by Larry Kramer
Nate Bulb brings her new mattresses. He brings her food now, patiently feeding her himself. For some reason her smell doesn’t offend him. It is as if he doesn’t smell it. He would tell Herman, but Herman doesn’t want to hear any of this. As far as Herman is concerned Yvonne is dead. He does not know what is happening to his own wife.
Herman first hears about Yvonne’s bleedings from some old harpy who owes him back rent and tears up his eviction notice, flaunting it in his face when he comes to deliver it. Yes, he likes to deliver eviction notices personally now.
“Your wife is a bleeder!” she screams at him.
“What are you talking about?”
“Ask her! Ask her!”
“Ask her what?’
“How she bleeds to death! How she walks around town bleeding at every step! How she bleeds out blood every minute of her life! How you bleed her to death! And take your rent bill and shove it up your heinie. Now put me out on the street! I dare you!”
He returns home late that night, after walking his land, all over the city, in the suburbs, in the Northeast, in the Northwest, in the Southeast, in Franeeda County. He does this every day now, sometimes all night long, again and again, he can never walk it enough, this land is MINE, I own more Washington than any other Jew, than any other man! He slowly climbs all the many steps to the fifth floor to confront his wife, distressed to find that he is panting and winded. How can I walk and breathe freely all night long but when I walk upstairs to see my wife I gasp for air? By the third floor he already smells it, a smell as of something dead. Each step closer, the smell becomes more putrid, until he thinks he will faint. He is forced to put a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. He opens the door. The waves of putrefaction are like some typhoon that swallows men whole and drowns them. He stumbles before he can right himself. He feels her staring eyes in the dark. He reaches for the light switch but no bulb goes on. It is she who turns on a small lamp. She will let him see. She wants him to see, but only by her light.
He sees. Her mattress is crusted with dried blood, the wooden floor stained with overlapping circles in hues of different density. Piles of bloodied towels mass around the room like ancient primitive mounds of dung. He walks around and around in the baby steps that this minuscule space demands, his eyes on the floor, like an archaeologist calculating carbon rings in these patterns of blood. How long has this been going on? No, nothing makes sense. Age brings only more confusion. He throws open the window and sticks his head out to gobble air. What did we do that this should happen? His arms reach awkwardly out the window with his question. Yvonne has her arms out too, to him, as a new tributary of blood trickles down the insides of her legs. He starts to cry. He kneels down in her blood. He sticks his finger in it. He makes an X on his forehead.
“This is all my fault,” he finally says.
He picks her up, Yvonne, his wife. He does not know why he made his admission. He cannot tell whether he is crying or sweating from exhaustion, or from fear. But he is carrying them both back downstairs to life. She is light as a feather.
Abe, their child, hears noises in the hallway and opens his door and follows his parents, tiptoeing in the shadows, having learned early on and only too well how to be not seen and not heard. He sees his father lay his mother on the dining room table, light long candles in brass holders, and place them around her. He sees him stick his hand under her skirt and pull it out all bloody. And put his forefinger to his lips. And with this bloody forefinger make an X on her forehead to match the one on his own.
Then begin such moanings and shreiings as Abe has never heard. First Herman begins softly intoning what sound like prayers, in some language unfamiliar, both guttural and high-pitched. Then Yvonne joins the shreiings, her shrill intensity insinuating itself above his, but only for a moment, until the volume of his screeched imprecations walks up some ectoplasmic stairs to reach above hers, only to be joined by her own new cascadings from a higher plane, as if they are making a braid, in and out, over and over, plaiting some crown of hideously painful thorns. It is an awful racket, and frightening to a thirteen-year-old, whose own body is trying to grow up.
When the sun comes up, Abe is still hiding and peeking, listening as his parents’ invocations wind down. The shreiings become moans become warblings become soft sobs become daylight. Both his parents look older than he’s ever seen them. Herman is almost ethereal; his skin is tighter on his bones, shiny and vaguely yellow like the parchment on lampshades. Yvonne is just a skeleton, without any skin at all.
The parents don’t see their son, but Abe is used to that. Not even as Herman picks up his wife, who is no longer bleeding, and carries her upstairs, passing Abraham on the way, is this child seen.
There are smiles on the elders’ faces. They have sought surcease and surcease has been granted. In the master bathroom the husband bathes the wife slowly and tenderly, sponging her body and changing the water often so that all traces of red disappear, except for the emerging pinkness of her skin. Then he puts her in his bed and props her up against many pillows and fetches some soup, which he spoons into her with patience and care.
This sounds like a happy ending, and for a while it seems to be, at least as concerns the extreme deprivations Yvonne has endured. When she realizes she’s stopped venting blood, of course she’s happy. She lies in the master bed next to her husband, both of them waiting to see if good food and rest and a modicum of affection will do the trick. When after a week she ventures to walk a few steps and sit by a window to look out at the garden, which is miraculously in bloom, an actual smile crosses her face, though no one sees it. After a month she dresses in a new dark green robe Herman ordered from Madame Helga in Paris and she goes downstairs to join her husband and son for dinner.
A few days later she is sitting with Abe in his bedroom, both of them cross-legged on the floor, preparing his pants and socks and shirts with name tags for his first summer at sleepaway camp. She’s lived for so many years in her silent and invisible world that he feels awkward, pleasantly, being close to her like this. She sees him looking at her and she smiles, covertly, like a bashful girl, and then he smiles back, shyly, and hands her the navy sweatshirt with Kamp Komfort emblazoned in bright maroon lettering, and she takes it and finds a hidden inside seam where she attaches his name, “so you won’t get lost,” she says. She uses a needle and thread from the little kit Emmanuel gave her.
Abe sees it, the trickle. Suddenly her face is grotesque, twisted by returning fear.
The bloods, as Yvonne calls them in her head, begin again.
“Momma, Momma, what should I do!”
Both of them stare as the floor beneath her becomes a pool of blood. She is wearing a light summer dress and the diaphanous skirt drips blood as she stands to run—where? There are noises from inside of her, rumblings, gaseous quackings, like some rusty machine starting up again. She runs, into the hall, down one flight toward the master bedroom—no, she doesn’t want to go back there, so she climbs to her old turret hideout, but Herman has had this horror chamber locked up. She can’t get in. Where is there to go? She starts down again, her trail marked only too vividly from room to room, from floor to floor, from son to husband, the poor woman, the poor woman, no animal should live like this, casting its spoor to earth as if to say: I exist.
She collapses on the second-floor landing outside the master bedroom. Abe picks his mother up, the child who years before a bar mitzvah refused to have one, to celebrate that day on which each Jewish boy can say “today I am a man,” his answer being, “I already am a man,” the mother who is all of 60 pounds, maybe less, as she drips copiously and curls like an infant into his arms. He almost slips in her blood as he carries her to the dining room table, where he lays her down and lights the long tapers in the brass candlesticks. Yvonne tries weakly to protest before she loses consciousness.
Abraham begins softly. He tries to recite the prayers he heard his parents utter, hoping to God that because he had quit Hebrew school l
ong ago the intention is more important than the accuracy of its conveyance. Higher and higher he intones, trying to capture the exact timbre and emotion he recalls from his parents’ descants, and then when he reaches as high as he can go without choking or coughing he sticks his hand under her skirt as he saw his father do, poking awkwardly, for what he doesn’t know. For the first time in his life he touches a woman’s genitals. He feels the burbling blood. He feels the hairy lips that exude this blood. His head starts to spin. He forces himself to be strong. He pulls out his bloodied hand, and as his father did he kisses his forefinger before placing a mark of blood on his mother’s forehead and on his own. Over and over, rising and falling, his words rush together into increasing incomprehensibility. He is screaming these prayers now. Or are they cries of horror? What’s the difference? He mustn’t stop. He must not let the fumes emanating from his own mother asphyxiate him. His father rose above it. Had Herman’s first lesson in real estate not been that through consistency, over and over and over, by never stopping, never quitting, always pushing forward, no matter what … His voice goes up and up, piercingly up, to a pitch that reaches heaven, and he collapses. By the time his father returns (from a trip with Nate Bulb, to Richmond, a new and farther outpost, where a profit of several hundred thousand dollars was turned on the spot), the youngster has been imprecating for some seven hours; his mother has not revived; his mother has not stopped bleeding; the table and the floor are covered in his mother’s blood. No one has heard the son, certainly not God, and Abraham has collapsed into exhausted unconsciousness on top of his mother, convinced not only that he’s failed to save her but that her death is on his hands.
Herman finds them thus entangled. Once again he washes his wife and puts her in his bed. She has stopped bleeding again. How? What has transpired? Has the child been able to accomplish this? Has he inherited the gift I once had of talking to the Lord?
Or my curse?
What is the nature of this curse?
What difference?
A curse is a curse.
He returns to pick up his son, who lies still on the table, and carry him to his own room, to the suite of bedroom and bath and study that Herman has made for Abraham and then never once visited, here in his own mansion, a mansion inhabited by three curses.
No. Four curses. There is another youngster somewhere in this house, who never leaves here.
And the dead daughter. That makes five. Five curses.
He tries to think if the number 5 had some ancient symbolic significance in the Vernah. In the Kaballah and the Yohar and the Nitzevehu and the Ahvahdod. In the Kreptz. In the Nidred. When he had read them.
Herman lays his son down on the bed to undress him. There is a spot on the boy’s crotch. Fearing he knows what it is, he pulls the clothes from the boy’s body, his hands fumbling, his fingers trembling; he tries to yank the underpants off; when they won’t come off he buries his face in his son’s crotch, sniffing, smelling, even trying to taste with his tongue, knowing what it is, what this spot is; then he peels back the shorts; now he sees with absolute surety: semen sticks both to the little penis and the cloth. He slaps the boy as hard as he can, until there are black-and-blue marks. Finally the boy is brought back from wherever he was. But having resuscitated his son the father as always finds no words. What words are there for this? You have had an emission over your mother? Over your God? He is aghast at either possibility.
Herman begins to cry. I do not know this world or my life or any life. He begins to mumble jumbled words from some old testament, some ancient book of prohibitions. Semen must not be visible before a woman until the marriage vows. Semen spent in vain is semen spent in sin. Semen ejaculated without the aid of woman and without the intent of procreation is semen that pollutes the soul. Semen semen semen …
Where am I? He starts walking around the house like some crazy man, a Lear on the heath, abandoned by all yet straining to be heard. From room to room he stumbles, utterances dribbling from him. From the holiest Yablonz. From the most sacred Scrud.
The son lies on his bed awake. His face and jaw hurt. His throat is sore. He tries to speak but can only whisper hoarsely. His penis is cold. The weight of unanswered questions upon him is overwhelming. Where is any future he can understand? He hears his father stumbling through the house. His father’s cries are guttural, sudden waves that almost sound like meaning but not quite, followed by plaintive, fervent whisperings and sinister, hollow hisses.
“Papa, Papa, stop! Take my hand! Please!” the naked boy croaks, trailing after the moaning father, who, bereft of his senses, wanders like a driver in a strange country without a map, from room to room, from floor to floor, and finally to the basement. Here Herman unlocks a hidden safe Abe has never seen; his arm disappears into the long dark hole up to his armpit and then withdraws, his fist clutching a leather pouch. He sits down on the floor. No, this is not right. He feels constrained and imprisoned. He stands up and takes off all his clothes, which, drenched with sweat and agony, have been sticking to him like his own skin, and he places them neatly on a workbench. He stands before his son naked. His body is thin and ghastly white, and patched with blobs of hair, some now white, puffed out from his skin here and there with no rhyme or pattern, no grace or symmetry. He opens the pouch and withdraws a hard leather case, and he snaps this hard case open, and there are flashings and shinings as light from the harsh bulb above them catches the silver of a set of tiny knives, the circumcision knives, the knives for slicing this way and that, north and south and east and west, the tools of his former trade, the calling that once called him. He puts the open set of knives down by his clothes. He looks upon them. His fingers hover above them, seeking guidance. He decides on the one he wants. He plucks the longest. He kisses it. Then he lowers it down upon himself and with his other hand parts the blotch of hair that hides his penis.
The son looks upon his father’s penis. It is hidden in folds of flesh. It is uncircumcised. The son watches as his father slowly cuts the folds and swaths away, as if paring an apple, his core spurting so much pent-up blood that it should impede any further progress. But Herman’s eyes are closed. He is doing it all by touch. He cuts and cuts some more, his fingers darting into the leather kit to exchange one instrument for another, and when he has made it around once he goes around again with yet another blade to smooth the edge. His member is gushing. He is proud. He parades around the room as if to model his new thing. Look, look, look. I am a Jew. I am a Jew.
The stone floor is now slippery to walk on. The father’s feet can gain no purchase, nor can those of his son, who, not knowing what to do, does what instinct propels him to do, to catch his father as he loses his balance and slips, as both fall down, as both try to pick themselves up, the father blindly groping, for what? reaching out ahead of him, for what? trying to slither through his own spoor, the son following the trail of his father’s dripping penis, to the master bedroom, in which Yvonne is laid in a white gown like a corpse, the ghastly thought still crashing inside the son that he’s killed his mother, and now he’s driven his father crazy. The follower and the leader, up they go, leaving the mother on her bier, climbing to the turret room, Herman’s arms reaching up and up, as if with luck he might bypass this room and reach the roof and from the roof reach heaven.
But it is at the turret room that he stops, and reaches for the key over the lintel, and unlocks it, and forces his son inside. There is no light, for Herman has boarded up the windows against all light and air and memory. He throws his child to the floor and beats him. “Here she would not have me!” he screams out. “Here I burned the house down!” he screams out. “Here she bore me a dead daughter!” he screams out. “Here I now become a Jew!” He is beating his son and beating his son and beating his son, the poundings punctuated by such agonizing cries that the son allows the punishment. In the dark Abraham feels Herman take his young penis into his hand. He feels the growing pain as the father yanks at it and tries to tear it from the boy’s to
rso. Now it is Abraham’s turn to scream in agony as he feels the cold steel of the mohel’s knife. Now it is his turn to find out if he is able to fight back. Lest he be mutilated for life he fights with all his might, kicking his father’s face and pushing him off.
Abraham locks his father in the tiny turret room. He runs the endless flights down to the kitchen, where he grabs towels and newspapers and puts them to the gas stove to turn them into torches. As his father did upon the death of the brother Abe never knew, torching the house on Scribbs Place, so Abraham runs around this second house lighting everything he can touch. In the bloodied dining room he stays the longest, trying to burn up the entire memory, the long slab of mahogany on which she lay, the Oriental rug still damp with her insides. Only the drapes catch fire, but that is enough to ignite the wallpaper and then the wood framing in the walls, and soon the house is a huge pyre, from his father’s foreskin in the basement to its owner in the tower.
None of them dies in this new conflagration. Relief from agony on such a grand scale is rare. The house still stands there, out on Sixteenth Street (not, in fact, so far from where Adolphus Fahrt had seen his hospital burned down), the hideous stone caryatids of hugely breasted maidens still supporting the many porches and verandahs. Firemen preserved the structure and luck saved the family, if luck it can be called. Inside, the house is black and redolent of horror, as it always will be now. After a few years it’s cleaned up. Yvonne will live here in her turret until she is one hundred.
Herman, after a brief period of institutionalization, is released when Nate Bulb purchases the institution. He is released, only to die the next day crossing Sixteenth Street, run down by an overexcited horse hauling a big load of lumber belonging to his own Masturbov Lumber Company. The horse had been a favorite of Herman’s and smelled him coming near. As his will reveals, he does indeed own more of the Washington area than almost anyone else, certainly more than any other Jew. The will bequeaths money enough to support Yvonne, but none for Abe. This boy receives nothing. Everything is left in trust to Abe’s first son, whoever he may be, and who in fact will be Mordecai Masturbov, who will become a most important historical figure. Nate Bulb is appointed executor and administrator of this huge estate until such time as Abe grows up and marries and has this son and this son is old enough to understand his great, great wealth.