Another Insane Devotion

by Peter Trachtenberg

  In former years, F.’s father had been prone to rages in which he’d rail at his wife and shove the children around. The threats he’d made sounded preposterous to me, but they must have been frightening and deeply embarrassing to three naive adolescent girls staring mutely as a red-faced grown-up told them that Castro was going to march in and shove his cigar up their asses. Now there was no trace of the old ferocity. His voice never rose above a murmur. Still, as we were talking in the kitchen, the refrigerator let out a squeal, probably something wrong with the fan, and abruptly the old man bared his teeth—bared them like an animal—and slammed it with the flat of his hand. “Bastard!” His eyes met mine for a moment, then looked away.

  A few months after this, he fell ill. Probably he had been ill all that time but had refused to admit it. He couldn’t eat, and he hurt everywhere. F. went down to Lexington to help care for him but, after a week, felt she had to go back to work. No sooner had her plane landed than she was suddenly struck by the certainty he was about to die. In a panic, she flew back once more and got there in time to sit by his bedside with her sisters as the last bit of life was twisted out of him.

  During the time F.’s father was dying, I was sometimes petty with her. She was away, and I wanted her with me. She was sad and withdrawn, and I wanted her to be cheerful. Even now the memory of my behavior shames me. It also puzzles me. My mother had died only five years earlier, and for a long time afterward I’d walked through the world in a dream and bristled at any claim other people made on my attention; you’d think I would have understood what F. was going through. I’ve been told this amnesia isn’t unique, and I can only relate it to the amnesia that comes over women after they give birth. The only way to bear this thing is to forget it. Of course, a woman who’s had children can always choose not to have any more. But when it comes to death, you can’t push away your plate and say, “No thanks, I couldn’t eat another bite.” The death kitchen goes on serving.

  We put off our wedding six months. Late that spring we went back to Kentucky to clean out the old man’s house. Before we left, we held a small memorial. I don’t remember if F. bought another ham; it would have been fitting. But there was nice food, and wine and flowers, and we covered the dingy furniture with sheets, which produced an effect that was both austere and ethereal. Not many people came, apart from the family. At the climax of the afternoon, F. put on a tape we’d made of music he’d liked: a cut of a Scots marching band whose shrilling pipes lifted the hair on the back of your neck; the theme song of the old TV show The Avengers; some big band jazz he would have listened to as a young man on a last leave before shipping out for Italy, where most of his unit was wiped out at Anzio. From that same period, there was “I’ll Be Seeing You,” sung by Jo Stafford. Stafford’s version may be the saddest song in the American songbook, saturated with yearning, slow as a dirge. Why does she sing it so slowly, you wonder? But, of course, “I’ll Be Seeing You” is a song of the war years, and it’s clear that Stafford is singing to a man who won’t be coming back. She knows it, and he knows it. She’s singing a love song for the dead. This accounts for the omnipresence of its object. The singer sees him everywhere—the children’s carousel, the chestnut tree, the wishing well. Nothing like that happens when you just break up with somebody. In your imagination, she is where you know her to be: going out with an asshole she met at El Teddy’s. Only the dead can be everywhere, and that’s because they are nowhere.

  I made the tape hastily, without EQ, so some tracks were much louder than others. Somehow I managed to lose several seconds of “Nessun Dorma.” I hate to think what F.’s father would have said about that, but none of the guests seemed to really notice. F. and I may have been the only people there who were listening to the music as music rather than as the background for a gathering that couldn’t decide whether it was sacred or social. F. said that her father would also have listened to the music as music and gotten angry with anyone who tried to talk over it. His remarks would have been restricted to a running commentary on the soundtrack: “‘Nessun Dorma.’ ‘No one shall sleep.’ From Puccini’s immortal Turandot.” But over time the commentary would have become increasingly emotional, until he was pacing the living room in agitation and, eventually, in rage.

  The guests stole out until it was just F., her sisters, and me. The tape continued to play. The final track was a song F.’s father was unlikely to have listened to, Iggy Pop’s snarling cover of “Real Wild Child.” But F. had asked me to put it on the tape, feeling it expressed some aspect of his personality. Maybe it was the part of him that had bared his teeth in the kitchen, though I would have said that was just a passing convulsion of rage. You could imagine Iggy baring his teeth as he sang, but baring them the way you do when you’re biting into a steak, a nice, thick, bloody one, the blood running down his chin. F. got up to dance, and I joined her. She’s a terrific dancer, lithe and sexy and peppy and funny. One moment she’d be rolling her hips like a girl in a cage and the next she’d be prancing about on tiptoe, and she inspired me to be almost as uninhibited. It didn’t occur to me that it might be inappropriate to dance at a memorial, especially the memorial of someone who, if he’d lived a few months longer, would have been my father-in-law. In former times, the Nyakyusa or Ngombe people of Tanzania were said to do this as a matter of practice, and their funerals, according to the anthropologist Monica Wilson, were correspondingly jolly:Dancing is led by young men dressed in special costumes of ankle bells and cloth skirts, often holding spears and leaping wildly about. Women do not dance, but some young women move about among the dancing youths, calling the war cry and swinging their hips in a rhythmic fashion. . . . The noise and excitement grow and there are no signs of grief. Yet when Wilson asked the onlookers to explain the scene, they always replied, “They are mourning the dead.”

  Turandot is Puccini’s last opera. He died before he could finish it, and it was given its present ending by a second composer. When the opera was first performed at La Scala, on April 25, 1926, the orchestra fell silent in the middle of the third act, and the conductor Arturo Toscanini is said to have laid down his baton and addressed the audience: “Qui finisce l’opera las-ciata incompiuta dal Maestro, perchè a questo punto il Maestro è morte” (“Here ends the opera left incomplete by the Maestro, because at this point the Maestro died”). The curtain fell.

  F. and I almost postponed our wedding a second time, since a few days before it was supposed to take place a pair of hijacked jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center. After a day or two of indecision—during which we fretted about how petty it was to even be thinking about a wedding when almost 3,000 of our neighbors had just been murdered before our eyes—we were persuaded to go ahead: our friends who lived in the city said they needed us to go ahead. As one of them put it, “I need a party to go to.” If I’d had any real doubts, I might have been swayed by the stories of the people who jumped from the burning towers holding hands. I don’t know if any of them were married to each other; some of them may have been lovers, as often happens in workplaces. For months and years, they’d kept their relation secret, but in a matter of minutes the need for secrecy was over, and they jumped together, in full view of the world, holding hands. A man and a woman leaping off a burning building while holding hands struck me as a metaphor for marriage, the clause in the vow that goes “till death shall us part.” But this probably says something about my laziness and the shortness of my attention span. It took only ten seconds for the people who jumped from the World Trade Center to hit the ground, and that’s not a long time to hold hands.

  I could tell I was nearing the airport when I began to pass beachfront lined with condos that leaned contemptuously over the undeveloped real estate of the Atlantic. What must the tenants who lived to seaward feel when they stepped out onto their balconies? Satisfaction at their unobstructed view of white sand and blue-green water or irritation that they had to share it with their neighbors or, worse, the tiny freeloaders strolling down the pu
blic beach with zinc oxide on their noses? Across the highway were golf courses and an amusement park full of corkscrewing waterslides and a Medieval Times restaurant. Curious about what a medieval menu would look like—larks’ tongues? chine of beef?—I later checked out the online reviews. One visitor said the dungeon had been a letdown.

  I parked and walked to the terminal. It was almost sunset but still warm. The passengers at the ticket counter wore shorts and sandals and were tanned various reddish browns. I’m sure I was too; I tan easily. If I ran into people I knew when I got up north, they’d exclaim at how good I looked. Up there, it would already be getting cold, and some mornings there’d be frost on the ground. If I were still living at home, I’d be harvesting the late vegetables. Biscuit liked to watch me do that. On seeing me head for the yard with a spade and hand rake, she’d follow me closely, which used to puzzle me until I realized she was probably waiting to see if I’d dig up any small rodents. You see what a clever cat she was. She’d sniff the roots I tugged from the ground, plump and matted with earth. But she always turned away. They were only beets, and what could be less interesting to a cat than a dirty beet?

  Bitey was never the same after her illness. She still enjoyed menacing Tina but could no longer do it with her old élan. After one assault, F. lost patience with her and, seizing her by the back of the neck, dragged her the length of the kitchen, meaning to lock her in the basement as punishment. She knew better than to try picking her up, but there was a time when she wouldn’t even have been able to scruff her. Bitey screamed in protest, her limbs splayed impotently on the tiled floor. Probably compounding her wretchedness was the fact that Suki was following her closely and sniffing her butt, and Tina, her intended victim, was watching with interest. A humiliated cat probably emits a special tincture of shame that its fellows find deeply pleasurable.

  Some months later, while I was petting her, she bit my hand with more than usual ferocity. She wouldn’t release me. She just glowered up at me with those absinthe-colored eyes; it really hurt. At last I gave her a swat, and she sprang away. But one of her fangs remained lodged in the meat between my thumb and forefinger. It stayed there only a moment, then fell out by itself. Not long after this, she died.

  As I held her in the vet’s office, she cried in fear. The sound was like a small horn playing a single plaintive note. No amount of soothing could make her stop. The vet said Bitey might be hallucinating. Of course, you hear of humans doing that at the end, as they pass into what may be the next world or one of the worlds they traveled through on their way to this moment. On his deathbed F.’s father called out for his mother. She’d died when he was a small boy, disappearing into the hospital to be treated for something no one bothered to explain to him and never coming home. How long had it been since he’d called her name? All those people we keep folded inside us, filed away like old deeds. We can’t bear to throw anything away. As awful as it was that my cat was dying, it seemed worse to me that she was dying in fear. “It’s okay, honey,” I kept murmuring to her as she let out those monotonous dying calls and stared in horror at a spot on the ceiling above my left shoulder. “You’re safe, you’re safe.” I don’t think it could be called lying. A cat has no way of knowing what “safe” means.

  In my closet I have a box of letters I collected from my mother’s apartment after her death. Many of them are written on that ethereal blue aerogram stationery that signifies foreign travel far more than a postcard of the Colosseum or a camel can, as well as the frugality of a time when people worried about the weight of a letter. Some of the letters are from her parents, written during the war when my mother first came to this country from Europe. Some were written later on, when she was traveling. Some are from me. I found an entire bundle of the ones I used to send her from summer camp. I rarely had much to say. Today I caught a fly ball (which was probably a lie). We had crafts; I made an ashtray. There are letters from my mother’s cousins, the ones in Boston, the ones in Moscow, the ones in Tel Aviv, the one in Winnipeg whom she held in awe because he wasn’t just rich but a lawyer and not just a lawyer but a “solicitor,” a “Queen’s counsel.” The way she fawned over him used to drive me crazy.

  At the time I emptied my mother’s apartment, I took out as many as five boxes of letters. But over the years I culled them the same way I culled her other papers, throwing out statements from long-closed bank accounts, instruction manuals for appliances that had broken years before. I used to go through her letters every year or so, when there was something else I was trying to avoid doing. In this way, I was able to get rid of the ones I thought ephemeral or meaningless. Still, many letters, especially the older ones, are in foreign languages—German, Russian, Swedish—and I can’t bring myself to get rid of them until I know what they say. They may turn out to be as inconsequential as the ones I chucked: thank-yous for wedding or baby presents, records of long-ago holidays when nothing happened. We went to the museum of arms and armor. Emil was deeply interested in the arbalests. Munich turned out to be foggy and unseasonably cool. Your uncle was struck by the number of soldiers in the streets. But they may say more than that. I keep promising myself to get them translated.

  After Bitey died, I was in no hurry to adopt another cat. I was surprised at how sad I was. Every time I entered a room, I looked down reflexively and was stricken not to see her. The entire house became suffused with her absence. It was almost the opposite of what happens in “I’ll Be Seeing You.” I saw her nowhere. The bed was a bed without her on it; the armchairs were empty of her. The dining table had no black cat lounging on a heap of mail, waiting to scatter it when she was shooed off. It was more constant, more preoccupying, than any grief I’d known before. A month after my father’s death, I’d flown to Paris to hook up with a girlfriend who’d gone overseas for graduate studies. It was just before New Year’s and very cold, the streets around Les Halles powdered with light snow. Almost from the moment of my arrival, I’d figured out that L. had lost interest in me, and my disappointment displaced whatever else I was feeling. Every few blocks I’d have to stop in a bar for an Armagnac and a coffee, the coffee to disguise the Armagnac, make it look like some species of creamer served in a balloon glass. Only after I came back home did I remember that my father had lived in Paris for a few years before the war; he’d gotten out just before the Germans marched in. The whole time I was there, it never entered my mind. Looking back, I see an inverse symmetry between my response to my cat’s death and my response to my father’s: In one case, the lost object remained constantly present in my consciousness, which made the object’s absence from the world more acute, more haunting. In the other case, the lost object had vanished not just from the world but from the field of my attention, and to such a degree that I passed through a city that had once been associated with the object—had once been home to it, to him—without that connection ever rising to consciousness.

  Can we speak of some lost objects as being more lost than others?

  Oddly, for all the times I was reminded of my cat’s absence, I half believed that she was still there in the house. Some of this was because of how the other cats had behaved when F. and I came back from the vet’s office where we’d sat with Bitey at the end. Instead of greeting us at the door, the two gray tabbies, Suki and Ching, gazed fixedly down at us from the top of the stairs. When I climbed up to where they were sitting, they continued to stare past me. “What are they looking at?” F. asked from below. I turned to follow their gaze. All I saw was the floor of the vestibule, with its scuffed boards and inexpertly lined-up shoes. Suddenly I knew it was Bitey. “If it’s you,” I called, “come in. Please. You’re welcome here.”

  I suppose that belief, which wasn’t really a belief but a more forceful kind of wish, was what made me keep looking for Bitey in every room I entered for weeks after her death. Whatever the impulse was, it wasn’t wholly mistaken. To keep the lost object in mind is to keep it alive. You hold it cupped in consciousness as you might cup a lit match in
your hands to keep it from being blown out in the wind. This, according to the philosopher George Berkeley, is what God does with the entire universe, each of whose trillions of objects, down to its tiniest grains of matter, exists only because the Creator has thought of it, is thinking of it, sustaining it from moment to moment with the labor of his enormous and encyclopedic brain. I find this idea very moving, even though I have a hard time believing, as Berkeley did, that there is no such thing as matter. But then, Berkeley, who was also an Anglican bishop, seems to have felt that it was only a short step from believing in the existence of matter to disbelieving the existence of God. You can imagine what he might’ve felt about appointing gays and lesbians to the clergy.

  Berkeley is an example of somebody whose ideas are consistent. Mine are not. I grieved for my cat even as I nursed the fantasy that she was still present in our house in a small town in the Hudson Valley, where F. and I had moved when we began to have faith in our relationship, this third thing that had arisen between us, as if from the vapor of our breath, and then condensed, the way your breath condenses on a window pane, so that you can write a name in it. The consequences of these beliefs were the same. On sad days, I could barely pay attention to the surviving cats. On days when my spirits were higher, I worried that getting a new cat would be unseemly. Thinking about the etymology of that word, its roots in “seeming” and “seeing,” I ask myself who or what might have been offended to see a new cat romping around our home. But, of course, I know the answer. I was thinking of Bitey. Bitey would see.

  In many stories of the supernatural, a ghost is summoned back by jealousy, a fury at being replaced.