The Sorrows of an American Page 3

  “I swear and hope to die,” I said.

  This seemed to delight her. She beamed at me, closed her eyes, and then inhaled loudly through her nose, as if we had just exchanged smells rather than words.

  When I turned back to Miranda, I found her regarding me with a shrewd expression, as if she were penetrating my depths. I have a weakness for smart women, and I smiled at her. She smiled back, but then stood up, effectively ending the interview. The abrupt gesture provoked a sudden desire to learn her story, to find out all about this woman, her five-year-old, and the mysterious father the daughter had assigned to a box.

  Before they walked out the door, I said, “Please let me know if you need anything or if there’s anything I can do before you move in.”

  I watched them walk down the steps, turned around in the hallway, and heard myself say, “I’m so lonely.” It shook me because this sentence had become an involuntary verbal tic. I seldom realized I was saying it or perhaps didn’t know that I was speaking the words out loud. I had started to experience this unbidden mantra even while I was still married, mumbling it before sleep, in the bathroom, or even at the grocery store, but it had become more pronounced in the last year. My father had it with my mother’s name. While he was sitting alone in a chair, before he dozed off, and later, in his room at the nursing home, he would utter Marit over and over. He did it sometimes when she was within hearing distance. If she answered the call, he seemed not to know that he had spoken. That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don’t notice the threshold has been crossed.

  AS WIDOW AND divorced man, Inga and I found the common ground that mutual loneliness offered us. After Genie left me, I realized that most of the dinners, parties, and events we had attended were connected to her rather than to me. My colleagues from Payne Whitney, where I worked at the time, and my fellow psychoanalysts had bored her. Inga lost friends, too, people who had been attracted to the shine of her famous husband and had accepted her as his charming second, but who then disappeared after Max was dead. Although there were many among them whom she hadn’t much cared for to begin with, there were others whose precipitous absence deeply pained her. She did not, however, pursue a single one of them.

  Inga met Max when she was a graduate student in philosophy at Columbia. He gave a reading at the university, and my sister was sitting in the front row. Inga was a twenty-five-year-old blond beauty, brilliant, fierce, and aware of her seductive power. She held Max Blaustein’s fifth novel in her lap and listened intently to every word of his reading. When he was finished, she asked him a long complicated question about his narrative structures, which he did his best to answer, and then, when she laid her book on the table to have it signed, he wrote on the title page, “I surrender. Don’t leave.” In 1981, Max was forty-seven years old and had been married twice. He not only had a reputation as a major writer but was also known as a profligate seducer of young women, a carousing wild man who drank too much, smoked too much, and was, all in all, too much, and Inga knew it. She didn’t leave. She stayed. She stayed until he died of stomach cancer in 1998 when he was sixty-four.

  Only a month after she defended her dissertation on Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, Inga was pregnant. Although Max had no children from his earlier marriages and had declared himself a “nonparent,” he became an almost comically enthusiastic father. He bounced Sonia and sang to her in his rasping, altogether tuneless voice. He recorded her early utterances, photographed and filmed her at every stage of her growth, taught her to play baseball, faithfully attended her school conferences, recitals, and plays, and bragged shamelessly about her poems as the verbal gems of his “wonder girl.” Still, Inga did most of the everyday work, the feeding and comforting and dressing, and a good share of the nighttime reading. Between mother and daughter, I saw a tie that reminded me of the connection between Inga and our mother, an unarticulated corporeal closeness that I call an overlap. I have seen many versions of the parent-child story in my patients, people suffering from the intricacies of a narrative they are unable to recount. Max’s death wrenched Inga and Sonia off course. My niece was twelve, a precarious age, an age of inner and outer revolutions, and she retreated for a while into compulsive orderliness. While my sister sank, shuffled, and wept, Sonia cleaned and straightened and studied far into the night. Like my father’s labels and files, Sonia’s perfectly folded sweaters organized by color, her radiant report cards, and sometimes brittle response to her mother’s grief were pillars in an architecture of need, structures built to fend off the ugly truths of chaos, death, and decay.

  Max was emaciated at the end. As he lay in the hospital bed, no longer conscious, his head looked like a skull with a thin covering of gray, and his arm, inert over the sheet, reminded me of a twig. By then, the morphine had carried him off into a twilight reserved for the dying. After the agonies that had gone before, I felt resigned. I’m still haunted by the image of Inga lifting the IV and crawling in beside him. She pressed her body against him and rested her head on his shoulder. “Oh, my darling, my darling, my own darling,” she repeated. I had to turn away and walk into the hallway, where my tears fell more freely than they had in a long time.

  It was only after Max’s death that I truly became Uncle Erik, the all-purpose fix-it man, science paper advisor, speedy pot washer, and general consultant to Inga and Sonia on matters grave and small. I had failed as a husband, but I succeeded as an uncle. Inga needed to talk about Max—to tell me about the ferocious daily stints of writing that left him limp and depleted, his nightly communing with a whiskey bottle, Camel cigarettes, and old movies on TV, his irascible moods that were followed by regrets and declarations of love. She needed to talk about the cancer, too. Again and again, she told me about the morning when he vomited and vomited, and then, white and shaking, how he had called out to her. “The toilet was full of blood. The seat was splattered red and the bowl was full of it, blood and more blood. He knew he was dying, Erik. I hoped, and I kept hoping. But later he said to me that when he saw what was coming out of him, he knew it, and he thought to himself, ‘I’ve done a lot of work. I can go now.’ ”

  I had always sensed that theirs had been a passionate marriage, but not an easy one. The two had been mutually dependent, a couple locked in a long love story that never became stagnant but churned and boiled until it was finally cut short. “There were two Maxes,” Inga likes to say, “My Max and the one out there—the literary commodity: Mr. Genius.” Writers come in every form, but Max Blaustein represented some idealized cultural notion of the dashing novelist. He was handsome, but not in an ordinary way. He had gaunt, delicate features, a full head of hair that had turned to an even white early, and signature wire-rimmed spectacles that Inga thought made him look like a Russian nihilist. The Max Blaustein out there, the author of fifteen novels, four screenplays, and a book of essays had inspired devotion and fanaticism in his readers and, from time to time, all-out hysteria. At a reading in London in 1995, the author was nearly trampled to death by a hopped-up crowd that surged forward to get close to the idol. The memorial service had brought out hundreds of weeping fans, people who despite their demonstrated sorrow, pushed and shoved one another as they pressed into the hall. “He inspired adoration,” Inga said, “that sometimes bordered on sickness. He always seemed bewildered by it, but I think his stories scraped on some darkness in people. I’m not sure anybody could or can explain it, Max least of all, but sometimes it frightened me—what was in him.” I remembered these words because when Inga spoke to me, her voice broke, and I felt there was more behind them. Later, I wished I had asked her what she had meant, but at the time something had blocked me. I know that what I choose to call reserve or deference may be a form of fear—an unwillingness to listen to what comes next.

  IN ORDER TO pay off the interest on his mortgaged land, my grandfather sawed lumber for a man named Rune Carlsen: He received one dollar for each 1,000
board feet that was sawed. When they moved to a new site, there was much heavy work but no pay. The same was true if the machine broke down, and there was much of this. The rig was old. Our father worked the fields from four to six in the morning and from 7:00 p.m. until dark in the evening. The American shibboleth that hard work guaranteed success became in this case a crass lie. After some years of this, just when things began to improve, came foreclosure.

  The lost forty acres hurt my father for the rest of his life. It wasn’t that he pined for the missing land but that the effort to keep it had broken something in his father. He never said this, but I’ve come to believe that is what happened. A depression, he wrote, entails more than economic hardship, more than making do with less. That may be the least of it. People with pride find themselves beset by misfortunes they did not create; yet because of this pride, they still feel a pervasive sense of failure. Bill collectors earn their living by demeaning and humiliating people with pride. It is their ultimate weapon. People of character become powerless. If you have no power, all talk of justice is just so much wind. The consoling argument that everyone was in the “same boat” had only partial validity. Farmers who entered the depression free of debt may, in fact, have increased their assets by buying up cheap land and farm machinery at dumping prices. During these years farmers went up or down. We went down. Those bill collectors had faces. Perhaps there was one man in particular who took pleasure in shaming Ivar Davidsen in front of his oldest son. Perhaps Lars had watched the man badger his father repeatedly for money he didn’t have, and perhaps Lars waited for his father to clench his fists and throw a left to the bastard’s jaw, followed by a swift right to the gut. Those blows were never delivered, not then, not ever.

  UNCLE FREDRIK’S LETTER arrived less than a week after I had written to him. His mother had mentioned Lisa, he wrote. She wasn’t from one of the neighboring farms but had traveled from Blue Wing to help out at the Brekkes when their son came down with appendicitis and was then laid up for a while. The girl had disappeared, and his mother had worried that something had happened to her. Then he retold the story of the lost land.

  Before the Depression, my grandfather Olaf made a loan from Rune Carlsen and secured the loan with forty acres of land. During the Depression Rune foreclosed, and Dad, who had purchased the land from his father, lost the land to Rune. Dad suffered emotionally from this loss and often had nightmares during this period. When it happened, Mother would ask either Lottie or me to wake him up.

  Rune was sawing wood on the forty acres and hired Dad. This was humiliating for him. Harry Dahl also worked for Rune. One day, the sawmill broke, and Harry was sent to Cannon Falls to buy parts. He returned late and intoxicated to face a hostile crew at the rig. I remember Dad talking to Mother about it. He had been angry and told Harry to go jump in a lake. I don’t remember Harry’s time in jail. But there was a great deal of talk about Chester Haugen’s drunk driving charge and arrest in Blue Wing. Had he only been more cordial to the police, he would not have received thirty days in jail. He was missed by all of us during his sentence, and when he was released, we gave him a festal reception that included small gifts.

  With love, from Fredrik

  As I folded the neatly written letter and returned it to its envelope, I imagined the eight-year-old Fredrik standing in the tiny room with its narrow single bed. I saw him lean over his father to shake him from the dreams that made him cry out in the night.

  IN THE EVENINGS, after I returned from the office and had eaten my dinner, I would go over my patient notes for the day. This had been my routine since my divorce, when the hours I spent at home grew longer, and I knew I had to fill them. As I surveyed the words I had recorded during a session, insights would sometimes come to mind unbidden, and I would make further comments or write down questions to bring to a colleague whom I might need to consult. After my father died, I began to fill another notebook, jotting down fragments of conversations that had taken place during the day, my fears about what looked like an imminent invasion of Iraq, dreams I could remember, as well as unexpected associations that arrived from the recesses of my brain. I know that my father’s absence had prompted this need to document myself, but as my pen moved over the pages, I understood something else: I wanted to answer the words he had written with my own. I was talking to a dead man. During those hours at the dining room table, I would often hear Eggy’s high shrill voice and Miranda’s much softer one, although I could rarely make out what they were saying. I smelled their dinners, heard their telephone ring, their music play and, from time to time, squeaky cartoon voices from their television. Those solitary winter evenings seemed to spawn fantasies. I recorded some of them. Others never found their way into the black-and-white journal I reserved for my private thoughts, but at some point Miranda began to appear as a character in this disjointed record of my life. She kept hours different from mine, and I rarely saw her. When I did, she was polite, reticent, and well-spoken, nothing more, but I began to dream that I would someday crack her coolness. Her distant eyes, her imperfect teeth, her body hidden under layers of warm clothing had become part of a life I wished for.

  One night, I returned rather late after a meal with a colleague, and as I approached the house, I noticed that a shutter on the middle window of the garden apartment had swung open. A light was on, and I saw Miranda seated behind a table in the front room. She was wearing a bathrobe that had fallen open at the neck, and I saw the curve of her breasts as she leaned over a large piece of paper, her hand moving as she drew. Beside her were scissors, pens, inkpots, and chalk. At first I thought she was working on a book design, but when I glanced down, I saw a large female figure with a gaping mouth and sharp teeth like a wolf’s. There were other figures, too, smaller ones, but I couldn’t identify them. Afraid she would catch me spying, I walked on, but that momentary view of the bestial woman remained with me. That evening, I recalled the first time I saw Los Caprichos and how the pictures had made me queasy as I shuttled between fascination and repulsion. The single glimpse of Miranda’s picture made me think of Goya and of monsters in general. What’s frightening is not their strangeness, but their familiarity. We recognize the forms, both human and animal, that have been twisted, contorted, elongated, or mingled together until we can’t say they’re one thing or the other. Monsters burst the categories. I went to sleep thinking of Mr. T., my old patient, who had been occupied by the jangling voices of the famous and infamous dead, male and female, and of poor Daniel Paul Schreber, whom Freud wrote about after reading the man’s memoir. Tortured by supernatural rays that were tied to celestial bodies, Schreber suffered from “bellowing miracles” and “nerves of voluptuousness” that were filling him from head to toe and slowly turning him into a woman.

  WHEN SHE WAS little, my sister had spells. Her eyes would become unfocused and then, for an instant, she would lose herself. Only once did it last long enough to frighten me. We were playing in the woods behind our house. I was the pirate who had captured her and tied her with imaginary ropes to a tree while she begged for her life. Just as I was relenting and about to invite her to become a girl pirate, she opened her mouth to speak and stopped abruptly. I saw her eyelids flutter strangely as a thin line of saliva trickled from her bottom lip. The sunlight caught the string of spit, and it gleamed like silver as I looked at her. I remember that there was some motion in the leaves above us and that I could hear the noise of the water from the creek, but otherwise everything seemed to have stopped with Inga. I don’t know how long it went on, only seconds, but those seven or eight beats of waiting and watching terrified me. I imagined the game had somehow hurt her, that my villain fantasy had paralyzed my sister. After an unendurable pause, I howled her name and threw myself into her arms. All at once, she was comforting me. “Erik, are you all right? Are you hurt?”

  I’m convinced now that Inga was suffering from absence, what used to be called petit mal seizures, which resolved themselves spontaneously as she grew older. What has re
mained with her are migraines and their auras and something fragile in her personality. As a boy, I knew that Inga had a quality that separated her from other children and that it was my job to take care of her as best I could. Inside the family, she was safe, but once we boarded the school bus, her vulnerability became a target. I can still see her walking down the aisle to her seat, holding her books against her chest, long blond braid trailing down her back, brown glasses on her nose, trying to look as if she didn’t hear the rude whispers that followed her: “Weirdo” and “Inga, dinga-bat.” She quivered. This was her fatal error. Her shuddering encouraged the verbal assaults, and because from early on she had decided to live a life of purity and goodness, she never answered her tormenters. This gave her a feeling of inner superiority but did little to ease her trips on the bus or her suffering at recess.

  Neurological debilities always have content; this is something that hard science has been loath to recognize, just as psychoanalysis has often disregarded the physiology of various forms of mental illness. The stuff of Inga’s early seizures and auras turned on our religious education. Neither my mother nor father was particularly devout, but out there in the American heartland just about everybody went to some church or other. We attended a Lutheran one, and our Sunday school teachers fed us stories about God and Jesus and that third and most distressing deity—the Holy Ghost. Because I felt that my parents were relaxed about the God problem, and I was not prone to “funny lifting feelings” or seeing “sparklers” the way Inga was, my connection to the divinity was more abstract. I worried about an invisible God looking inside my head and listening to my thoughts. Sometimes, before going to sleep, I’d cup my penis in my hand and think I heard him speak harshly in my ear, saying single words like “No” and “Don’t.” My sister, however, had angels inside her. She heard wings rustle in her ear and felt flaming hands touch her head and lodge themselves in her chest cavity and pull her upward toward heaven, and sometimes they spoke to her in rhythmic verses. She didn’t like their ministrations one bit, and when the seraphim paid her a visit at night, she would sometimes come to me. If I wasn’t sound asleep, I would hear a soft knocking at my door and her voice say, “Erik, Erik, are you awake?” A little louder. “Erik?” When it was late, and I was completely unconscious, I would feel her tapping my shoulder. “Erik, I’m afraid. The angels.” I would turn over then and hold her hand for a while or let her hug me until she had the strength to return to her own room. Sometimes her courage failed, and I would find her curled up at the end of my bed in the morning.