The Liar's Wife

by Mary Gordon

  Are you surprised that I stand here, holding the old notebook, the old pages in my hand, and weeping? I suppose I am above all weeping for myself, weeping for the young man who was shocked, electrified by these words, who felt the force of clarity: we knew what was good, what was evil, and we would die for it. I would have followed him anywhere, felt humbled that I could follow him off the stage, into the room with its ugly green walls, to offer my hand and say, Thank you, thank you, you have changed my life.

  “And do you think, Mr. Bill, Mr. American, that America will do as I have said? Will save us, will save Europe? Or will you hide from it, protected by the miles of ocean; will you leave us to our perhaps just deserts? Our just destruction. Will American boys be willing to give their lives for us? For what we call civilization?”

  “I’m sure we will,” I said. “I’m sure the best of us will want to.”

  He shook my hand and sat down heavily on the inadequate chair. “I’m afraid that the best might not be enough.”

  He’d insisted that he be showed directly to the car: he said it took too much out of him, this speech, and he didn’t want to talk to the press or anyone in the audience. Mr. Hauptmann gave me the signal to bring the car around. I was hoping Thomas Mann would sit beside me in the front seat, but he walked towards the back door, and Mr. Hauptmann opened it for him and got in beside him.

  I didn’t know what I could possibly say to him after those words that shone and burnt and pierced me like hot arrows. Now I had to drive him to Chicago. Because that was another reason Mr. Hauptmann had chosen me. He didn’t like to drive. He was afraid of driving in Chicago. And I was known to be an excellent, supremely responsible driver.

  I think he fell asleep in the backseat. I drove him to the Palmer House, and Mr. Hauptmann got out with him; he was going to spend the night in Chicago. “Thanks for everything, Bill. You did us proud.” I got out of the car to shake the great man’s hand. “Thank you, sir, I’ll never forget this day.”

  “You very well may, my son,” he said. “You have your whole life ahead of you. I hope it is a beautiful life.” And he made his way into the formal doorway, Mr. Hauptmann walking a few paces behind him, as if he walked behind a king.

  And then I just drove home. I wondered what my mother thought of it, or my father, who thought that Communism was the greatest evil under the sun, who was even against labor unions as something getting in the way of his ability to do his job. But they weren’t there to see Thomas Mann. They were there to see me, their son, sitting transfixed, electrified, ready to change his life. Perhaps they were relieved that my shoes were shined, that my tie was straight, that I’d got a haircut. That I hadn’t stumbled over any of my lines or mispronounced any words. In fact, we never talked about it. We never said a thing about what Thomas Mann said. They told me they were very proud of me. But that was all they said.

  I don’t want the relief of too easy tears, because I am, in a way, crying for a young boy, a whole way of life that took its tone from a kind of deafness. Deafness and blindness. Thomas Mann told us that good and evil were clear, but I hadn’t even noticed the evil of living in a restricted town, going to a segregated school … and my parents died without grasping it. Does that mean they were good Germans? That we all were? That we can love ourselves only because of the accident of not being put to the test?

  And I wonder what he would think of his idealistic words about America now? He left America in disgust during the McCarthy years. What would he have thought of Vietnam, when the world and we ourselves no longer thought us worthy of the faith and hope that we’d believed in? What, I wonder, would my children, my grandchildren make of Thomas Mann’s speech? Or of an old man, in an attic, wiping the dust off on his trousers, weeping.

  I’d like to say that my life was changed from that day forward, that I thought about Fascism and Nazism and evil and good and that force must be used against force all day, every day. But I was just seventeen years old, and although Thomas Mann’s voice was never far, it wasn’t always at the center of what I heard. I was still the self-absorbed moonstruck boy in love with Laurel Jansen. And I was still the midwestern boy who hoped that war could be avoided, hoped for that above all.

  Nevertheless, I had the image of Thomas Mann, the sound of his words as a lodestar. When I remembered to—it wasn’t always, but it wasn’t rarely—I measured things against him. I wrote letters to him, which I of course never sent. I have no idea what happened to them, and I’m not sure whether or not I’m sorry that they don’t exist anymore. Let me be honest: I am sorry. Any trace of the boy I was, whom I loved for some of the very reasons that he hated himself, is precious to me, and any loss of the trail, a sadness.

  I know for certain that I wrote to him about the real tragedy that struck all of us in the Dunes, the terrible death of Betsy Laird. The death of a young girl, right in Ogden Dunes, on a night in June: a full moon, and a sky full of bright stars.

  I suppose the night began with my lying on my bed, sulking. I knew I was sulking, knew that what I was doing wasn’t admirable, not manly, but the obvious deep wrongness of it granted it a kind of grimy voluptuous allure, as if I were putting my nose to something filthy, but the filth was my own. The way I sometimes liked the smell of my own dirty shirts. Is it something that everyone does, sniffing their own clothes to see if they’re good for another day’s wearing? Or telling yourself that’s what you’re doing. But is it really that, secretly, everyone is a little in love with his own stink?

  So there I was, lying on my bed while everyone I knew was outside on this glorious June evening. A perfect night, everyone said, for the hayride we’d all been planning for weeks.

  I’d had some part in planning it, but it was my brother, Sam, who ran the show. He’d arranged with one of the local farmers to rent his tractor, arranged that the farmer would both drive the tractor and provide the hay. He would load it onto a flat-bottom cart that the tractor would be attached to, that the tractor would pull. We were expecting ten people, five couples: Sam and his fiancée, Mabel, two other couples that were friends of Sam’s from Purdue, Betsy Laird and her boyfriend from Northwestern, and the youngest among them, Laurel and myself.

  I’d dreamed of it for weeks. I’d lie on my bed as the nights grew steadily warmer, the days steadily longer, breathing the heavy air, the breeze just lively enough to move the white muslin curtains, occasionally. I thought about lying on the hay in the wagon next to Laurel, how the smell of the hay would mix with the smell of her hair, the light lovely smell of her skin that in my mind had its source on the insides of her arms, particularly the bends of the elbows. I had smelt that wonderful smell when my face came close to her arm when I turned her as we danced a jitterbug. I knew just how the stars would be, flat as saucers, and the moon, which we knew would be three quarters full. I knew there would be singing and I’d practiced the song I’d sing to her, though I’d pretend I was singing it for the whole group. I’d spent a lot of time choosing the song, studying the songs on the hit parade as carefully as I later studied for organic chemistry finals. I narrowed it down to three. I was tempted by “Change Partners,” because it was such a clear expression of my fervent wish that she free herself of the beastly Dolph Johnson. But I rejected that: too obvious. I was drawn to the high drama of “All or Nothing at All,” but I was afraid it might scare her off. So I settled on “Moonlight Serenade.” It was romantic, but gentle; it spoke of the touch of a hand and roses and the stars and the moon, but it hinted of something larger, “break of day … love’s valley of dreams … you and I … summer sky … heavenly breeze, kissing the trees.”

  I stood in front of the mirror, practicing, closing my eyes at particular moments, opening them, moving my head closer to and farther away from the phantom Laurel. I’d been told I had a good voice: after all, I’d had the lead in The Mikado. But I had to use my voice now to suggest to Laurel that she’d be happier with me, a gentle but no less passionate lover, the kind of man who didn’t rely on muscle p
ower, but would listen to her dreams, than with Dolph.

  And then the morning of the hayride, she had telephoned and said she couldn’t make it: a cousin was visiting from out of town. But I knew it wasn’t a cousin, it was Dolph, home from Purdue for the weekend.

  All I wanted to do was sleep, sleep so I could forget the humiliation, but maybe it was because the moon was too bright, I couldn’t get to sleep. I decided to read. I decided I would read Tonio Kröger, and the thought allowed me to salvage some vestige of pride in myself. Laurel Jansen had stood me up, but I was reading Tonio Kröger, and I had been praised by Thomas Mann. I was sure Dolph didn’t even know who Thomas Mann was.

  I read the beginning quickly, the encounter between Tonio and the boy Hans, stupid ordinary Hans, who doesn’t want to read a great book; he only likes books with pictures of horses. And then like a detective finding the right clue—the footprint, the piece of string, the crushed grass, the discarded envelope—I came to the place I had been looking for, and it filled me with a rush of excitement. This is me, I thought, reading by the light of the three quarter moon, so bright was it that I didn’t need to switch on my bedside lamp. These words, I thought, will tell me who I am.

  I still have my old copy of Tonio Kröger, and I see the passages I underlined. To say that I was self-dramatizing would not be the half of it, but then Tonio is a master of self-dramatization.

  “To feel stirring within you the wonderful and melancholy play of strange forces and to be aware that those others you yearn for are blithely inaccessible to all that moves you—what a pain is this!… But yet he was happy. For he lived. His heart was full; hotly and sadly it beat.”

  So I turned my sense of shame into “the wonderful and melancholy play of strange forces,” and I took a deep, unkind pleasure in Tonio’s description of the people who were more successful in the world than he, though he knew himself to be superior. Of the despised dancing master, Tonio says, “To be able to walk like that, one must be stupid; then one was loved, then one was lovable.”

  So I lay in the bright moonlight in my thin pajamas (it was only ten o’clock but I’d taken off my clothes in despair) and thought: Laurel doesn’t love me because I am not stupid enough, and to be loved one needs to be stupid, like Dolph.

  But soon Tonio Kröger failed in its work of consolation. I was not Tonio Kröger. Laurel was not Ingeborg. For one thing, Ingeborg was stupid, as stupid as Hans; her phrases were “commonplace,” her thoughts “indifferent.” And I knew Laurel wasn’t; she was the smartest person in our class. It upset me terribly that she planned on studying home economics in college because that was the only thing her father would pay for, the only thing he said it made sense for a girl to study. I had dreams of marrying her the day after graduation, running away and putting both of us through college, waiting tables, working in a factory, anything so she could study whatever she wanted: literature, philosophy. I dreamed of us sitting at our kitchen table, reading the tragedies of Aeschylus, Shakespeare’s sonnets. No, Laurel wasn’t Ingeborg. If Laurel didn’t want me, there must be some good reason.

  It must be because she knew I wasn’t Tonio. Tonio despised the dancing master because he loathed dancing, loathed everything about it. And I loved dancing, everything about it. Holding the lovely girls in my arms, the light silkiness of their dresses, the fresh smell of their hair and their skin, moving to the music, singing the words in some girl’s ear, or silently, in my own heart. The most wonderful night of my life had been the freshman dance, walking with Laurel through the trellis of artificial roses, dancing under the synthetic moon.

  It was true that I had given up going to the dances, but it was also true that what I considered the most wonderful night of my life had happened at a dance, the freshman dance that Laurel and I had been in charge of, the first time we’d danced together, the beginning of what was for me (but not for her) what I believed to be the great love story of my life.

  There were four of us on the dance committee, Laurel and I, and Rose Blaine and Tom Nelson. We’d decided what the theme of the dance would be: spring. God, weren’t we original! Spring. We planned on setting up trellises in the girls’ gym and covering them with paper flowers. We decided to take a look in the school attic to see if anything like trellises might be up there. But what we found was much more wonderful than trellises that could be covered by paper flowers: a sky painted on scrim, clouds and stars on a background of what could only be sky blue. We brought it down to the gym. It stretched from one end of the balcony to the other. Rose Blaine’s father was the electrician who was in charge of the lights of the Christmas tree and also the lighting of the little theatre; she talked him into getting involved. He set up two lights behind the scrim. One would revolve and change the shade of the scrim as it revolved so that the sky seemed to be turning from dark to light, and he would get his pal to train a spotlight on a particular couple and follow their progress across the dance floor. And on the night of the dance, Laurel Jansen and I walked through the trellis together.

  I knew what the Hauptmanns would say about it, that it was the kind of thing that one had to have risen above, that only the unimaginative members of the Four Hundred would have fallen for it. But I had fallen for it, would always fall for it; even now I remember it as one of the magic nights of my life. The sky turning, as if we’d captured our own moon, from light gray to pure blue to midnight, and the two beams, one revolving behind the thin cloth, one focusing on the dancers, rendering all the girls magic, beautiful, suggesting that what was between the beautiful girls and the gallant boys was wonderful, and magic, and could only be true love.

  And even though I’d given up the dances because I didn’t approve of them on ethical grounds, it was a sacrifice. But if I’m really honest, I’d have to say that there was a pleasure in the sacrifice: I knew that Laurel would not go to the dances with me, and going with anyone else was a falling-off from the ideal. My sense of myself as ethically heroic was something of a compensation. But it had been a sacrifice; it had been a loss. The truth was, I loved the dances. I loved to dance.

  Tonio Kröger couldn’t help me. Tonio was great, Tonio was an artist. At first, he suggested that he didn’t know what he wanted to become. Asked what in the world he meant to become, he gave various answers. He was used to saying—and had even already written the words—that he bore within himself the possibility of a thousand ways of life, together with the private conviction that they were all sheer impossibilities. But really he had always known that he meant to be a writer, an artist. He was perfectly ready to give up everything for art. He loathed the spring because it disentranced him from writing.

  I knew I had no idea what I really meant to become. When you were a child, people were always asking, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” But they didn’t really want to know, whatever you said was fine with them. A fireman. A policeman. President of the United States. Mostly adults found whatever answer you gave funny. But Tonio Kröger knew he was meant to be a writer: he said he felt it as a curse, but even then I knew that wasn’t real. And I knew I had never felt anything like a calling. And I was face-to-face with my own meagerness. I knew that there was nothing in me that was great, and there would never be. I was better at some things than most of the people around me. A better actor, with a good comic timing and a good voice. But I knew I wasn’t a great actor: I knew what a great actor was. Laurence Olivier. I’d seen Wuthering Heights six times, because I had a job as an usher in the movie theatre. I’d seen him as romantic Orlando in As You Like It and as a cold-blooded spy in Clouds over Europe. That was greatness. Thomas Mann had greatness. But all I could say about myself was I was better than some people at some things.

  I wondered if I could never be great because I wanted to be happy.

  I was sure Thomas Mann didn’t want to be happy. Certainly, Tonio didn’t. He didn’t require to be loved; he was happy to love hopelessly. Happiness is not in being loved—which is a satisfaction of the vanity and mingled wi
th disgust. Happiness is in loving, and perhaps in snatching fugitive little approaches to the beloved object. I wasn’t satisfied with fugitive little approaches to the beloved object. I wanted to make love to Laurel Jansen, then to marry her, to have children with her, to live with her forever, to grow old beside her, to die at an advanced age in her arms.

  Tonio Kröger didn’t even seem to want friends. He called his friends “impious monsters.” I thought of my best friends, Larry Held and Ernie Townsend. We could talk about anything. I could trust them with everything. I could trust them with my life.

  And I knew that there were times in my life I had been happy. And that I wanted that as much as possible. I lay in my bed holding Tonio Kröger wishing I could think of something better to wish for than happiness. But I could not. And I wondered whether I could never be great because I wanted to be happy or whether I wanted to be happy because I knew I could never be great.

  And so a new layer of self-loathing covered the original one, the one whose source was Laurel’s rejection. For a moment I could imagine she had rejected me because she knew I was better than Dolph and she preferred stupidity to tenderness. But then I came to believe that she was right to reject me, because I was nothing, not one thing, not the other, not Hans, which was to say not Dolph. Not Tonio. Certainly not Thomas Mann.

  Looking at my copy of Tonio Kröger, seventy-three years later, I remember the boy lying in his bed in the moonlight, thinking these young man’s thoughts. But more strongly, I remember waking up at midnight and hearing my father and my brother, Sam, in the kitchen. I heard chairs scraping across the wood floor. Then I heard my brother’s voice and my father’s. It’s a strange thing, but you know right away when something terrible has happened. The air changes: it becomes electric, like just before a storm, and both heavier and lighter. But charged with something. Overfull.