by Daniel Klein
Franny immediately makes out Herb’s target: Gary and Tony in military uniforms. Tony’s jacket is emblazoned with more ribbons and medals than any of his marching fellows. As far as Franny knows, neither of them had ever mentioned to the vigil group that they had served in the military.
“Their hands,” Herb whispers urgently.
And now Franny sees that the two septuagenarian men are very discreetly, yet not entirely out of view, holding hands as they parade by.
“Good for them,” Franny murmurs.
With the binoculars still to her eyes, she has started methodically inspecting every face on Main Street. She is looking for Lila. Franny knows that Lila stopped attending these parades years ago, but she searches on the chance that Lila made an exception this year so she could show her South American boyfriend another highlight of Grandville life. According to Wendell, among Lila’s myriad personality changes since taking up with Hector is, amazingly, a newly adopted pride in her hometown. Apparently Hector, who has lived in many places, considers Grandville far and away the most civilized of them all. A paradise, he says, and Lila, learning about the wider world from her lover in a way she never could at Grandville High, has evidently quickly come to see her town from his perspective.
Franny cannot find her daughter out there. Since she was released from Austen Riggs four weeks ago and taken up residence in an apartment over Cohen’s Hardware, Franny has only seen Lila twice, both times in the company of Wendell and Esther. Lila’s transformation was obvious the moment Franny laid eyes on her. Lila’s face was animated, her complexion luminous, her laughter easy and frequent. She even hugged Franny and whispered, “I’m glad you’re better,” the first time they saw one another. But they have not met alone or talked on the phone, and Franny still has not met Hector. Franny cannot help but think the reason for this is that Lila is afraid her mother could somehow ruin her wonderful new life.
Franny can easily understand why Lila might feel that way. Franny may now be safe from the specter of a major depressive episode and the irrational behavior that goes with it, but she remains dull and hesitant. She is not good company. In Lila’s parlance, she is a ‘downer’ and Franny knows it. Lately, Franny has considered the possibility that mothers and daughters are ineluctably locked in a zero-sum game of happiness, that ultimately it took her breakdown for Lila to become her own person. By this calculus, Franny is hopelessly stuck between her own mindlessly chipper mother and her newly exhilarated daughter.
But Franny’s greatest anxiety is that Lila is afraid she will not approve of Hector. Franny can understand that all too well, too. Because the truth of the matter is the very idea of a handsome young man from an exotic country sweeping her daughter off her feet fills Franny with anxiety, and one need not be a graduate of Austen Riggs to understand why.
Scanning the parade watchers, Franny now sees Stephanie Cyzinski next to a short, red-haired girl wearing an old-fashioned pinafore, the two of them standing behind a man in a wheelchair. The man’s legs are enclosed in casts surrounded by metal braces. It is Michael Dowd and he, remarkably, appears to be enjoying the festivities. Franny knows about his accident from Wendell—an early evening hit-and-run out near Dowd’s house. Apparently there was not much of a police investigation, but then there was not much for them to go on anyhow. Franny feels a fleeting quiver of distaste for Stephanie and her solicitous stance in this little tableau: the girl seems to glom to wounded people like Tiffany Korand and her son, Bret. Franny moves her binoculars on.
Wendell, Esther, Kaela, and Johnny are standing at the corner of Main and Melville in the spot where the vigil group usually gathers. Wendell has one arm around Esther’s waist, the other over Kaela’s shoulder. Johnny, standing in front of them, is waving an American flag on the end of a dowel stick with one hand, while eating a hot dog held in the other. They are the picture perfect all-American family of the twenty-first century—multicultural, with a white-haired pater familias and a sexy-looking, baby boomer mamma. Franny wishes to God she could feel happier for them. That will come in time, Dr. Werner has assured her.
The evening Franny saw Wendell and his new extended family through the porch window, her world changed irrevocably. And when she told Dr. Werner what she had seen and how it made her feel, the psychiatrist—for the moment, at least—changed also. “They were so alive,” Franny told him. “Bigger than life, really. And they made it look so easy—you know, just enjoying each other, all of them. So effortlessly. But it was—I don’t know—not completely real. Not connected to anything outside their little world. Like they only existed for themselves.”
Listening, Werner found himself gazing through that window with her. For once and finally, Dr. Werner was able to enter the place where Franny lived, not through the prefabricated doors of psychoanalytic theory, but through the fundamental passageway to understanding another human being: imagination. Without thinking, he pushed aside the ever-ready Electra complex with its sexual sparks of father love, and simply imagined being Franny deVries. What Rolf Werner understood in that moment might seem banal to many people, to, say, someone like the historian, Emmanuelle Jones, who spends almost every waking hour imaginatively inhabiting the skin of other human beings. What Werner grasped is that every person, no matter how wounded, is the final arbiter of the meaning of everything in her own life.
“It’s incredible how quickly people get on with their lives,” the doctor said to Franny in his office at the sanitarium. “They just do. They get on without you.”
Franny nodded, holding back her tears.
“I mean, I’m sure if you just went over and knocked on the door, they’d welcome you with open arms. But you’d probably feel like an intruder. An outsider.”
Franny remained silent.
“I don’t know what you can do,” Werner said finally. And then the psychiatrist offered his patient the simplest, yet truest counsel: “Except—when it is possible—to get on with life. On your own. You know, the best you can.”
Franny hands the binoculars back to Herb and goes to the couch in Herb’s living room where she stretches out on her back and listens, trying to distinguish a single melody from the musical muddle.
Watching the contingent of Grandville veterans’ parade in front of him, Wendell is bewildered. As always, he is profoundly moved by these men and women who risked their lives for the honor of their country, but his qualms and suspicions about his country’s current military adventure are twisting his respect for these people into shame. Or, at least, pity. For the first time he can remember, Wendell is confused by the idea of patriotism.
Heaven knows, he had more reason to be confused back in the sixties when he drew a high number in the draft lottery for the Vietnam War. He did not think much of that war either, although more because it did not seem to have anything to do with America than because he believed it was immoral. But he never considered registering for conscientious objector status or moving with his wife and daughter to Canada. Basically he just held his breath, and when President Johnson declared that young married men with children were exempt from the draft, he simply shrugged with relief and got on with his life, fairly oblivious to the fact that a good dozen of his Grandville High classmates were shipped off to Asia, one of them never to return. Maybe it was easier to be passive back then when he rarely felt ambivalent about anything and, on the occasions when he did, neither of ambivalence’s tines dug very deep. In those days, passivity felt to him like inner strength.
One reason he feels strongly about the war in Iraq is because Esther and Emmanuelle talk about it and its horrors almost every evening. It is clearly a terrible and wrong-headed thing. Still, it was Esther who wanted to bring the kids to the parade; she sees no inconsistency in honoring our soldiers but reviling their current Commander in Chief. Recently, she attached a bumper sticker to the rear of Wendell’s truck that said: “I LOVE MY COUNTRY—but I think we should start seeing other people.” She manages to be both more earnest and more light-he
arted than Wendell.
It is just such juxtapositions in Esther’s character that delight him. She constantly surprises him, and those surprises invariably cheer him, make him feel more alive. But on the subject of Franny, Wendell does not want any surprises; the situation is baffling and disturbing enough as it is. For this reason, he rarely talks about Franny with Esther, and Esther respects this. She rarely mentions Franny herself.
Just before Franny was released from Austen Riggs, Dr. Werner asked for individual meetings with Beatrice and Wendell. It was Dr. Werner who informed Wendell that his daughter would not be returning to the house on Mahaiwe Street, that for the indefinite future it would be better for her to live apart from her father and daughter.
“She needs to define herself as an individual,” the psychiatrist explained, but for the life of him Wendell could not fathom what that verdict meant. Wendell believed—indeed, he continues to believe—that Franny needs love, not definition. He wants to cradle her in security and unconditional acceptance. He wants her to wallow in the sanctuary of their home. But Wendell could not argue with Werner because he still did not understand what happened to his daughter and why he did not see it coming. Further, at the conclusion of his session with Werner, the doctor said, “It’s better this way, Mr. deVries. She wouldn’t be coming back to the same home anyway.”
Those words devastated Wendell to the brink of tears—tears that he only managed to hold back until he was out the front door of the sanitarium. At that moment, he resolved to ask Esther, Kaela, Johnny, and Emmanuelle to move out so that Franny could come back to the home she knew. It was a sacrifice they all had to make, that they all could afford to make because, unlike Franny, they were stable and happy people. But Wendell could only maintain this resolution up to the Grandville town line. It was not that he changed his mind after carefully weighing the alternatives; he simply was overwhelmed by the magnetism of his present contentment.
Wendell lives with this act of selfishness daily. It is with him now as Matt Maxwell’s band rolls by, guitars clanging, and Johnny salutes them with his hot dog, and giggles.
The ersatz music wafting up the hill and through Emmanuelle Jones’s open, third-floor window serves a practical purpose: it almost blocks out the tumultuous hubbub on the other side of her bedroom wall. God knows, Emmanuelle does not begrudge Lila and her apparently indefatigable young man a single cry or groan of pleasure. They are joyful noises. But Emmanuelle’s attempt to write clear, lyrical prose that captures the rhythm of Sarah deVries’s nineteenth century trek from Georgia to Massachusetts is hampered, to say the least, by the young couple’s relentlessly pounding counterpoint. The parade music is soothing by comparison.
Emmanuelle loves living in this house on Mahaiwe Street. She cannot remember a happier period in her adult life. Several weeks ago when she finally admitted to herself that there was not one more relevant document to be found in the Grandville Historical Society’s or Zion Church’s archives, or in the African-American collection at the University of Massachusetts, or in Wendell’s personal trove of family journals, correspondence, and inscribed Bibles, she also admitted to herself that she did not want to return to her apartment in Atlanta, there to begin writing her book.
This change of heart began with the missing days—Days Eight through Fourteen of Sarah deVries’s escape from slavery. Before coming to Grandville, Emmanuelle had convinced herself that all would be revealed in the journals kept by Sarah’s daughter, Edith; surely the family chronicler would have an account of those missing days. But Emmanuelle uncovered nothing of the sort. In fact, Edith wrote, “[Sarah] will not speak of how she came to be here, neither of why—although the latter is self-evident. It is not my prerogative to insist she do so. Thus, it is left to the province of imagination.”
Upon reading this, Emmanuelle despaired of continuing with her project. It would be more fruitful—and certainly more professional—to simply abandon Sarah deVries and start over with a fully-documented traveler on the Underground Railroad. She confessed to herself that she had too quickly been seduced by Uncle Billy’s enthusiasm for a book about his great-great-grandmother and his promise of comprehensive resources about her here in Grandville. But such was the historian’s lot. For every history written, millions go unwritten for lack of surviving evidence; a life unrecorded essentially does not exist. Still, that was hardly the case here. Eight days were unrecorded, but the days that framed the missing days were exhaustively documented. There was a vivid beginning and end.
Such was the private debate that babbled in Emmanuelle’s mind for the better part of a week. Her housemates surely knew she was in some kind of turmoil, but they did not press her to reveal what it was—not even the hypersensitive and curious Kaela. Emmanuelle took to long solitary walks down the hill, through town, across the bridge, and then almost to the town line before turning back. On one of these walks, she found herself repeating Edith’s journal entry in her mind: ‘Thus, it is left to the province of imagination.’ Could not Emmanuelle imagine those missing days? Not out of whole cloth, of course. Indeed, with the bookend days of Beginning and End, the distance traveled from Point A to Point B, the geography and topography of the space between, even dependable accounts of the townships, flora, and fauna that dotted the way, could not Emmanuelle fashion a credible account of the missing days for her readers? Did perfect accuracy always trump a methodically inferred and richly imagined story? Some years ago, a colleague of Emmanuelle’s had participated in a lecture series on memoir writing at the New York Public Library; the series was called, ‘Inventing the Truth.’ Emmanuel concluded that she, too, could invent the truth; she could conjure the missing days one at a time, even hour by hour, re-experiencing the passing landscape as Sarah deVries raced northward—the air she breathed, the shoots she ate, the spirit that drove her.
But no sooner had Emmanuelle reached this decision when she realized she dreaded the idea of writing such a speculative history among her friends and university colleagues in Atlanta. Even if they knew nothing of her modus operandi, she would sense their judgment of it every time she encountered them. Inexperienced as Emmanuelle was in this way of thinking and working, she appreciated that imagination did not flourish in a climate of doubt. Better to write where hardly a person knew her.
So, very tentatively, she broached the subject of remaining here with Esther. “You’ve got to be honest with me, Esther,” she said. “This is your family and I don’t want to intrude any more than I have already, so if—”
“What are you talking about?” Esther had said. “We always assumed you were going to write the book here. It’s just part of—you know—the whole gestalt.”
The whole gestalt! Emmanuelle has to laugh whenever she thinks about Esther’s pronouncement. The heartfelt goofiness with which Esther expresses herself, her hodgepodge of Eastern philosophy and Western self-seriousness, never fails to charm Emmanuelle. It infects her with an optimism that goes a long way in quelling her personal doubts—not only doubts about her book project, but about why she feels so comfortable living here in an overwhelmingly white community. Why she, a scholar who has devoted her entire professional life to studying and interpreting the lives of African-Americans, feels so at home in this place. Is it some kind of escapism? In the end, is her fascination with her own tribe an inverse reaction to latent shame for belonging to it? Or more to the point, has she—as her ex-husband often said—become so white in her intellect that it has finally subjugated her black soul?
But then a compelling thought came to Emmanuelle: Maybe she was—for this little while—escaping her identity as a representative African-American, but in the process wasn’t she regaining an identity of her own? In this small town, she finally could indulge her long-ignored desire to be a representative of no one except herself. No shame in that, no self-hate. Sure, she knew what Uncle Billy meant when he said that prejudice in Grandville was a subtle thing. She saw the puzzlement in townspeople’s eyes when she walked down Main
Street or waited in line at the Grand Union. She sensed their flashes of nervousness and wonderment. She was even aware of the self-congratulatory enthusiasm behind the vociferous, ‘Hello’s’ and ‘Hi there’s’ that some Grandvillians launched in her direction when she walked among them. But it was only she they were responding to—her strangeness, and there was something oddly reassuring about that.
Lila’s ecstatic shriek eclipses the whole musical extravaganza down in town. Emmanuelle wonders if Lila could be heard in downtown Grandville. God love young people who are discovering sex for the first time, and God keep them from realizing that it will never be the same again.
Lila is laughing in Hector’s arms.
“Oh God, I’m so loud!” she says to her lover.
“But it is beautiful,” Hector replies. “The most beautiful love song I have ever heard.” He nuzzles into a spray of golden hair that covers her right breast and kisses it. Everything about this girl tastes sweet to him. Here, in this bedroom, in this town in America, Hector has discovered a contentment he never could have imagined. This feeling is with him from when he wakes in the morning until he falls asleep at night in the apartment behind the Wright Mountain Motel that he shares with the other restaurant workers.
Hector loves Lila deVries. The truth is, he never in his life thought about love, not this kind, entirely different from the love he saw between his mother and father, or from whatever it was he felt for Sylvia. The love between his parents was gentle and honest, but it was not passionate; in Puerto Alvira, the business of day-to-day survival eliminated the very concept of passionate love. And as to Sylvia, she was a dream of passion, which is altogether different from tasting it on the naked body lying next to him. Even making love is as new to Hector as it is to Lila. Yes, he has performed this act with many women; it would even be false to deny that he had learned to perform it pleasingly under their tutelage. But what he feels with Lila, this union of souls, is as astonishing as if he had been a virgin too.