An absence? She noted somehow it was hers. No. It’s not. It has been inflicted on you by…
That’s me, of course, protesting ineffectually across the ages. But my inability to reach her on that morning, millennia ago, only confronts me with my own failings, incompletions, absences.
I content myself with noting, then, that she does not much resemble our housekeeper when I was a child, Mrs Bembry. (Her face was round, brown, and lineless.) Mrs Bembry, who cooked, cleaned, and baby-sat for us, lived at home with Mr Bembry and was, indeed, Mrs Bembry from the first time my father introduced my sister and me to her when I was four and my sister just beyond two. But this was because we were a black family hiring a black maid in the forties:
My Father (while my mother looked on): What is your name?
Mrs Bembry: Cora.
My Father: What is your name?
Mrs Bembry: Cora…?
My Father: What is your full name?
Mrs Bembry: Cora. Mrs Cora Bembry.
My Father: Sam, Peggy, this is Mrs Bembry. She’ll be helping us in the house and sometimes taking care of you.
Mrs Bembry: Oh, you all can call me Cora…
My Father: We’ll call you Mrs Bembry.
And for a dozen years we did. I think Mrs Bembry and the nameless servant both believed in magic. But at this remove, I couldn’t say which believed in magic more.
4.51 I hesitate before any notion about the reception of theory for this prehistoric woman. (In both our urban and rural landscapes, so overwhelmingly based on service rather than production, the nineteenth-century ‘house servant’ or ‘body servant’ is a very weak model for modern maids and housekeepers, cooks and gardeners, mail carriers and delivery men and women, wait-persons and counter people, supers and maintenance folk, civil servants and secretaries, not to mention live-in babysitters. Still, what draws us to it and what makes us hesitate before it are both historical—that is, composed as much of nostalgia as of curiosity.) Only the most minor character in what is to follow, her minority masks an incompleteness (a dis-ease in the writer) clear and close to that which makes Pheron so uncomfortable.
4.6 Six-thirty in the morning, and I have been up since five-twenty-three, sitting in the living room, drinking coffee, reading desultorily at the Mandelstams—Osip and Nadezhda—Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, preparing for the big plunge, two weeks hence, into the Russian Yeats, Ana Ahkmatova: generally putting off the rewrite on ‘The Tale of Fog and Granite’ with an eye (and an urgency) to handing it in on Monday.
It’s Saturday, 14 January 1984, my daughter’s tenth birthday. (Through childhood she ran around with her sunny crew-cut till, three years ago, she put her foot down and, since, has developed Long Blond Hair.) She will be up in an hour, if not in minutes.
Last night she and I sat, where I sit now (writing this), watching a TV Charlie Brown special. Then, the shutters were open. Now they’ve closed against predawn black. Morning traffic is cut by a fire siren; I can hear the slush under the tires from the last days’ snow. The vacuum cleaner sits, where Ted as usual left it, by the jamb of the double doorway between the living room and the dining room, half on the red rug, half on the green.
Last night:
My arm around her, I joked: ‘This is the last time I can watch TV with my nine-year-old,’ and, a minute later, took another trip to my word processor in the office—checking for corrections, formatting this, that, and the other.
‘You know,’ she told me suddenly, when I came back and we sat again together, ‘I remember my seventh birthday!’
I raised an eyebrow and looked down.
It was after my party…? All the paper from the presents was lying on the floor, and I remember standing there and thinking: Finally! I’m seven! I didn’t think I was ever going to be seven!’
I smiled. ‘Was that here or at your mother’s?’ I just wanted a better picture of it.
‘I think it was here,’ she said. ‘But I’m not sure.’
And though I could write twenty pages detailing her fifth, I realize that I have no memory of her seventh birthday at all!
It gave me an astonishing sense that this marvelous micro-person, who has been so much a part of me for a decade, has her own inner life—a life which I’ve always known was there, wanted to be there, but, as a parent, I so rarely catch the signs of.
Hingley’s Nightingale Fever, some notebooks, Zhivago, Clarence Brown’s Mandelstam (among the volumes of translated poems) are scattered on the tweedy couch-cover. Soon she’ll be up and off to her horseback riding lesson, the day’s presents—the actual party will be a sleep-over with a handful of her friends. The great change marked by ten? Well, as I remember it:
No more writing down your age with one numeral!
Odd, after all these years, to be catching up on the Russians.
Odd, too, that this sort of moment (in its domestic, not its literary, aspect) is something I’ve decided to deny to Zadyuk and Nari by an offstage quirk of biology. (But then, offstage biological quirks are what this whole tale is about.) Odd also that, ten years ago, just before my daughter’s birth, when I began the Nevèrÿon series, I wouldn’t have thought it odd in the least.
5. ‘…including Lord Vanar?’ The minister lifted a palm, leaving his fingertips on stone. ‘That is a great many people in the city to have such a singular and serious illness. Already six others have died of it, you say; and none has recovered…?’ The small window of the council room was high and deeply beveled; a bird beat by outside, its shadow flicking the table. ‘It would not be a lot of people for headache, or stomach distress, or a cold. But certainly any number over fifty is an unconscionable amount for fevers, pains, incapacitations, and fatal swellings. We must observe this carefully and be prepared to act…’
5.1 Joey is a Boston-Irish hustler and heroin addict (when he can get it) who lives mainly on the street. Of his four brothers, one killed himself in a drug-induced depression when Joey was out at the store. At twenty-one or twenty-two, they were trying to kick together. His brother wasn’t doing very well. Joey came back from the grocery carrying a paper bag with a quart of milk and a pack of cigarettes in it to find his brother hanging by an old jumper cable from the kitchen light fixture above an overturned chair. A year later he watched another brother get pushed out of a third-story window to impale himself on a spike fence below. (Revenge for money owed on drugs: ‘Sometimes, afterwards, I’d see the fuckers who did it on the street. They’d say “Hi.” I’d say, “Hi.” That was all I could do.’) The two other brothers also died violently. So Joey left his mother in the hospital (‘What the hell she need with me—though I like to go see her, sometimes. She’s still there’) to come to New York.
The quality of street dope, he says, is better in New York than in Boston.
Joey says he used to lift weights. (‘I was up to a hundred and ninety-eight pounds, and all muscle! I was doing tournaments and getting third, second place. Can you imagine me that strong?’ Today he seldom weighs in at over a hundred-thirty.) At twelve he got a job washing dishes in a Boston diner, thanks to an affair with the twenty-five-year-old man who’d inherited the place: that lasted till he was eighteen—when his drug involvement and the owner’s interest in younger boys ended it. Briefly, when he was nineteen, a woman a few years older than he married him for a couple of years. (‘That’s when I was lifting weights. She thought I was cute.’) They had a daughter. Drugs again. Another male lover, this one another weight lifter. Joey drove an ice cream truck for a while—managed a fleet of trucks, he sometimes says. By the time he was twenty-five, it had all gone bust: marriage, lover, job. And someone had blown up the truck(s?), which he’d used to move drugs and illegal money around between whorehouses, anyway. At twenty-seven he came more or less permanently to New York. (Just before he made the change, someone hit him in the mouth with a baseball bat, knocking away most of his upper teeth; the broken ones have rotted out by now, helped by a couple of trips to the dentist, a year or so apart, to remo
ve a few of the stubs.) Living on the street, he says, is easier in New York than in Boston.
Among the stories Joey has told me, he says he thinks about this one a lot. It’s from his first months here in the city.
A drug friend of his had taken over an abandoned apartment in some half-burned building in Hell’s Kitchen. No heat or electricity in the place. But as Joey was outside that winter, he considered his friend lucky and—compared to him—prosperous. Joey went to see him one cold morning, hoping he might get some dope. There was never any lock on the door. Joey just pushed in. With his works out beside him, the man sat shirtless on a mattress on the floor of the chilly tenement kitchen.
‘Hey!’ Joey said. ‘How you doin’?’
The man looked up and said, matter-of-factly: ‘Oh, you’re here? I was just gonna kill myself.’
‘Yeah: How?’ Joey squatted down before the mattress to watch.
You gotta understand, Joey told me, I thought he was joking. I was livin’ in my clothes and sleeping out, which means I wasn’t sleeping much. I was pretty sick, so I wasn’t too alert, and I was trying to act nice—you know what I mean? And this guy had a place to stay, sometimes drugs, and sometimes food—I never thought anything could be wrong with him!
The man jabbed an empty hypodermic in his arm. ‘Air,’ he told Joey.
If he’d said ‘bubble,’ Joey told me, I would’ve known what he meant and done something. (‘A bubble to the ticker’ is the usual drug slang for this.)
‘It ain’t supposed to hurt much.’ He pushed the plunger in.
Nothing happened.
Joey thought he’d just interrupted his friend’s shooting up.
‘Sometimes you need two or three,’ the man said, sliding the needle loose, pulling out of the plunger, and injecting himself again.
‘Hey…!’ Joey said, ‘That’s kind of dangerous—’
‘No,’ the man said. ‘It’s what I wanna do.’ He pulled the hypodermic free again, again filled it with air, stuck it back in his arm a third time, and thumbed down the plunger.
He didn’t even get the needle out, Joey said. Suddenly he sat up straight, like someone hit him with a hammer in the small of his back, and he falls over on the mattress.
I hadn’t been in there thirty-five seconds!
I stayed around for another five minutes, to see if I could do anything. I tried to give him mouth-to-mouth artificial respiration. (And doing that with somebody you know is a corpse already is weird!) There was no breath, no heartbeat, no nothing. So I left him there with the needle still hangin’ off his arm.
But he’d just decided it was time to go.
In the almost three years I’ve known him, I’ve seen Joey dragging through the retarded slough of pain that is his biweekly bout of heroine deprivation sickness. I’ve seen him with his arm in bandages, shoulder to wrist, because the night before he’d rushed into the parking lot to help a woman who was being mugged and got his arm and hand knifed open for the effort. And—most recently, after not running into him for three and a half months—I’ve seen him in clean clothes, with a fresh haircut and weighing thirty pounds more than I’d ever seen him before, showing off arms that have doubled their diameter from a vigorous exercise program. He’s been off the street three months, he says, and swears he’s touched no heroin since just after I last saw him.
‘I ain’t sayin’ I don’t take a snort of coke if somebody offers it. But you ain’t gonna get me near that other shit again. I mean, look at me. I’m the best lookin’ guy in here—’ and he grins about the Fiesta—‘long as I don’t smile at nobody.’
5.21 At nineteen, the Master explained, I took stock of my prospects (did some work to find out which of my titled relatives would get what) and realized, by the end, my title would get me little.
Well, not too long ago such things got you killed.
So I abandoned mine.
That simple act of unnaming started something of a fable, which still grows and moves and develops in the city and its suburbs, quite apart from me.
Oh, there’ve been moments when my reputation seemed a light rippling out into darkness, myself its central flame. More often, however, it’s some gnarled, preposterous monster, inhabiting my city with me, whom I’ve never met, but whom, for incomprehensible reasons, people who should know better still mistake for me. It goes about, parodying me with misquotation, mocking me with stupidities and homilies, giving my actions false motives—oh, doing things somewhat as I would do them, yet always for absurd reasons, and finally doing them differently enough that I don’t recognize them when the reports come back.
Of course the misunderstandings brought about by this malignant entity are all laid at my door. I wonder if it isn’t the main reason why, when I decided to open my school, it never occurred to me to settle it in any of the available Neveryóna estates (though I had enough connections there) but rather here, at the far edge of Sallese, where it becomes one with the District of Successful Artisans: here where, nearly ten years ago, in the three adjacent buildings with the yard between, I began to interview, house, and instruct the young people whose parents sent them from all over the city and beyond.
The monster often comes close, but it refuses to confront me personally: I must wait for people to tell me about it. Yet I’m astonished how boldly it trespasses on my personal circle. (Again and again, I meet those who find the monster acceptable—its most disconcerting aspect!) But the doorsteps of Neveryóna, my real home, I now suspect, were what I wanted to protect from the grotesquerie all knowledge becomes when it moves too far from the knower.
5.211 In ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,’ Walter Benjamin quotes the first modern poet of the city: ‘The time is not distant when it will be understood that a literature which refuses to make its way in brotherly concord with science and philosophy is a murderous, suicidal literature.’ This notion was expressed, of course, by various other people besides Baudelaire at various times and places throughout the nineteenth century.
5.22 Youths of my titled class traditionally visit the High Court of Eagles between our fifteenth and twentieth year, the Master said, sponsored by one or another relative already in residence there. We stay between three months and—those of us destined for government work—three years.
There’s a story about me, though it was never told till after I gave up my meaningless honorific:
When my invitation from court arrived (I was seventeen, so runs the tale), I refused to go, declaring that I would seek my education from the land rather than in those gloomy and official chambers. So instead of my courtly visit, I took off on a trip from one end of Nevèrÿon to the other. That’s the story.
No, I never went to court.
Yes, I took a year-plus trip around the country, departing a few months before my eighteenth birthday and returning a few months after my nineteenth.
The distortion, then?
Let me say, rather, when I heard the tale’s first inkling.
I don’t recall how many months after I’d gotten back from my trip. But while I stood in a fountained garden of Sallese, filled with matrons and merchants congregating in honor of someone not me (a party, somehow, I’d felt obliged to attend), a tall, soft-voiced countess (suffering regally the same obligation) with green stones on a leather braid about her somewhat hairy forearm, to whom I’d been outlining some of my immediate plans and past adventures, bent her head to the side and exclaimed: ‘I see what you did now! In place of your traditional time at court, you sought out your education in the world! How wonderful! The empress herself, whose reign is luminous and lively, should encourage the same of all the bright and imaginative young people in Nevèrÿon!’
I thought: What an interesting—and complimentary!—way of stating what I’d done. Was it factual? That didn’t occur to me. Nor, I doubt, to her. Rather the words seemed much like those some traveling tale-teller sometimes tosses out: an extraordinary phrase for the most ordinary occurrence, which, from then on
, makes both occurrence and phrase hold in memory. I smiled. We went on talking. And I had no idea of the story I’d just heard the beginning of.
Perhaps a year later, I first heard the tale complete, in its more or less final form: I’d been asked to speak at another party—a gathering of some of our interested citizens, back when I first had thoughts of running a series of exploratory programs for intelligent young people. (A decade more, and these programs would become the school I now head.) While the smoking brands kept away the insects, a gentleman introduced me to the people sitting on the benches or standing near the tables filled with drink and food about the lawn:
‘…and when he was presented with the traditional invitation to court in his seventeenth year, he declared to his parents that he would not accept it, and demanded that he be sent, instead, on a journey about the land, where he would learn many more things of interest and importance than he might ever glean within court walls. His wise parents consented, no doubt proud to have such an intelligent and resourceful son…’
But here, as it hadn’t that afternoon in the other garden, the pressure of fact assailed me:
No such interview ever took place between me and either my mother or my father. Mother died suddenly when I was nine, while she was away visiting relatives in the Avila. Father’s long and drawn-out illness through my sixteenth year, till at last in murmuring delirium he died, was no doubt one among many reasons that, in the confusions his terminal sickness wreaked on all his affairs, the topic of my official visit to court was indefinitely postponed. I’m sure when he saw me off in my caravan, my mother’s brother, who generously housed me in the months after my father’s death and who, indeed, sponsored my trip, was glad to see me go.
But when I was making plans to leave, I never thought of court. I don’t believe my uncle did either.
There on the lawn, however, as I heard this gentleman refer to that fabulous parental encounter, I remembered the countess: somehow, in my failure to nip the rumor, which had no doubt budded back in that other garden, I saw now that I’d indulged a dishonesty that had returned as this outright false fact. But as the man went on, I also heard his tone of voice: he was speaking not as someone informing strangers of new happenings and new ideas. Rather he was reminding his friends, many of whom were my friends also, of things they already knew.
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