never know.

  Having got me through Buddenbrooks, Mr. Hauptmann thought it was time to accompany me up The Magic Mountain. I was overwhelmed at the prospect, and Mr. Hauptmann told me just to skim it: he’d tell me the most important things to know about it. But I didn’t want to skim it; I was fascinated by it … maybe it was a sign that all along I was meant to be a doctor, although I must admit I skimmed the parts when Settembrini offers his theories, and I skipped his arguments with Naptha. I didn’t care that much that Naptha died.

  I felt very sad for Hans Castorp. I could very well understand his kind of passivity … I knew I had it in myself to do what I was told, to listen to people in authority. And I was sad for his cousin Joachim. I remember being shocked that, as he’s leaving the sanatorium, he calls Hans by his first name for the first time. And I thought of my cousin Bob, whom I’d had so much fun with for our whole lives, and how odd it would have been if we’d called each other by our last names. Bob, who was a polio victim, walked with a limp but insisted on playing baseball. I kept thinking of him when I read The Magic Mountain, how he would never have allowed himself to sink into that seductive invalidism. Bob, who was my only real contact with serious illness. To think, except for Bob, I had a whole childhood free of contact with anything more threatening than mumps or tonsillitis. A privileged childhood in clean, well-fed America, even in the Depression a fortunate country, even in the horrorstruck 1930s, a privileged life.

  And of course I identified with his hopeless love for Clavdia. Although I thought it was very weird that she gave him her X-ray. Just this year, I reread it, and I thought the detail of the X-ray was wonderful. I remembered a patient of mine when I was just an intern, doing an orthopedic rotation. She’d been in a car accident and had broken several ribs. The attending doctor was showing her her X-ray. And she said, “It’s really rather disappointing. It could be anybody’s rib cage. There’s nothing special about it. I would never know that it was mine. And all my life I’ve considered myself quite special. Now I have to think of myself as a skeleton like any other skeleton.” I liked her very much for that, but I never saw her again; she hadn’t been badly hurt and she left the hospital. If she’d stayed longer, I might have asked her on a date. I might have told her about Clavdia.

  And reading the book now, after a lifetime tending to sick bodies, I found it even a little arousing that Clavdia had given Hans her X-ray. Was she telling him what my patient was telling him: that she was nothing special, that he could love her or any other woman, it didn’t matter? Or was she telling him that beauty is skin deep, that we are the envelope that covers us and without that we’re anyone or no one?

  Reading it again I remembered copying a passage in the notebook I kept specifically devoted to Thomas Mann. It’s a conversation that a fellow patient has with Hans, someone even more hopelessly in love with Clavdia than he is. Would there be any sense, he asked Hans, in making a declaration of love to a woman whom he adored but who made absolutely no response, a declaration, in other words, of hopeless love? He thought there would be boundless happiness in the experience. Even if the act of confession aroused nothing but disgust and involved great humiliation, still it ensured a moment of intimate contact with the beloved object. The confidence drew her into the circle of his passion, and after that, all was indeed over, yet the loss was paid for by the despairing bliss of the moment, for the avowal was an act of force, the more satisfying the greater the resistance it encountered.

  I remember reading that with a great sense of relief: I was better than that, I wasn’t tempted to make a hopeless confession to Laurel, I wouldn’t have opened myself up to that kind of humiliation; I had more pride than that. If I’m honest about my thoughts at that time, the time that I met Thomas Mann, and if there had been some sort of calibrating apparatus to measure the amount of time my thoughts ran to particular subjects, I have to admit that I spent much more time thinking about Laurel than about the rise of Fascism or the admirable President Roosevelt or the prospect of World War. Soon that would change. It had already begun to change when the Hauptmanns began their tutelage. The temperature jumped after I had met Thomas Mann. But when I was reading him, before I had met him, what I was most able to attach to were the passages about unrequited love.

  There was nothing about unrequited love in the Joseph novels, and when I finally got to them there wasn’t really enough time for me to do more than skim. And I have no impulse to reread them now: I have had no impulse to reread them in all the years between. What I remember being excited about were the ideas about the past, the past of humans as unfathomable, like a deep well, the bottom of which can never be seen. And that there is no such thing as the present because it is always only the remembrance of the past or the anticipation of the future. Alongside my boundless self-involvement, I was capable of being excited by large ideas. Particularly by the idea of large ideas.

  And so the day arrived. My mother saw me off, standing at the door I knew till she couldn’t see me anymore, till I’d turned the corner and was out of her sight, in the world. I experienced for the first time a sensation, or more a way of being that would last me a long time. As I approached the school I wondered, What will Thomas Mann make of this? I’ve heard that some religious Christians wear bracelets that say, “What would Jesus do?” I might as well have worn a bracelet that said, “What would Thomas Mann think?” Only at times it felt more like a shackle than a bracelet.

  I’d been so proud of the school, the grand staircase leading from the parklike grounds—the pond, complete with swans, the high Gothic windows, the whole building based, we’d been told, on the English architecture of the sixteenth century: it was meant to recall an English castle. But I’d heard Mr. Hauptmann call it pseudo-Tudor, and of course Thomas Mann had seen real castles. And the swans were not peaceful and graceful; if you got too close to them they made an ugly squawk, worse than a quack, and there had been stories of a little boy who tried to feed them and had got his arm broken for his pains.

  I tried to banish the feeling that the Hauptmanns had stolen things from me. Of course it was better to know what the real thing was, what the truly beautiful was, what the good really consisted of. As it was better to have been told (why had I never found it out on my own?) that across the town was a black high school, which had been built to replicate Horace Mann but was vastly inferior, with none of the facilities or equipment that Horace Mann had and where speakers were never invited, where Thomas Mann would not have been brought to speak. “Haven’t you noticed, Bill, that there’s not a single Negro student here?” I hadn’t noticed, and I was shocked that I hadn’t, and I was grateful that they’d pointed it out. I knew it was better to know, but I hated knowing it. I knew things, but I believed there was nothing I could do about them. Remember it was 1939. It would be twenty years, at least, before I began to see that there might be something I could do.

  But walking into the auditorium that day, I couldn’t forget that it was a place I had been happy: the site of my greatest successes, what I knew now was a ridiculously small venue. But I knew I was a star, the st
ar of the high school plays, The Mikado, Charley’s Aunt. And walking down the stairs, seeing the rich red velvet curtain, which I’d both stood behind and pulled the ropes to open, I remembered that happiness, that sense of being outstanding, of being gifted, of being admired. Loved by strangers. Praised.

  By the standards of high school auditoriums, or I guess they should be called auditoria (what would Thomas Mann say?), our auditorium was quite grand. You entered from the outside through one of those open tunnels like you see in football fields. It was a kind of amphitheatre; on either side of the aisle there were sloping rows of seats: around five hundred, as I remember. Below was the stage, which stretched across the entire space. It had a rich velvet curtain, far enough back to allow for a sizeable apron. That day, there was a podium set up on the left side, with a pitcher of water and a glass. At the back of the stage was a set of stairs that led to two smallish classrooms; the lower one was used as a greenroom. We made up there, changed costumes. Thomas Mann would be showed to one of those rooms.

  There would be coffee and something to eat: the Hauptmanns were in charge. I didn’t know if he was there yet. I was very early.

  But they were already there: Mr. and Mrs. Hauptmann. And the great man himself. Thomas Mann. Looking exactly like his pictures. The stiff hair, the stiff moustache, the stiff spine, the stiff shoulders. Holding a cigarette (smoking was not allowed but who would stop him?) so that I felt I couldn’t offer my hand for a handshake, certainly because he hadn’t offered his. The Hauptmanns introduced me. Mr. Mann inclined his head. He seemed to be looking at nothing, focusing on nothing, staring at the sickly green walls as if there were a message there he needed to decipher before he knew what the next thing would be for him to do. He looked uneasy. It didn’t seem possible to me that he was nervous. But I knew his English wasn’t good, and all I wanted to do was to reassure him: that he was a great man, one of the greatest men in the world, that he could do anything, anything at all, and everyone in the audience would revere him, would feel honored simply to be breathing the same air.

  I had memorized my speech. I had delivered it for the Hauptmanns at least twenty times; they said that they were satisfied. I understand now that it didn’t really matter what I said: what mattered was how I looked and the way my body moved across the space of the stage. And that I wouldn’t embarrass them if Thomas Mann asked me something about one of his books.

  “Bill here has actually shaken hands with someone whose father shook hands with George Washington,” Mr. Hauptmann said.

  Thomas Mann shook his head several times, as if he had water in his ear.

  “But how can that be possible?”

  I told him the story of Grandmother Geer. I reminded the Hauptmanns that not only had her father shaken hands with George Washington but also she had seen Abraham Lincoln, both in his debates and the train that carried his body.

  “You see, Herr Mann, we have here a real American. As the Americans would say, the real McCoy.”

  “And what is the etymology of that, I wonder,” Thomas Mann asked. “The real McCoy.”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” Mrs. Hauptmann said. “But then I’m not a real American. Do you know, Billy?”

  I felt paralyzed by my own ignorance. “I think they were what we call hillbillies that kept feuding with other families. They seemed to keep killing each other. But I don’t know why this entitled them to be called real.”

  And everyone laughed, as if I’d been purposely witty, whereas I was just saying anything at all, to cover my mortification.

  “Bill’s going to start the University of Chicago in the fall.”

  “And what will you study, young man?” Thomas Mann asked.

  I had no idea what I would study. I said the first thing that came to my mind. “Philosophy,” I said.

  “Ah, the queen of the sciences.”

  “I fear he’s not a Platonist. Much too much devotion to the real world. An Aristotelian in the bud,” Mr. Hauptmann said.

  “I object,” said Mrs. Hauptmann. “Bill is a devotee of the ideal.”

  Just then the principal and his wife came in. I could have fallen at his feet in gratitude. I was afraid that they were going to ask me whether I was a Platonist or an Aristotelian. I had never read Aristotle, and my only Plato was what Mr. Hauptmann had made me read, the Phaedrus, so that I could talk to Thomas Mann about Death in Venice.

  “A very great honor, a very great honor,” said Mr. Prendergast, the principal, whom everyone knew to be a timeserver and an idiot. Thomas Mann looked again at the green wall. He accepted a drink of water. “I am grateful that it is not iced,” he said. “Americans seem to have a mania for ice.”

  And then it was time for us to go onstage. The principal led us out, and I was next, Thomas Mann last. I have no memory of what the principal said. When I stood up, all my friends clapped very loud; some of them, to my mortification, whistled. I have almost no memory of what I said. What was there that someone like me could have said? It was something about the honor of having a great writer, about the eternal value of literature. What else could it have been? I sat down, wrapped in a kind of blankness; I hadn’t disgraced myself, but I hadn’t done anything wonderful either. I had done what was expected of me. I had done what I was told.

  And then he made his way to the podium, walking slowly, as if he hoped he’d never actually get there. He coughed. He took a sip of water. He took off his glasses and put them back on. We’d been told he was going to read his lecture; he didn’t trust his English. In fact, his accent was so thick that we all had to work very hard to make out what he said.

  It’s a word people use much too easily, much too carelessly, but you must believe me when I say that Thomas Mann’s speech was electrifying. Because I felt in all the nerves of my body a heat, a luminosity, as if they were the first time real to me, palpable, almost visible. I felt a thrumming up and down my back, and then a sense of a match having been lit under my ribs. It was almost as if I were being given shock treatments, the old consciousness emptied out, but instead of torment being replaced by nullity, the nullity of my own life would from then on be replaced by a torment. A torment that was the knowledge of the world, of the implication of what it meant to be human in a world that was full of evil and greatness, of terms and conditions larger than I had ever imagined.

  Now I’m opening my Thomas Mann notebook, a black-and-white cardboard composition book, the most common kind, the pattern aspiring perhaps to an impression of marble. The journal I kept of my thoughts about meeting him, and after meeting him. Pasted on the cover, the paper so brittle I’m afraid to hold it in my hand, yellow and fragile and somewhat pathetic, is the speech itself, which was reprinted in the Gary newspaper the next day. I look at the title and I can hear his voice.

  “The title of my speech,” he began, “is ‘The Problem of Freedom or the Crisis of Democracy.’ ”

  He began talking about the conflict between socialism and individualism, between the common good and the good of the individual. I’d forgotten that he spoke about Western civilization, or Occidental civilization as he called it, as Christian and that he saw Nazism as an attack on Christianity. I find that odd now; I know he wasn’t a religious man. But perhaps he knew his audience. Perhaps he knew that he had to convince Americans that they were fighting not just people who wanted to kill Jews but people who wanted to do away with Christianity. I can see what he was trying to do, he was trying to refute the argument that Fascism, particularly Nazism, was a bulwark against Communism. He was trying to convince them that Nazism wouldn’t protect their property, or anything that they held dear. Oh, how Germanic so much of it is, turgid, dense; he invokes Goethe and Heine and tries to distinguish between the claims of the individual and the larger society.

  But finally he gets to his point and he’s as passionate as any Neapolitan. He says that, unlike any other revolutionaries, Nazis are devoid of any humanity, any ideal, that they are devoted only to extermination and to force. He
calls for a forceful response to their love for force; he insists that, like the church of old, the church militant, there must be a democracy militant. He says that no moral person can be outside the fight.

  It was thrilling to be in the presence of someone not afraid to use words like “evil” and “force” and “revolution” and “humanity.” It was shocking to hear someone insist that, at the very moment that we were drawing our safe breaths in safe, middle America, blood was being shed in the defense of democracy and liberty and the individual. That there were clear choices to be made: between freedom and tyranny, between liberty and annihilation. And that we must not hide our faces from it.

  But most electrifying were his final words, when he spoke as himself, a man, an artist. Seventy-three years have passed and I still feel the same heat, the same illumination of my nerves, the same match-lit blow to my ribs when I read those last paragraphs.

  “Before you stands an individual who never expected in former years that he should be called upon to make statements and efforts such as these.

  “I have spoken to you of truth, justice, civilization, democracy. In my purely aesthetically determined youth, it would never have occurred to me to deal in such terms. Today I pronounce them with a wholly unexpected note of joyousness. For the position of the spirit has changed upon Earth in a peculiar way. Civilization is in retreat. A period of lawlessness and anarchy reigns over the outward life of the people. Yes, we know once more what is good and what is evil. Evil has been revealed to us in such crassness and meanness that our eyes have been opened to the dignity and the simple beauty of the good. That is, if you like, a rejuvenation of the spirit, and I often have thought that this period of spiritual rejuvenation and simplification, this moral epoch, into which we have entered, might well be the great hour for America. May America stand forth in an abandoned and ethically leaderless world as the strong and unswerving protector of the good and the godly in mankind. I salute you as a country that is conscious of its own human inadequacy but knows what is good and what is evil; that despises force and untruth, a country that perseveres in a faith which is sound and utterly necessary to life—faith in goodness, in freedom and truth, in justice and in peace.”