The Sorrows of an American Read online

  The young woman and the little girl paused on the sidewalk with Laney Buscovich from Homer Realtors. I couldn’t see the woman’s face, but I noticed that her posture was beautiful. Her hair was short and cut close to her head. Even from that distance, I liked her slender neck, and although she was wearing a long coat, the sight of the cloth over her breasts triggered a sudden image of her naked, and with it a wave of arousal. The sexual loneliness I had felt for some time, a feeling that had on occasion driven me to the voyeuristic pleasures of cable porn, intensified after my father’s funeral, mounting inside me like a keening storm, and this postmortem blast of libido made me feel that I had returned to my life as a slobbering teenage onanist, the tall, skinny, practically hairless jerk-off king of Blooming Field Junior High School.

  To interrupt the fantasy, I turned to look at the girl. She was a spindly little thing in a bulky purple coat who had clambered up onto the stoop wall and was balancing there with one thin leg out in front of her. Under the coat she was wearing what looked like a tutu, a pink concoction of tulle and net over heavy black tights that bagged at her knees. But what was most noticeable about the child was her hair, a pale brown mass of soft curls that enveloped her small head like a huge halo. The mother’s skin was darker than the child’s. If these two were mother and daughter, I decided, the girl’s father could be white. I drew a breath as I watched her leap from the wall, but she landed easily on the ground with a little bounce in her knees. Like Tinkerbell, I thought.

  LOOKING BACK AT our early life, the most astonishing feature must be how small our house was, my father wrote. A kitchen, living room, and bedroom on the first floor came to 476 square feet. Two lofts on the second floor, which were used as bedrooms, provided the same amount of floor space. There were no amenities. Our plumbing consisted of an outdoor toilet and a hand-operated pump, each at its own location about 75 feet from the house. A teakettle provided hot water, as did a reservoir attached to the kitchen range. Unlike better-equipped farms we had no underground cistern to store rainwater, but we did have a large metal tank which caught rainwater during the summer. During the winter we melted snow. Kerosene lamps provided light. Although rural electrification began in the thirties, we did not “hook up” until 1949. There was no furnace. A wood-burning range warmed the kitchen and a heater cared for the living room. Except for storm windows, the house had no insulation. Only during the coldest spells was fire maintained in the heater overnight. The water in the teakettle was often frozen by morning. Father was up first. He built the fire so much of the edge was gone by the time we crawled out of bed. Even so there was shivering and huddling around the stoves as we got dressed. One winter in the early 1930s we ran out of wood. Not enough had been put up in the first place. If one must burn green wood, ash and maple will serve you best.

  As I read, I kept waiting for a reference to Lisa, but she didn’t appear. My father wrote about the refinements of piling “an honest cord of wood,” plowing with Belle and Maud, the family horses, clearing the fields of dreaded weeds like Canadian thistle and quack grass, the farm arts of dragging, seeding, cross-dragging, corn planting and cutting, haying, collective shock threshing, silo filling, and gopher catching. As a boy, my father killed gophers for money, and from his later vantage point he understood the humor in this occupation. He started a paragraph with the sentence: If you are not interested in pocket gophers or how to catch them, move on to the next paragraph.

  Every memoir is full of holes. It’s obvious that there are stories that can’t be told without pain to others or to oneself, that autobiography is fraught with questions of perspective, self-knowledge, repression, and outright delusion. I wasn’t surprised to see that the mysterious Lisa, who had sworn my father to secrecy, was missing from his memoir. I knew there were many things I would leave out of my own story. Lars Davidsen had been a man of rigorous honesty and deep feeling, but Inga was right about his early life. Much had been hidden. Between Not enough had been put up in the first place and ash and maple will serve you best was a story untold.

  It took me years to understand that although my grandparents had always been poor, the Depression had ruined them entirely. The sorry little house my father described is still standing, and the remaining twenty acres of what was once a farm are now rented to another farmer who owns hundreds upon hundreds more. My father never let the place go. As his illness progressed, he willingly decided to sell the house he had lived in with my mother and us, a lovely place built partially with wood from trees he had chopped down himself, but the farmhouse of his childhood he gave to me, his son, the renegade doctor, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst who lives in New York City.

  By the time I knew my grandfather, he was mostly silent. He sat in the small living room with the wood-burning stove in a stuffed chair. Beside the chair was a rickety table with an ashtray on it. When I was young, that object fascinated me because I found it shameful. It was a miniature black toilet with a gold seat, the only flush toilet my grandparents would ever have. The house always smelled strongly of mildew and in winter of burnt wood. We rarely went upstairs, but I don’t believe we were ever told not to go there. The narrow steps led to three tiny rooms, one of which belonged to my grandfather. I don’t remember when it was, but I couldn’t have been more than eight. I sneaked up the stairs and walked into my grandfather’s room. A pale light was shining through the small window, and I watched the dust specks dance in the air. I looked at the narrow bed, the tall stacks of yellowing newspapers, the torn wallpaper, a few dusty books on a beaten dresser, the tobacco pouches, the clothes piled in a corner, and felt a muted sense of awe. I think I had a dim idea of the man’s solitary existence and of something lost—but I didn’t know what. In this memory, I hear my mother behind me, telling me that I shouldn’t be in the room. She seemed to know everything, my mother, seemed to sense what other people didn’t. Her voice wasn’t at all harsh, but it may be that her sanction made the experience memorable. I wondered if somewhere in that room was something I shouldn’t have seen.

  My grandfather was gentle with us, and I liked his hands, even the right one, which was missing three fingers, lost to a circle saw in 1921. He would reach out and pat me or lay his hand on my shoulder and hold it there before returning to his newspaper and spittoon, a coffee can that said “Folgers.” His immigrant parents had eight children: Anna, Brita, Solveig, Ingeborg, another Ingeborg, David, Ivar (my grandfather), and Olaf. Anna and Brita lived into adulthood, but they were dead before I was born. Solveig died of tuberculosis in 1907. The first Ingeborg died on August 19, 1884. She was sixteen months old. Our father told me that this Ingeborg died shortly after birth and was so tiny that a cigar box was used as a coffin. Our father must have confused Ingeborg’s death with some other local tale. The second Ingeborg also came down with tuberculosis and spent time at the Mineral Springs Sanitarium, but she recovered. David fell ill with tuberculosis in 1925. He spent all of 1926 in the sanitarium. When he recovered, he disappeared. He wasn’t found again until 1936, and by then he was dead. Olaf died of tuberculosis in 1914. Sibling ghosts.

  My grandmother, also the daughter of Norwegian immigrants, had grown up with two healthy brothers and inherited money from her father. She was entirely different from her husband, a female spitfire, and I was a favorite of hers. Entering the house became a ritual. I would throw open the screen door, run through it, and bellow, “Grandma, my sword!” This was her cue to reach behind the kitchen cupboard and pull out a two-by-four onto which my uncle Fredrik had nailed a short crosspiece. She always laughed then, a loud cackle that sometimes made her cough. She was fat but strong, a woman who hauled heavy buckets of water and carried a bushel of apples in the folds of her skirt, who peeled potatoes with a fierce stroke of her paring knife, and overcooked every comestible that came her way. A woman of moods, she had her smiling, chatty, storytelling days and her days of gloom, when she muttered asides and squawked out dubious opinions about bankers and rich folks and sundry others who were guil
ty of crimes. On her worst days, she would say a terrible thing: “I never should have married Ivar.” When his mother ranted, my father stiffened, my grandfather remained quiet, my mother tried humor and negotiation, and Inga, sensitive to every emotional wind change, whose face registered pain at even the hint of a conflict, drooped. A raised voice, a retort, a sullen expression, an irritable word stuck her like needles. Her mouth tensed and her eyes filled with tears. How often I had wished in those days that she would toughen up just a little.

  Despite the occasional outbursts from Grandma, we loved it there, the place my father called “out home,” especially in summer, when the broad flat fields with growing corn ran to the horizon. A rusting tractor, overgrown by weeds, a permanently parked Model A, the old pump, and the stone foundation of what had once been a barn were all fixtures in our games. Except for the wind moving in the grass and trees, the sound of birds, and an occasional car passing on the road, there was little noise. I never gave a moment’s thought to the fact that my sister and I were climbing, running, and inventing our stories of shipwrecked orphans in an arrested world, but at some point, the world of my grandparents, of those second-generation immigrants, had ground to a halt. I see now that the place is a scar formed over an old wound. It’s odd that we’re all compelled to repeat pain, but I’ve come to regard this as a truth. What used to be doesn’t leave us. When my great-grandfather Olaf Davidsen, the youngest of six sons, left the tiny farm high on a mountain in Voss, Norway, in the spring of 1868, he already knew English and German, and he had his teaching credentials. He wrote poetry. My grandfather would finish the fifth grade.

  The diary was one of those small five-year volumes with only a few lines allotted per day. My father kept it from 1937 to 1940, and there were some sporadic entries from 1942. Lars Davidsen’s prose had undergone a revolution since 1937, and I puzzled over his peculiar use of the verb to be and his mutating prepositions. There were several entries that simply stated, Was to school. It took me several minutes to realize that this odd construction was a loose translation of the Norwegian Var på skolen, literally “Was on school.” His syntax and a number of the prepositions were English versions of the family’s first language. I guessed that he had received the diary for Christmas and began writing in it on January first. He recorded visits from and to neighbors: Masers were up for dinner. Neil was along, too. The Jacobsen boys were over in the afternoon. Was to Brekkes today. Was on a party at Bakkethuns. Weather conditions: There was a snowstorm today. The wind is blowing very hard. The weather was nice and melting. Today there was a hard snowstorm. From morning till now. There is a drift four feet high outside the house. Winter illnesses: Lotte and Fredrik were not in school, but Fredrik was up today. Was in bed all day because account of a cough. Animal troubles: Daddy and I was up to Clarence Brekke. He was having bad luck. 4 of his cattle was dead. Daddy was up at Clarence helping him skin the seventh cow. 4 heifers, 1 steer, 1 cow, and one calf have died for him inside a week. Jacobsen’s horse, Tardy, died. Ember’s dog was driven over. On January 28, I found a mention of David. Today is a year ago since dad was up in the cities to identify uncle David after hearing he was dead. By spring there were several gopher entries: I caught 6 gophers today. Caught four gophers. I caught 7 gophers in all at Otterness. On June 1, my father wrote, Today there was a row between Harry and Daddy. June 3, I found the first mention of the world beyond that small rural community. I plowed and dragged today. King Edward and Mrs. Wallis Simpson. On the fifteenth of that same month, my father recorded an emotion. I hoed potatoes all day. Pete Bramvold was here and wanted to hire me. I am so doggoned disgusted because I can’t go. On the day before Lisa sent the letter to my father, June twenty-sixth, I found this entry: We plowed in the potatoes. Daddy was to town. Harry was put in jail.

  Who was Harry? When I spoke to Inga, she said she had no idea. I agreed to write to Uncle Fredrik and ask him. Tante Lotte was beyond asking. She was in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s.

  THE FIRST THING Eglantine ever said to me was, “Look, Mommy, he’s a giant.” After opening the door for my new tenants, I was somewhat relieved that when I looked at Miranda a second time, I shook her hand without going to pieces. Her eyes were unusual. They were large, almond shaped, the color of a hazelnut, and tilted upward slightly, as if someone in the family had come from Asia, but her intense gaze was what held me during those initial seconds. She then lowered those remarkable eyes toward her daughter and said, “No, Eggy, he’s not a giant. He’s a tall man.”

  I looked down at the child and said, “Well, I come pretty close to being as tall as a giant, but I’m not like the ones in fairy tales.” I bent over and smiled encouragingly, but the little girl didn’t smile back. She looked at me without blinking and then narrowed her eyes as if she were weighing my comment with great seriousness. Her grave expression made me even more self-conscious about my height. I’m six feet five inches tall. Inga is six feet, and my father measured in at just a hair under six-three. My mother is the shrimp at five-nine. The Davidsen family and, on my mother’s paternal side, the Nodeland family, tended toward the thin and towering. The genetic combination had been predictable, and Inga and I grew and grew and grew. We had endured the beanpole and how’s-the-weather-up-there jokes throughout our lives, as well as the mistaken assumption that our jump shots were superb. Not a single seat in a movie theater, playhouse, airplane, or subway, no public toilet or sink, no sofa or chair in lobbies and waiting rooms, not one desk in the world’s libraries has ever been built for the likes of me. For years, I have felt that I inhabit a world a few sizes too small, except at home, where I raised the counters and built high cabinets that, as Goldilocks put it, are “just right.”

  As we sat at my kitchen table, I felt a strong reserve from Miranda Casaubon, a proud distance that I rather admired, but which made conversation difficult. She could have been anywhere between twenty-five and thirty-five, was conservatively dressed with the exception of her high boots that laced up the front and tightly followed the line of her calves. I knew from Laney that she had “a good job” as a book designer for a major publisher, could afford the rent, and had insisted on Park Slope so her daughter could attend P.S. 321, the local elementary school. There was no father in the picture. Miranda told me that she had grown up in Jamaica and left with her family when she was thirteen. Her accent had been blunted, but she retained some of the musicality of Caribbean English. Her parents and her three sisters were now all living in Brooklyn. Miranda kept her hands on the table as we spoke, one laid over the other. They were slender with long fingers, and I noticed that there was no tension in them or in the rest of her body for that matter. She was still, relaxed, and alert.

  If not for Eggy, I wouldn’t have discovered anything more. She had stayed silent after our greeting, and when we sat down she hugged her mother’s arm, buried her face in her shoulder, and then began a game with the back of the chair. She held it with one hand and leaned outward until she could go no farther and then pulled herself back again. After this gymnastic routine, she abruptly skipped away and began to dance around the room with her arms out, pale brown curls flying. She hopped over to the bookshelves and began to sing, “Books, bookers, books, and more bookerees! Book-a-book, book-a-book. I can read today.”

  I turned to Miranda. “Can she read?”

  Miranda smiled for the first time, and I saw her even white teeth, which protruded just slightly. The overbite sent a shudder through me and I looked away. “A little. She’s in kindergarten and is learning.”

  Eggy leaned her head back, threw out her arms, and started to spin on the floor.

  “You’re getting wild,” Miranda told her. “Calm down.”

  “I like to be wild!” She grinned at us, and her wide mouth seemed to take up the whole bottom of her small face, for a moment giving her an elfin expression.

  “I mean it,” Miranda said.

  The little girl watched her mother, then spun again, but more slowly. After a short r
ebellious tap with her foot, she shook her curls and skipped over to me, eyeing her mother with a touch of resentment. She moved close to me and in a conspiratorial way said, “Do you want to hear something private?”

  I looked at Miranda.

  “Maybe Dr. Davidsen doesn’t want to hear it,” Miranda said.

  “Erik,” I said.

  Miranda glanced at me but said nothing.

  “I’m happy to hear it if it’s all right with your mother,” I said, striking a compromise.

  Eggy regarded her mother fiercely. Miranda sighed and nodded, and then I felt the child’s hand on my head as she pulled my ear toward her mouth. In a loud, excited whisper that felt like a blast of wind on my eardrum, she said, “My daddy was in a big box, and it got very sticky and wet in there, and so he dis”—she paused—“peared. ’Cause he’s magic.”

  I wasn’t sure whether Eggy believed these words were inaudible to her mother or not, but I saw Miranda grimace for a moment and lower her eyelids. I turned to Eggy and said, “I won’t tell anybody. I promise.”

  The young Eglantine gave me a flirtatious smile. “You have to swear and hope to die.”