Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

  Standing there stuck mid-sentence when she met with it, the mountainous black man’s gaze made Rose a woman again. The whole roomful of jostling fools might as well have seen her naked at that instant—she felt as though she were. In his look any number of thresholds were cleared instantly. Douglas was ex-army and wore his police uniform militarily clean, militarily natty. Rose realized at once she’d been living, for decades, in a persistent state of cultivated hysteria about the U.S. authorities infiltrating their meetings, infiltrating their ranks, and what a relief it was to simply acknowledge one such actual authority undisguised, in uniform, and telling her at a glance he knew she was a dirty Red. Anyhow, the authorities hounding Rose were the ones within the ranks, always telling her she wasn’t Red enough because she couldn’t go the whole nine yards of Soviet bullshit. Here was how Douglas Lookins confirmed everything about her in a glance: His appetite said she was still a woman and his disgust said she was still Red.

  Everyone thought it was an affair between Jew and black but it wasn’t. It was between Commie and cop.

  Two competing operators on the same beat, the same circuit of pavement.

  Albert had tried to explain to her the shame of being a noncombatant during the war and she’d scowled at his failure to see the manliness, the honor, in pacifism. Now she loved a man in uniform.

  If Carl Sandburg had written a six-volume Douglas Lookins she’d have not only read it but erected a shrine in her foyer.

  But Douglas Lookins had Diane Lookins and Cicero Lookins at home. Too bad for Rose. On this matter he was like a soldier, serving without judgment, obedient to the letter of duty, the spirit having vacated the premises of his marriage however many years before. Rose was prohibited from meeting Diane Lookins. From even asking, after the first round of questions met with clipped replies. Douglas Lookins got to know Miriam Zimmer, barely, for Miriam was less and less at home, franchising herself to the kitchen table and basement of the Himmelfarbs, to the schoolyards and soda shops and then to Greenwich Village and whatever lay beyond the horizon of her sophistication. Miriam had the power to throw it in her mother’s face and yet simultaneously inform her not at all of what it consisted.

  Douglas Lookins indicated minimal interest. He was not in the market to father a white teenage bohemian. He was not on the prowl for a second family.

  Rose Zimmer, however, got to know Cicero Lookins a great deal more. Douglas introduced the two of them at the library, quite deliberately, a day when he knew Rose volunteered there doing after-school tutoring. He presented the chubby Cicero as a problem for a local expert to address: This was a kid who needed books, badly. Listen now, boy, this lady will tell you how it works here. It was neither a gesture of closeness between the lovers nor the imposition of a burden, merely pragmatic sense. A child had appeared in the Lookins house with a mind his own mother couldn’t fathom. His father had no better luck. Soon enough it was as though this had been the affair’s higher purpose, as though Douglas Lookins had been unconsciously seeking this consummation. Every part of Rose’s defiant idealism could be enlisted in helping her lieutenant’s boy’s intellectual apparatus come alive.

  Here was what Abraham Lincoln wanted from her all along.

  They could start with emancipation and civil rights and then she’d bring him along later to labor and capital.

  The revolution was actually a secret occurrence going on just under the skin of the betrayed century. An operation—yes, a dialectic—among two and then three persons, of divergent skin colors, of apparently opposed ideological beliefs.

  1954–1962. In this case, the tombstone’s end date being that of the very last time Rose and Douglas had gone to bed together, a happening which in the latter years of the relationship—her word, forget anyone else’s—had become scarce, sometimes months between. Rose felt him not so much turning away from her charms, these steadily softened and blurred, nor from his own appetite, which did the same, as she felt him sinking backward from her, into the weight of his own footsteps. Sinking into his life’s proper role, responsibilities like slow quicksand, quicksand working over a duration of decades. Diane Lookins was sick. Sick without the drama of death, just slow degeneration, a hastening of the mortality outrunning them all. Lupus. Rose learned the name of her illness not from Douglas but from Cicero and knew that Douglas had never spoken that name less from pity than honor. Not wishing to excuse himself to Rose by offering the unanswerable: a sick wife.

  Rose let him sink away.

  Rose clung to Cicero.

  Rose became ever more the bane of the board of the Queensboro Public Library. One of these days, they joked, they’d have to elect her to join them just to shut her up.

  Rose railed against Miriam. She who, like Douglas, left Rose more and more alone. She for whom, unlike Douglas, Rose could locate a voice with which to rail. She tilted as her own mother had tilted at her, only translated from the Yiddish.

  Rose never loved this way before or after.

  And then, the third and last of Rose’s postwar, post-Albert husbands, or fourth if you counted Lincoln. The one Miriam brought home. Rose’s fate was generic, this she understood. A divorced mother of a single daughter, the provider of a man-absented childhood, such a mother was destined, when that daughter ventured out and brought home a man of her own, to enter into a marriage of sorts with the son-in-law. The son-in-law couldn’t merely be approved and tolerated—he needed to be secretly married to the mother in the soul of the mother and the daughter both. Not because the mother desired it, though she might, but because the daughter demanded it, in an unconscious action of correction. The mother was a problem to be solved. Yours ran from you, Rose, but I’ve fixed it now. Mine won’t run. You can quit bringing home the iceman or outraging the neighbors with Douglas. It was an action of finishing. The mother’s failed enterprise sealed and forgiven. I’ve brought one home to you, Rose.

  And so it must be a total fait accompli. The Irish folksinger was never given an audition, never brought around as a boy who might be rejected, a mere date. The first time Rose was to meet Tommy Gogan she was informed she should set a dinner table because Miriam was bringing home someone special, and Rose, falling into the spell, into the script, set a table and prepared a dinner. Absurd command obeyed completely. She found herself worrying over her own dress and comportment, blackening the gray at her temples as she’d only very recently learned to do. Miriam arrived separately, half an hour before their guest. Over a shared cigarette on the kitchen steps—Rose and Miriam suddenly capable of admitting to each other that they both secretly smoked!—Miriam slammed the door on any chance Rose could modulate what was to be enacted here this evening.

  “Mother, I’ve met the man I’m going to marry.”

  “I see.” Rose recognized this for what it was, a motto, a banner waved. The words were not to be quarreled with. The way Miriam pronounced them, etched as in flames, defiance masked as jubilation, the only question was what they left her to do besides fall over in a faint when the man in this equation walked through the door.

  “You don’t yet, but you will when he gets here.”

  Be unreservedly happy for me, Miriam’s triumphalism commanded. And never have intercourse again!

  Before he appeared, Miriam sharpened her pitch. Rose would be delighted, her daughter assured her, to find Tommy Gogan was no unwashed beatnik, was a folk musician not in the callow college-dormitory sense onto which Rose had heaped such scorn, every time she glimpsed Miriam’s MacDougal Street circle, but an upstanding and engaged protest singer, and soon also with a record deal. A deal was in the works, Miriam promised. Organizer with a guitar, Miriam called him, her appeal giving form to an expectation that hung thickly between mother and daughter: that it lay with Miriam to find some way to bear forward Rose’s urgencies, to resurrect them from the Socialist sarcophagus. By the time their cigarettes were extinguished and lipstick was reapplied, Rose was malleable as wax, could offer no protest to the protest singer.

&nb
sp; Why not be happy for Miriam?

  In fact a folksinger, one either of the unwashed or prep-school variety, was hardly Rose’s worst scenario. After Miriam’s trip to Germany, of which she’d declined to make even the most cursory report, unenunciated dread hovered at the possibility that the girl had made a crazy alliance with her father’s history and was to be drawn behind an Iron Curtain of the soul.

  For years after Albert was gone Rose continued dragging Miriam to her grandmother Alma’s apartment, insisting the girl know where she came from, never thinking her reward might be to have Miriam fall into a dream of Meissen china and Niederegger marzipan and grand pianos and politics mulled over snifters of brandy.

  Germany. Let it not steal one more thing from Rose’s century than it already had.

  No, the Irish folksinger wasn’t Rose’s worst fear. So it wouldn’t be a Jew she married—little surprise. Miriam, since graduating from the Himmelfarb College of Assimilation, had run with the uncircumcised as if in a program of renunciation. Rose had watched as Miriam shrugged off the petitions of her Angrush cousins—Rose’s sisters’ daughters, all marrying well, dentists and lawyers and diamond men, and whispering with Miriam to ask when she’d do the same, and how Miriam laughed them off. How Miriam mocked the petitions of Cousin Lenny to remember where she was from, to think of the promised land even as she prepared for world revolution. In this Rose had no particular ground on which to stand, no one but herself to thank. So Rose’s sisters would be denied the chance to gloat that Miriam had found a Jew for herself despite Rose’s Godlessness. They’d gloat instead that Rose had reaped what she sowed—she should consider herself lucky Miriam hadn’t brought home a schvartze! This wasn’t a disaster. This was a kind of satisfaction.

  Tommy Gogan came in and kissed Rose’s hand. He’d put on a tie beneath his denim jacket and he knew to take off his cloth cap and the tiny burr of his accent was, if a slight put-on, nevertheless a million miles from the slack, thuggish tongue that arose typically in the collision of Irish parents and Queens streets. Underneath, his ginger hair was combed and not too long ago cut—he ran his fingers through to revive it from the pressure of the cap, showing a charming eagerness in presenting himself to his prospective mother-in-law.

  Tommy Gogan had, as Rose’s sisters would have said of a baby born under dubious circumstances yet nevertheless to be embraced as marvelously adequate, two arms and two legs. He had two eyes, and a nose in the middle of his face. He wanted to marry Miriam. He talked of himself as a fighter for peace and equality, not immodestly. Yes, he came from the ranks of the rather corny brothers and had appeared with them on The Steve Allen Show, but his own art was less traditional in the blarney sense, more directed to international themes and American styles, specifically The Blues, which term he pronounced as if Firmly Capitalized. Where had Rose heard this before?

  The dungarees and dust-bowl heroes, the fershlugginer blues: The children of MacDougal Street were busy refurbishing the old fantasy. The bumpkin arts, the nobility of the country poor, the redemption lurking across some agrarian horizon just outside the city’s bounds. The Popular Front all over again!

  Yet Rose allowed herself, the entire evening, one single flare of sarcasm. Really, Rose could ratify falling for Tommy Gogan, a threadbare Lincoln type, a Tom Joad, and no more misguided a choice than the man she’d married. For once let Rose keep her tongue. Expected to pepper the boy with queries, apply the third degree, she merely poured the wine and listened, as Tommy Gogan’s slight vanities swelled under the steady application of Miriam’s adulation. Rose schooled herself to honor what had consented to appear in her pitiable apartment, with its shelf of library books arranged in the order they were to be returned, with each room darkened apart from the one she moved through, to save on the electricity bill. An old woman’s apartment, she understood. The two could have run off together. Instead they’d come calling, as Rose had come to Alma. Let Rose find gratitude that a world still existed for Miriam to dwell in with such innocence that she could make each of Rose’s mistakes again. In the miraculous hands of the young these were not yet mistakes. The two were in love.

  Rose’s grievances momentarily drowned in a sea of time, in the sameness years imposed on every human situation.

  Were Rose’s sisters, and Miriam’s cousins, those dull daughters, those aspirant bourgeois, so right after all? Husband, a life’s compass?

  The whole thing was a matter of permanent wonder.

  Miriam and Tommy spoke of causes and protest. Civil rights, Martin Luther King, for whom Tommy and his brothers had warmed up a crowd of Harvard students. Their politics floated in the air, unmoored in theory or party—a cloud politics. Miriam and Tommy were intent on changing the world, and why not, when they themselves were so readily changed? Brought to boiling by the fact of another. Limbs unable to quit tangling long enough to lift their forks and eat the chicken and egg noodles Rose had prepared. She suspected the lad’s guitar was gathering dust lately—well, the better to play dust-bowl songs when he picked it up. You discovered yourself and what really mattered only after you passed through the lens of the fairy tale, imposed on every human female and male alike, that someone existed out in the forest of the world for you to love and marry. So let them each cross that threshold and encounter themselves in the light on the other side. Rose, therefore, only interrogated the courtier once in the manner that had surely been expected of her. It was here that she succumbed to her instant of sarcasm, though was it even sarcasm if no one present knew what you were talking about? The joke was for her alone.

  “This is all well and good, young man, but let me ask you one thing.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Don’t call me ma’am or for God’s sake Mrs. Zimmer. I’m Rose.”

  “Certainly, Rose.”

  “Tell me this one thing. How would you feel about a chicken farm in New Jersey, should it come to that?”

  4 Tommy Gogan’s Second Album

  After all, after all and all considered, there is no possibility of saying no when Rye calls you at the rooming house where you must use the telephone in the corridor where any other laborer might be listening, not that they’d much care, and says, Little brother, good brother, you had rightly best get the first plane down here because there is something about a halfway-decent Irish harmony act that at the moment has the beatnik girls soaking their underthings wringing wet and it is more than good brother Peter and I can possibly exploit by our lonesome selves. Every night we ask ourselves why destiny should have excluded you from this occasion, however long said occasion should happen to last. Forget bricks, please. Forget Canada. And forget the Delta blues. You are a certified County Antrim primitive, or you will be by the time you get here. We have you fitted for a brocade vest and have in fact informed our manager—that’s right, good brother Thomas, I said manager, and he’s a strange little Jewish fellow in a turtleneck—that our first recording contract ought to have places for three Gogan brothers to sign (Rye spelled the name out, “G-O-G-A-N, not Geoghan anymore, we’ve been advised to simplify it”) for we’ve got a third and he’s got a high sweet voice that completes our harmonies, and he only happens to be on a hiatus. That’s right, I told them you were on a hee-ate-us, Tommy, just a wee stretch of the verrrr-ities, I insisted we’d always been a threesome. If you think I’m talking funny, Tommy, cor, you should see how quickly you’ll be talking funny too, when you see the effect it has on the wee lasses in their berets and sunglasses-o. For there was only one Dylan Thomas around these parts, not enough to go around and he likely couldn’t hoist up the old blushing johnson anymore from the way he was carrying on at the end and so poor Mr. Dylan Thomas left his female constituency a wee bit unsatisfied. Therefore what he sowed so shall we reap. I said rrrreap, brother. For their knickers come off at a glance.

  No, it is not possible to have refused Rye at the prospect of that call, and who would have wished to? Not the twenty-year-old Toronto bricklayer—born and raised in Ulster, y
es, but then few were the Canadians upon whom no greater claim of citizenship elsewhere lay, whether borne lightly or heavily. No, certainly not this bricklayer, he who to take the call leaned on the wall beside the telephone in the corridor of Powell’s Residence for Men, in northeastern Toronto, a mostly Scottish suburb in this vast mosaic of suburbs, where the frowning Scots-Canuck landlady had to her chagrin found herself housemother to a fresh contingent of Irish bricklayers, including himself, and she was not a friendly or forgiving sort of housemother either, least of all when it came to micks. Here in her corridor where he clutched the telephone’s heavy receiver with knuckles and fingertips so dry and cracked from the laying-in and smoothing of mortar that he doubted the chances he’d lift up his Silvertone tonight after dinner. Even if willing to brave the shushing disapprobation of Mrs. Powell, rising through the transom into the room he shared with George Stack, should his and George’s harmonizing voices drift above a certain volume, a measurement verifiable only by her. Often he suspected Mrs. Powell hovered at their door just waiting, such pleasure did she seem to derive from the action.

  Apart from his mate George Stack, Tommy Gogan couldn’t any longer recall the names of the other brickies and hod carriers there at Mrs. Powell’s. For all he knew they still lived and worked there as he’d last seen them, a scattering of young northern Protestants who, by dint of an uncle’s letter or because of a friendly tip from a beaverish fellow at a settlement house’s labor office, on being viewed en masse were seen as unemployed men to be sorted into professions according to their birth nationalities and creeds. So the Irish had been fated to assemble the dull brick two-stories with which this young city was hurriedly fleshing itself, and in the process to have whatever was native in them be leached by Ontario’s winter light.