I HAVE BEFORE ME on picture postcards two self-portraits by Rembrandt, one painted in 1629, when he was twenty-three, the other in 1669, the year of his death. I have been eyeing them on and off for a long time, two years, as objects to be decoded. The message would be something beyond the obvious one about experience as registered in the flesh and the trek towards death. They seem to refer to passages, journeys, remote from Rembrandt’s; they suggest something closer to home.
“The extraordinary phenomenon of Rembrandt’s self-portraits,” the critic Jakob Rosenberg tells us, “has no parallel in the seventeenth century or even in the entire history of art.” Sixty of them, besides etchings and drawings. Years ago, in an introductory art history class, the instructor asked why, in our opinion, did Rembrandt paint himself so many times. Egotism, I promptly thought, and that was the answer a few jocular students gave. Our instructor was disheartened. “Rembrandt seems to have felt that he had to know himself if he wished to penetrate the problem of man’s inner life,” Jakob Rosenberg says. How obvious. How could I not have perceived that, even at seventeen?
The figure in both portraits is posed in the same way: upper body on the diagonal, head turned to face the viewer. The right side of the face is lit and the left is in shadow, but this contrast is more pronounced in the early work. In both portraits Rembrandt wears something white around his neck, while the rest of the clothing is black, first a glossy, elegant black, then, forty years later, drab and porous. From the young Rembrandt there radiates a willed elegance, an arrogance nearing defiance—youthful softness masquerading as hardness. His soft brown hair billows around his face, a long, smooth face, smoothly painted. The eyes are dark, soft, and unwelcoming, and a shadowy furrow grooves the bridge of the nose, which is straight and fleshy at the tip; the lips are rosy and curled, with the faintest suggestion of a mustache, the chin is prominent, and the space between lips and chin a shade long, a subtle disproportion adding to the general aloofness. It could be the portrait of a youth too clever for his own good painted by a discerning older person. But the painter is the youth himself, appraising his forced arrogance. A faint wonder ruffles the surface—how dare you presume to capture me, know me?
In the later portrait, all, as one might expect, is changed utterly. Rembrandt is wearing a hat, an amber beret streaked with beige. The hair is wispier, less carefully groomed; the skin has Rembrandt’s characteristic mottled texture. No more smoothness, either in the subject or in the manner of presentation. The nose is fleshier and nubbier, the mouth a thin line. The fine slope of the jaw has given way to jowls and double chin: everywhere paunchy, pouchy fleshiness. He looks sad, weary, a man who has been through hard times. As indeed he has: he has seen his popularity and esteem, at their height in his thirties, gradually wane; he has seen three children die at birth; has suffered the loss of his wife, Saskia, and years later of his mistress and housekeeper, Hendrickje Stoffels; has lost his only son, Titus, at the age of twenty-nine; has been bankrupt and lost most of his possessions—enough to leave pouches on anyone’s face.
Jakob Rosenberg writes that this last self-portrait exhibits “some decline in the aged artist’s expressive power. His painterly skill has not failed him, but the psychological content shows a diminished intensity. The facial expression here is mild and slightly empty, when compared to all the others in the imposing group of late self-portraits,” which the same critic calls, variously, mellow, tragic, monumental, reflecting “mythical grandeur and dignity,” “philosophic superiority,” “a deep consciousness of man’s fateful destiny,” and so forth.
True, there is little grandeur or majesty here, but the expression is not so much empty as subdued, in the way of a man who has withdrawn his investment in his face and liquidated it, so to speak, who is in the process of ceasing to care.
I have before me also two pictures of my father with about a forty-year interval between them, not paintings but photographs. The first is a standard graduation photo, so old that the cap and gown have almost merged with the dark background. I can just make out one sharp corner of the mortarboard floating above my father’s head, pointing forward like a lance. Held flat under the light, though, the photo relinquishes the whole silhouette—gown, hat, and tassel—black eerily detaching itself from sepia. This must have been taken on the occasion of his graduation from Brooklyn Law School, when he was twenty-two or -three, about Rembrandt’s age in the first self-portrait. My father sometimes said that if he had had the means—money, social class, correct ethnic background—to attend law school at Harvard or Yale, his life would have gone differently. He was not a complainer; this was a simple fact. It seems to me his life did not go so badly as it was, but what can I presume to know about his aspirations? I do know he wanted to make a lot of money and that from time to time, to my mother’s horror, he would invest in risky business deals cooked up with like-minded aspirers, and lose his savings. To the end of his days he kept his dream of striking it rich. Rembrandt, who was a notoriously poor financial manager, as well as hugely extravagant in his youth, was driven in later years to an odd stratagem to stave off creditors. A contract was drawn up in which Hendrickje Stoffels and his son, Titus, were made proprietors of a business, art dealers engaged in selling the works of Rembrandt, who would own nothing himself—save his genius—and be in effect working for them. My father was not a poor manager, in fact he earned his living advising others on prudently managing their businesses, and he was not too extravagant either. But he enjoyed taking risks. Maybe it was not Brooklyn Law School that thwarted him. Maybe he too had entered, tacitly, into a contract wherein his talents were used in the service of his wife and children: an employee of a sort. In any case, the graduation picture is of a man I never knew, who hardly knew himself yet.
The connection, the curious feature, is my father’s striking resemblance to the young Rembrandt—I should say my father’s graduation photo’s resemblance to Rembrandt’s self-portrait. Even the poses are similar, though reversed—my father’s left side faces the viewer and the right side of his face is shadowed—and the costumes, black relieved by the white collar. Like Rembrandt’s, my father’s eyes are dark, only instead of being aloof and impenetrable they are penetrating—two little glints of light, like lasers, animate the pupils. The nose, like Rembrandt’s, is straight, then fleshy at the tip, the mouth has the same beautiful bow shape and haughty curl, there is the same unsettling length between mouth and prominent chin. An elongated, smooth arrogance, the blank, hard defiance of youth. Both faces are touching in their innocence and at the same time conceal what they might know, as the faces of youth can readily do.
My father did not age as drastically as Rembrandt; his cheeks remain firm in the later photo; the face is more fleshy and molded, but hardly paunchy. Because he did not suffer the wearying effects of self-scrutiny? But why should there be any resemblance, why should the comparison be symmetrical? Granted that faces in their sixties mirror the trajectory of their owners’ lives, my father’s life had little in common with Rembrandt’s. Their similar faces took dissimilar routes to the same end. Maybe in their eighties, when the uniqueness of individual faces is subsumed under the common fate, they might again have looked alike—but neither lived that long. Meanwhile my father never lost children or wife; he was not a painter and not seeking knowledge of man’s inner life; he neither achieved wide acclaim in his youth nor lost it; his business reversals were not on so grand a scale, and unlike Rembrandt, he always managed to haul his forces together and venture anew. In this late photograph (a group picture including my mother and four friends) he appears to be a calm, wise, contented man. Still handsome, in his white shirt and gray patterned tie he looks straight into the camera, one eye, as always, open slightly wider than the other, and he is almost smiling, on the verge of a full smile—but he cannot quite yield it up, as he could not quite yield up the tear I once saw in his eye. Even so, he emits benevolence. Judicious, good-tempered. Maybe not “mythical grandeur and dignity,” but “philosophic superiority,” yes. Is this the “real” man, sage and mellow? Does he know himself at last? I feel that although dead now, he is looking straight at me, that I am looking back at myself.
Perhaps the soul does not depart from the body at the last breath, to fly out the window and rise, but begins departing in the late years and takes its leave gradually, puff by puff, which accounts for the shrinking we notice and grieve over, the “diminished intensity” the critic complains of in the last Rembrandt self-portrait. In the late photo of my father, though, I see no diminishment yet; the face is fully alive with the abiding spirit.
My father’s hand would slice the air dismissively at my analyzing pictures. I myself feel a tribal needling: all this trouble for pictures? He lived by the word. Pictures were a crude, provisional mode of representation and communication, happily supplanted by the advent of language. People who still looked at pictures for information were in a pre-verbal state, babies or Neanderthals. The Daily News, “New York’s Picture Newspaper,” was a publication designed for the illiterate, for “morons.” Likewise Life magazine, which prided itself on its photography; he would not have it in the house. His newspaper of choice, the New York Times, contained pictures, but he probably regarded them as a concession to the occasional lapses of its readers, or proof that certain events took place, for instance that the Big Three—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—really did meet at Yalta. Other printed matter he would not allow in the house were confession magazines and Classic Comics, which retold great books in cartoons with captions. My aunt in Brownsville once gave me two Classic Comics for my birthday. I flaunted them—he wouldn’t outlaw a birthday gift, but he offered to buy me the real books if only I would get the comics out of his sight. In the end I had to admit he was right, they were as nothing next to the real thing, and so for a long time I didn’t value pictures either. Like him, I trusted only things that came in the form of or humbly awaited translation into words.
Or numbers. In company he liked to announce his age, a habit my mother deplored. “I’ll be fifty-three years old in February!” “I’m fifty-eight years old!” “Sixty-four last February!” he would proclaim, beaming, twinkling, puffing out his chest as if the attainment of such years without showing them deserved a decoration. This was self-knowledge of a kind: he could translate himself into numbers, he kept track. My mother would grumble or slip out of the room. She would never reveal her age. When pressed, she told me she was seven years younger than he—seven must have been the highest number she thought she could offer without suggesting a questionable age gap. But part of family lore was that my parents had met in high school. When I asked how this could be if they were seven years apart, she said my father had been behind in school because he was an immigrant. He must have been very far behind, it seemed to me, maybe even a ludicrous figure?—my own school had some hulking retarded students who turned up in the same classroom perennially, like furniture. ... Mostly I would contemplate their seven-year age difference and their meeting in high school, two irreconcilable facts, then shove it aside like a shoelace you can’t unknot—today, anyway. My mother was two years younger than my father, I learned much later. My desire to know was frustrated by one type of vanity. My father, even in his immigrant state, was not far behind at all, it turns out; his type of vanity would hardly have liked my thinking he was.
Maybe it was their limitation and finiteness that he disliked about pictures. He loved what was bountiful and boundless and hated anything mean and narrow. (He hated the way he was offered food at the Classic Comics aunt’s house in Brownsville. “‘You don’t want a piece of fruit, do you?’” he would imitate. “What does she expect a person to say? Of course I don’t want a piece of fruit.”) Pictures were circumscribed by their frames. A house, a tree, a cloud, added up to a landscape, and that was the end of it. The space of pictures is inner space, but he didn’t look into, he looked at. Words, though, could go on forever, linear, one opening the door to a dozen others, each new one nudging at another door, and so on to infinite mansions of meditation. Nor was there any limit to what you could say; words bred more words, spawned definition, comparison, analogy. A picture is worth a thousand words, I was told in school. Confucius. But to me, too, the value seemed quite the other way around. And why not ten thousand, a hundred thousand? Give me a picture and I could provide volumes. Meanings might be embedded in the picture, but only words could release them and at the same time, at the instant they were born and borne from the picture, seize them, give them shape and specific gravity. Nothing was really possessed or really real until it was incarnate in words. Show and Tell opened every school day, but I rarely cared to show anything. You could show forever, but how could you be sure the essence had been transmitted, without words? Words contained the knowledge, words were the knowledge, the logos, and words verified that the knowledge was there.
Long ago, long before I knew him, my father must have had a foreign accent. I try to imagine how he sounded and hear a stranger. Did my mother, sitting next to him in high school, watch it gradually slip from him, as you watch a swimmer gradually dry in the sun, the drops first showering off, then rolling down slowly, then evaporating imperceptibly? Was there a point at which she told him, “You’ve got it, relax, you sound like everyone else”? One way or another, his command of the language, like Rembrandt’s of his brushes, reached virtuoso proportions. Maybe—and one might suspect this of Rembrandt too, judging from the early self-portrait—he was like those stubbornly perfectionist babies you hear of, who refuse to babble, and speak only when they can produce flawless paragraphs. But fluency alone is not memorable; he was verbally idiosyncratic, selective, in such a way—or to such ears—that he leaves behind most vividly a heap of phrases, as the other left canvases, by which to know him.
My father spoke of visits to my mother’s family as “going to Williamsburg,” “going to Brownsville,” “going to Borough Park”—the last pronounced as one word with the accent on the first syllable—rather than going to her mother’s or sisters’ houses. This made the visit more of a geographical venture than a personal encounter. His mode of being in the world turned on movement, getting from one place to another rather than being anywhere, something that intensified as he aged and became less mobile. Then on a family visit, immediately upon reaching the destination he would check his watch and the car’s odometer and announce, “We made very good time.” No sooner was he settled in a chair than he would begin calculating when he might start the return trip, plotting, again, how to make the best time. Of course, he was not well in his last years and was most comfortable lying in bed. But all his life he preferred any position to sitting; he lived in physical extremes, either frenetic movement or total repose. After supper he would lie down with the New York Times on the red tufted couch in the living room and wonder why my brother, at seven years old, wouldn’t stop running around making noise and lie down with him. But he would stand to eat breakfast and stand, or pace, to converse. My brother and sister and I do not much like to sit either. We are most comfortable standing or lying down. Something in our genetic structure does not like to bend.
Williamsburg, Brownsville, and Borough Park were neighborhoods in Brooklyn which because of my father’s frequent mention of them (“What’s doing in Borough Park?” after my mother telephoned her sister) remain archetypal place names bearing the personalities of my aunts and my grandmother. Now Brooklyn boasts unfamiliar names that sound concocted: Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill. Where are these strange places? I think, and what are their real names? I can see my father’s lips compressing scornfully, rejecting the new fatuities. Greenwich Village, once Manhattan’s Bohemia, he persisted in pronouncing as spelled rather than the correct “Grennich” Village. Far as he was from Bohemia, he must have heard the words spoken; I think he persisted in the literal pronunciation to protest at least one of the area’s many, to him, arty eccentricities.
He spent his first American years on Cherry Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and forever after spoke the words “Cherry Street” with a tone of disgust and hostility, a tone in which I could feel the textures of deprivation, of all that was disheveled and ungainly. He would have been appalled to know that a movie called Hester Street (near Cherry Street) drew fashionable crowds over fifty years later, that his humiliation was advertised as art. Now on Cherry Street stand tall buildings, low and middle-income housing. Hispanic people, Chinese people, artists live there, not in squalor. But when I hear the words “Cherry Street” I think, squalor, confinement, and I feel the lust to rise up out of them—as if that had not already been done for me.
In speech and in everything else he liked boldness and swiftness and despised timidity or hesitation, and he promulgated these tastes as absolutes. Fortunately my brother and sister and I came to be loud or swift or bold, most of the time; we picked it up in the atmosphere or had it in the genes or learned it for survival. The faint of heart, the slow, sometimes even the thoughtful, were morally inferior as well as aesthetically displeasing. My father was driving up Utica Avenue in Brooklyn, a steep hill, when an elderly woman, crossing as the light was changing, saw our car approach and stopped mid-street. Then she reconsidered and started to walk again. He slowed down; she stopped. He accelerated; she trotted. Madly working the gearshift, he came to a violent halt and rolled down the window. My innards stiffened at the prospect of what terrible words he would say, how he would mortify her, the epitome of all he scorned. (Rembrandt, too, was reputed to be “a most temperamental man” who tended to “disparage everyone” and make “brusque, ironical remarks.”) As she stood in the middle of the street, thoroughly muddled now, he at last hurled out sternly, resoundingly, “Don’t falter!”
My mother could be loud and bold and swift when necessary, but in a manner different from the rest of us. Softer, with prettiness and diplomacy. She was what men call “emotional”; her words and judgments arose from feeling and intuition rather than reason, a mode of operation inimical to my father. He would ask her a question, did she want to go here or there at such and such a time, and she would reply with a string of conditional sentences. “Give me a yes or no answer!” he would shout. I admired his quest for clarity and definitiveness; I took it as a categorical imperative. If every question had a yes or no answer there would be fewer problems in the world, no shilly-shallying. Later I learned that this tactic came from a legalistic tradition and was used in the courtroom to interrogate witnesses. So he had not invented it—though it might have been invented expressly for him.
It wasn’t obscenities that I feared my father would hurl at the faltering woman—I had never heard him use those. “Goddamned” was his adjective in moderate anger, and “Goddamn it to hell” his expletive when he was seriously enraged; he was a man inhabited by rage, who seemed most alive, most recognizably himself, when in a verbal tempest. His furies lashed the stupidity or willfulness of those around him, and in them would blaze forth like lightning the word “moron,” his worst epithet. In our household, “moron” was a word of such immense power and inclusiveness, so thoroughly condemning, that the filthier words I learned later are mild in comparison. “Moron” was the worst epithet because brains were the most precious possession, without which a person was of little or no worth. “There’s no substitute for brains,” he liked to say. Brains were demonstrated by articulate speech, such as his own disquisitions on political and economic topics. He would fix the listener with his glittering brown eyes and address him or her as a hypothetical You. The thesis might be abstract, the workings of the laissez-faire economy or the dynamics of imperialism, but it would usually be illustrated by a concrete example. “Let’s say You have half a million dollars to invest. Now supposing You happen upon an extremely advantageous ... And so on. Then at some point—perhaps You were about to indulge in a shady deal, to act with less than utter probity—he would reassure his listener, “I mean editorial You, of course, you understand.” He never failed to make this explanation about editorial You, an odd scruple in a man who was otherwise quite ready to call people morons.
He was generally pleased with his three children because he judged them intelligent, but women, to be worthy, had to be pretty as well. Those who were not he called “dogs” and found it painful to be in their presence. “She’s a dog,” he would say with revulsion, but a different kind of revulsion than he used for “Moron!”—a sort of regretful revulsion, as if it were not the woman’s fault that her presence pained him, whereas in the case of “Moron!” the person was held responsible. Among my friends, who were perpetually crowding into the house, he liked the ones who were bright, pretty, and lively; he asked them questions so he could enjoy their replies and tease them a bit, and he addressed lectures on politics to them, using editorial You; the others he avoided.
When he felt insufficiently appreciated or when my mother disagreed with his views, he would say with rueful conviction, “A man is never a prophet in his own home town,” and till I was grown I mistook the key word for “profit,” possibly because he was a businessman as well as a lawyer and often spoke of “the profit motive,” for example, as the real reason for the United States’ hostility to communism (“Markets! Markets! It’s all economics! The profit motive!”). Strangely enough, I attributed almost the right meaning to the adage anyway, though I was puzzled by its semantic awkwardness. Then at some point I realized it was “prophet” he had been uttering all those years. So it was not respect and credit and glory that he sought, but spiritual allegiance. Disciples. In a less exalted sense, company.
He loved company, especially on errands or trips to the doctor and dentist. He cajoled me into watching him get haircuts and have his shoes shined, and on a few Saturdays even took me along to see a client upstate, to have company for the drive. He would present me with aplomb to the barber or client, try to get me to say something clever, then proceed with business. I always brought a book. I, who loved the idea of going places alone and thought it the pinnacle of adulthood, would suspect that, like our government in its hostility to communism, he had an ulterior motive—to get me out of the house or tell me a secret—but he didn’t. He truly wanted company.
In turn he would offer to drive us—his children—and our friends to places, and given the way he loved to drive, he would want to drive us to places we preferred to walk to, and would feel slighted when his offers were declined. He had little understanding of walking for pleasure, of allowing time to flow unorganized, of not wishing to “make good time.” He took walks, as far as I was aware, only during the summers, in the country, when he would often ask me along for company. We would set out down the dirt road and he would commence beating the bushes on either side for a good walking stick. He couldn’t amble along without a purpose, so the purpose became finding the walking stick. I would find a few candidates, but they generally didn’t meet his standards, which were unclear. At last he would find just the right one—thick, sturdy, a good height; he would rip the twigs and leaves from it and, holding it in his right hand and stomping it on the ground, walk still more purposefully, trying it out. We went along, talking; he explained things to me, not about the natural surroundings we were in, of which he knew nothing, but political and social things; sometimes I even had the pleasure of being editorial You and having my responses solicited in a Socratic way. Before I was ever satisfied with our walk, he would turn around. It seemed the thrill of the walk was over once he had found the stick and tested it. At the end of the walk he would usually toss it back into the woods, and when the next walk came around he regretted it. “I had such a good walking stick last week—what ever happened to it?” He had a nostalgic turn of mind. Nothing today was as good as it had been yesterday, and nothing was ever as good as it could be.
The world in general showed an offensive, needless disorder. At the refusal of people and events in the world of our household to arrange themselves as he wished and knew to be best, he often called, in alarming tones, for “discipline.” He was forever “putting his foot down.” “Discipline! Discipline!” and when I was quite young it would frighten me to think of what terrible rules might be forthcoming. But it was only the word. The foot never came down. After such scenes my mother, who was intimidated neither by his pronouncements and threats nor by their volume, would tell me that his father, “the old man,” had been a stern disciplinarian, and that while his sons forever resented him for it, they kept the notion that it was the way to be a father. I am hard put to remember any rule he actually laid down. No comic books and no reading at the dinner table are all that come to mind, and the latter we—my sister and I, the offenders—often ignored. This is not to say that his bark was worse than his bite. His bark was his bite. To know him meant to have been exposed to his fierceness, fiercely articulate. But even then what did you know, really? Only that he had an immense vat of boiling fury inside, in precarious balance, waiting to be tipped over.
Certain times when his anger was provoked, or when he wished to give the impression that it was, he would stand quite still and say he was “counting to ten.” He would press his lips into a hard thin line and I would imagine, pounding inside his head, “One, two, three ... Then he would speak quietly, in a tight voice. He took pride in these moments of tantrums controlled notwithstanding great provocation, and even seemed to expect admiration from us, his near victims. But no one congratulated him, for we understood he was only pretending: the provocation lacked the mysterious extra grain that rubbed the equally mysterious sore place in his soul and caused the explosive, intolerable pain, sweeping him past the gates of civilized restraint to a far and savage, solitary place. Then there was no counting to ten. Then he would call volcanically for “peace and quiet.” “Will you let me have some peace and quiet!”—holding his head as if it might erupt. At the apogee of the tantrum he would yell at my mother, “You make my life miserable!” and would flee, slamming the front door so the house shook. I would hear the engine starting up in the driveway, sputtering as violently as he, then the whiz of the car escaping down the street. I was sure he would never be back. The next hour or two, alone in my room with the door closed, I would try to decide whom to live with after the divorce, and conjure the scene of myself being consulted in the judge’s chambers, a dark room with dark drapes and green carpets and oak furniture, the judge in black robes and gray hair, with a somber countenance, feeling sorry for me in my plight—the whole scene something like a Rembrandt painting, murky, a spiritual murk, redolent of profundity and pain. It was a difficult decision; there were significant pros and cons on either side, but I knew how to give a yes or no answer, and most of the time (not always—not when I was too repelled by his noise) I would decide to go with my father, never doubting that he would request me of the judge: he was easier to live with, his arbitrariness congruent with my own; he set fewer rules and left me more to myself. I felt a temperamental affinity, I understood him, or so I believed. And the absence of my mother would not really be an absence, I felt obscurely. A mother is so close, you can carry her around inside wherever you go. But a father can escape. And then who would talk to me? His presence, like that of all men, was exotic. When he came home at night I would ask what he had done out in the world, and he would tell me. I would have a glimpse of what awaited me.
I felt sorry for my mother for the impending loss of us both (and how baffled she would be at my choice!), but after all, she had provoked him, hadn’t she? Yet why did his reaction have to be so violent—why the words so torrentially bitter? Why remove a splinter with pliers? The answer was a mystery known as the family temper, spoken of by my aunts and uncles by marriage with a resignation they might have employed for the genealogical shape of a chin or a hand. No one sought its origin, mired in the bogs of history and the tangle of chromosomes. No one had ever gotten anywhere trying to reform it; you lived with it and navigated your way around it, like a neighbor’s savage watchdog.
I don’t think my father knew what he was so angry about either. He was not introspective by nature and the habit of introspection had not yet suffused the middle class so that one undertook it as a duty whether or not so inclined. He too must have felt his terrible temper as a hereditary burden no more eradicable than his inherited and tireless heart, which kept cruelly beating when every other organ had failed and when he tried to yank from his chest the patches hooking him to the heart monitoring machine, mistaking them for life-sustaining equipment. And because he was not introspective and his words were spontaneously borne on currents of logic or enthusiasm or impulse or rage, we were not a family who ever “talked things over.” When I hear nowadays the psychological language urging family members to settle differences by calm discussion, to reveal their feelings, be “open,” when I see snatches of television families “working things through,” I get a sense of comic unreality. I try it so that my children do not become thralls to verbal fire and brimstone, but I have a sense of rubbing against the grain, of participating in some faddish, newfangled ritual. I feel like shouting out what I want and hearing others shout back, and slugging it out with ever more pungent insults. ...
While I drifted in fantasies of our life together, in which I would know instinctively how not to provoke him, the car would pull into the driveway, the door would open and close with a temperate sound. Relief and disappointment: no dramatic change now, no exotic twosome. I never gave a thought to where he might have been during that hour or two. Probably just driving, counting to ten, till the wild sea-green vein in his right temple stopped pulsing.
After these outbursts, my mother could remain cool for days (“belligerent,” he would call her; “Why do you walk around with a chip on your shoulder?”), but she sensibly refused to believe she made his life miserable. I, who took all words literally, especially those spoken with passion, still thought it logical and inevitable that one of them should leave. The concept of leaving was not in my mother’s repertoire of possibilities, and besides, she regarded the words as no more meaningful than steam or lava. She preferred to give credence to other of his remarks, such as when in company, if she referred to her size—she was a very large woman—and he had had a drink or two, he would say gaily, “I love every inch of it,” though most of the time, quite unlike her, he was reserved to the point of prudery about sexual matters. I saw him twist my mother’s arm with the playful sadism that was his sign of physical affection, but I never saw a real embrace or a real kiss.
She said too that when they were alone he was another way entirely; he merely had to “show off” in front of others. She was instinctively right about matters of the heart; it was probably this very lightness, those relentless instincts, amiably presented, unsupported by any rational structure, that my father found so exasperating. Also, despite her conventional moral judgments, she had endless sympathy and excuses for wrongdoers. Public Defender, he called her, and this too, I realized only later, was a legal term with a very specific meaning. He might be ready with money, words, car rides, and devotion, but he could not, or would not, comprehend moral ambivalence or extend sympathy for emotional confusion. Once, when I was in my twenties, I tried talking to him about some painful dilemma, which took nerve—we all talked a lot, constantly, but we did not “have talks.” As I started to cry he walked out of the room. When he saw it was something no money or car ride could help, that I was not editorial You this time, he was confounded, as confounded as the woman crossing the street.
I never saw but one tear of his: at the funeral of my mother’s mother he delicately flicked at his lower lid with his pinkie, smiling cavalierly, pretending it was a speck. My grandmother, she of Williamsburg, was a woman of the sort he loved: feisty, clever, pretty, bold, swift, decisive, and opinionated, and years earlier he had taught her, in Yiddish, to play gin rummy, in which all those qualities could be brought to bear, and had pronounced her an excellent player, which was very unusual, because most of the people he played cards with, including my mother and the five men in his weekly pinochle game, he called morons.
When he was old and sick and I visited him, I brought along many pairs of corduroy pants to hem—I had young children and was busy, I couldn’t waste a minute. He wasn’t saying much. But sitting on the back porch, watching me pick up one pair of corduroy pants after another, he did say, “You haven’t stopped sewing since you got here.” I nodded and kept on. Would it not be sufficient, he was asking, simply to keep him company, even if he could no longer offer the flow of words? He may even have been acknowledging—little as I like to think he knew about such matters—that I couldn’t sit still and watch him die, I could hardly sit under the best of circumstances, so I let down hems for growing children. At that moment he was undergoing, as Jakob Rosenberg says of Rembrandt’s last portrait, “some decline in ... expressive power.” His face showed “a diminished intensity.” His spirit, so amply present in the serene and judicious photo, was leaving puff by puff. He was in the process of ceasing to care.
I have had the graduation photo of my father for almost ten years, since he, raging without words, died, and the picture postcards of the Rembrandts for about two years. Only the other day did the fourth one, my father in his sixties, fall into my hands, completing the group, that is, notifying me that they formed a group. My father would find all this silly and suppositious, especially since I clearly live, as he did, by the word. I would not attempt to explain to him, even if I could, that the pictures have been speaking to me in sentence fragments, subjects only, for a very long time, and that the arrival of the fourth picture was the long-awaited predicate. And then they had to be translated.