The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

Home > Other > The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart > Page 70
The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart Page 70

by Larry Kramer


  But it was wrong to think of it that way then. Then was innocence. There’s no accretion that adheres to innocence except experience, and experience for the young should be a different set of germs not yet quite so fatally contagious. The sun must have shined then once in a while, even though I recollect it always rained.

  When I go back to wander the streets of Masturbov Gardens my memories quickly yield to a disheartenment that I ever lived here. Here I learned too much. Here was the unhappiness that was the first disease that almost killed me. If others think Masturbov Gardens was bucolic, red bricks on green grass under huge ambitious trees sharing their ground haughtily with cowering thorned rosebushes and timid lilacs and droopy forsythia, they’re right too. But if they claim that with a thousand places to play Masturbov Gardens could not have been an unpleasant home for any child, a dangerous place to grow up in, I’m here to say that they’re wrong. Here I did not have a dog, here I did not take the piano lessons I longed for, here my brother Lucas spent every waking and sleeping minute he could away from home, here my brother Stephen turned from happiness to anger to darkness, here none of us had much love for or from either parent.

  And here my identical twin, David, left me.

  My, what a heavy load of upset and dissatisfaction and distress! Surely the world doesn’t need another unhappy record of yet another unhappy life.

  Why do I desire so strongly to tell this story to the world? Why do I desire to tell it to you, Fred, or more to the point, why do you want me to, since you lived in Masturbov Gardens too, although you were younger and we barely knew each other back then? As a physician I learned long ago that it is a certain fact that most of mankind is unhappy. But we both know this history is more than just unhappiness. That must be it.

  Yes, as we both know, this is a murder mystery. I will write it as I lived it, hoping that answers will reveal themselves to me as well. Isn’t that what’s meant to happen in a good mystery story, even though there is nothing good about this one?

  Yes, it always rained in Masturbov Gardens.

  By the way, for the record, my name is Daniel Jerusalem.

  * * *

  The economic news remains dire and hateful. The Depression’s never really gone away. I’m in kindergarten when Lorna May Drift’s father kills himself. Mrs. Drift is my teacher and Mr. Drift is found dead sitting in one of her schoolroom’s little desks. He is holding a note to the children that says, “Don’t ever believe your president again.”

  Washington is still a sleepy town. If it’s the capital of a country, why’s it been asleep for so long? People aren’t polite, they’re just bland. Personality is frowned upon. Everyone speaks in the same tone of voice. If people didn’t identify themselves, everyone would sound the same on the other end of the phone. There’s no sense of power, no sense of a world out there, just waiting to be defended. Moderation in everything is all. Few are those who sense that futures shouldn’t be fashioned from such emotional stinginess.

  Quietly, fortunes are being made. Bad times for some are ripe times for others. There is no fairness. Huge parcels of land are being bought up, usually in outlying areas. Smart men are out there busily sniffing suburbs that might sprout. The smartest nose belongs to our cousin, Abe. Abe has had a son with Doris, Mordecai, Mordy, my best friend for a while.

  In the Washington area, people still know other people, if not by name at least by face or business or place, white and Negro alike. Washington is still small neat houses side by side near woodsy parks. There’s never much traffic. The roads are good because congressmen like to drive on smooth roads. Congressmen keep Washington in good shape. It’s their little toy city to play with, and they enjoy building big marble museums and blocks of triumphant offices and erecting equestrian memorials to heroes on horses. The glint from the sun off all this celebratory stone is dazzlingly white.

  Washington is also white in a less dazzling way. The Negroes say nothing about it. They know there are more of them, that this city should be theirs if democracy knew how to count, but they don’t think that way yet. Political figures who, for a brief moment in time, might actually make a reputation by caring for those less fortunate are still a ways away. Critics of the status quo are considered uppity. Negro preachers like Felindus Max Graves, in his Cathedral of Our Holy People, preach each Sunday, and each Sunday hundreds too many come. The overflow crowd stands singing on the one plot of earth Herman Masturbov, Abe’s father who was rich and hungry before him, couldn’t buy around their small wooden church, this little bit of ground that I can see and hear from my bedroom window where Felindus Max Graves and his flock sing out passionately surrounded by where the whites are living. Felindus Max is famous for his stirring rhetoric. He preaches devotion and duty and discipline, all the D words, he calls them, “that if you don’t follow you get the final D word, which is Damnation.” He can make damnation the longest word you’ve ever heard. He talks a lot about someone by the name of Jesus Christ. His worshippers come from far away, all over the District and Maryland and Virginia, and line up for hours on Sunday morning, everyone all dressed up. My goodness, how obedient everyone is. Every Wednesday night is choir practice and the music is wonderful and almost makes me happy when I’m sad. Yes, the Negroes are obediently in line, and a good many of them think life is good. The government is hiring a lot of them now, at last, to clean the endless corridors and ten thousand toilets. If they clean them well, they might get to file papers and empty wastebaskets. I write in my little diary, “I wonder if their Mr. Christ has a black skin so any Negro boy can see his own skin on his God.”

  But mostly, on both sides of this District Line, Washington’s dreary. It’s never been anything but a town, and towns don’t provide much to cheer people up. All the people who work here are paid to worry about people somewhere else. No one has much money. Including the government. America is poor and Washington is the capital of a country having the worst of times and still not admitting it. When Rockefeller dies he leaves more money than is in the Treasury. How can a government, or a country, admit that? The rest of the world thinks America is recovering from its depression fine. They’re wrong. And the rest of the world isn’t even thinking about Washington. Yet. That doesn’t come until much later, although FDR starts them noticing. It will take another war before things boom again. But that, too, will come soon enough.

  * * *

  Yes, here in Masturbov Gardens our father, Philip, houses us, for do not Cousin Abe’s rental billboards posted at the District Line promise “One Hundred Acres of Heaven”? Like almost everyone else in “the Washington area,” then and since, my family has moved here from somewhere else. My great-uncle Israel somehow got here from Palestine. My great-aunt Yvonne, Israel’s sister or half-sister and Abe’s mother, whom none of us has ever seen, got here from Moscow, “but so long ago she won’t talk about it,” our mother tells us. My father just crossed over from that part of downtown Washington where all the Jews once lived, huddled in their ghetto, but my mother is an outsider: she comes from New York, that huge city I haven’t seen yet, but which lures me with the sound of its magic when she tells me about it. “My maiden name is Wishen,” Rivka says, making it sound like royalty instead of the name of another grocery store like the one Philip’s mother has. I wonder if anyone in America would have eaten if it weren’t for all those little neighborhood Jewish grocery stores. But I was born here, and my brothers were born here. My twin was born here. We’re not from anywhere else.

  “You had no more than we did! Why do you lord it over me so la-di-dah?” Philip complains to Rivka when she hurts his pride, as she often does. He is sensitive not only to her occasional taunts, albeit truthful, that others of their friends have fared better in the world but also to her constant implications that New York is higher on some scale than Franeeda County and that on both counts her marriage is beneath her. Permanent employment has just found him, in 1941, in the form of the job he will keep (except for several mysterious interruptions) until
he dies, a job in a small backwater of the National Institute of Tumor Science, where he devotes himself to investigating “important procedures.” He is never more specific, and none of his sons presses him. He’s a lawyer, we know, and he went to Yaddah, we know, and to Yaddah Law School, we know, and he finally gets this job after the Depression kept him unemployed, or so we thought, for so long we wondered if he’d never work again, and what’s more probably didn’t want to, so feeble were his visible attempts to rectify this situation. As a young man, Philip had loved ships and had become an expert on the law of the sea. Sometimes he can be found looking at old picture books from his youth, almanacs of sailing ships, running his hand over the shiny surface of a rotogravure as if he were touching some priceless and delicate object. At work he says he has a staff of several to supervise. At work he is presumably listened to, obeyed, as he is not in Masturbov Gardens, at 4212 Mordecai Avenue, which of course is named after Mordy, my playmate, my first love. Though Philip knows it is a backwater of a job, and beneath the prestige that Yaddah is meant to bestow on all her sons, Philip never wavers in his gratitude to “our country” for landing it and keeping it. Each day of the many years remaining to him in this capital of our country and the world, he will travel one hour to work, one hour home, standing each way in three crowded buses that are freezing in winter and sweltering in summer, to fall asleep right after dinner, exhausted after his day of labor, a repetition of its predecessor, each week and month and year the same, Philip surrounded at the office by a sea of unfamiliar and constantly changing faces as co-workers come and go, and surrounded at home by sons and a wife who do not love him. He is not a fool, and often come more tired complaints. “For this I am an educated man. For this Grandma Zilka saved every penny.” Although I discover at an early age that I hate him, for his failure, for his not loving me, for an endless litany of other charges, I wonder, almost in admiration, particularly now that I’m grown and wonder the same about myself, what kept him going for so long, rather than simply disappearing like his own father (and like his other youngest son) and simply not coming home one day. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  * * *

  Several years ago I decided to try to find out what exactly Philip did at NITS. I knew by now that no ships or seas figured in any enterprise of the place. It’s not easy locating old records and piecing together the history of anything in this town. Believe it or not, there are no official rules or guidelines or even suggestions for the preservation of ordinary records past a certain date. Washington, amazingly, is not interested in preserving itself for history. Or perhaps it’s not amazing; perhaps evaporation, all tracks covered, is the point. I discovered that there had been warehouses holding tons of cartons arranged by years and decades until President Ruester closed them down. Everything had, like Atlanta, been burned.

  However, because NITS is concerned with living and once-living human beings, there are congressional mandates that require certain precautions. If a person died from a contagious illness, for instance, or a questionable one, or because of any criminal act, or by suicide, or through any contention with a religious organization or government, foreign or domestic, or of course by “any sexual perversions, irregularities, and/or abnormalities,” these records must be kept in perpetuity under penalty of fine. The only question was where.

  It took a lot of inquiry and phoning, and then more time for me to be properly investigated and fingerprinted and certified, with pass and badge, before I could get into the Federal Storage Facility (Vera Section), Building Stanley, located almost all the way to Fille de Maison (Velvalee Peltz was from Fille de Maison), which is just about as far as you can go in Franeeda County before entering West Virginia. God, what a monstrous place Vera Section turned out to be, miles and miles of plain wood shelving under a ceiling as high as an airplane hangar’s, with no ladders or employees in sight. An old sergeant gave me a sort of electric golf cart and a map of the place and wished me good luck when I asked about the last time anyone had come to look for anything here, and he said, “I honestly can’t remember.”

  After several hours I located what appeared to be the aisle by year and division and finally office. I had to stand on the golf cart to reach the sagging high shelves covered by the dust of decades. I found the old cartons with peeling labels: Inheritance Office, Mr. Philip Jerusalem. Inheritance? Choosing a carton at random I yanked it open to see it packed with neat files, all carefully labeled “In the case of U.S. v.…” I opened one file, then another, then a third, then pulled out another carton and another. In each I found more of the same. My father’s signature had confirmed a death and authorized the disposition of estate and remains. In each and every case the person had died from an unusual or communicable disease, often unspecified. The deceased was almost always a resident of—I assumed incarcerated at—government institutions like St. Elizabeth’s or St. Recta’s or St. Goth’s or St. Purdah’s. I know all these crumbling places and I know what horror shows they were and, in St. Purdah’s case, still are. In many cases my father had made a notation: “Visited the patient on the premises to witness his signature, hereby verified,” or some such. That he’d visited those hellholes of dying people so often was news that he never brought home to tell us, unlike Rivka with her running catalogue of her world’s misfortunes. Why hadn’t he told us any of his?

  I spent much of the day studying these files, finding nothing to vary their simple messages, their inexorable parade of disease and death, the depressing monotony his routine must have offered as he recorded these never-ending horrors. Many of the deaths were attributed to diseases long gone, rare and unfamiliar. Nerduze. Atrophied triumphans glans. Heart valve redumtavitis. Fallker’s syndrome. Elevated butterfly dirt. Was there ever a fatal illness called elevated butterfly dirt? Granted many of the dead had been incarcerated for many years in these ancient “hospitals” more akin to crazy houses, prisons of soul and body, still … elevated butterfly dirt? I left marveling again at how much of his life Philip never shared with us. “Today I certified a death from the last case in modern medicine of Nerduze, a disease from the Middle Ages!” We would have been electrified with interest and would no doubt have looked at him in an entirely different light. But once again I realize that he never really lived with us at all.

  And since I’d become someone rather expert at dealing with complications just as uncomfortable as many he faced, how much we turned out to have in common.

  * * *

  Rivka journeys in the other direction, into the Franeeda countryside, on uncrowded transport, to small rural Hykoryville, the county seat and biggest town, which means all of several thousand, every one of whom is white. Here she is at first a volunteer, then a paid worker, talking to patients, spreading cheer and her version of worldly wisdom. She will soon be asked to run this local outpost of American Red Blood.

  American Red Blood has been around for a while, but it takes a colored man, Dr. Charles Drew, with his really pioneering research on blood transfusion, to popularize the idea of blood banks and bloodmobiles going from neighborhood to neighborhood to collect blood on the spot. This is all very new (no one knows that a colored man is involved—if they did, no one would give blood), and Rivka is in on the ground floor. A lot has happened in the blood world. Landsteiner in Vienna got a Nobel for determining types A, B, AB, and O, and later in New York, of the Rh-factor in human blood similar to one found in the red blood cells of monkeys and thus relates us to them. (He also showed that polio could be transmitted to monkeys by injecting into them the ground-up spinal cords of kids who’d died from it.) Drew was from Washington and wanted to try out his ideas for the bloodmobile in some small place out of sight, and ARB hit on Hykoryville and asked Rivka to oversee it in addition to running the office. (Rivka actually worked by Drew’s side until he was taken off the project for objecting that white blood and Negro blood were being segregated from each other.)

  Thus she now commences, with great delight, to begin taking charge of a
s much of the world, and the upcoming crises that are being whispered about more loudly every day, as the world will let her, which turns out to be more and more as the weeks and months and years pass by. It’s only a few more years before husbands and daddies begin to be reported dead or missing in strange-sounding faraway places, and wives suddenly are made widows, and children fatherless. Blood comes to represent the answer to it all. Everyone has blood to give! Dying bodies can be made whole and daddies will come home to wives and kids. The current prewar catastrophes, with which Hykoryville Hospital is filled, involve merely unattended children getting sick, a surprising number of fires, and things of that sort. Rivka can manage it all. Blood. Burnouts. It’s all the same to her. Like Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver, Rivka bears any and all harrowing news. She helps everyone with advice, like Rosalind Russell in Sister Kenny. Over dinner she tells us all the details, every single one, like gossipy Billie Burke. Does anyone besides a lonely kid who lives too much in the dark, in the movies, remember great performances like these?

  I confess to a never-ending fascination with Rivka’s bulletins. As the war comes at us with fuller force, each day brings Rivka home with tales more grisly than yesterday’s. Philip harbors little sympathy for her job, even from Boston, where he and David are now living. “I’m sick of hearing of it!” he writes in one of his few letters home. Perhaps that’s why I can’t get enough of it. The husband is unhappy that his wife can talk about her work with such pleasure! He’s jealous of her growing importance in the world, at least to hear Rivka tell it. He could not have helped noticing his wife and my mother might even be loved by so many others.

 

‹ Prev