Dr. Fried saw Esther Blau in the doctor’s bright, cluttered office. It was important to Dr. Fried to know whether Deborah’s mother would be an ally in this treatment or an adversary. Many parents said—even thought—that they wanted help for their children, only to show, subtly or directly, that their children were part of a secret scheme for their own ruin. A child’s independence is too big a risk for the shaky balance of some parents. On Esther’s impeccable surface Dr. Fried saw intelligence, sophistication, and straightforwardness. There was also an intensity that made her smile a little hard. How those two blunt wills must have struggled over the years!
They sat down in the comfortable chairs, the doctor breathing a little heavily and feeling somewhat dowdy as she faced Esther’s formidable jewelry. She examined her again. The woman was sane: she accepted the heavy penalties of reality and enjoyed its gifts also. Her daughter did not. Where was the difference to be found?
The mother was looking about the room. “Is this—is this where Deborah comes?”
“Yes.”
Relief showed on the carefully composed surface. “It’s pleasant. No—bars.” She got the word out, straining so hard for relaxed matter-of-factness that the doctor almost winced.
“Right now it hardly matters. I don’t know if she trusts me enough to see the room as it really is.”
“Can she get well? I love her so very much!”
If it is so, Dr. Fried thought, the love will meet a strong test in what they are all about to undergo. She said, “If she is going to get well, we are all going to have to be patient and to work like anything.” The colloquialism sounded strange in her accent. “She will need a tremendous amount of energy to give to this, to fight her own impulses for safety . . . and so you may find her tired and not keeping herself groomed as she should. Is there something that worries you particularly about her now?”
Esther tried to frame her thoughts. It was too soon to think about Deborah’s progress really; the worry was something else. “You see—all these days . . . all these days we’ve been thinking and thinking how and why this could have happened. She was so much loved! They tell me that these illnesses are caused by a person’s past and childhood. So all these days we’ve been thinking about the past. I’ve looked, and Jacob has looked, and the whole family has thought and wondered, and after all of it we just can’t see any reason for it. It’s without a cause, you see, and that’s what is so frightening.”
She had spoken louder than she wished, trying to convince the chairs and the tables and the doctor and the whole institution with its bars and screaming people whose reasons for being there must be different . . . must be.
“Causes are too big to see all at once, or even as they really are, but we can tell our own truths and have our own causes. Tell me what you know about Deborah and yourself in your own way and as you knew it.”
“I suppose I should start with my own father.”
Pop had come from Latvia. He had a clubfoot. Somehow these two things represented him more fully than his name or occupation. He had come to America a young man, poor and foreign and lame, and he had borne down on his new life as if it were an enemy. In anger he had educated himself; in anger he had gone into business, failed, succeeded, and made a fortune. With his fortune and his anger he had bought a great home in an old neighborhood of the inbred and anciently rich. His neighbors had every manner he admired, and in turn they despised his religion, his accent, and his style. They made the lives of his wife and children miserable, but he cursed them all, the neighbors and wife and children, in the crude, blunt words of his abhorrent past. The true conquest, he saw, would not be for him, but for his seed, educated and accentless and gently conditioned. The Latvian and Yiddish curses that they had learned at his knee he tried to temper with tutoring in genteel French.
“In 1878,” Esther said, “the daughters of noblemen took harp lessons. I know because I had to take harp lessons, even though playing the instrument had gone out of fashion, even though I hated it and had no talent for it. It was one of the flags to capture, you see, and he had to try to win it, even through me. Sometimes when I played, Pop would pace the floor and mutter to his nobleman, ‘Look, damn you—it’s me, the little cripple!’ ”
Pop’s “American” children had grown up knowing that all their worth and gentility and culture and success was only a surface. For a glimpse of their true value they had only to look into their neighbors’ eyes or to hear Pop’s remarks if the soup was cold or the suitor came late. As for the suitors, they were to be flags also; the proud banners of great families; the emblems of conquests in alliance, as it had been among the great in the old country. But willful Esther had chosen beneath her family’s hopes. The boy was smart enough, well-spoken, and presentable; still he had put himself through accountancy school and his family was “a bunch of poor greenhorns,” beneath Esther, beneath the dream in every way. They had argued and fought and at last, on the strength of Jacob’s prospects for the future, Pop had given in. Natalie had married well enough for the family to afford a gamble. Soon both of the young wives were pregnant. Pop began to think of himself as the founder of a dynasty.
And Esther’s daughter was blond! A singular, thrilling, impossible fair-skinned blonde. She was Esther’s redemption from secret isolation, and for Pop she was the final retort to a long-dead village nobleman and his fairskinned daughters. This one would go in gold.
Esther recalled then the time of the depression and the cast of fear that had surrounded everything. It was fear and—Esther groped for the word that would evoke those years—unreality. Jacob had entered his working life at the very nadir of opportunity. The accounts that he had sworn to take in order to deserve Esther as a wife— the boring and routine, the scraps that others threw away—were simply not there. For every column of figures there were a hundred minds waiting, as hungry and well-educated as his. Yet they lived in one of the best new sections of town. The daughters of the dynasty had to live well and Pop paid all their bills. When Deborah was born it was into the handmade lace—the heirloom of some great European house felled by the revolution. Capturing an old flag was better than weaving a new one, and the princely carriage caps that Deborah wore for her outings had once been fitted to the head of a prince. Though the peasant’s mud-village past was already a generation removed, there was still in that peasant a peasant’s dream: not simply to be free, but to be free to be titled. The New World was required to do more than obliterate the bitterness of the Old. Like the atheist saying to God, “You don’t exist and I hate You!” Pop kept sounding his loud shouts of denial into the deaf ear of the past. When Jacob was earning fifteen and then twenty dollars a week, Deborah had twelve hand-embroidered silk dresses and a German nurse.
Jacob could not pay for her food. After a while they moved back into the family home, surrounded by a new generation of neighborhood scorn. Even as a prisoner of her own past, Esther saw that Jacob was unhappy, that he was taking charity from a man who despised him, but her own fear made her subtly and consistently side with her father against her husband. It seemed then as if having Deborah had made her allegiance right. Jacob was consort of the dynasty, but Deborah—golden, gift-showered Deborah—always smiling and contented, was a central pin on which the dream could turn.
And then they found that their golden toy was flawed. In the perfumed and carefully tended little girl a tumor was growing. The first symptom was an embarrassing incontinence, and how righteously wrathful the rigid governess was! But the “laziness” could not be cured by shaming or whipping or threats.
“We didn’t know!” Esther burst out, and the doctor looked at her and saw how passionate and intense she was under the careful, smooth façade. “In those days the schedules and the governesses and the rules were god! It was the ‘scientific’ approach then, with everything sterile and such a horror of germs and variation.”
“And the nursery like a hospital! I remember,” said the doctor laughing, and trying to comfort Esther with her laughter because it was too late for anything but remorse for the mistaken slaps and the overzealous reading of misguided experts.
At last there were examinations and a diagnosis and trips from doctor to doctor in search of proof. Deborah would have nothing but the best of course. The specialist who finally did the operation was the top man in the Midwest, and far too busy to explain anything to the little girl or stay with her after the miracles of modern surgery were over and the ancient and barbaric pain took their place. Two operations, and after the first, a merciless pain.
Esther had forced herself to stay cheerful and strong, to go to Debby’s room always with a smile. She was pregnant again and worried because of the earlier stillbirth of twin sons, but to the hospital staff, the family, and Deborah, her surface never varied, and she took pride in the strength she showed. At last they learned that the operations had been successful. They were jubilant and grateful, and at Deborah’s homecoming the whole house was festive and decorated, and all the relatives were present for a party. Two days later Jacob got the Sulzburger account. Esther found old names coming to mind from nowhere.
At the time the Sulzburger account had seemed to be the most important thing in their lives. It was a series of very lucrative smaller accounts and they had gone a little crazy with it. At last Jacob could be free, more than a consort in his own house. He bought a new one in a quiet and modest neighborhood not too far from the city. It was small, with a little garden and trees and lots of children close by with lots of different last names. Deborah was cautious at first, but before long she began to open, to go out and make friends. Esther had friends, too, and flowers that she could take care of herself, and sunlight, and open windows, and no need for servants, and the beginnings of her own decisions. One year—one beautiful year. Then one evening Jacob came home and told her that the Sulzburger account was a vast chain of fraud. He had been three full months discovering how and where the money was going. He said to Esther on the evening before he went to resign it, “A fraud that’s as diverse and clever as this one is has a kind of beauty in it. It’s going to cost us—everything. You know that, don’t you? . . . But I can’t help admiring that mind. . . .”
They had to give up the house and a month later they were back in the family home once again. There was very little money, but Esther’s parents decided to give the house to them; there was too much room without the whole family and the parents had rented an apartment in Chicago. But the big house had to stay in the family, of course. And so the hated place became the Blau house.
Deborah went to the best schools in the winter and the best camps in the summer. Friendships came hard to her, but they do to many people, Esther thought. The family had not known until years later that the first summer camp (three silent years of it) was cruelly antisemitic. Deborah had never told them. What Esther and Jacob saw were the laughing teams of girls at play and singing over toasted marshmallows the old camp songs about Marching on to Victory.
“Was there nothing to show you that she was ill or suffering—just reticence?” Dr. Fried asked.
“Well, yes. . . . I mentioned school—it was small and friendly and they all thought well of her. She was always very bright, but one day the psychologist called us and showed us a test that all the children had been given. Deborah’s answers seemed to show him that she was ‘disturbed.’ ”
“How old was she then?”
“Ten,” Esther said slowly. “I looked at my miracle, trying to see her mind, if it were true. I saw that she didn’t play with other children. She was always at home, hiding herself away. She ate a lot and got fat. It had all been so gradual that I had never really seen it until then. And—and she never slept.”
“A person must sleep. You mean she slept little?”
“I knew that she must sleep, but I never saw her asleep. Whenever we came into her room at night, she would be wide awake, saying that she heard us coming up the stairs. The steps were heavily carpeted. We used to joke about our light sleeper, but it was no joke. The school recommended that we take her to a child psychiatrist, and we did, but she only seemed to get more and more disturbed and angry, and after the third session she said, ‘Am I not what you wanted? Do you have to correct my brain, too?’ She had that way of speaking even at ten, a kind of bitterness that was too old for her. We stopped the visits because we never wanted her to feel that way. Somehow, even without realizing it, we got into the habit of listening, even in our sleep, for—”
“For what?”
“I don’t know . . .” And she shook her head to ward off a forbidden word.
When the Second World War began it was no longer possible to maintain a fifteen-room house. Esther struggled on while they tried to get rid of it, feeling overwhelmed by its huge, musty rooms and the awful compulsion to “keep things up” in the critical eyes of Mom and Pop and the rest of the family. At last they found a buyer, dropped the weight of the past gratefully, and moved into an apartment in the city. It seemed a good thing, especially for Deborah; her little oddities, her fears, and her loneliness would seem less strange in the anonymity of a large city. She was still not really happy, but her teachers thought highly of her in the new school and the studies went well without any great effort on her part. She took music lessons and did all the ordinary things that young girls do.
Esther tried to think of something that would make Deborah’s present condition believable. Well . . . she was intense. Esther remembered speaking to her about it now and then, telling her not to take things so very, very seriously, but it was part of both of them, and not something to be stopped just by a decision or request. In the city Deborah discovered art. The opening of her interest was like a torrent; she spent every spare moment drawing and sketching. In those first years, when she was eleven and twelve, she must have done thousands of pictures, not to mention the little sketches and bits of drawing on scrap paper at school.
They had taken some of the drawings to art teachers and critics and were told that the girl was, indeed, talented and should be encouraged. It was a bright and easy answer to Esther’s gray, vague suspicions, and she tried to pull it up over her eyes. To the whole family it suddenly seemed to explain all the sickness and sensitivity, the sleeplessness, the intensity, and the sudden looks of misery, covered quickly by a blank hardness of the face or the bitter wit’s backthrust. Of course . . . she was special, a rare and gifted spirit. Allowances were made for her complaints of illness, for her vagueness. It was adolescence, the adolescence of an exceptional girl. Esther kept saying it and saying it, but she never could quite believe it. There was always this or that nagging sign that seemed to taunt her perceptions. One evening Deborah had gone to the doctor for another one of her mysterious pains. She had come home strangely blank and fearful. The next day Deborah had left early on some errand and not come home until late. At about four in the morning, Esther had awakened for some unknown and instinctive reason and she had gone to Deborah’s room with a certainty that now, in the telling, brought her a strange feeling of guilt. The room was empty. When she looked in the bathroom, she had found Deborah sitting quietly on the floor, watching the blood from her wrist flow into a basin.
“I asked her why she didn’t just let it go into the sink,” the doctor said, “and she answered interestingly, I thought. She said that she had not wanted to let it get too far away. You see, she knew, in her own way, that she was not attempting suicide, but making the call for help, the call of a mute and confused person. You live in an apartment house; you have from your windows a death much quicker and surer at every hand and yet this—and she knew you to be light sleepers because she was.”
“But did she decide to do this? Could she have planned it?”
“Not consciously, of course, but her mind chose the best way. She is, after all, here. Her call for help was successful. Let us go back a way now, to the camps and the school. Was there always trouble between Deborah and the campers and schoolmates? Did she work her own troubles out or did she call on you for help?”
“I tried to help, certainly. I remember quite a few times when she needed me and I was there. There was the time when she had just started school and was having trouble with a little clique there. I took them all out for a big day at the zoo and that broke the ice. In the summer camp sometimes people didn’t understand her. I was always friendly with the counselors and that would ease the way a little. She had great trouble with one of the teachers at the public school in the city. I had the teacher in to tea and just talking a bit, explaining Deborah’s fears of people and how sometimes they were misinterpreted. I helped her to understand Deborah. They were friends through the rest of school, and at the end the teacher told me that having known Deborah had been a real privilege, that she was such a fine girl.”
“How did Deborah take this help?”
“Well, she was relieved, of course. These troubles loom so large at that age and I was glad to be a real mother to her, helping in things like that. My own mother never could.”
“Looking back at those times—what was the feeling of them? How did you feel during them?”
“Happy, as I said. The people Deborah had trouble with were relieved and I was happy to be helping her. I worked hard to overcome my own shyness, to make it fun always to be where I was. We sang and told jokes. I had to learn how to bring people out of themselves. I was proud of her and often told her so. I told her often how much I loved her. She never felt unprotected or alone.”
“I see,” the doctor said.
It seemed to Esther that the doctor did not see. Somehow the wrong picture was there before them, and Esther said, “I fought for Deborah all her life. Maybe it was the tumor that started it all. It was not us—not the love that Jacob and I had for each other or for our children. It was in spite of all our love and care, this awful thing.”
“You knew for a long time, didn’t you, that things were not right with your daughter? It was not only the psychologist at the school. When did it seem to you that the trouble started?”
“Well, there was the summer at camp—no—it was before that. How does one sense just when the atmosphere changes? Suddenly it just seems to be, that’s all.”
“What about the camp?”
“Oh, it was the third year she had been going. She was nine then. We had come up to see her toward the end of the season and she seemed unhappy. I told her how I had gotten over bad spots of growing up by going in for sports. It’s a good way to get recognition and friends when you are young. When we left, she seemed all right, but somehow, after that year . . . something . . . went out of her. . . . It was as if she had her head down from then on, waiting for the blows.”
“Waiting for the blows . . .” the doctor said musingly. “And then there came a time, later—a time when she began to arrange for blows to fall.”
Esther turned toward the doctor, her eyes full of recognition. “Is that what the sickness is?”
“Maybe it is a symptom. I once had a patient who used to practice the most horrible tortures on himself, and when I asked him why he did such things, he said, ‘Why, before the world does them.’ I asked him then, ‘Why not wait and see what the world will do?’ and he said, ‘Don’t you see? It always comes at last, but this way at least I am master of my own destruction.’ ”
“That patient . . . did he get well?”
“Yes, he got well. Then the Nazis came and they put him into Dachau and he died there. I tell you this because I am trying to tell you, Mrs. Blau, that you can never make the world over to protect the ones you love so much. But you do not have to defend your having tried.”
“I had to try to make things better,” Esther said, and then sat back, thinking. “Somehow, as I see it now, there were mistakes—great mistakes—but they are more toward Jacob than Deborah.” She paused, looking at the doctor incredulously. “How could I have done such things to him? All these long years . . . since that overpriced apartment, the years of Pop’s charity, the years and years I let him come second, even today—if ‘Pop thinks so’ or ‘Pop wants it.’ Why—when he was my husband and his wishes were so simple and modest?” She looked again. “It’s not enough, then, just to love. My love for Jacob didn’t stop me from hurting him and lowering him in his own eyes as well as my father’s. And our love for Deborah didn’t stop us from . . . well, from causing . . . this . . . sickness.”
Dr. Fried looked at Esther and listened to the words of love and pain coming from the carefully composed mother of a girl sick to death with deception. The love was real enough and the pain also, so that she said very gently, “Let us, Deborah and I, study for the causes. Do not agonize and blame yourself or your husband or anyone else. She will need your support, not your self-recrimination.”
Brought back to the present, Esther realized that she would now have to face the Deborah of the present. “How—how can I know the right thing to say while I am talking to her? You know, don’t you, that she won’t let Jacob see her, and she had such a strange, sleepwalker’s look when I last saw her?”
“There is only one thing that is really dangerous, especially now because she is so sensitive to it.”
“And what is that, Doctor?”
“Why, lying, of course.”
They rose because the time was over. Too short, Esther thought, to say a fraction of what needed to be said. Dr. Fried saw her to the door with a last small gesture of comfort. She was thinking that the patient’s versions would be radically different from the ones her mother ascribed to both of them. The helpful parent, the grateful child. But if it were not so, the child would not be a patient. The quality of and the difference between these versions of reality would help to give depth to each of their interpretations of it.
As she left the doctor’s office, it seemed to Esther that she had not put her case correctly. Perhaps her attempt to help had been, after all, interference. The hospital had given her permission to take Deborah out by herself. The two of them would go to a movie and dinner in town, and they would talk. “I swear to you,” Esther said to the Deborah in her mind, “I swear to you that I will not use you. I will not ask you what we did or didn’t do.”
She went to the small hotel room to tell Jacob that Deborah still refused to see him. The doctor had said that they must not force her, that perhaps what she had done was not so much a slighting of Jacob as an attempt, poor and misdirected, to make her own decisions. Esther had thought that this was only placating, but she had said nothing. Poor Jacob—and I am in the middle again—the deliverer of the blow.
And after a while Jacob stopped insisting, but Esther saw him in the back of the theater, watching Deborah instead of the film. And as they came out she saw him standing in the shadows alone, watching her, and on the corner as they went into the restaurant, he was standing in the cold path of early winter.