by Seth Lerer
Twenty years later, in the fall of 1986, I fell apart. Days passed and I could not get out of bed. I didn’t shave for a week. At the time I told myself it was the stress of coming up for tenure, or the tensions of five years of marriage. I lay in bed, replaying my interview with the department chair, remembering how he would coddle his assistant professors into complacency, only to let them drop. I thought about that afternoon upriver, in the library with Elias Boudinot’s books, steeling myself for the humiliation of losing my job. And what would Dad say: we don’t think he’ll get it. What would he think if I turned out to be what one of my predecessors had been: a brilliant junior medievalist who, two years after being denied tenure, was found by a senior professor selling ties at Brooks Brothers in Manhattan.
I’d given up my lab for the library. All of the things I’d hope to do in childhood, the person I had wanted to grow up to be—all that was over. At thirty-one, I had accomplished only one thing in my life: to stay in college and wear tweeds. I lived in the afterglow of Dad’s Harvard afternoon, when men who’d known Henry Adams tottered up to ask directions. I thought of Grendel groaning, of my Iceland summer. I thought, if I just got dressed I would feel better. And then I recalled the story of my predecessor selling ties.
My bedside books that autumn were the ones I’d taken from Dad’s study. There was Maynard Mack’s Modern Poetry, still with the Barron’s Textbook Exchange slip inside it. And there was F. O. Matthiessen’s Oxford Book of American Verse, with a few dogeared pages in the Frost section. I split the book open at “My November Guest”:
My sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain,
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
I got up and called the hospital. Give me a pill, find me a solvent for this sorrow. They referred me to a psychiatric pharmacologist, a man my own age, confident, well-spoken. Why are you here, how do you feel, is this a sadness or a true depression?
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away . . .
Count backward from one hundred by sevens, he instructed. Ninety-three, eighty-six, seventy-nine, seventy-two. I spit the numbers out without reflection. The doctor said, “Red boat, blue boat, green boat,” and then he asked me to repeat the sequence. He asked me about my weight, if I was regular, if I had ever done the stamp test (you take a roll of stamps and adhere them around your penis at night, and if the roll has broken in the morning, you know you’ve had a night erection and you’re not impotent). He asked me, once again, to list the boats in the same order that he’d said them.
Red boat, blue boat, green boat.
“Let’s go with lithium,” he said.
I picked up the prescription at the hospital and swallowed. Within days, I felt my fingers twitch, my memories blur. The final lines began to disappear, and as I prepared for my classes, I was terrified that I would forget something. Weekly, I would show up at the clinic just to see if the titration levels were correct: too much lithium, and I would fade; too little, and I’d sorrow. After a month, a mineral crust covered me. I carried Dad’s anthology around, my finger stuck in “My November Guest.” I’d wander around Princeton, poking into Einstein’s yard or loitering in the physics building. Some afternoons, I’d walk the mile or so to the Institute for Advanced Study.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky, . . .
Thirty years before, J. Robert Oppenheimer ran the place. The director’s house still had the white corral that Oppenheimer had put in for his young daughter’s horse—an animal that, Princeton legend had it, she fed chocolate milk out of a porcelain teacup while her parents argued in their alcohol-fueled anger.
Before the coming of the snow . . .
Oppenheimer’s ghost still walked those lanes, arguing over policy or protons, still locked with Edward Teller over what they called the “super.”
Teller’s hydrogen bomb would never have been built without lithium. For what he realized (or what he would always take credit for realizing) was that in order to get hydrogen atoms to fuse and thus release the massive energies of thermonuclear explosion, you had to use the element’s heavier isotopes. Deuterium and tritium would fuse, theoretically, at lower temperatures than simple hydrogen. So, on an afternoon somewhere in the Pacific, in the year before my birth, Teller and his minions supervised the wrapping of a regular, atomic bomb in a casing of lithium deuteride. This compound, when exposed to the immense heat of the atomic blast and the release of radiation, would do two things: first, it would transmute the lithium into tritium; second, it would fuse the tritium and the deuterium in the compound together. It worked.
She’s glad the birds are gone away . . .
I walked the sodden Princeton streets, remembering the duck and cover drills of elementary school, the fallout shelter in the basement of the fire station, the doomsday clock twitching to midnight. I remembered the terrifying television ad for Johnson’s presidential campaign—the little girl, the flower, and the countdown. Ten, nine, eight . . . and then the blast. I took my lithium, walked through the Institute, and waited for the end. It never came. I got my tenure that spring, with a phone call from the chair, who said, in one breath, “Congratulations. Don’t disappoint us.” I went into the bathroom, opened up the bottle full of lithium and dumped it in the toilet. It didn’t spatter like the metal, didn’t flame out colorfully. It just dissolved.
. . .
“I guess I was just tired of playing the beard.”
And with Mom’s kiss, the funeral was over. I smiled and looked at you, and thought how blessed you are that, with a California childhood, there would be no frosted windows to get in the way; how you would always be our prince; and how your only lithium would be in batteries.
TEN
Beauty and the Beast
Years passed after the funeral. We settled Dad’s estate, sold off his things, and took the pictures down. I taught my classes, wrote my books, and watched our son’s chemical imagination blossom. He built a laboratory in the garage, stocked with chemicals I helped him purchase off the Internet. He put together equipment for pyrotechnic displays, thermite reactions, electric dazzlements. I raided the old physics laboratory at Stanford just as they were moving out: Tesla coils lay in dumpsters; piles of diffraction gratings sat outside offices, waiting to be trashed; lenses and light boxes spread themselves across floors, like Prospero’s detritus. I thought—I can control this beast, I can tame his impulse to explode. When friends visited, we would sit in the backyard, and after barbecue and biscuits, he would come out, like a showman, and turn an upended trash can into his podium. He’d place a little powder on a plate and drop some liquid glycerin on it. Smoke would appear, and then a lilac flame. He’d take a handful of steel wool, an ordinary battery, and some wires and burn it up before our eyes. He’d throw some chemicals on to the still hot barbecue, and flames would spectrum out: strontium carmine, lithium red, copper green, sodium yellow. And for his final act, he would ignite some powdered metals on the trash-can lid. Blinded into bliss, we applauded every trick behind his chemical theater.
But howsoe’er you have
Been jostled from your senses, know for certain
That I am Prospero.
The garage was his court, and his teenage attendants waited on him as he lectured on reactions and reagents. One afternoon, he brought a friend home from tenth grade, a fellow member of the science bowl team. He pressed the button on the garage, and as the door rose he stood there, arms thrown wide out, and announced, “This is it.”
Pray you look in.
School fell apart. We had him tested. “But he’s brilliant,” I would protest, as if simply loving him would make him work, as if my desire was enough to bring him to my fold. I would come home from teaching or the library an
d smell the weed on him. I’d drop him off at playgrounds where he used to ride the swing and watch him meet his buddies, young men now, with their first beards shadowing their smiles. His government I cast upon my wife, and to my state grew stranger . . .
And my trust,
Like a good parent, did beget of him
A falsehood in its contrary as great
As my trust was . . .
Finally, after stabs at therapies and private school, we realized that we’d have to have him taken from us, “involuntarily transported” to a place to get him clean, to keep him safe, to teach him how to be. Like Caliban in exile, I thought, thrown out of his bed. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and walk in his room where he would sleep, encircled in his sins.
this thing of darkness I
Acknowledge mine.
We had him taken just before he turned eighteen. Faced with his erratic behavior and the threat of an arrest record, my wife and I met with an educational consultant and together planned his transport. This woman, in her seventies, spoke to us in a blend of care and pity. She would make the calls, arrange the transportation, and make sure that when he arrived at the euphemistically named assessment facility in Utah, all would be in order. We sat there in her office, and I thought of Dr. Sachs. I half-expected that she’d lead me to a little room and we’d make popsicle-stick houses together, and she’d remind me that our dreams are windows to our souls. But she gave us the names, and one night in early April my wife and I drove to a motel outside the Oakland airport and met with the two moonlighting cops who would take him. They explained to us the procedure: they had done this many times; just be prepared for his attempt to bolt. I let them know that he slept with his pocket-knives next to the bed, and they said, “Get them out.” They helped us script this dreaded night: they would arrive at 5 a.m. We’d say good-bye, tell him we loved him, and then leave the house. If all went well, he’d be at the facility in rural Utah by dinnertime.
He fell asleep in a bedroom still filled with picture books. There was Goodnight Moon, with its litany of the green room, the pictures on the wall, and the bunny. There was Pat the Bunny, its fur mottled by years of stroking. There was Carl’s Masquerade, his favorite at three: a picture book with no words, with the Mom and Dad dressing up for a costume party and the baby left in the care of the dog, Carl. See how the baby rides Carl to the party, I remembered saying to him. Nobody recognizes them, because they think they are in costume, too, and there are Mom and Dad, Mom beautiful as a princess and Dad dashing as a pirate, and the baby and Carl win the prize for the best costumes at the party, and then they go home, just in time to be in bed when Mom and Dad return.
What costume would he wear now?
They came, as planned, at 5 a.m. We woke him up. We sat there in his bedroom, telling him we cared, telling him how it was all for the best. And then we left and sat in the car a block away, watching them bring him into their car, watching them drive off, knowing that soon they would be in an airplane en route to the Utah desert.
After we had him taken, I went through his lab. There were shrink-wrapped containers of compounds I knew we hadn’t bought together: reagents for drugs, a setup for chilling the heated mixture. There was a stash of marijuana and some pills I dared not recognize. I thought of how I’d done this all before, how I’d rifled through Dad’s closet only to find things that made me wonder: did I know you? I sat there on the concrete floor of the garage, surrounded by substances, and wished Dad back, less to ask for advice than for approval. I thought of Sebald’s stories of the Kindertransport, little children taken from their homes and set on railroads to supposed safety. And in my thoughts, I rewrote passages from Austerlitz to match his days: I thought of the onset of winter in the mountains where we’d sent him, the complete absence of sound from him, and my childhood wish for everything to be snowed over, the garage, and the lab, and the late nights, and the slammed doors, and I imagined what it would be like when we would thaw out, when we would speak again and I would tell him of my father, and of how he’d read me “Rumplestiltskin,” “Ali Baba,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and we would remember that the bedtime stories all resolved to happy ends.
In “Beauty and the Beast,” a merchant, having lost his fortune, seeks news of his ships. He travels far from home, leaving his daughters, and gets lost in a forest. He takes refuge in a castle, is treated to great hospitality by a mysteriously absent lord, and then meets that lord—the Beast—when he plucks a rose to take home to his daughter, Beauty. In compensation, the Beast must have Beauty with him. She comes, and he treats her with great elegance and courtesy. He makes her promise never to leave him, but when she begs for a week’s leave to visit her poor father, he agrees. “Do not forget your promise.” But she does, overstaying her time at home. Almost too late, she remembers, and she has a vision of the Beast dying in his garden. “Forgetting all his ugliness,” the story goes, she throws herself upon him. “You forgot your promise,” Beast replies. But Beauty, moved by the inner nobility of the Beast, pledges herself to him as his wife. With this, the Beast is magically transformed into a handsome prince, released from a spell cast by a wicked fairy.
The story worked a magic on me as a child, a magic that materialized one evening, at fourteen, when my parents and I saw Jean Cocteau’s film La belle et la bête at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh. The library was running a historical film series, and it was Mom’s idea to go. She wanted to see something in black and white. And it was beautiful: Jean Marais with his shoulder-length blond hair, Josette Day looking like a porcelain goddess, and the Beast with eyes like hot coals. People slipped in and out of walls, arms stuck out holding candelabras. At the end, Marais, as Avenant, the human suitor of La Belle and a crony of her brother, goes after the riches of the Beast’s Temple to Diana. He has the magic key to let him in, but he opts instead to break through the temple’s glass skylight. Du verre, c’est du verre, glass is glass, he says, as he pushes his foot through. And yet, it is not, for in fairyland the glass is always something else: a mirror is a portal to a hidden world, or a deceptively transparent barrier between reality and fantasy. When he breaks the glass and tries to get in, Diana shoots him and he is transformed into the Beast. At that precise moment, the Beast rises before La Belle and we see him as Prince Charmant, played by the same actor who played Avenant, Jean Marais. Ou est ma bête? “Where is my Beast?” says Beauty. He’s gone, and the prince explains: my parents never believed in fairies, so the fairies punished them through me.
Du verre, c’est du verre. We’d led a mirrored life. Mom sits forever at the vanity before her wedding. Dad leaves me at the airport with the broken glass beneath the car door. When memories come back to you, it says in Austerlitz, “you sometimes feel as if you were looking at the past through a glass mountain.” Du verre, c’est du verre. I look through the glass and see the forks and knives that seemed to come alive. I slip through doorways to forgotten libraries. I see all the books I’ve read and written about, trying to imagine myself in them. Like Alice, I go back to get the little golden key. Like Scrooge, I want to go back to school. “You recollect the way,” says the spirit. “Remember it!” Scrooge cries, “I could walk it blindfold.” And yet, when he visits Christmas Yet to Come, he sees himself forgotten by all but the gravestone.
Where is my Beast? Where is my Wonderland? Let me remember their lessons. If you hold the strangely written “Jabberwocky” to a glass, “the words will all go the right way again.” And when the White King shouts out that his terrifying moments are ones he will never forget, his Queen notes, condescendingly: “You will though, if you don’t make a memorandum of it.” But when the King begins to write, furiously, in his memorandum book, the pencil is too thick for him. “I can’t manage this one bit. It writes all manner of things that I don’t intend.” The pencil always was too thick for me. As a child, I scrawled, I blotted. My beautiful words showed up on the page as beastly scribbles.
If only I could make the words
all go the right way again.
Let me rewrite his childhood. Let me start again with all his books. Let me read Winnie the Pooh to him and explain the words. Let me teach him. Let me explain how Pooh’s line about living “under the name of Sanders” is a joke: he literally lives under a sign with that name on it, but it’s an everyday expression to say that someone is living under another name. Let me explain TRESSPASSERS W, the broken sign whose erstwhile threat of prosecution Piglet turns into an identity. It is, he says, short for his grandfather’s name, Trespassers Will, which in turn was short for Trespassers William. And at the story’s end, when everyone is ready for a party, the gifts given are the tools of writing:
It was a Special Pencil Case. There were pencils in it marked “B” for Bear, and pencils marked “HB” for Helping Bear, and pencils marked “BB” for Brave Bear. There was a knife for sharpening the pencils, and India-rubber for rubbing out anything which you had spelt wrong, and a ruler for ruling lines for the words to walk on, and inches marked on the ruler in case you wanted to know how many inches anything was, and Blue Pencils and Red Pencils and Green Pencils for saying special things in blue and red and green.
Now let me tell my son that we can start to write. “Was Pooh’s pencil case any better than mine?” Christopher Robin asks, and the father-narrator replies, “It was just about the same.” A man, I’d like to say to him, in my best professorial voice, should be measured by the quality of his pencil case.
I’ve measured out my life against my pencil case. I’ve found books in which I could underline myself. That afternoon in Armonk, as I looked for anchorage in an old widow’s library, I thought of Henry Adams, finding himself in his father’s bookshelves. I remembered how I had studied for my orals, how I knew just how every work of literature had ended, how I’d parried with Wayne Booth as he thrust and feinted with quotations. In what books, now, will I find my solace?
I hold Sebald’s Austerlitz in my hands, the underlinings from ten years ago unfaded like the outlines of a face. It is the story of a man ripped from his childhood, who has lost his name, and who returns to his home city. Like Scrooge, he walks the streets again as if blindfolded. He finds records of his parents: a flamboyant father and an actress mother, one who had starred in operettas, who had taken him to her performances, who dressed him up, at times as a player in a fairy tale of her own imagining. The photo on the book’s cover depicts a little boy clad in white, with a furred cape, breeches, and a huge plumed hat; when Austerlitz finds his aged nursemaid still alive in Prague, she shows him the picture and tells him the story, six decades old. His mother “had the snow-white costume made for you especially for the occasion. On the back it says, Jacquot Austerlitz, páze ruzové králnovy, in your grandfather’s handwriting.” Jacques Austerlitz, page to the Rose Queen. Or better, Jean Marais in Cocteau’s film, rising up off the ground with his elaborate plumes and dazzlingly white cloak. There is a prince in all of us, as long as we believe in fairy tales.