Green Books
1953–1963
1
Singing I hate to see that evening sun go down, Artie looked into the window of a music store, like the dilapidated places where he’d once worked, letting kids try out trumpets and cornets they’d never buy until the owner lost everything or fired him. I love to see that morning sun come up. This shop was more dilapidated, maybe owned by someone so good-hearted he’d give money for any instrument, starving in there, worse off than Artie. The window was piled with scarred instrument cases, their leather stained and rubbed away: cases for clarinets, flutes, bassoons, no doubt with dull, creaky instruments still inside, sold by some musician or would-be musician who finally gave up—took the office job, married the girl. On top were instruments with no cases at all: blotchy trumpets, greenish and dented, parts of clarinets, dull gray flutes. He was on his way home from work. He’d begun walking down Broadway instead of getting into the subway. He’d walked miles.
Artie had taken a job unwillingly, but he wasn’t young. He couldn’t pretend his luck would change any day. He worked in Evelyn’s uncle’s shoe store. His brothers had been too embarrassed to look at him when the Board of Ed fired him, too embarrassed to hear Artie’s angry explanations, or just unwilling to let their crazy brother work in their various businesses, in which room might have been found for somebody who could read and count.
Or they waited to be asked, but Artie didn’t ask, and nobody came forward except Evelyn’s uncle, so now Artie Saltzman, seventh-grade teacher, fitted shoes to the feet of irrational people. Even now, he couldn’t resist teaching: he told his customers that women shouldn’t wear tight shoes or high heels. Everyone should wear shoes in which they could run, if necessary. Evelyn’s patient uncle patted Artie’s shoulder and said, She wants size six? Sell her size six.
Artie had played the clarinet as a young man, and he too had sold the instrument eventually. He didn’t remember where. It was not like selling the photography equipment. He turned to go away—St. Louie woman . . . Then he turned back and walked into the store. It was dark, dusty, and he was alone. He thought he would sneeze but instead, as he stood listening to something, he cried, shedding new tears for the pupils he didn’t have, the lost privilege of walking into the teachers’ lounge and finding someone to joke with (What do you eat that candy for, do you know what it does to your teeth?), arguing with the school secretary about where paper should be stored. The main entrance to the school had a simple decorative pattern of slanted bricks, with no mistakes he’d ever found, and he’d marveled, many a morning, at the care given to add a little style to something that might have had no style at all.
It was some kind of whistle tootling along, playing the complicated ups and down of the baroque music he’d been hearing on the radio. Ah, it was a recorder. The music came from the back of the store. Wet-faced, Artie pushed through a curtain.
The instrument Artie bought that day from Frederick, the man in the dark store, was a soprano recorder. But the soprano was squeaky, and he moved on to an alto, even though he had to learn a whole new fingering. The second time he came to the store, he signed up to take a few lessons. He had found what he wanted.
—Not the same key, Frederick repeated. He was a distinguished-looking man, unlike the battered creature—a match for the instruments—whom Artie had expected. Looking at a C on a page of music, Artie arranged his fingers on the holes of the alto where they’d go for a C on the soprano.
—No, no. The C is now an F.
—Be quiet a minute, Artie said. When he finally caught on—the C was now an F!—he was so pleased he had to teach someone to play.
The recorder was a wooden cylinder with a line of holes on top and one hole—for the thumb—underneath. The soprano was shorter and thinner than the alto. They came apart, and the top of the lower part had waxed thread spooled tightly around its neck, so it wouldn’t shift when it was fitted inside the upper part. It was important to wax the threads at stated intervals. A long thin brush, cotton thread looped around stiff wire, cleaned spittle out of the instrument when you were done playing. Artie practiced scales and exercises. There were trills and mordents—ornamental flourishes for which the musician played extra notes above and below the notes on the page: lore nobody else knew. When he began lecturing about the recorder at family dinners, his relatives thought that he meant a record player, but the recorder was an ancient instrument. Ancient or not, it drove Evelyn crazy, and he liked to practice in the kitchen. On her way from the stove to the refrigerator, she tripped on the spindly metal feet of the music stand. She sent him into the bedroom, but the music stand seemed to walk back when she wasn’t looking. And sometimes she listened, saying, That’s pretty.
When their father brought home a second music stand, Brenda and Carol removed the music books, notebooks, and pencils that had rested on the first stand’s lip, then dressed the metal contraptions in hats and skirts, and marched them three-leggedly around the house. Evelyn got home late these days, and the girls were alone after school. She’d taken a job keeping records in a home for the aged, and she was also taking a course on how to do it.
Brenda preferred being at home without her parents in the afternoons. It was restful. She and Carol watched anything they liked on television or they listened to the radio. What interested Brenda was the Rosenberg case, which her parents refused to discuss as too upsetting for children, though Brenda was twelve and considered herself an adult. She followed every detail of the trial and discussed it with nobody but Carol, who had nightmares but loyally wouldn’t say what they were about. These people who seemed as if they might have been Brenda’s aunt and uncle were going to be electrocuted.
Artie yelled when he found his music on the floor, then told them he’d brought home the second music stand so he could teach Brenda or Carol to play the soprano recorder he had stopped playing in favor of the alto. Carol offered to learn. Brenda disliked the squeaky sound but didn’t want her father and Carol to know something that she didn’t know, so she hung around while Artie showed Carol how to read the notes and where to put her fingers. Later, Brenda practiced until she played better than Carol did. Carol quit, and now the challenge was to learn more quickly than her father. Soon Brenda—who couldn’t always explain or alter an intensity that took shape inside her—could play all the songs in the beginners’ book. She couldn’t overtake Artie because he delayed teaching her some things. He believed that the best way to learn was to practice the basics, not to add new skills until the old ones were mastered. Brenda learned trills but not mordents, and she never learned the alto, so it remained mysterious to her how F could be C or the other way around. Her father was soon playing music he borrowed from the public library, flute and clarinet pieces he somehow figured out, playing in the kitchen after supper, while the rest of them cleaned up and tripped over him.
Everyone connected with the Rosenberg case—lawyer, judge—had a Jewish name, Harold noted. The Rosenbergs’ lawyer tried to delay their execution, which was scheduled for a Friday night—after the start of the Jewish Sabbath—so the judge had them killed before sundown. Ethel Rosenberg had resided in Harold’s mind for months, and as he walked through the dusty city in June 1953 on his way to hand in a book review or get an assignment, he seemed to experience her terrified obstinacy. Her brother had betrayed her—her brother.
When Harold lost his job, he had changed his name to Harold Abrams. Someone else—someone wider, bulkier, harder to spell, and closer to immigrant awkwardness—had lost that job. For months after he was fired, Myra wept and slept, neglecting the children, while they lived on savings and money from her family, plus the few dollars he made from writing. He roamed the city, dropping in on Naomi, or sat restlessly in the library, trying to write and looking at job ads. But one day Myra had a mysterious errand in the city, and came home to announce that she’d been hired for a lucrative commercial art job. Harold began staying home with Nelson and Paul. On the Friday on which the Rosenbergs would die, Harold stayed outside, pushing Paul in his carriage, keeping away from the radio. At three, he picked up Nelson at school, and they went to the playground. By the time he reached his apartment and snapped on the radio, the Rosenbergs were dead. They’d had to shock Ethel three times to kill her. Myra was home and in the bathtub. It was late.
Nelson, hot and overtired, began running back and forth through the house saying, Is she dead? She’s dead. Is she dead? She’s dead, and Harold realized he’d forgotten him and had walked straight from the door to the radio, picking up Paul as he did so, not remembering he had another son.
—Are you tired? he called to Myra, pausing in the bathroom door.
—It’s hot, she said.
Harold changed the baby and Myra came into the kitchen as he started supper. Paul was in his bassinet in the doorway. As she eased herself, in a summer robe, into a chair, Nelson leaned silently against her and she shrugged him off, then touched his arms and shoulders and forehead. Go wash your face, Nelson, she said. You’re overheated. Then she said, I’ll make supper.
Harold agreed, though sometimes he regretted agreeing. Supper would taste better, but she was tricky when tired. Retying the belt of her robe, Myra took his place at the stove. Nelson, who had not washed his face, followed. Did you make money today? he asked her.
—Don’t stand near me, Myra said. She was getting ready to cook lamb chops. You’ll get burned.
—Why did they kill those people?
—What people? Myra studied the cans on the shelf.
—On the radio.
—Nobody got killed, Myra said.
Nelson resumed leaning against her. He said, They did get killed. He had a way of leaning against her right arm that made her shake him off like a fly.
—What did they do? Nelson said. Did they burn up? The radio said they got killed.
—I didn’t realize he was listening, Harold said.
—What’s he talking about?
—The Rosenbergs.
—Oh, my God, Myra said.
—What, Mommy? Nelson said. What did they do? Did they take people’s money?
—He thinks people get electrocuted for bank robbery, Myra said. Honey, nobody died, they just put them in jail.
—But the radio said.
—These are bad people, Myra said. They did a lot of bad things, Nelse, but they didn’t get killed. Nobody got killed.
—But bad guys get killed, Nelson said. He sat down on the floor, his back to Myra, and leaned forward, his hands clasped behind the back of his head, his head down. It was something like the posture Harold had been taught to enforce during Take Cover drills, when the children were supposed to get under their desks—as opposed to ordinary air-raid drills, when they sat on the corridor floors.
—And . . . these . . . people . . . got . . . killed, Nelson said, bobbing his head rhythmically.
—Nope, Myra said, now at the sink. Didn’t happen.
—Myra, Harold said.
—When he’s older, she said. You should hear my father on this topic. Couldn’t happen soon enough. Sing Sing?
—What? Harold said.
—They did it at Sing Sing, didn’t they?
—Come on, Nelson, Harold said. Let’s give you a bath.
When he thought later about evenings like that, he didn’t remember Nelson eating in his pajamas. He often carried or walked him off or, when he was old enough, urged him to take a bath on his own. Nelson liked baths, and sometimes they’d forget and find him in a cold tub, his skin wrinkled, an hour later or more, playing with the assortment of toys and household objects he took with him. Did he never return and eat? Did Harold not notice? He’d discover gaps like this when he described the children to Naomi.
—You want kids, he said to her one night, when she’d asked him whether Paul had begun to talk.
—I have kids. She meant her pupils. She had a childish body for all her passion, straight and firm, and season after season she wore the same navy blue skirt. Now she leaned toward him, her hair pulled up in a ponytail, as if she was a high school girl, her shoulders square. They were eating spaghetti and meatballs at a little place in the Village that Naomi liked, drinking red wine. Harold couldn’t feel guilty for sleeping with Naomi—he simply couldn’t, though he did feel guilty for not feeling guilty—but he felt guilty for eating in restaurants when Myra was home with the children, scarcely eating at all. A year after losing his job, Harold was studying for his doctorate in English literature at Columbia, and now it was easy to meet Naomi after classes.
She twirled spaghetti on her fork, forgetting Harold in the task, that little frown line steady between her eyes. Naomi often startled him by looking older than she did in his imagination. She had to be thirty-five or more by now; he didn’t know how old she’d been when she sat in his apartment weeping over the occupation of Paris.
When she twirled her fork, she thought only of the fork—or of the fork and Paris—but not of him, not of any man. She didn’t play the game other women he knew played, that sad game they always lost: waiting for a man to do what they wanted him to do. Naomi risked her youth, her time, her body—and that was what you had to do if you didn’t play that game and if you were a woman: you risked being single, childless, and middle-aged.
—You don’t mind that I treat you this way, he said. The candle on their table, in its chianti bottle, lit her face. I think you don’t mind—is that right? He meant to sound admiring, not rude, and he gentled his voice to make that clear, but she wouldn’t play that game either.
She cut her meatball with her fork and ate before looking up. Mind your buying me dinner? No.
—That’s not what I mean.
—Mind that you married Myra instead of me? You deserve each other.
—But your life? What kind of a life—
—I’m going to France in the summer, she said. I’m going to stay in a chateau and speak French all day.
—I didn’t know, Harold said.
—I’m sure the effects of the war are everywhere, but at least now they can have people come and stay. She spoke as she always did of France and the French, with respect and restraint, and maybe as if she had to think twice to speak English when talking about France.
—You didn’t tell me.
—Oh, I wouldn’t have left without telling you, she said. You can come to the ship with a bottle of champagne. Yes, it’s a terrible life. She laughed. Then she said, Nobody in my family marries. I’ve told you that. She finished her dinner—she always cleaned her plate—and folded her arms on the table, wineglass in hand.
—Somebody must.
—Well, my parents married, but their brothers and sisters still say it was a mistake. She frowned. I don’t mean a problem; I mean an error. They walked into the Municipal Building looking for a bathroom and, by mistake, went to the room where the clerk who performs marriages sits, so they had to get married.
She could go on this way, making up stories about her relatives, who sounded like rabbits or field mice in a Beatrix Potter story, with little harmless arrangements and childlike ideas of what adults do. She would not—would not—turn the conversation to Harold’s failings, Harold’s troubles, Harold’s boring, lumpy burden of grief at how badly he’d managed his life. A conclusion, anyway, at which she scoffed. You wanted to go to graduate school, she would say, you’re in graduate school. You wanted to bed a sexy French teacher, you got that. You know just what you’re doing.
2
When Evelyn Saltzman had been in college, she didn’t know what work she wanted to do, and then it was the Depression and she sold shoes. What she was good at, Artie knew, was knowing what had to be done immediately and what could wait. Of course, the bastards at the home where she worked weren’t slow to discover that Mrs. Saltzman, who was hired part-time to keep records, also knew when to start planning the fund-raising dinner.
—They’re not paying you for that, Artie said, when she came home late and tired. Evelyn ignored him, and soon she had a full-time job.
—It’s up to you, Artie said when she told him her new salary. But don’t tell me it’s because I complained about money!
—Did I say that? said Evelyn, and went into the bedroom to take off her shoes. He followed. They still found sex a fine game, but even with the door closed, she wouldn’t do it when the girls were awake.
She wore her hair pulled back with two barrettes and had never stopped having the look of a girl who might giggle or run away if you surprised her. Artie sometimes put down what he was doing and stared, watching Evelyn walk through a room, looking as if anything at all might be in her mind—something amusing, something easy to think about. When Artie noticed that look, he promised himself never to yell at her again, and one night he made up a limerick for her.
There once was a guy with a wife.
They had plenty of trouble and strife
But her hair was so curly
Although she was surly
He loved her for all of his life.
—Who’s surly? Evelyn said. Anyway, it’s wavy, not curly. She was piercing potatoes with a fork, preparatory to baking them, and she pretended to throw one underhanded at his head. Artie waited for Brenda to come home, to recite his limerick for her.
Brenda was late. It was spring 1956, she was in high school, and she had stayed after school to try out for the tennis team. She didn’t know much about tennis because what she did know, her father had taught her, which meant that she knew one thing well. Brenda still played the recorder and had even gone with her father to a meeting of the American Recorder Society, at which an auditorium full of recorder players—brandishing their soprano, alto, tenor, and bass recorders—played music together. Brenda tootled along on her soprano, biting the inside of her cheeks to keep her mouth from opening in laughter at the sound she and her earnest neighbors produced.
He’d never taught her the alto recorder, never taught her the trickier ornaments on the soprano, and in the same way, in tennis she’d learned nothing but a basic forehand. But it was a lovely forehand. She practiced in the park, batting balls against the handball courts after school. A good forehand might impress the coach, who would teach her the backhand and how to serve. How hard could it be?
Artie had laughed when she mentioned at breakfast that she’d be home late because she was trying out for tennis, and his laughter made her lose her temper. Then she cried.
—It’s about time you learned to be realistic about what you can do and what you can’t, he said, ignoring her tears. That made her sure she couldn’t do it, but now she couldn’t back down. And she hated to give up her image of herself, darting across a court, slamming a ball—backhand—just over the net, as a stymied opponent scrambled for it.
Brenda knew it would be better not to pay attention when her father criticized her, better to feel angry instead of ashamed. But she could sustain her anger only so long, and when she was alone after an argument with him, she frightened herself with imagined rituals of worthlessness, torments inflicted on herself, not by her father but by godlike authorities. Alone in the bedroom she shared with Carol, Brenda might conclude that she ought to be killed or turned out to starve. Her father didn’t say it, he didn’t think it, but something in his ridicule met something in Brenda that consumed his laughter with terrifying eagerness. Her mind turned on her, and her thoughts were too big for her head.
So she had to try out. And anyway, what could the coach say that would be worse than the cruel, laughing voice she sometimes heard as she deposited coins to ride the bus, or tied her shoe? It spoke inside her ear—not her father’s voice, not anyone’s—high-pitched, not quite clear.
Brenda didn’t make the team, but her forehand got her into an advanced after-school class that the coach, Mrs. Broward, said was another way of making the team. Mrs. Broward was short, powerful, and blond, not young but younger than Brenda’s parents. When she volleyed with Brenda—leaning forward, positioning her racket and grinning, then meeting any ball without stretching—Brenda felt protectiveness coming toward her, along with the tennis ball and, to tell the truth, a hint of disdain. A couple of girls had crushes on Mrs. Broward and informed the others of the progress of their passions, but Brenda hated the word crush and would never have spoken of the yearning delight she took in the coach, who sometimes dug in her pocket, thrusting her hips forward slightly, to ease a man’s handkerchief from the shorts that hugged her thick midsection. Her voice was critical but never sarcastic. Someone said Mrs. Broward had once sung in a Christmas show in the auditorium, and Brenda would have given much to have heard it.
Her father was not surprised that Brenda didn’t make the team—after all, she didn’t know how to play tennis. At supper, he detailed all she didn’t know. Brenda sometimes went along on a Saturday or Sunday when Artie met Harold to play. She’d watch or take her racket to the handball court and practice. Artie would interrupt his game with Harold, which he nearly always won, to go over and give her some pointers.
—Leave her alone, Brenda heard Harold say, the second time he did this. She has a teacher. Let the teacher handle it.
—What does that dame know? Artie said. He and Harold rarely talked about anything but tennis these days.
Mrs. Broward didn’t teach as Artie did. Her after-school class learned forehand, backhand, and serves, all within a few days. Brenda stood to demonstrate service with an imaginary racket, flinging her arm at the kitchen ceiling.
—This is asinine! Artie shouted, and Brenda burst into tears.
—Artie, said Evelyn.
—Artie, Artie, he said, imitating her. Every time I give these kids something to think about, something to consider, it’s Artie, Artie. What’s wrong with letting her see her teacher isn’t God in heaven?
—Mrs. Broward is an excellent teacher, Brenda said, though she didn’t know if Mrs. Broward was a good teacher or not.
For a year, Artie heard about the after-school tennis class and Brenda’s beloved Mrs. Broward. When Brenda came to the park, he could see right away that her form was lousy. One night when he got home from work she was arguing with Evelyn about how to cook meatloaf. It’s disgusting, Brenda said.
—You’ve eaten it this way for years, Evelyn said.
—It should be crisp, Brenda said.
—For God’s sake, now what? Artie said. She wants caviar?
—I’m having a conversation with Mother, Brenda said, if you don’t mind. It ended with her refusing to eat anything but toast and jelly, which she prepared ostentatiously, several times that evening, crunching the toast crudely.
As Artie and Evelyn were turning off the television and moving toward bed, Carol came out of the bedroom. She said, Brenda got thrown out of the tennis class.
—What are you talking about? Artie said.
—She said she could come home earlier now, and I said, Did you quit tennis, and she said, Not really.
—Not really! Artie said.
—Leave it alone, said Evelyn.
Artie ignored her. Brenda! That dame threw you out? What happened? He strode into the girls’ bedroom without knocking, something they made a fuss about. Brenda was in bed, but he could see she was only pretending to be asleep.
—Tell me what happened!
—Would you leave me alone?
—She threw you out?
She sat up. If you must know, yes, Mrs. Broward said I’m out of the after-school class.
—Did she give a goddamn reason? Did she offer the slightest explanation?
Brenda started to cry. Leave me alone. I stink, that’s all. Forget it.
—For crying out loud, Artie said. I’ll go talk to this Mrs. Broward with her fancy ideas and total incapacity for education.
Brenda leaned forward and screamed, Don’t you dare! Then she said. It’s not her fault. I can see I’m no good.
—Well, whose fault is that? If the pupil can’t learn, the responsibility goes to the teacher. You wouldn’t have found me telling some kid he can’t learn! I just tried a little harder. He was leaning in the doorway, getting interested. Carol was in bed, and now Brenda lay down and turned her back to him under the covers. Artie kept talking. One method doesn’t work, you try another one. I should have talked to her a long time ago.
Brenda had pulled her head under the blankets.
Carol said, Daddy, Brenda doesn’t want you to say things like that.
—And what do you know? Artie said.
—Artie, come to bed, Evelyn was calling.
There once was a guy with three women, Artie said. There once was a guy with three women . . . Oh, to hell with it.
He had worked out the limerick by morning. Hey, Bren, he said, how about this? Brenda was eating corn flakes and hadn’t yet spoken.
He recited,
There once was a guy with three winnimen
As delicious as sugar and cinnamon,
But they cried all the time
Though he plied them with rhyme
And sooner or later they DID HIM IN.
—For God’s sake, Brenda said. At least she’d spoken.
—I’m taking the morning off and coming to school with you, Artie said.
—You are not.
—Of course I am. What kind of a father— He didn’t finish the sentence. Brenda stood up, her cereal half eaten, and left the room. Before he knew what was happening, she was gone, not saying good-bye.
Artie could find the goddamn school on his own. He put on his tie and called the store to say he had to talk to one of Brenda’s teachers and would be late. Evelyn asked what was going on, but he didn’t say anything, and she was in a hurry herself.
Artie walked into the first school office he saw, hat in hand, and asked how to find Mrs. Broward. The building smelled so much like a school that he was shaky, though it didn’t particularly resemble the junior high where he’d worked. He was directed to another office, where the dean of students decided they’d go and speak together to Mrs. Broward, and sent for Brenda as well.
In Artie’s mind Brenda was a child, but as he sat in the dean’s office, nervously waiting, he heard steps that sounded familiar but sounded like a woman, and when he turned, Brenda looked different. At home her gestures were histrionic, chosen to communicate outrage as often as not, but here she had the efficient, sturdy walk and movements of a short woman going about her business, expecting to be left alone. Seeing her father, she stopped and said, Oh, for heaven’s sake, what is this all about? She told the dean that she understood perfectly why Mrs. Broward had dismissed her, that she didn’t mind, and that she was more interested in other activities.
—What activities? Artie said.
—I haven’t decided yet.
The dean, who was pleased to have a parent taking an interest, led the way to the girls’ gym, where Mrs. Broward was teaching a large phys ed class. Through an open door Artie glimpsed long rows of girls in green uniforms doing jumping jacks, and the dean asked them to wait while he went inside. Brenda wouldn’t look at Artie. Then the dean returned with Mrs. Broward, a stocky woman, not much taller than Brenda, in a white polo shirt and white shorts.
—Bren, she said, you know why I cut you from the group, don’t you?
—I tried to tell him, Brenda said.
—It simply seems to me, Artie said, in what he knew was a loud voice that seemed to get louder when he tried to modulate it, It simply seems to me that if a pupil has trouble learning, that’s the signal for the teacher simply to redouble her efforts. This is your failure, not my daughter’s.
—No, Mr. Saltzman, Mrs. Broward said. Sorry to put it this way, but other girls are better. I don’t keep anyone in that class for long. It’s onto the team or out of the group. Mrs. Broward looked straight at Artie as she spoke, then took a step in his direction, raising one arm and holding it, palm down, just above his own arm, as if she owned the space between them and reserved the right to touch him.
Artie didn’t know he was going to do it, and his right arm moved, in response to the movement of her arm, before he spoke. It swung backward as if to meet a good shot with his forehand, and he said, Don’t you touch me! and then—to his horror, as rage seemed to course through his body so he felt all his veins and arteries at once—he delivered a blow to Mrs. Broward’s white-clad shoulder that knocked her back against the tiled wall. She fell to the floor.
The dean sprang between them and grabbed Artie by the wrists. He struggled, he heard a sound that was Brenda shouting, and then he understood what had happened, and stopped moving, and began to sob.
—I lost my job, he said through sobs, so nobody heard him. I know how to teach, but they took away my job.
Brenda knelt over her teacher, looking like a child after all. She turned and said to her father, I will never speak to you again, and helped Mrs. Broward stand and walk away.
The dean led Artie to his office, where the police interviewed him, then brought him to the station house. Mrs. Broward had said she would press charges. Artie could go to prison. After some hours they sent him home with a summons, which he showed Evelyn. She was too embarrassed and frightened to speak.
For many weeks Artie did not shout. He called Harold, did not tell him what he’d done, but picked a fight with him. Forget the tennis, he said. I can’t have a decent time, you’re turning into such a snob—telling me how to teach my kid, sounding like a fancy professor.
—That doesn’t make sense, Harold said.
—Well, I’m so stupid I don’t go to Columbia, so I don’t make sense, Artie said, and hung up.
But he wrote Mrs. Broward several letters of apology, and in the end she decided not to press charges. Brenda blamed herself for the whole incident; she shouldn’t have loved her teacher.
3
Myra left her job and became the art director of a glossy women’s magazine Harold had seen in supermarkets, but of course never read. Now she was paid so much there was not much reason for him to work. He stopped feeling that he was depriving his children of shirts and raincoats to feed his craving for literature. As a graduate student, he taught composition, and he continued writing reviews and articles: his professors said he had an ideal life. He wasn’t ashamed of being a man supported by his wife, and Myra liked having more money than he did—it was always helpful when Myra liked something—but Harold thought his father, who had died recently, would have been ashamed. Sometimes he seemed to catch the old man watching him sorrowfully from a point just beyond Harold’s peripheral vision. A few times he turned swiftly, looking for him, and then winced to picture his big blond self whirling.
He missed Artie. Myra had found out from Evelyn that Artie had gotten into real trouble. Of course, he didn’t want Harold to know. Harold’s life had only improved with the loss of his job. Artie’s was harder. Harold waited. He felt clumsy, angry with Artie for his childishness, angry with himself for being unable to help.
During most of the year, Myra didn’t read books, only magazines resembling the one where she worked. Harold felt guilty that their life had deprived her of reading, what he believed in most: as if the wife of a divinity student had no time to pray, he told Naomi. Myra insisted she didn’t miss books, which made him feel worse. When he’d first known her, she’d read incessantly. Now he closed the bedroom door in the evenings and stretched out on the bed with his notebooks, reading and rereading books he’d loved for years—he had started his dissertation, on Henry James—while Myra watched television. Once a year they spent as many weeks as she could take off from work at the cabin, and then she did nothing but read, looking up dazed at times, not quite recognizing him. The look of her face then—the unplanned simplicity—stopped his heart. She’d sit in a canvas chair at the lake, always with more than one book beside her, in case she got tired of the one she’d begun. Before their trips, she gathered what she called green books—books to be read, apparently, when surrounded by trees—and there would be a pile of books in the trunk when they drove north, mostly new bestsellers, sometimes older books she mysteriously deemed green. She would never read Jane Austen in the mountains, she said, as if anybody could see why, but F. Scott Fitzgerald qualified. The distinction had nothing to do with urban versus rural settings; he thought possibly it had to do with sexual openness, but he didn’t ask.
At the cabin—which Artie no longer rented for a few weeks each summer—Harold and the boys swam or put together jigsaw puzzles, or they drove into Schroon Lake. Myra looked up and waved when they drove off. It was 1961, the summer when Nelson at fifteen grew taller than his mother, and he finally stopped mashing himself into her body when she’d let him. Harold didn’t notice until weeks had passed and he realized he had stopped hearing Myra tell Nelson to leave her alone. Harold was always trying to make friends with his older son, as if Nelson was somebody else’s child he thought he should know better.
Paul, at ten, was easier—blunt, critical, funny, not polite, but so confident it seemed his rudeness was not that of an impertinent child but of an adult caught in a child’s body, unfairly expected to suppress adult opinions. Harold needed to look away when Paul scoffed at Nelson, who was so much taller—a thin, rangy kid with hesitant gestures, looking down at Paul and then away when Paul spoke, rarely answering. Nelson was afraid of insects. He took hours—literally hours—to work up the nerve to walk into the water and get wet, yet he wouldn’t stop trying, standing all afternoon in water up to his ankles. Nelson liked small objects—toys when he was small, little trucks and plastic animals and things he found in the house: a cap of a lost pen, rubber bands, boxes that had held matches. The inside slid into the outside. Now his toys claimed to be functional, but he still fiddled with small objects: a souvenir key ring, combs and scissors that folded into themselves, in case you ever needed a comb or a scissors.
One hot August morning that summer, Harold made his way down to the dock early, with his coffee and James’s The Golden Bowl. Eating in the cabin was easier these days, now that it had a real kitchen. Myra’s father, who liked to fish, had done most of the work himself. He and Gus seemed to be friends, and Harold wondered what they knew about Myra that he himself didn’t know. His father-in-law felt proprietary about the cabin, and Harold, who had contributed little money, couldn’t object to his plans. Now the old man had said he was going to cover the rough pine walls of the main room with what he always spoke of as decent paneling, as if the present boards, which Harold loved, were obscene. The old bedroom had become an open hallway that contained a rickety red table with a phone on it and had three doors. Two led to dark but cool bedrooms, the other to the bathroom.
Harold’s father-in-law had bought the lots on either side of the house when a developer subdivided them, and Harold was grateful. Now ten or a dozen houses stood on the lake, fishermen used boats with outboard motors, and occasionally children played wild games in the evening, rowing into the lake and shouting. Once or twice, Paul joined them. But often the other houses were empty. This morning the lake was still, and he saw nobody. The evergreens that ringed the lake—he’d never found out just what kind of trees they were—were so dark their green was almost blue.
Harold had explained the topic of his dissertation to Artie as What are Jews for in Henry James?
—For? What are Jews ever for? Artie said cheerfully. Many people think Jews are no use at all. He’d had nothing to do with Harold for two years. Then he had phoned and suggested they meet to play tennis. Harold understood that he was supposed to act as if this was nothing special, and he immediately agreed. After a few weeks of tennis dates, Evelyn had suggested that the two of them take Paul and Carol—who were still willing to go—to a museum or the zoo, and they went to the Hayden Planetarium. Walking to the subway that afternoon, Artie had asked, So what ridiculous topic did you pick to write about? and that was what led to his comment on the use of Jews. It was winter and the wind was blowing into their faces. Harold, who still wore a fedora, was clutching it. Artie was bareheaded.
At the time, Harold had ignored what Artie said, but now he realized that the usefulness of Jews was exactly what he was writing about, though he didn’t think he could call his dissertation—or the book he was already imagining—What Is the Use of Jews?
The Golden Bowl was one of several James novels in which lovers can’t afford to marry and do harm to naïve rich people so as to get money. He was fond of this pair, the Italian Prince Amerigo and the American Charlotte Stant. Without revealing that they are in love with each other or are even more than just acquaintances, the prince marries Charlotte’s best friend, an heiress, and later Charlotte marries this woman’s father. And then the old lovers must deal with constant proximity—they don’t plan to cheat. Harold, sitting on the dock with his feet in the water, opened The Golden Bowl to the page where Charlotte and the prince have a moment alone, and Harold found words he loved: they could breathe so near to each other that the interval was almost engulfed in it and the intensity both of the union and the caution became a workable substitute for contact.
The Golden Bowl was a green book, most definitely. He looked up at the lake. Once, he and Naomi had met by chance in the street. They spoke without touching, and then she turned her head in the direction she was going. A few hairs that had come loose from her ponytail curled against the back of her neck, and he raised his hand, which just grazed the side of her ear.
But not touching—and not speaking and not knowing exactly what’s going on—can take characters only so far, and that was when Jews became useful in Henry James, if not in real life, or so it seemed to Harold. In the book, several Jewish characters—or people who look Jewish—take small actions that set the plot in motion. (James wrote of these Jews with faint distaste, and that horrified but fascinated Harold.) And when the young heiress outgrows her stupidity and finally figures out what’s going on, she learns about her friend and her husband’s past from a Jew, a dealer in antiques.
Where would the plot be without Jews, and where would James be without Jewish biographers and critics? But would the Columbia English department, with its sole Jew, consider Harold’s question worth asking? He believed that in James, Jews were good for saying what nobody else would say, but then what, then what?
The screen door behind him slammed. He turned his head, one finger in the book, to watch Myra step firmly in his direction. She carried two hardcover books with colorful jackets. Halfway to the lake, she detoured to loop onto her arm the back of her canvas chair, which she moved each night to a spot that got sun in the morning, so dew or rain would dry by the time she came out. She came more awkwardly after she picked up the chair, the faded yellow canvas slung on her left arm, the books held in her right. She wore a black bathing suit with a white terrycloth jacket, and her red hair, roots showing a little since she bothered to look her best only when she was working, fell in waves around her head. When the sun grew warmer, she’d return to the cabin for a big straw hat. She came to the edge of the water and put the books on the dock while she set up the chair. They were Lady Chatterley’s Lover—only recently legal—and Justine, the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet. She set up the chair, wiggling it to make sure the legs were evenly set into the ground. Then she retrieved her books and sat down. She didn’t open them, and Harold didn’t speak.
Myra drummed the heels of her hands on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as if imitating a fanfare, and laughed a little, perhaps at her gesture. Harold, she said, I’m in love with someone.
4
Brenda twisted her knee stepping from a train onto a subway platform on her way to work in 1961, the summer she was twenty and had just finished her sophomore year at Hunter College. She went down on all fours, a little too close to the edge of the platform, as the train moved out behind her, and a man reached to steady her. Careful, he said, supporting her arm with a firm hand as she stood. He was maybe in his thirties and wore a jacket and white shirt but no tie, and he somehow resembled her father’s friend Harold Abrams, though this man looked Chinese. It was the slope of his shoulders that recalled Harold, a combination of claiming quite a lot and modestly denying it, built into the shape of his body. She didn’t think this clearly until later.
Brenda went to Hunter College because it was free. It felt like a continuation of high school with no men, but she liked having a reason to come into the city every day. She was majoring in math, but it was too hard. The summer job gave her a different reason to come into Manhattan. She liked the anonymity among people, the warm, gritty breeze off the Hudson.
The man on the train platform looked at her with frank laughter, as if to say, Look at us, touching when we don’t know each other! and Brenda was surprised too. She laughed back, feeling her mouth open wide and her big teeth protrude—Brenda was appalled at the size of her teeth—though her knee hurt and it was hard to walk. Her hands were dirty from landing on the platform.
Brenda had been in love four times, twice with teachers—both women—once with the man who supervised her work in the college bursar’s office during her freshman year, and once with a boy in high school who didn’t like her. She had never been touched by someone she was in love with except inadvertently. She’d dated and kissed boys in high school but didn’t like it when they touched her. So she had little experience of the welcome, deliberate touch of a man’s hand. This man said, Take your time, and Brenda felt something like an expanding balloon in her chest. Together, they started up the stairs to the street.
—Don’t you have to go to work? she said.
—I work odd hours. His jacket was clean and somehow fragrant, even in the subway. My name is Douglas, he said. Where are you heading?
—A couple of blocks from here, Brenda said. The company she worked for supplied clothing manufacturers with buttons and hardware, such as hooks and eyes and snaps, but Brenda rarely saw the objects themselves except in storefronts in the neighborhood, where there were many such companies. She dealt with pieces of paper.
She thought she could manage on her own after a minute, but she liked climbing the grimy stairs with Douglas, in pain but not agony, looking down at chewing gum wrappers. He might be dangerous: he wasn’t hurrying to work, and he used a full first name by itself. She thought a normal person would have said either I’m Doug or I’m Douglas X—but she was interested in putting herself in possible danger, figuring she’d escape just in time, waiting to watch herself do that.
When they reached the street, Douglas said she should rest her knee, and they went into a luncheonette and ordered coffee. Brenda watched herself curiously, as if she were watching a movie. He offered her a cigarette and she took it. He said, Are you a student?
Douglas said he tutored people applying for citizenship. I make it easier, he said. Papers. He didn’t have a foreign accent, but his speech seemed slightly formal, and he said he’d come to this country from China as a baby. She began talking about her classes, and he asked intelligent questions. After an hour, he said, I think we should go to my apartment.
It was as if the decision was already made. The apartment was a block away, in the opposite direction from the office. Again, Douglas supported Brenda on the stairs. She followed his lead. Inside, without discussion, he removed her clothing, one piece at a time, led her to a clean bed, and kissed her cheek. He helped her onto the bed and began stroking and rubbing parts of her body vigorously, and then at last he undressed, turned aside to put something on his penis, and entered her. She had never done it before. She had tried to imagine it. How did the penis fit? The penis felt big. Brenda didn’t go to work. Maybe she never would. In some tentative way, she was pleased with herself.
Douglas believed in good behavior, though she was pretty sure that whatever work he did involved illegalities. The second day, when they met in the same coffee shop, Douglas bought her coffee but then insisted she had to go to work.
—That’s stupid, they’ll fire me.
—Maybe not.
—Why not? I didn’t even phone them yesterday, and now I’ll be late.
—Tell them you got hurt. You were at the hospital all day.
—What about today?
—It will be better that you’re late, he said, and gave his abrupt laugh again. They’ll know you do things your own way. He had a light voice that rose and fell in pitch. She was disappointed, but she needed the money. He walked her to work, and Brenda went upstairs and was not fired. The people weren’t interested enough to fire her. She was glad to be meeting Douglas later: he’d want to know what had happened. The woman in charge of her shrugged, and Brenda got back to work. She was not smart enough to be a math major, but she was a genius at Volkman Trimmings, and that was her only trait there: she was the girl who could add in her head.
She sat before the pile of bills—larger than it would have been yesterday and thus less boring. Her vagina was interestingly sore. She had been a virgin and now she wasn’t one. She had allowed her clothes to be taken off in the apartment of a man she had known for an hour. He had not killed her, or seemed to dislike her thick, straight body. It saddened Brenda to recognize in herself something like a wish to be killed, something that had made this encounter possible. But she was pleased as well—eager to know what would happen next.
The boy she’d loved in high school was straightforward and pleasant, and they’d been in honors classes together term after term. When she realized she loved him, she made herself noticeable by starting arguments with him in class. Once she made a class laugh at him, correcting his misconception about the Egyptian seizure of the Suez Canal. She thought he might seek her out for more argument later, but he avoided her.
That day Douglas asked if she’d like to look at pornography with him. The magazine he showed her was stupid. In her fantasies, men asked her to do strange things, but nothing like what she saw in the magazines, which mostly concerned what women wore, tightness and fullness and hidden or exposed body parts. She planned what she’d say—how she’d get out of his apartment—if he asked her to wear something like that. They went to bed as before. He didn’t ask. He didn’t hold or hug her, and his kisses on her mouth were mild bites. But his firm touch was kind, and this time she felt pleasure.
Several weeks passed. Sometimes Brenda visited Douglas during her lunch hour, thinking she’d go back to work. His eyes lit up with humor. He often held his long, narrow hands up and out, as if to prove they were empty. Usually she didn’t go back to work. When she left Douglas’s apartment alive and unharmed (everything in her upbringing would have suggested this was unlikely), she found herself nodding briskly on the stairs, and she noted that she nodded the same way when, once again, she arrived at work after an unexplained absence and nobody cared, something else she’d been raised to think was impossible.
It was a hot summer, and in the dead air of the city Brenda was loose, adult. She held herself upright, straighter than usual, as if something inside might tip and spill. One afternoon she argued with Douglas. It was about a plant in his bedroom. She demanded to know why he didn’t put it near a window, where it would get sunlight, though Brenda knew nothing about growing plants.
He took her to bed and said politely, Do you think you might like me to give you a little spanking, just because you are such a bad girl for arguing with me about the plant?
Brenda sat up quickly. I don’t think so, she said. She was confused and troubled, partly because she thought she might indeed like Douglas to give her a little spanking, but she could never admit that that was so. She dressed and, when he apologized, assured him that she wasn’t offended and would come the next day.
When she arrived at work the next morning, her supervisor said, Never mind, just go to the office and they’ll pay you what they owe you. After that, Brenda had no reason to be in that neighborhood and, belatedly, she didn’t want to be. She told her family the trimming company didn’t need her anymore. Douglas had known her last name, but she hadn’t told him her father’s name or where they lived, so he couldn’t look her up in the phone book unless he was prepared to speak to many Saltzmans and Salzmans.
With three weeks until school was to begin, Brenda spent a few days at home, restless and bored, alone all day. Carol had a babysitting job. Now the city felt intolerable. She thought of the cabin in the Adirondacks, where she hadn’t been for years. She knew she’d feel better if she could be somewhere where she could think, and she asked her father if he thought Harold would let her go to the cabin for a few days.
—All by yourself? he said. What do you know about a place like that? There are things you have to know. The stove.
—I might call him, she said.
—He has no time for us! Harold was busy, she knew that. The last time he’d been in the house, he’d explained the book he wanted to write. But she didn’t need his time. It took a few days to work up the courage to phone him. She imagined herself telling him the story of Douglas, gratefully accepting his inevitable disapproval and careful advice—but she wouldn’t do that.
Brenda felt worse about the breakup with Douglas than she expected to, better about her lost virginity and how little she had to give to lose it. He always used condoms, and she had just had a period, so that was all right. What seemed most remarkable was the size and unmanageability of the person she had discovered herself to be—her recklessness—as if she’d planned to be a dog or a cat and found that she’d become a rhinoceros.
She didn’t know when she’d find Harold at home, and she didn’t want to talk to Myra. At last, one evening, she went for a walk after supper and phoned his number from a pay phone. Harold answered, and she asked if she could use the cabin for a few days—if nobody else was there. Maybe there was some painting or cleaning he wanted done?
He paused. Nobody’s there, he said slowly. My father-in-law was there, but he’s gone. But how will you get there? Do you have your license?
She had her license, but her father would never lend her his car. She would take the bus to Schroon Lake, she said, buy groceries, and find someone she could pay to drive her to the cabin and come back for her when it was time to leave. I bet there’s a taxi service, she said confidently.
—The phone in the cabin is connected, Harold said. If something goes wrong, call me. She realized he was hesitant not because he thought she’d harm the cabin but because she herself might come to harm, and she almost cried.
Brenda arrived in Schroon Lake late in the afternoon, and it took several hours to find someone who’d drive her to the cabin. Before inquiring, she’d bought groceries, so she walked up and down the main street several times, her suitcase in one hand and her bag of groceries in the other, before the man in the liquor store offered to drive her when he closed up shop. He wouldn’t take money. By the time she arrived, it was dark and her bag of groceries was damp from her sweaty arm.
—You’re sure the lights work? the man said. I’ll wait while you try the lights. She knew where the key was hidden, in a crevice in the stone foundation, in a Band-Aid box. The lights worked, and she heard the man’s car as he returned to the main road, the sound diminishing down the long driveway.
She put down what she was carrying and looked around. She hadn’t been to the cabin for eight or nine years. There had been improvements, of which she disapproved. The old pine boards had been covered with highly varnished paneling, still smelling of newness. But she could still take in the real smell of the place: chill, mustiness, the woods. She heard the lake slap the shore. She crossed the screened porch, opened the door to the swirl of moths, and tried to make her way to the lake in the cold darkness. She returned for the flashlight, found it in its old place next to the sink, and succeeded. At the lake, she turned the light off. She was cold and hungry. She could scarcely believe she was there, and through her own efforts. She heard katydids: it was late summer, but they were still sounding three syllables. The solid arcs of the mountains were visible against the sky until the half moon went behind a cloud. She saw a few stars, but many clouds. She crouched on the damp shore.
Surrounded by mountains, she let herself know what she felt. In the dark, as she hugged her bare arms, her detailed and unready self took its place like a giant puppet in the air, hurrying into an adulthood for which she seemed to have had no preparation. Brenda had managed childhood, even the weeks when her father lost his job, by means of a slightly stupefied steadiness. She was intelligent, but her intelligence felt slow-moving, clumsy, easy to put aside. She did what was necessary, did not ask much of herself, taught herself not to notice the effect on others of what she did, and had told herself that was all right because she was a child. She understood, crouching—then sitting—on the damp ground, that she had believed there was only so much harm she could do to others or to herself, just because she was a child. She couldn’t help her father but couldn’t hurt him either.
Now she understood that she could do harm. Worse, part of her wanted to do harm, sought harm and punishment and shame, as if only those exercises could sufficiently explain or respond to events and people as they were. Thinking about the summer that had just passed, Brenda didn’t sense in herself the capacity to choose, or even to know, whether she would do harm—to herself or to others—or not. She might have destroyed her parents’ lives by being murdered in Douglas’s bed. She might have insulted Harold when she phoned, turned him against her forever; it was as likely as the pleasant exchange that had taken place. For a long time she sat on the cold shore of the lake in the dark like an exile, growing colder and colder in her sleeveless city blouse, thinking the same series of thoughts about herself, hoping to come to a different end. She was immense: dangerous. It was exciting; it was terrible. At last her mind moved to another topic, and she stood awkwardly—that knee was still a little sore—and stumbled into the cabin to heat a can of soup, open a beer, smoke a cigarette.
5
Harold had figured out that what Jews were good for was saying what others wouldn’t say, and he continued to hold that view even though when Myra said she was in love, sitting on her canvas chair in her sunglasses, looking not at him but at the glittering lake—which took in all news and still looked serene—Harold quickly said, Well, that’s not a conversation I feel like having! Gathering his belongings, he returned to the cabin, though he was the talkative Jew and she was not. He blustered through the rooms, making noise that caused Nelson—asleep on the living room couch—to stir. Then he went back outside and down to the shore, where the shimmer of heat was already dizzying. Is it Gus Maloney? he said.
—Well, of course not! said Myra.
He went back inside. Without inviting either boy to come along, he drove into Schroon Lake for the paper, his hands trembling on the wheel. They were still trembling when he paid for the Times, and he stood in a hot parking lot, greedily taking in the news, forcing himself until he was thinking of nothing but the news and what it implied. The story that interested him most these days was the Eichmann trial in Israel, and the paper that day reported that the evidence phase was done and the court would pause for a couple of weeks. Harold had read everything, watched the highlights on television, listened to the radio.
He got back into his car with the newspaper, thinking of Jews in Henry James and Jews in the life of Eichmann—anything but thinking about Myra—and drove some miles out of his way before returning to the cabin.
And even when he’d had time to think about what she said, even then he couldn’t think about Myra. She drove him mad—she was selfish, unpredictable, critical, then suddenly charming and talkative, friendly. They rarely made love, but when they did, it remained a thrill. He knew there was something wrong with Myra. She was almost never seen to eat, though she cooked. She’d smoke and watch him and the boys eat, then she’d leave the room, and later he couldn’t say when that had happened. He didn’t know why she had said she was in love with someone, whether it was true. He found he was terrified that if he asked a question, she’d leave him. Months passed and speaking became less possible.
Aren’t there Jewish writers for you guys to think about? Harold’s closest friend at Columbia asked, one evening that fall, speaking thoughts Harold had entertained as well. He was a Negro named Austin Granger, with whom Harold sometimes shared supper in a neighborhood place before they both taught late composition classes. Austin was writing about Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. You make yourselves miserable, he said. Henry James or T. S. Eliot, one or the other! That’s all you Jews look at! Your literary gods are a couple of anti-Semites. You’re trying to join the aristocracy.
—I never was accused of that before, Harold said, though he had been. I lost my job in the public schools for being a Red. He didn’t miss his high school job more than occasionally. It was almost worth it, bragging about being a victim of oppression.
—You’re no Red, Austin said. You’re an aristocrat. He had said much the same when they picketed Woolworth’s together a couple of years earlier, eagerly joining student sympathy picket lines that supported the lunch counter sit-ins in the South. The two of them marched for an hour or two.
—You and I, we don’t belong in the streets, we belong in libraries, Austin had said then, including himself that time. Now, when he asked about Jewish writers, they were making their way back from supper, in the early dark, to their seven o’clock classes. They began talking about Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow, why Harold admired them and why he wanted to write about Henry James anyway. It was October and raining lightly, and Austin was wrapped in a big rain cape that made him seem mysterious. He tapped Harold’s shoulder in farewell, on his way to his own class, and Harold made his way through the corridors to his classroom. The heat had been turned on, and there was a pleasantly indoor smell. The weather and the season promised time for reading and writing, reasoning silently and aloud, and though Harold’s freshmen weren’t true intellectual companions, they were bright and interesting. He loved his joking yet serious suppers with Austin; they both loved their work too much to say so aloud, but their passion for what they did was in the space between them at the table.
A folded note was Scotch-taped to the door of the classroom with his name on it: Call your wife, it said. Harold’s throat tightened. The note was from the department secretary. He excused himself to the three students already present and hurried to the office. From a phone on someone’s desk, standing, he dialed his house and heard Paul’s hello.
—Mommy called? Harold said.
—She’s not here, said Paul. His voice was squeaky with anxiety, and Harold became frightened. What’s going on?
—Nelson did something, Paul said. I don’t want to say . . .
—He’s in trouble? Nelson was in high school, and there had been conferences with concerned teachers. He wasn’t disruptive, they were assured, but inattentive. Harold and Myra had nodded in rare unanimity. Nelson was inattentive.
—He’s in the hospital, Paul said. Then, in tears, Daddy, he tried to get killed.
—Oh my God, Harold said. His own voice rose in pitch, and as he experienced the sensation of being separate from his body, he also sensed two people behind him in the office stand up and turn in his direction as if to catch him when he fell.
—He’s not dead, Paul said, and sobbed again. He’d never been home alone before and explained through sobs that he’d volunteered to stay and wait for Harold’s call.
Harold said, He’ll be all right, sweetie, I promise. Don’t worry.
But how could he know? After their conversation was over, Harold realized he should have told Paul to go to a neighbor’s. He should also have asked what exactly Nelson had done, but he didn’t call back. He sent the secretary to dismiss his class, raced to the street, and as he searched for a taxi, he found himself, irrationally, worrying primarily about Paul, alone where criminals might break in, where he might take it into his head to imitate his brother, whatever his brother had done. Jostled from side to side on the wide seat of the taxi—fancy but shabby—he settled into his real trouble: his boy Nelson, his first boy, his darling son whom he’d never known how to love.
When Harold finally saw Myra in a hospital waiting room on the floor where he’d been told he could find Nelson, she was smoking and crying, a closed magazine in her lap. What if Nelson was now dead? As he went to her, he suddenly thought of her lakeside confession—or boast or point of information—from three months before. It was absurd that he had been unable to speak of it. He looked right and left as if he expected to see another man hurrying to comfort Myra, a man in a well-fitting suit who’d lean over her solicitously, the smoke from their cigarettes mingling over their heads. She was alone, and Harold dropped his briefcase on the floor—the same briefcase in which Nelson had carried his toys when Paul was born—sat beside her, and put his wide hand on her knee.
—What happened? he said, and was surprised at his voice, which sounded old and almost foreign, almost his father’s voice.
She wasn’t startled, and she turned and fell against his chest, sobbing. He’ll be all right, she said, he’s going to be all right.
—What did he do?
—Oh, Harold, she said. He jumped in front of a train.
Nelson had tried to get himself killed by the IRT at Union Square, jumping off a platform after an afternoon spent somewhere in the East Village. He’d been seen, alarms raised, the power turned off. The train stopped. Irate transit workers had rushed to him and yanked him back to the platform. He had a broken leg and bruises from the jump. After a short stay in a medical ward, he’d be sent to a locked psychiatric unit.
Harold, as the hours and days passed, could not stop thinking about what might have happened—what Nelson had planned—and could not bear to think about what might have happened. Why was almost beside the point.
Jumping from a subway platform was such an easy, obvious way for New Yorkers to die that it was unthinkable and unspeakable, and for the first days and weeks the primary effort of them all—parents, relatives, doctors, and nurses—was to look past Nelson’s act and only at the bruises, the broken leg, as if he’d fallen when out for a walk. Harold could not ask why, ask himself or Nelson or anyone, because the answer had the coming train in it: it was what Nelson had chosen to accept, the train reaching his body. Or had he been so sure he’d be rescued? How could he have been sure?
Harold abruptly led a new life, rushing back to the university only when he had no choice. Nelson, in lank hospital gowns that bared his thin chest and tremulous neck, wouldn’t answer his father’s questions or agree or disagree with his speculations. Unlike everyone else, Harold couldn’t stop beginning sentences that would include the coming train, but even he couldn’t bring himself to finish them. When he was with Nelson, he did most of the talking. He had something to say to Nelson, something to say at last. The choice for suicide, Harold believed, was dignified and honorable—a choice, but a wrong choice. To choose death was to decide that life—the bargain offered human beings—was not worth it. Suicide wasn’t Harold’s choice, or the choice of the writers he loved best and believed in. Harold felt that if he explained to Nelson that suicide was an honorable choice, he could then persuade him that it was a choice he should not make, that the arguments of those who rejected suicide were better than of those who believed in it. Live, it’s a mistake not to, James’s Lambert Strether had said, with touching awkwardness.
—James doesn’t mean Live as opposed to die, Harold explained, in Nelson’s hospital room, but live fully, don’t deny oneself intense experience. But the other view, he repeated, the defense of suicide, was a view. Eventually, he hoped Nelson would read some of the authors who had espoused and others who had denied this view. (Would it be dangerous for Nelson to read authors who espoused it, and who were they, anyway?) As father and son, perhaps they could soberly make the decision to reject this view.
Nelson didn’t reply. Myra smoked and looked angry—or sometimes scared. Paul stood and stared out windows, his back to whatever room they were in. He seemed older than he was. Paul was the one who’d say, as the three of them walked from the train station to their apartment, Is there anything in the house for supper? Should we pick something up?
Nelson’s psychiatrist was a thoughtful Jewish man who looked as if he might have enjoyed talking about literature, but he was not interested in discussing suicide as a philosophical position. From Harold and Myra he wanted to know details about Nelson’s childhood: toilet training, schoolwork. Harold said, Nelson’s different from everyone, hoping for some ordinary back-and-forth discussion.
—How do you find Nelson different, Mr. Abrams? asked the doctor.
—That’s not true, said Myra, and the doctor swiveled in his chair to face her. He’s not different from everyone, she said. He’s like me.
—In what way?
Harold chided himself for expecting a psychiatrist to talk like a dinner guest, then realized that the dinner guests he was imagining were no more real than the psychiatrist of his fantasies, the man who would exonerate Harold and Myra while restoring Nelson to something he had never been. The dinner guests were in books, and so were the psychiatrists.
—I’m of no use to my sons, he said to Austin Granger.
—Oh, look here, Austin said, looking uncomfortable. He was younger, unmarried, the son of a bus driver who was as baffled about him as Harold’s father had been about Harold’s desires and choices. Sometimes Harold and Austin seemed a generation apart, and their racial difference made Harold awkward as well; he wondered if Austin blamed him for discrimination and Negro poverty. Would a Negro boy be thrown in jail, not sent to a hospital, for jumping off a platform and disrupting the trains?
It was a relief that Nelson was in a locked ward, but someday he’d be released, and Harold didn’t know how he’d stand it, not knowing where his son was at any moment. Nelson was friendlier once he was in the psychiatric hospital. He didn’t mind confinement as much as Harold had expected. Maybe he felt safer. Harold dreaded the visits, but going alone, he’d sit on the edge of Nelson’s neatly made bed while his son, dressed, sprawled at the other end of it, and as 1962 began, progressed, and ended, they talked about what they saw on the news—the hanging of Eichmann, the death of Marilyn Monroe, the Cuban Missile Crisis.
—I might go into politics, Nelson said once. It seemed an absurd ambition for this silent, brooding boy who couldn’t make friends, but Harold was uplifted because Nelson had spoken of a future. He was on medication and grew heavier, which made him seem likelier to live, as if the hospital had proposed to save Nelson by enlarging him, so there would be more to grasp and hold on to.
Harold had been pleased to let Brenda Saltzman use the cabin, but he was surprised to hear from her. He was sorry he hadn’t seen a way to ask her about herself and her father. He was sure that at heart, Artie still blamed him for the loss of his teaching job. And Harold was embarrassed at the difference between them. Even if Artie had been exaggerating the one time he said it, it was probably true that he thought Harold was a snob.
Yet after Nelson was admitted to the Psychiatric Institute at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, Harold wanted Artie to know all about it, if only so that he’d stop resenting Harold’s good fortune. Or because it was important: he couldn’t live through something important without Artie. Harold’s life now included many more trips on the subway, where he was unable to keep from thinking of Nelson walking closer and closer to the edge of the platform. He was in agony, though also not in agony. He liked the upper Broadway neighborhood where Nelson was, which had vigorous street life, huge fruit and vegetable markets, and cheap discount places. Combining a visit to Nelson with his classes or trips to the library, Harold had more private life. He didn’t visit Naomi for months, and then he did again.
Now it was easier for Harold to stop by Artie’s shoe store, also on Broadway but closer to midtown, and propose that they go out to lunch. It had been embarrassing—for both of them—to see Artie at work in his tie but no jacket, kneeling to measure women’s feet. The first time Artie said he had no time, but Harold tried again and they went to a Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood, where Harold studied Artie’s face, bisected by sunlight. Artie danced his fingers playfully in the light, which didn’t seem to bother him. He seemed younger than Harold.
—Do you miss teaching? Harold said, after they’d ordered.
—Oh, my friend, it’s everything, Artie said, and his face wrinkled as if he would cry. He poured water and tea and drank both. Is that what’s bothering your kid? That stuff we went through?
—I don’t know what’s bothering my kid, Harold says. He says he didn’t want to live, but now he does. He makes it sound like nothing much—he didn’t want a sandwich but now he does; he didn’t want a glass of water.
—Maybe that’s what it’s like, Artie said. You should have got girls, and I should have got boys. Everybody would have been fine. I don’t know what’s what with Brenda. Nothing like what you’re going through—at least as far as I know. She goes to college, but she doesn’t seem interested. He shrugged. A waiter put dishes before them.
Harold felt himself prepare for something, and then Artie said, You still have a lady friend? At last the sun seemed to bother him; he stood and closed a curtain behind Harold, and Harold realized he should have closed the curtain.
When Artie sat down again, Harold said, Yes.
There was a long pause. Maybe it’s none of my business, Artie said. I made up my mind I didn’t want anything to do with you, the way you live, but maybe it’s just none of my goddamn business. What do I know?
—Say what you want to say, Harold said.
—If I’m allowed to say, Artie said, spearing beef slices with his fork (Harold had learned to use chopsticks, eating in little places near Columbia with Austin, but Artie waved his hand at an idea like that). If I’m going to say, then here’s what I say. What the hell do you expect your kid to do, knowing his father’s treating his mother like that?
—How would he know?
—How would he know? How would he know? I’ll bet you twenty Chinese lunches that Nelson knows the whole story.
Harold did not take the bet, and he did not discuss the subject with Nelson, but he made an appointment alone with Nelson’s psychiatrist. He said, I thought maybe you should know. I see a woman. Very discreetly.
The doctor asked a few questions, then offered to refer Harold and Myra to a psychiatrist of their own. Do you think it’s a good idea? Harold asked. That we see someone?
—For your son’s sake? the doctor said. It could be.
—I remembered something, Harold said as he stood and gathered his coat. My wife—well, the summer before last, my wife told me she was in love with someone. The doctor looked up, amused. For months, Harold had thought constantly of what Myra had said, but when Nelson was hurt—and when time passed without anything else from Myra—he had put it to one side, and now it was true that he had not thought about it for many weeks.
The end of term was approaching—Nelson had been in the hospital for a year—and Harold had papers to grade. Over the Christmas holidays, he was determined to make some progress on his neglected dissertation, but he made up his mind that in January he would suggest to Myra that they consult the doctor whose name and telephone number Nelson’s psychiatrist had given him. He wondered if he had to tell Myra about Naomi—to have a reason. He tried not to think too hard about what he would say and concentrated on choosing, well in advance, a date on which to speak.
When the time came, an evening in January 1963, Harold cooked dinner—Myra had come in late—then washed the dishes while Paul did arithmetic problems at the kitchen table. Next, Paul watched a little television, but then he went to bed. Harold had chosen a night when Myra didn’t have a favorite show, and when he came into the living room, she was lying on the sofa, a stack of magazines on the rug next to her. He knew she was checking out the competition, looking at layouts and design. Her feet were toward the doorway he stood in. If he were to sit down, it would be behind her.
—My, he said. There’s something I want to talk about.
—Talk, she said, continuing to turn pages. He sat, but she didn’t turn to look at him.
—I think it might help Nelson, he said, and hesitated. He started again. Dr. Fried thinks it might help Nelson for us to speak to a psychiatrist ourselves, together.
—What us? Myra said. You and me? What do you mean, Dr. Fried thinks? How do you know what he thinks?
—I went to see him, he said.
—Without telling me? Are you trying to turn Nelson against me? You visit more than I do, but I can’t do anything about that—I can’t leave work. I missed so much time when he got sick.
—Yes, I made an appointment and spent a few minutes with Dr. Fried.
—And what right— Myra sat up and wheeled around, her hands on her knees. What right did you have to do that?
—I think either of us has the right to speak to our son’s doctor, Harold said. He heard himself sounding rational in a way that would set her off—it always did. He knew with dismay that he was trying to make that happen.
—And what did you say to Dr. Fried, Myra said, that made him decide we should see a psychiatrist, may I ask? What on earth did you say to him?
Harold was silent for a long time. There was an answer that would not be the whole truth but might work. He said, I told him what you said.
—What I said?
—At the lake. The summer before last.
At that, Myra laughed, self-consciously and ironically. Oh, so you were listening! I had no idea you were listening. I thought you had some water in your ear and couldn’t hear me! You certainly never have taken any interest in that conversation before.
—I was interested, Harold said. I was interested.
—So let me get this straight, Myra said. You walked into Dr. Fried’s office and said, My wife says she loves someone, and he said, Better go see a shrink. Is that what happened?
Harold was silent. He felt a great need to take off his shoes. He knew that if he left the room to put on his slippers, he would not come back. He never took his shoes off in the living room. It would feel immodest, outlandish. He stayed where he was. He should have realized that it would not sound likely that he’d walked into Dr. Fried’s office and accused his wife, and slowly Harold conceded to himself that to make that claim would not be fair, would not be ethical. Harold wished to be moral—and usually considered himself all but depraved. Yet that was self-indulgent. He was not depraved, he saw, in a dreadful moment of clarity: he was only habitually selfish. He had not been a good person, but possibly he had changed. Maybe he could be less selfish.
—Myra, he said, and it felt, as he spoke, like the first honest thing he’d said to her since the day they met, I want to tell you what I told the doctor.
—I should hope so, said Myra, but her features narrowed, as if she hoped he would not.
—I know this will distress you, he said. I told him I—I have a mistress. A lover. A woman.
Myra jerked her head back and shut her eyes as he spoke. He didn’t know whether she was surprised at what he had said or the fact that he’d spoken out loud. She was quiet for a long time, and he waited. He expected crying, screaming, but no.
She stood up. You’d better sleep in Nelson’s room, she said.
—What?
—I’m going to bed. I don’t think there’s much to be said tonight. I want to make some phone calls before we talk again.
—Phone calls? Harold said.
—My father. To recommend a divorce lawyer. And my father, also, come to think of it, about the other thing. I’m getting the cabin. Leaving the magazines scattered on the rug, with their dazzling colors, their photographs of cold, elegant, powerful women, Myra walked into the bedroom. You can get your slippers and pajamas now, she said, turning. And move the rest of your things to Nelson’s room when I’m at work tomorrow. You can take a week if you need it to find an apartment. Paul stays here. I stay here. She’d rehearsed this many times in her mind, Harold understood. Maybe she’d even spoken it out loud. She had been waiting for him to say what he had just said. He gave a wild, wordless cry, reaching toward her. Still, it would have been wrong not to say it.