The Sorrows of an American Read online

  I had to show it to her, of course. If the image came through me, the unpleasantness might be softened somewhat. Wiping out eyes is a cheap trick, a cliché borrowed from horror movies, but the lack of originality didn’t make it any less effective. As Inga once pointed out to me, since Plato, Western philosophy and culture have had an ocular bias: vision is our dominant sense. We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone’s eye, we look into a mind. A person without eyes is disturbing for the simple reason that eyes are the doors to the self.

  FROM HIS TINY room in the Coates Hotel on Concord Street in South St. Paul, my father looked down on a brave new world, the heart of which was Obert’s Lunch. He worked two grueling janitorial jobs during the week, took some night classes, and peeled potatoes at Obert’s on Sundays. His cause: college tuition. During the week Obert’s was a bustling place. Regulars who worked in the stockyards or at one of the packing plants came in for breakfast and left with their lunch buckets and thermoses. They returned for a leisurely evening meal. Many luxuriated over one of Obert’s giant T-bone steaks. Nothing fancy: a mountain of fried potatoes, four slices of bread, and all the coffee one could drink for 45 cents. Beef or pork roast with mashed potatoes and gravy was a 40-cent option. Harry O’Shigley was the chef, a man with a massive torso placed on a pair of short legs. Oscar Nelson, a thin small-boned man, ate little else than hot milk and toast, known cheerfully at Obert’s as Grave Yard Stew. The Wee Cook lived at the fire station, but drove a city truck. Some years back his daughter had refused to let him see his newborn grandson because he came drunk. He had not touched a drop since that day, but the ravages of an earlier life were evident. Billy Muir, better known as the Windbreak because of the primitive shelter he had built for himself on the Mississippi flats, was a general handyman and a homespun philosopher. Persons who wanted his services made contact through Obert’s. A Reverend Christianson, known for his conservative views, came by one Sunday to talk to Billy about some repair work.

  “What’s cook’n in the parish?” asked Billy.

  “We need a hundred good new members,” said the parson.

  “Why don’t you get a hundred bad ones and make good ones out of ’em?” said Billy.

  My father took warmly to the splendid riffraff he found himself among, to Happy Kramer, Push ’Em Up Tony, Jerry the Dip, and Putsy Schultz, characters who would brighten his inner landscape for the rest of his life. They are the creatures of a young man’s perception, preserved forever in the glow of his first steps away from home. My Concord Street was New York City, a town loaded with the vibrant, the eccentric, and the outré. In the first two months after my arrival, I met Boris Izcovich, a homeless, alcoholic former cellist; Marian Pibble, the cheery one-eyed cashier at Bubba’s Bagels; and Big Rita, the first drag queen I’d ever laid eyes on. Only a couple of inches shorter than I am, she liked to stop me on the street, lean her head on my shoulder, and coo, “I just love a big man.” My first super was a character named Dumpy Gonzales, who repeatedly dared me to heal him. “Hey, young doctor man, I got a pain in my knee. Take a look down my throat, will ya?” An ambulatory catalogue of complaints, from imaginary tumors to fantasy hair loss, Dumpy was a medical student’s nightmare, but I remember him and all the rest of them fondly nevertheless. They were so vividly un-Minnesotan, so un-Lutheran, so unknown to me and, as such, they have lingered as the radiant symbols of my urban initiation. I am less impressionable now, more prone to tune out the mad diversity of human life that confronts me every day on the subway and in the streets. I am inhabited by my patients, who have spoken every language and come from every walk of life. They have provided me with as much variety and color as I could possibly want.

  My father was unhappy that I decided to go east to medical school. He never told me this. He told my mother, who mentioned it to me many years after the fact. He had wondered aloud why the University of Minnesota wasn’t good enough, or the University of Wisconsin, where he had earned his Ph.D. I think he viewed my choice as surreptitious criticism of him and, although I knew nothing of it then, it created an unspoken cleft between us, one that grew as the years passed.

  While he was living in South St. Paul, my father met a young woman whom he took out a couple of times. Poor Dorothy was about as inept at the art of dating as I was. We may have shared educational aspirations, but our backgrounds could hardly have been more different. Everything I said sounded stupid and contrived and in all likelihood was. What does a farm lad tell a history professor’s daughter? How to psych out a mean Holstein bull? Lars Davidsen became a history professor, but he also remained a “farm lad,” and I don’t think he ever reconciled the two. The worst of the regulars at Obert’s were perhaps only steps away from skid row—has-beens, moral and physical wrecks, family disgraces, and each in his own way a failure in life. Nonetheless, there was goodness among them and little hypocrisy. All his life, my father freely distributed his tenderness to the downtrodden, the misshapen, the sorry, and the sad. He never judged the powerless. That was his goodness. It was also his misery. Success, his own, but mine as well, was colored by a feeling of betraying those at home and the ghosts they had left inside him. The irony is that my ambition, if you measure the distances traveled, was finally not as great as my father’s.

  I SEE LISA walking into Obert’s Lunch on a Sunday afternoon. It’s a fall day in 1941. Pearl Harbor is yet to come. I imagine a heavy-breasted blonde with blunt features, wearing a trench coat and those short boots to the ankle I’ve seen in period movies. Then I see her and my young father (with a full head of hair) outside on a nearly empty, muddy street. She has her hand on his arm and is speaking to him urgently, but I am too far away to hear what they’re saying.

  WHEN I TOOK the photograph to Miranda that same evening, Eggy was already asleep. I didn’t want the little girl to see the altered picture of her mother, but when I looked into Miranda’s closed, tense face, I realized that I missed the child’s piping voice, her energy, her affection. Miranda opened the pocket doors to the front room and waved me inside. I stepped into the once familiar space, now changed by its new spare furnishings—the large worktable I had seen through the window, bookshelves, a small sofa, and a box of toys. I glanced at the table, hoping to see more drawings, but none were visible. On the wall above the mantel was a large ink drawing, a full-body picture of a younger Eglantine, her soft hair lit from the right so the curls on that side of her face formed a partial nimbus as she looked soberly at the viewer with the intense expression I had come to know, her arms folded across her chest. She was standing in an empty, featureless room, wearing a one-piece bathing suit, and she looked rather grubby. Her bare knees were smudged with dirt, and there were dark spots around her mouth, perhaps from candy. Despite the child’s firm stance on the floor and the grime on her body, the image had an ethereal quality, as if the little girl were indeed an enchanted creature rather than a mere mortal. Was it her expression? Was it the emptiness of the room? Although the picture’s luminosity conveyed a feeling of transcendence, I found it unsentimental, not one of those pictures that turn children into the objects of an adult’s false romantic projections.

  “That’s a great drawing,” I said, rather stupidly.

  “I did it as an exercise in likeness,” she said. “Sometimes it’s harder to draw a person you’re close to than a stranger.”

  “Eggy told me that you’re an artist, not just a graphic designer.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I needed to be able to do something practical that I also like.” She looked at me for an instant before she moved her eyes away. “I make money from one. My heart is in the other. You said there was something you had to speak to me about?”

  I had noticed Miranda’s conscious, slightly formal diction from the beginning, but her curt tone took me aback. “Yes, another photograph was left outside the door. It’s rather unsettling.”

  Miranda rubbed her face with one hand. It was an oddl
y masculine gesture, I thought, like a man feeling his beard. She sighed. “Let me see it.”

  I handed the picture to her. She looked at it for an instant and then put it on the coffee table. She didn’t invite me to sit down.

  “You’re being harassed,” I said. “Stalking is something of a professional hazard in my business. A woman who has an office near mine went through it last year. Have you thought of notifying the police?”

  “What are they going to do?” she said.

  “Do you know who it is?”

  “If I did,” she said evenly, “why should I tell you?”

  She hadn’t spoken in a harsh tone, but the words cut me, and I felt a hot rush come to my face. In that instant I was hurt far beyond what I knew to be reasonable. The words because it’s my house appeared in my mind, but I suppressed them. “I’m sorry to have bothered you,” I said. “I’ll leave now.”

  I let myself out without looking at her. She would have to lock the gate from the inside, but I didn’t bother to remind her. Upstairs, as I made myself some chicken sausages and mashed potatoes, I replayed the encounter over and over again. Why should she tell me? What was I to her? The landlord. The shrink upstairs who had befriended her kid. A really tall white guy with the hots for her, or worse: a busybody, an old woman butting into the neighbor’s business. I knew I was vulnerable to these blows, even when they were minor. In analytic-speak, my narcissistic balance had been thrown off, a wound reopened. Pride, I thought, the Davidsen curse. That hurt stayed through the evening and reappeared for days afterward when I had a moment to remember. I blessed the commute, my full days of patients, the hundreds of articles I was behind on reading, the Empathy Conference the following weekend with its good papers and bad ones. I blessed Laura Capelli, fellow analyst and Park Slope neighbor who had flirted with me over doughnuts before the first speaker that Saturday and given me her card. “If we run low on empathy,” she quipped, “we can always refuel on guilt. That’s next month.” And I blessed Ms. W., one of my patients, because she had started to pain rather than bore me. The pangs I felt as I listened suggested that something was stirring in Ms. W., and after months of attending to her precise, uninflected dissections of her co-workers’ habits at the advertising agency and her intellectualized versions of her childhood, I had welcomed the slight but definite color of anger in her voice. “He looked at me as if I didn’t exist,” she said.

  I BECAME DESPONDENT, my father wrote, when Roger began to unpack his wardrobe: suits, sports jackets, slacks, sweaters, neckties, pajamas, etc. He mounted each garment on a hanger, held up each piece for viewing, and then hung it in his closet with the solemnity of a religious rite. When he ran out of closet room, I said he could fill out my unused space, hoping that visitors might take his clothes for mine. In this new environment I was ashamed of my poverty and did what I could to disguise it. Least of all did I talk about it. Today I am ashamed that I was ashamed. My first impression of Martin Luther College? A grand style show.

  A WOMAN I didn’t know was shutting the door to Inga’s apartment just as I arrived. I saw her hunched body and rust-colored hair on the landing as she turned and, with her head lowered, proceeded slowly down the stairs. When we neared each other, she abruptly looked up into my face for a fraction of a second. I backed off to allow her to pass, but she didn’t move out of the way, and we brushed arms for an instant. “Excuse me,” I said, although I felt I had done nothing that called for an apology. She jerked her head toward me, looked me in the eyes for an instant, and then, before she moved away, she smiled. It was a grim smile, an uncomfortable mixture of self-satisfaction and shame. It reminded me of a child who has just kicked a dog and enjoyed it, but who, when discovered, is also keenly aware of adult disapproval. She said nothing. She turned away immediately and continued down the steps, but the expression I had seen lingered in my mind like the aftermath of a pinch.

  I greeted Inga with the words “Who was that?”

  Inga looked shaken. Her face was drained of color, and I could see that she was making an effort to control her voice when she spoke, “It was a journalist from Inside Gotham.”

  “You did an interview about your book?”

  Inga nodded. “That’s what I thought, anyway. It was supposed to be about all my books. I even went back to Essays on the Image and Culture Nausea to make sure I was fresh. The magazine editor must have lied to Dorothy. I thought publishers were supposed to protect you from sleaze. For the first half-hour I was confused about what she wanted, but she kept asking me about Max, insinuating all kinds of things. . . .”

  “What kinds of things?”

  Inga made a face. “Let’s sit down. I feel sick, Erik.”

  “Your hands are shaking.”

  Inga clasped them in front of her.

  Once we were seated, I asked what on earth the woman had said to her.

  “It wasn’t anything she said directly, it was what I smelled coming from her, something rancid . . .”

  I stared at her. “Smelled?”

  Inga straightened up in the sofa and took a breath, “You know what I mean. She wasn’t interested in my writing or my ideas. She wanted gossip about my marriage, and I refused to say anything. She said, ‘It’s only fair to warn you that lots of people are talking, and it might be better for you to go on the record with your story than keep quiet.’ She’s writing a piece for the magazine. I’m sure it will be one of those gossipy articles that make you want to climb in the shower after you’ve read it.” Inga put a trembling hand on her forehead.

  “Is there something you’re afraid of, Inga?”

  “I loved Max with all my heart. He never left me.” I could see that Inga was thinking about how to phrase what came next. She looked at me with open, earnest eyes. “The truth is he was fragile, sensitive, and a little volatile. He threw things across the room a few times. He roared like a lion when he was angry. He could be cut off, too, hard to talk to sometimes, but she used the words ‘physically aggressive,’ a euphemism, I presume, for wife beating or something. You can’t respond to that; it sounds like denial. You can’t say anything. There’s no recourse at all. She also mentioned Scotch with a little sneer, asking me which label he preferred, and then she brought up the time he punched that stupid reviewer at a PEN dinner. Max drank, but he worked hard every day of his life until he was too sick and that was only near the very end. Even in the hospital he kept notes. All the time I knew him, he got up in the morning and wrote. The difference was that when I met him, he wasn’t sad. He was so hungry for everything, but as he got older, he got sadder. After his mother died, he suffered, and I suffered with him. He was my best friend, but did I know everything about him? No, I didn’t, and I didn’t want to either. This awful woman will round up Adrian and Roberta. They were both married to him for exactly three years. Adrian won’t say much, but Roberta will be delighted to crap all over him. God only knows how many of his ex-lovers and one-night stands are out there. She’ll talk to the ones who continued to like him and the ones who hated his guts. She’ll listen to the envious yakking of this third-rate novelist and the next one, and she’ll write some garbage that will all be accurate, not a word misquoted, and then she’ll parade it out there as the real story. That’s how it goes, Erik. I know that. What sickened me was what I felt in her—something intrusive and ugly that made me feel polluted, no, not just polluted, frightened. I was scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “I had the feeling that she knows something . . .” She paused. “She mentioned Sonia too, in an unpleasant way. She said something about all those women and just one child—it was so . . .”

  “Mom.” We both turned to see the girl herself standing in the hallway. “Who was talking about me?”

  “A creepy journalist.”

  “Did she have red hair?”

  “Yes,” Inga and I said in unison.

  Sonia took a few steps forward. “I was at the Bowery Poetry Club with some friends, and she came up to me, ‘
You’re Max Blaustein’s daughter,’ blah, blah, blah. I tried to be polite and blow her off, but she kept pushing. I’m afraid I got kind of angry. I told her to piss off.”

  I laughed. Sonia smiled at me, but Inga shook her head. “Next time, just say you have nothing to say.”

  I don’t know why the picture of Sonia at that moment has fastened itself in my memory. She was wearing a pair of sweatpants and a ragged T-shirt with words on it. I’ve forgotten the words, but I remember her face very well. She was so lovely, my niece, just eighteen, standing in the hallway with her fine face, her large dark eyes, and that long lithe body. She looked like both her mother and her father, but that evening I saw only Max in her. God, I missed him. God, he could write. He tapped the underground in his stories—the harrowing nether regions of human life, articulated in a language we all understand. But Inga was right. He did get sadder, and he had a rough time sleeping. I remembered making a delicate suggestion to him once that psychotherapy or an analysis might be an adventure for him, and if that seemed impossible, an antidepressant might lift his low spirits, but he’d have to lay off the booze. Max had leaned close to me and clapped me on the arm. “Erik,” he said, “you mean well, but I’ve got a self-destructive bent, in case you hadn’t noticed, which I very much doubt, since you do this for a living, but people like me don’t go in for salvation. Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.”

  THAT NIGHT I dreamed that Inga and I were in a long corridor. Sonia was locked behind one of the doors. Inga was walking in front of me. Something was wrong with her legs, and she was limping. On her head she was wearing a red wig, which I found unsettling. I called Sonia’s name, walked to a door, opened it, and was greeted by a blast of light that illuminated, not Sonia, but Sarah, my patient Sarah, who committed suicide in 1992. “Sarah,” I said. “You’re here.” Her eyes were huge. She shuffled toward me with her arms open as if she wanted to embrace me. “Dr. Davidsen,” she said in her quaking, too-loud voice. “Dr. Davidsen, I can see!” I jolted awake, waited for my racing heartbeat to subside, and then walked downstairs for a glass of milk. I put on Charlie Parker, sat down in my green chair, and listened for a while until I felt able to return to bed.