I drove the few miles to Sparrow Street in something of a daze, even a trance. When we stopped in front of the old white cottage my mother was standing behind the lace curtains, watching for us. Marion had the presents in her lap. She started to open the car door.
“Wait,” I said. “I’m trying to get this straight. You wouldn’t leave me for hurting you. But you would for hurting the other woman.”
“That’s about it, I suppose.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said softly, more to myself, “you are a Christian at that, aren’t you?”
Again Marion started to get out, and again I detained her. I spoke in a rush.
“The school’s giving me a semester off. Something like sick leave. Maybe I am sick. I’ll go away. I’ll leave you for a while, get me off your neck and try to come to some sort of terms with myself. And do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to take my father with me. He’s always wanted to visit Poland. So do I. And do you know where I’ll stop on the way? I was reading your notes for the lecture on James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. The business about faith healing is very impressive, and what you said to me about the history of Lourdes the other day. I didn’t realize so many tourists went there on pilgrimages. I think I’d like to stop off at Lourdes.”
“Whatever for?”
“Well, a whole psychoanalysis is pretty involved. It takes years, and it’s pretty expensive.”
“Oh, my God.” She put her hands to her face, her elbows resting on the mound of brightly wrapped packages in her lap. She shook her head, uttering some further muffled ejaculation I did not catch. I didn’t know whether she was laughing or crying.
“The place has always held a certain fascination for me. Sixty miracle cures have been attested, did you realize that? One has to recognize facts, whatever your definition or explanation of ‘miracle’ may be. But what’s often occurred to me—why don’t neurotics go there? I mean if the waters can cure physical symptoms psychologically induced, why not the psychological condition itself? Why can’t it be reversed?”
She removed her hands from her face and turned to look at me in the dark. Again she gave a shake of her head.
“Let’s go in, shall we? Your folks will think we’re fighting. And we don’t want to spoil their Christmas, do we? So let’s try to behave as though that’s what it is. For their sakes.”
STAN
twenty-one
THERE’S NO REASON for me to take up the thread of the story again on my account. I do it on Tom’s. And only because he won’t. He “doesn’t want to talk about it,” as people frequently don’t about some out-of-the-ordinary happening they’ve been through. Soldiers home from the wars say it. Divorced people sometimes do. Religious experiences affect others the same way. So I’ll have to wind the story up in my own words. I’ll be brief.
Before I am, however, I ought to say something about the changes underwent in my own attitude toward things in general in the course of my doz. or so years in limbo. That’s what I believe they use to call the suburb of hell where you laid around waiting for orders to proceed one way or the other.
You can see I still mock. But with a difference. I ridicule only outmoded theological conceps, not the human realities behind them conceps. Certainly not the human need for belief as such. What happened to Tom at Lourdes is his own to think about in his own way, to make his own head nor tail out of, and in his own good time. I still say there’s some rational explanation if we knew it. But we don’t, so let it stand as it is for him to make what he wishes out of it for his own lifetime. After which will be the curtain, is my firm opinion still. Firm but not bigoted. There’s a difference. A bigot is a spigot whether of the right or left, always ready to turn hisself on full force whether anybody asked him or not. I use to be that way—notice my new attitude? I been through enough hell to know we don’t need no more in the form of any eternal P.S. We make it all here and it will have to suffice, ditto any heaven we’re going to have too. Now that I’ve come back to life I been trying to behave toward others according to the above ideal. The golden rule, me; that knock you over with a feather? The golden rule—beginning with my wife.
Like a fool, I should never of given her all that argument. That only stiffens the other party’s determination, like young people to get married when you oppose them. Say down with the match and up goes the ladder under the old bedroom window. Same with discussions of politics. Criticize a man’s candidate and he’ll pull the lever twice as hard. My narrowness helped make Elsie more narrow, etc., a vicious circle making it a throwup who will prevail in the end. In those days I regarded myself as an intellectual though my actions bellied my words—a statement you would not make about me now. At all events its not the formal beliefs themselves that are important. Its the human relationships behind the fussade of all our religion and philosophy that count. I was so grateful that my wrong didn’t damage my son’s life in the end, like I feared, that I have become a much better person. I’m decent to my wife. I take her out to dinner much oftener than I did. I help around the house the way she does at the office, and more than at the office too if it comes to that. I let her go out estimating the way she likes to, to meet people, even though I know full well she’s leaving her tracks everywhere. A pamphlet with every figure she hands out. Sometimes she even likes to pitch in and help unload the truck at the elevator. Many’s the job we unload together. I’ve even been to church to humor her. Not the Gospel tabernacle to be sure, she knows thats too rich for my blood, too primitive. But once in a while I’ll look in on the liberal community church to see what the intellectuals are up to. Its made up of several of the more modern congregations going in cahoots with one another, and the services “follow no fixed denominational pattern,” as the ads say.
The first time I dropped in there was a Sunday evening about a year ago. The pews were pretty sparsely populated for a combined congregation, but the minister was a very good speaker, very well educated. He opened on a modern enough note, but then references to an after life began to creep into his sermon—and even to some kind of heaven, where we will continue our existence on a whole nother plane where all memories of this earthly life will gradually disappear, like the railroads. I turned my head to rubber a little and see how my coworshippers were taking this. Near me sat a young mother who was very rapt up in what was being said to all appearances. She wanted to go on. She had a little boy who was reading a comic in his lap, just like in orthodox churches. Behind me was an old man the sandman had got, and a young couple holding hands, and even necking it seemed. This was apparently what was meant by the services not following any fixed denominational pattern. For a hymn we sung “The Spanish Cavalier” and then let go with a couple choruses of “Aura Lee.” In a weird way, I didn’t mind. The last time I went back was Good Friday, again more or less out of curiosity. I think they should call it Pretty Good Friday, what with all the doubts they have to work out a compromise with.
I made a similar attempt to make some sense out of my sex life. I mean I made a concerted effort to get that on a sounder and more satisfactory basis, investing in one of them manuals for married couples with all sorts of tips on cohabitative harmony and conjugal synchronization and what not. Things that are easier done than said if you ask me, but anyway. Not that swarming all over your mate to my unfailing delight was the sole outlet I give her. Not by any manner of means. Hitherto I hadn’t paid enough attention to the little things around the house that women harp on because its their domain for God’s sake! Lets get that through our craws, shall we boys? Her big crotchet use to be throwing chairs and sofas out and replacing them down to Pete Potmesil’s borax store, the local hdqtrs. for obtaining things worse than you have at home. I saw that she needs other releases—little drives into the country, spins into Chi to call on old relatives or track down new ones. She seems to need such stimuluses more and more as the years go by. Bad furniture is no longer enough. Then like I say I even humor her about attending divine worship.
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We’re here to use our intelligence, yes, but that ain’t everything. It’s our duty to see through things, but also to see things through. Or I’ll put it another way. We’re not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through. So all this psychology? Great—up to a point. Get too skeptical about everything and you wind up as narrow as the know-nothings. So no more firing at the wife, “Man is a digestive tube pierced at both ends.” Whats needed is a little compassion here. I remember once Tom and Marion were having a discussion on a subject and she mentioned that Wilde told Gide when he got out of jail, “The most beautiful thing in the world is pity.” “I never realized Gide was in jail,” I says, to help move the conversation along literary lines so she wouldn’t think we were all a bunch of ignoramuses at 922 Sparrow. I had read the name somewhere, and as to Wilde I suddenly remembered Lena Salerno bringing him into the conversation years ago. It seemed like another lifetime! Anyhow that was what Wilde said. Which he was right. You can’t forever:
Live in your house by the side of the road
And hurl the cynic’s ban.
I quoted that poem in this conversation at our house. I don’t remember what Tom murmured exactly, but something, running his finger around the rim of his glass, as though doubting the purity of its circumference.
Notice that last remark? It showed I didn’t sit around all them years in limbo doing nothing, but tried to improve myself. I read and I thought, I thought and I read. Not the kind of reading I’d been doing, radical pamphlets only, but books. Literature. That way I began to broaden my horizons, learning to absorb new impressions and think in metaphors that enrich your life. Thus I was able to see that the days were going by with the infinite banality of telephone poles. Things like that. I aim to go on taking in new impressions like that till my intake valve is shot. I use to be awful. Now I cultivate enlarged sensibilities, along with the moral lesson which I’m trying to emphasize: that there are no solutions, that people simply have to rub along, like everybody else. All that has the limpidity of Jell-o to me now. Not till Tom was in the clear did I snap out of it however.
And now before I be brief I want to say a word about that.
How delightful to watch Tom grow up, combining in a mature man the best of both heritages that we give him. My, they must be proud of him over to the school, giving him that much Sabbatical so soon and all, and we’re mighty proud of Polycarp’s pride in him. They even had him doing some work in the President’s office for a while. I know there were those who said he wasn’t executive lumber, but that don’t hurt. That part is all right. Detractors always arise in the land, putting down their betters. The point is that they liked him enough, and the President thought enough of him to appoint him acting head as his last official act before being judged off his rocker and carted off to the foolish factory. Those things make you feel good.
I can remember him as a little shaver, then as a fine lad, beginning to get pimples from impure thoughts. As for sex education, I figured he knew more than me all ready. Once when he was oh fourteen, fifteen, he asked me about extramarital relations, and I says, “Oh, wait till your married for them!” But I wasn’t always serious in my advice—sometimes a joke does it best. Once when he asked me for a shotgun I says, “No, son, I love you too much to give you one of those. Every boy with a shotgun is potentially fatherless, and I don’t want that to happen to you.” So do it with humor whenever you can, thats a must. Humor sees us through. Tom was always pretty fast with a wisecrack himself. As a shaver he would say, “Pa’s a standing joke—or would be if we could get him on his feet.” Oh. Incidentally I can drink again—the sure sign of somebody who’s not an alcoholic … So my thoughts drift in and out of mind, with the random trajectories of snow in windless air. Wow.
The greatest single satisfaction of my life was his marriage. I held my breath when I see who he was hooked up with, hoping to God it wouldn’t fall through. I always wanted him to marry somebody sophisticated, but by sophisticated I don’t mean one of them women that theyre so brittle if you kissed them you’d bleed. No. I mean a smart outside with substance inside. I was tickled to death to see somebody from the Chicago North Shore and the right families and all that, much as I didn’t in the least care about social standing persay. Not the type who can love you for yourself alone as long as you’ve got money. Not a bit of it. She was one girl who if she gave you the business about love being all, she’d live with you in a tent if need be, you could believe it. Most of them mean by a home today a place a husband can provide that he can get them out of, and fast, and often. This one was all wool and a yard wide. I could spot that at a glance, sick as a dog as I was. And cute as a cricket into the bargain.
So only two generations to climb out of the proletariat into the boorgeoisie. And maybe upper boorgeoisie at that. And like I can’t stress enough, all this in a not superficial vane, people sitting on patios nibbling bedeviled eggs and sipping cocktails—but in the genuinely cultured sense. And the beauty part of it all is, Tom never come to think he’s too good for us. No forgetting the old folks while he goes out and be’s continental.
Life is no easy matter today no more, if it ever was. No central belief giving cohesion, like in the Middle Ages. No clearly defined purpose or direction. No. Once a relatively simple dirt road with forks where the traveler had a simple choice, life is now a crowded superhighway with bewildering cloverleaf exits on which, after a maize of turns, a man is libel to find himself speeding back in the direction he came. I did somewhat, as per the above shift or anyhow modification in emphasis, and so I think did Tom—not that you were always sure what he had on his mind. But he has had a lot of readjustments to make in his thinking too. The big thing today among young people seems to be identity crisises. You have to have one of them. What we worried about at that age was where our next meal was coming from, but today they have to rack their brains about who they are. Which I think they tend to give theirself airs, intellectuals. Every time I hear an intellectual say, “Oh, who am I?” I want to say, “Oh, who the hell do you think you are?” But Tomasko’s I think was a little different. Deeper. Which brings me to Lourdes.
twenty-two
TO PUT IT in a nutshell, Tom got deathly sick at Lourdes. In fact he damn near didn’t pull through, to hear him tell it, though I think thats exaggeration. It pleases him to think so, is the point. To think God’s hand was laid on him in that offbeat manner so to speak, rather than the more normal method of arriving there sick and getting better. That type of revelation. I must give fair warning: from here on in you are on your own, to draw your own conclusions. “The belief that he was singled out in this way is important to him and probably typical of him” keeps being Marion’s estimate of what happened, and that may very well be what we shall have to settle for. But again, don’t look at me. You are strictly on your own. “Man has to live by some kind of illusion,” Marion says. Check. She doesn’t take it with a grain of salt, she takes him with a grain of salt. What every wife has to do with her husband I guess, and with that saving gift of humor or the union is a dead duck before its hatched. She’s got his number when she says God can’t be obvious with him, no, he, Tom, is different. Special. But the faith he got as he was being rushed to the hospital, making deathbed promises to God all the way and looking like something the cat dragged in, after arriving there in A-1 shape, in fact fine fettle, is just as important to him as the conversion more simple pilgrims get by arriving there sick and getting cured, which as you know is the more normal procedure in that little town at the foot of the Pyrenees. But he was a sight when he got to the hospital, his eyes bloodshot, his face looking like one of them portraits not aiming at verisimilitude. It was a near thing.
Good thing I was with him. He first invited both his parents along but Elsie refused—probably shrewdly enough thinking father and son together would get more out of such a trip, some much-needed friendship and understanding. And who would take care of the office? I bucked too a
t first, thinking he was only humoring the oldsters by asking them at all, but it was a token resistance, I was only too tickled to go. The plan was to visit Poland after doing some things like the Riviera (the Palm Beach of the old country), Rome and Athens and so on.
Tom never got to Poland. At Lourdes I could see that the place fascinated him more than I had bargained for. Anybody would be fascinated, believer or non. There all carping has to stop. There the complaints of the intellect are mere niggling. We stayed on, watching the ever renewed streams of pilgrims and attending service in the Church of the Rosary and listening to the singing and even, in the case of Tom, joining in the praying. He haunted the Grotto—or vice versa. He liked to stroll around the crowded town and talk to people till he struck one who could talk fluid English, when he would carry on conversations as long as the traffic would bear, asking the victim about the city and picking his brains about his private life and why he was there. Tom knows very little French himself. Marion is the one who can get along in it but she wasn’t with us—yet.
Finally one morning Tom broke down and says, “I’m going to bathe in the water. Why don’t you come with me?” I kicked at first, but he finally convinced me that it didn’t make any difference what you were, tourists all do it the way they kiss the Blarney Stone or mustn’t miss Lake Como. And the church certainly isn’t hidebound about it. So I agreed and went with him.
It was the next day during the service at the church that he said, “I don’t feel so hot.”
Not so hot was right. He was burning up with a fever of a 103.4 (translated into our Fahrenheit, for of course the French use Centigrade). I took his temperature at the hotel with a thermometer he made me buy on the way. When he found out what it was he insisted I call a doctor.
Doctors are easy to come by in Lourdes. The town is practically a medical center, as it would be with people flocking to it from all over the continent and even the world. Though Tom reversing the routine as noted.
Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel Page 26