by Mark Merlis
Mr. Fleischer cautioned that “Americans ought to be prepared for loss of life.” He noted that while the White House sought “as precise, short a conflict as possible,” the unknowns—from how American, British and Australian troops would be received to the elements of weather, accident and so-called friendly fire—were numerous.
I don’t need any help knowing what to think about this. All those people who drive around with Support Our Troops bumper stickers are, I am sure, prepared for loss of life, ready to read the weekly roll call of the dead—Juarez, McGiver, Brown—with perfect equanimity. And the mothers: they are prepared, too. They have already, even as they kissed their boys good-bye, clawed out a hollow space in their hearts, so that they will be empty when the word comes.
You think you’re prepared.
Mickey was delivered by caesarean section on Tuesday, April 8, 1952. We knew ahead that I’d need a C-section, so I got to pick the day, Tuesday or Wednesday. I ruled out Wednesday because Wednesday’s child would have been full of woe. He would also, in the draft lottery for boys born in 1952, have had the lucky number 289. Tuesday’s child was supposed to be full of grace, but his number was 35, and he was one of the last sad cohort of boys ever drafted. In the summer of ’72, just a few months after his twentieth birthday.
He had finished boot camp and started his infantry training in North Carolina when Dr. Kissinger intoned, in October, that Peace Was at Hand. Mickey was in country, as they said, somewhere undisclosed in South Vietnam, when the peace talks broke down in December. Then the talks started again, to our great relief, and by the end of January 1973 there was a cease-fire.
Except our doorbell had rung already; it rang in the middle of January. The buzzer to let people in was broken. I had to go down three flights. As I rounded the last turn of the stairs I saw, through the glass door, the uniform. It was late afternoon, already getting dark. But I could make out a uniformed man, headless from my angle, waiting in the vestibule. I didn’t know that was how they were doing it now, if anyone had asked I would have thought they were still sending out Western Union boys with those macabre telegrams: “The Secretary of War regrets …” I hadn’t known, but I knew at once, and I just sat down on the landing, unable to go down the last flight.
The doorbell rang again, I could hear it through the open door of the apartment. Then Jonathan’s voice: “Martha, goddamn it, why don’t you—?” Now I saw the officer’s face; he had crouched down to look up the stairs. He saw me and called through the glass door: “Mrs. Ascher?” I heard Jonathan on the stairs; he reached the landing where I sat and, after a moment, sat down next to me.
We were silent a long while. We just sat, as if you could turn away death by refusing to answer the doorbell. Finally Jonathan went down, but by the time he got there the officer was out of sight. Jonathan went out the door and didn’t come back for hours.
He had caught up with the officer down the street, he said. Mickey had been shot. He was by himself for some reason, just Mickey and a Vietcong alone together in a clearing. One shot to the head, they were sure he had died instantly. I learned later that the parents usually got some sort of letter, giving a little more detail about what happened and how valiant their boy was. Maybe we did. Jonathan always picked up the mail, maybe he got the letter and spared me the details. So I am left with just a picture of Mickey in fatigues and another boy in black pajamas, facing each other in a clearing.
The body was shipped to Williams-Cabell on East 38th Street. We went and had the required colloquy with the man in the black suit. He whispered some rehearsed language about Michael’s sacrifice for his nation and said he needed to call right away if we were going to want the military honors, they were kind of backed up just then.
“The what?” Jonathan said.
“Well, you know, they fold the flag and present it to the …” He looked away from me. “To the mother, and they play Taps.”
“We can’t do that, Jesus,” Jonathan said. “Imagine people sitting there and …”
He didn’t need to finish, I knew what he imagined. Our friends all sitting around a flag-draped coffin and thinking, “war criminal.” They knew he’d been drafted, they all commiserated with us, but something inside them would whisper that any boy who’d been to Vietnam had to be a monster, the place turned boys into monsters. Maybe they were even right. The boy-man I kissed good-bye at Fort Dix, with his taut shoulders and his nervous smirk: how do I know what he might have done? If his buddies were doing it, or some officer ordered it, how do I know he wasn’t torching villages and bayoneting children? Because he was my baby? All the monsters were somebody’s baby.
No, we weren’t members of any church, Mickey hadn’t been baptized or bar mitzvahed or anything else except tonsillectomied. No, there wasn’t any family plot.
We hadn’t talked about what to do; we had ridden over in a taxi in silence, our permanent silence. Even then, in the office, we weren’t able to think about it. The man in the black suit was unperturbed. “I understand, I understand,” he whispered.
Finally, I said, just to settle things, “Cremated, I guess we want him cremated.” I closed my eyes, picturing the flame.
Jonathan said, sharply, “We don’t cremate.” “We,” I realized, meaning Jews.
I was ready to say that Mickey wasn’t a Jew, Jonathan might have taken him over in life, but he wasn’t Jonathan’s anymore. But instead I said, “All right, buried. And with full military honors.” The man in black turned to Jonathan for confirmation, and I said, “I am his mother. I brought him into this world …” Brought him in on the wrong day. And would see him out of it with the flag and everything else he had … earned.
I said I wanted to see him, but I was smoothly dissuaded. We stepped outside. While Jonathan looked for a cab I glanced at the basement windows, just caught a glimpse of white tile and naked bulbs. I remember thinking: he’s down there. I should see him. But Jonathan was already holding the cab door open, waiting for me to slide in.
On the appointed day we took the Long Island Rail Road to the Pinelawn Station, just after Farmingdale, walked the half mile or so to the gate of the veterans’ cemetery. We were led to the grave site by a man with the smeared countenance of a figure in a Brueghel crowd scene. We hadn’t, in the end, asked our friends; we were too craven. My niece Emily—Mickey’s favorite cousin—was in California, too far to come. Jonathan wouldn’t hear of calling his brother, Bernie. So at the grave the crowd consisted of the man in the black suit and three boys in uniform, one of them clutching a bugle. Under a canopy was Mickey’s coffin, draped in a flag; far too many folding chairs were lined up facing a hole in the ground.
Jonathan murmured, “We should have had platshkes”
“What?”
“Professional mourners. You give ’em a few kopeks and they wail.”
I went to the coffin and touched it.
You watch on TV the women who go to reclaim the bodies. Perhaps the victims of some tyrant, exhumed from their mass grave and lined up in rows. The women walk up and down, slowly checking the corpses, calmly as if they were cruising the aisles in a supermarket. If one of them finds her son or husband, knows him by a ring or a tatter of the shirt he wore that last morning, she will have found only a heap of bones, already half dissolved into dust. But she will have something to touch. I touched a wooden box, on its lid a polyester flag. I sat down next to Jonathan.
The man in black looked around uneasily. Hadn’t we brought anybody—priest, rabbi, shaman? At last Jonathan mumbled, “I guess I should say a few words.” Oh, I could hear them coming. A diatribe about the war and Nixon and Kissinger and …
“Mickey was a beautiful boy, such a beautiful boy, my darling.” Jonathan said this to the soldiers, almost conversationally. “All these years, I’ve gone out every day trying to slay dragons, and it was all for him. You don’t know it, you think it’s all about principles and vocation, and it’s just about making the world safe for your kid. You’d wrestle angels if
you had to.”
The soldiers looked down at the ground; perhaps one of them suppressed a snicker. I thought, poor babies, the things you must have to listen to, all your days washed in strangers’ tears for strangers. Then I thought, poor babies? They get to ride around going to funerals, and it’s never their own.
Jonathan went on. “Now I don’t give a fuck.” The soldiers stirred uneasily. This was perhaps not the funeral oratory they were accustomed to. “I could close my eyes and if, when I opened them, the world was gone I wouldn’t give a fuck.”
I felt the same way, of course, with this difference: Jonathan seemed to believe that, if the world ended, he would still be here, eyes open. The witness, the dichter.
I thought he was just getting started, but he abruptly sat down. The soldiers looked around, bewildered: was that it? After a minute they went about their drill. A little ballet of folding up the flag, performed so mechanically they might have been figures on a Swiss clock. One boy handed me the flag. He was perfectly expressionless: he didn’t look sad or grim or sympathetic. I suppose they taught him this, to make of himself a blank screen on which the next of kin could project whatever feelings they brought to the occasion. Finally the boy with the bugle played Taps, so terribly slowly.
I had thought it was right that Mickey should have a soldier’s burial. But when I sat there, clutching a flag I didn’t know what to do with, when I heard the boy stutteringly play Taps, I realized: what I had done was give him over to them utterly. He had been a soldier for just five months—a brief awful episode at the end of a life that should have just been starting—but these strangers were burying a soldier, in a row of soldiers’ graves.
Mr. Bush stayed largely out of sight until his speech, save for a brief meeting Wednesday morning with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the secretary of homeland security, Tom Ridge, to review New York City’s needs to prepare for any new terrorist attacks.
That word again: prepare. All the nonsense about duct tape and canned goods, preached to us by men who prepare by descending into their bunkers. I prepare, as people always have, by going on about my business. Which today consists of trying, one more time, to paint a dead daffodil.
In the days since I brought it home it has gone crisp and translucent as parchment, with pale intricate hatching. The trumpet, once golden against the white petals, has taken on their pallor, only a slender halo of yellow left, like a last faint breath.
I have sketched the daffodil over and over, turned it a few degrees, tried it from another angle, but I still can’t get it right. My pictures are deader than the flower. I should have left it where it was, at St. Anselm’s, painted it in the garden where it was innocently going about its business of dying.
It has no context here. I guess I could supply the context. An extinguished candle, a scattering of coins, a skull: all the components of that classic genre of still life known as a vanitas. Except these cruel admonitions about the vanity of human wishes always have live flowers, not dead ones—that’s the whole point, that the flowers go on and we don’t.
Oh. Here it is, here is what I have not been able to shake off. I do not believe the flowers will go on without me. What do I suppose will kill them? Terrorists, global warming, nuclear winter? Asteroids, a burned-out sun, a jaded God? Oh, could anything be more self-centered! I do not believe that when I am gone the world will go on.
I do not believe that Mickey will go on, that is it. There was a world in which Mickey was a contingent possibility, then a world in which he breathed, then a world without him. My world, from which my baby is a constant absence. And when I die no one will feel his absence anymore. I will take Mickey with me as surely as if I had perished with him still kicking in my womb. The true unMickey: he will not even be dead.
Only Philip Marks could save us, Mickey and me. If he cared to mention us.
FOUR
After Mickey’s funeral we just went home. If we’d been Jews we’d have eaten smoked fish and covered the mirrors. If we’d been Episcopalians we’d have drunk martinis. But we were nothing. Maybe there are couples brought together by loss, but I think they would have had to be together in the first place. Without the shared enterprise of Mickey, Jonathan and I were stranded on separate islands, living in a household in which every connection except habit had atrophied.
No, I lived there, drawing vegetables, while Jonathan was out more and more. I even stopped making dinner, to our mutual relief. Why didn’t we break up? Maybe because it would have cost too much: someone would have had to leave an apartment whose rent was controlled in 1951. Stuff would have had to be divvied up, packed. We were just too tired.
One morning a few months after Mickey died, I was cooking Jonathan’s eggs—perhaps the last ritual we hadn’t discarded. Jonathan said, “They’ve done something to the goddamn paper.” Almost whispering.
“What?”
He held it out to me. “Look.”
I looked. It was the paper. The daily Watergate stories, the mysterious statistics on the sports pages.
“You see?” he said.
“See what?”
“They’ve done something to it!” Shouting now. “There are no words there, just these lines and squiggles. Why are they doing this to me? There’s something they don’t want me to know.”
After some frenzied investigation, we established that They had also rendered everything from cereal boxes to Proust incomprehensible.
“You can read it? You can read it?” he kept screaming. I almost wished I couldn’t, wished that They really had magically effaced every text in the apartment. And had gone on to wreck the Faherty’s sign we could see from the window or the board in front of St. Anselm’s announcing next week’s sermon topic. But They hadn’t. I could read all these things, and Jonathan couldn’t.
He went on running around the apartment, shouting and growling, for another minute or two and then—at the threshold of his office—just stopped. Looked at all the books and the magazines and the papers. He fell to his knees, mouth still open but soundless now.
I walked him to the sofa and we sat, holding hands for the first time in so many months. He stared straight ahead.
After a while I got up and called his brother Bernie, the neurologist, in Boston. Bernie listened and then said. “That’s it? That’s all you’ve noticed?”
“I guess. So far.”
“No vision problems, motion? He’s not in pain? He talks okay, he understands what you say?”
“Yes.”
“His face isn’t distorted—drooping on one side, or …?”
“No”
“Can he write?”
“Write?”
“I’ll hold on while you see if he can write.”
This seemed so absurd. I was sure, if I asked Jonathan to see if he could write, he’d just start screaming again. I said nonchalantly, “Jonathan, can you make a note that we’re out of milk?”
He looked over at me, a bit dazed, then automatically picked up a pen and paper from the side table and wrote the note. He looked at it with wonder.
“He can write,” I said.
“And he can’t read whatever he just wrote. Wow, I’ve read about this but I’ve never seen it. Alexia without agraphia. Probably a PCA stroke.”
“A stroke?”
“Yeah. In a blood vessel way at the back of his head. You need to get him to an ER pronto, but it could be this is all that’s going to happen just now. You get him over to—what’s close, St. Vincent’s? Meanwhile I’ll call—oh, maybe Sid Greenbaum, to get over there and take a look.”
We went to the ER. Dr. Greenbaum came and took a look; some hours later he was displaying to me Jonathan’s electroencephalogram, an endless sheet of paper with parallel, spiky lines on it. “I was hoping to see something, right here,” Greenbaum said, pointing at one of the lines. Of course they were as indecipherable to me as the lines of the Times now were for Jonathan. “I know there’s a lesion in the left occipital lobe, but it’s too small
to pick up. Which is a good thing—if it were big enough to detect there’d probably be a lot more wrong with him. Anyway, this syndrome he’s got, what happens is that the right and left sides of his brain are kind of out of sync now. The right side is seeing all the letters, but it can’t get the message over to the left side. And it’s only the left side that knows all those funny shapes are words.”
“What can we do?”
“Nothing. We’ll keep him here a couple days, see if anything else goes on. Then you can probably take him home.”
“What can we do?” I said it more sharply. “About his reading?”
“Nothing, probably. I’m sorry. But other than that he seems to be okay. Might put him on Coumadin.”
“That’s a drug?”
“Uh-huh. Try to fend off the next stroke.”
The next, he said.
And maybe it would have, but the drug—which they also, I gather, use for poisoning rats—gave Jonathan blinding headaches. So he stopped taking it, and in a couple of months the next stroke duly arrived and he was dead. But of course he was essentially dead that first morning when he opened the Times and discovered that he had lost his whole world.
Still, in those last weeks our routine went more or less unchanged. While I made his eggs, he sat in the kitchen—not reading the sports pages, of course, just sucking on his Pall Mall and mumbling at me. Then, as he ate, I would read the Times aloud to him, doling out morsels I thought would interest him. Avoiding the ones that might enrage him, although the line between interest and enrage was pretty fuzzy.
Once or twice, early on, I would ask if he wanted me to read the sports pages. He would look at me with bewilderment and dismay. I realized I wasn’t supposed to know about the sports pages. This was some sort of secret vice, even though he exhibited it every morning for years. Except, really, his expression—so far as I ever learned to read his expressions—was more like: why in the hell would I care about the sports pages? I may be illiterate but I’m not a cretin.