The Collected Stories, page 24
In court Carter said, Yes, I did force her, but he said he didn’t do nothing else.
Angie said, I did smack her when I seen what she done, but I never bit her, your honor, I ain’t no animal, that black hippie must of.
Nobody said—they couldn’t drag out of anyone—they lacking the evidence who it was picked her up like she was nothing, a bag of busted bones, and dumped her out the fifth-floor window.
But wasn’t it a shame, them two studs. Why they take it out on her? After so many fluffy little chicks. They could of played her easy. Why Carter seen it many times hisself. She could of stayed the summer. We just like the UN. Every state in the union stop by. She would of got her higher education right on the fifth-floor front. September, her mama and daddy would come for her and they whip her bottom, we know that. We been in this world long enough. We seen lots of the little girls. They go home, then after a while they get to be grown womens, they integrating the swimming pool and picketing the supermarket, they blink their eyes and shut their mouth and grin.
But that was my room and my bed, so I don’t forget it. I don’t stop thinking, That child … That child … And it come to me yesterday, I lay down after work: Maybe it wasn’t no one. Maybe she pull herself the way she was, crumpled, to that open window. She was tore up, she must of thought she was gutted inside her skin. She must of been in a horror what she got to remember—what her folks would see. Her life look to be disgusting like a squashed fish, so what she did: she made up some power somehow and raise herself up that windowsill and hook herself onto it and then what I see, she just topple herself out. That what I think right now.
That is what happened.
A Conversation with My Father
My father is eighty-six years old and in bed. His heart, that bloody motor, is equally old and will not do certain jobs anymore. It still floods his head with brainy light. But it won’t let his legs carry the weight of his body around the house. Despite my metaphors, this muscle failure is not due to his old heart, he says, but to a potassium shortage. Sitting on one pillow, leaning on three, he offers last-minute advice and makes a request.
“I would like you to write a simple story just once more,” he says, “the kind Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov, the kind you used to write. Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next.”
I say, “Yes, why not? That’s possible.” I want to please him, though I don’t remember writing that way. I would like to try to tell such a story, if he means the kind that begins: “There was a woman …” followed by plot, the absolute line between two points which I’ve always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
Finally I thought of a story that had been happening for a couple of years right across the street. I wrote it down, then read it aloud. “Pa,” I said, “how about this? Do you mean something like this?”
Once in my time there was a woman and she had a son. They lived nicely, in a small apartment in Manhattan. This boy at about fifteen became a junkie, which is not unusual in our neighborhood. In order to maintain her close friendship with him, she became a junkie too. She said it was part of the youth culture, with which she felt very much at home. After a while, for a number of reasons, the boy gave it all up and left the city and his mother in disgust. Hopeless and alone, she grieved. We all visit her.
“O.K., Pa, that’s it,” I said, “an unadorned and miserable tale.”
“But that’s not what I mean,” my father said. “You misunderstood me on purpose. You know there’s a lot more to it. You know that. You left everything out. Turgenev wouldn’t do that. Chekhov wouldn’t do that. There are in fact Russian writers you never heard of, you don’t have an inkling of, as good as anyone, who can write a plain ordinary story, who would not leave out what you have left out. I object not to facts but to people sitting in trees talking senselessly, voices from who knows where …”
“Forget that one, Pa, what have I left out now? In this one?”
“Her looks, for instance.”
“Oh. Quite handsome, I think. Yes.”
“Her hair?”
“Dark, with heavy braids, as though she were a girl or a foreigner.”
“What were her parents like, her stock? That she became such a person. It’s interesting, you know.”
“From out of town. Professional people. The first to be divorced in their county. How’s that? Enough?” I asked.
“With you, it’s all a joke,” he said. “What about the boy’s father? Why didn’t you mention him? Who was he? Or was the boy born out of wedlock?”
“Yes,” I said. “He was born out of wedlock.”
“For godsakes, doesn’t anyone in your stories get married? Doesn’t anyone have the time to run down to City Hall before they jump into bed?”
“No,” I said. “In real life, yes. But in my stories, no.”
“Why do you answer me like that?”
“Oh, Pa, this is a simple story about a smart woman who came to N.Y.C. full of interest love trust excitement very up-to-date, and about her son, what a hard time she had in this world. Married or not, it’s of small consequence.”
“It is of great consequence,” he said.
“O.K.,” I said.
“O.K. O.K. yourself,” he said, “but listen. I believe you that she’s good-looking, but I don’t think she was so smart.”
“That’s true,” I said. “Actually that’s the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic. You think they’re extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they’re just average with a good education. Sometimes the other way around, the person’s a kind of dumb innocent, but he outwits you and you can’t even think of an ending good enough.”
“What do you do then?” he asked. He had been a doctor for a couple of decades and then an artist for a couple of decades and he’s still interested in details, craft, technique.
“Well, you just have to let the story lie around till some agreement can be reached between you and the stubborn hero.”
“Aren’t you talking silly, now?” he asked. “Start again,” he said. “It so happens I’m not going out this evening. Tell the story again. See what you can do this time.”
“O.K.,” I said. “But it’s not a five-minute job.” Second attempt:
Once, across the street from us, there was a fine handsome woman, our neighbor. She had a son whom she loved because she’d known him since birth (in helpless chubby infancy, and in the wrestling, hugging ages, seven to ten, as well as earlier and later). This boy, when he fell into the fist of adolescence, became a junkie. He was not a hopeless one. He was in fact hopeful, an ideologue and successful converter. With his busy brilliance, he wrote persuasive articles for his high-school newspaper. Seeking a wider audience, using important connections, he drummed into Lower Manhattan newsstand distribution a periodical called Oh! Golden Horse!
In order to keep him from feeling guilty (because guilt is the stony heart of nine-tenths of all clinically diagnosed cancers in America today, she said), and because she had always believed in giving bad habits room at home where one could keep an eye on them, she too became a junkie. Her kitchen was famous for a while—a center for intellectual addicts who knew what they were doing. A few felt artistic like Coleridge and others were scientific and revolutionary like Leary. Although she was often high herself, certain good mothering reflexes remained, and she saw to it that there was lots of orange juice around and honey and milk and vitamin pills. However, she never cooked anything but chili, and that no more than once a week. She explained, when we talked to her, seriously, with neighborly concern, that it was her part in the youth culture and she would rather be with the young, it was an honor, than with her own generation.
One week, while nodding through an Antonioni film, this boy was severely jabbed by the elbow of a stern and proselytizing girl, sitting beside him. She offered immediate apricots and nuts for his sugar level, spoke to him sharply, and took him home.
She had heard of him and his work and she herself published, edited, and wrote a competitive journal called Man Does Live by Bread Alone. In the organic heat of her continuous presence he could not help but become interested once more in his muscles, his arteries and nerve connections. In fact he began to love them, treasure them, praise them with funny little songs in Man Does Live …
the fingers of my flesh transcend
my transcendental soul
the tightness in my shoulders end
my teeth have made me whole
To the mouth of his head (that glory of will and determination) he brought hard apples, nuts, wheat germ, and soybean oil. He said to his old friends, From now on, I guess I’ll keep my wits about me. I’m going on the natch. He said he was about to begin a spiritual deep-breathing journey. How about you too. Mom? he asked kindly.
His conversion was so radiant, splendid, that neighborhood kids his age began to say that he had never been a real addict at all, only a journalist along for the smell of the story. The mother tried several times to give up what had become without her son and his friends a lonely habit. This effort only brought it to supportable levels. The boy and his girl took their electronic mimeograph and moved to the bushy edge of another borough. They were very strict. They said they would not see her again until she had been off drugs for sixty days.
At home alone in the evening, weeping, the mother read and reread the seven issues of Oh! Golden Horse! They seemed to her as truthful as ever. We often crossed the street to visit and console. But if we mentioned any of our children who were at college or in the hospital or dropouts at home, she would cry out, My baby! My baby! and burst into terrible, face-scarring, time-consuming tears. The End.
First my father was silent, then he said, “Number One: You have a nice sense of humor. Number Two: I see you can’t tell a plain story. So don’t waste time.” Then he said sadly, “Number Three: I suppose that means she was alone, she was left like that, his mother. Alone. Probably sick?”
I said, “Yes.”
“Poor woman. Poor girl, to be born in a time of fools, to live among fools. The end. The end. You were right to put that down. The end.”
I didn’t want to argue, but I had to say, “Well, it is not necessarily the end, Pa.”
“Yes,” he said, “what a tragedy. The end of a person.”
“No, Pa,” I begged him. “It doesn’t have to be. She’s only about forty. She could be a hundred different things in this world as time goes on. A teacher or a social worker. An ex-junkie! Sometimes it’s better than having a master’s in education.”
“Jokes,” he said. “As a writer that’s your main trouble. You don’t want to recognize it. Tragedy! Plain tragedy! Historical tragedy! No hope. The end.”
“Oh, Pa,” I said. “She could change.”
“In your own life, too, you have to look it in the face.” He took a couple of nitroglycerin. “Turn to five,” he said, pointing to the dial on the oxygen tank. He inserted the tubes into his nostrils and breathed deep. He closed his eyes and said, “No.”
I had promised the family to always let him have the last word when arguing, but in this case I had a different responsibility. That woman lives across the street. She’s my knowledge and my invention. I’m sorry for her. I’m not going to leave her there in that house crying. (Actually neither would Life, which unlike me has no pity.)
Therefore: She did change. Of course her son never came home again. But right now, she’s the receptionist in a storefront community clinic in the East Village. Most of the customers are young people, some old friends. The head doctor has said to her, “If we only had three people in this clinic with your experiences …”
“The doctor said that?” My father took the oxygen tubes out of his nostrils and said, “Jokes. Jokes again.”
“No, Pa, it could really happen that way, it’s a funny world nowadays.”
“No,” he said. “Truth first. She will slide back. A person must have character. She does not.”
“No, Pa,” I said. “That’s it. She’s got a job. Forget it. She’s in that storefront working.”
“How long will it be?” he asked. “Tragedy! You too. When will you look it in the face?”
The Immigrant Story
Jack asked me, Isn’t it a terrible thing to grow up in the shadow of another person’s sorrow?
I suppose so, I answered. As you know, I grew up in the summer sunlight of upward mobility. This leached out a lot of that dark ancestral grief.
He went on with his life. It’s not your fault if that’s the case. Your bad disposition is not your fault. Yet you’re always angry. No way out but continuous rage or the nuthouse.
What if this sorrow is all due to history? I asked.
The cruel history of Europe, he said. In this way he showed ironic respect to one of my known themes.
The whole world ought to be opposed to Europe for its cruel history, Jack, and yet in favor of it because after about a thousand years it may have learned some sense.
Nonsense, he said objectively, a thousand years of outgoing persistent imperial cruelty tends to make enemies and if all you have to deal with these enemies is good sense, what then?
My dear, no one knows the power of good sense. It hasn’t been built up or experimented with sufficiently.
I’m trying to tell you something, he said. Listen. One day I woke up and my father was asleep in the crib.
I wonder why, I said.
My mother made him sleep in the crib.
All the time?
That time anyway. That time I saw him.
I wonder why, I said.
Because she didn’t want him to fuck her, he said.
No, I don’t believe that. Who told you that?
I know it! He pointed his finger at me.
I don’t believe it, I said. Unless she’s had five babies all in a row or they have to get up at 6 a.m. or they both hate each other, most people like their husbands to do that.
Bullshit! She was trying to make him feel guilty. Where were his balls?
I will never respond to that question. Asked in a worried way again and again, it may become responsible for the destruction of the entire world. I gave it two minutes of silence.
He said, Misery misery misery. Grayness. I see it all very very gray. My mother approaches the crib. Shmul, she says, get up. Run down to the corner and get me half a pound of pot cheese. Then run over the drugstore and get a few ounces cod-liver oil. My father, scrunched like an old gray fetus, looks up and smiles smiles smiles at the bitch.
How do you know what was going on? I asked. You were five years old.
What do you think was going on?
I’ll tell you. It’s not so hard. Any dope who’s had a normal life could tell you. Anyone whose head hasn’t been fermenting with the compost of ten years of gluttonous analysis. Anyone could tell you.
Tell me what? he screamed.
The reason your father was sleeping in the crib was that you and your sister who usually slept in the crib had scarlet fever and needed the decent beds and more room to sweat, come to a fever crisis, and either get well or die.
Who told you that? He lunged at me as though I was an enemy.
You fucking enemy, he said. You always see things in a rosy light. You have a rotten rosy temperament. You were like that in sixth grade. One day you brought three American flags to school.
That was true. I made an announcement to the sixth-grade assembly thirty years ago. I said: I thank God every day that I’m not in Europe. I thank God I’m American-born and live on East 172nd Street where there is a grocery store, a candy store, and a drugstore on one corner and on the same block a shul and two doctors’ offices.
One Hundred and Seventy-second Street was a pile of shit, he said. Everyone was on relief except you. Thirty people had t.b. Citizens and noncitizens alike starving until the war. Thank God capitalism has a war it can pull out of the old feed bag every now and then or we’d all be dead. Ha ha.
I’m glad that you’re not totally brainwashed by stocks, bonds, and cash. I’m glad to hear you still mention capitalism from time to time.
Because of poverty, brilliance, and the early appearance of lots of soft hair on face and crotch, my friend Jack was a noticeable Marxist and Freudian by the morning of his twelfth birthday.
In fact, his mind thickened with ideas. I continued to put out more flags. There were twenty-eight flags aflutter in different rooms and windows. I had one tattooed onto my arm. It has gotten dimmer but a lot wider because of middle age.
I am probably more radical than you are nowadays, I said. Since I was not wiped out of my profession during the McCarthy inquisitions, I therefore did not have to go into business for myself and make a fortune.
You damn fool. Plenty are wiped out to this day. I mean brilliant guys—engineers, teachers, just broken—broken.
I believe I see the world as clearly as you do, I said. Rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy gray when viewing the world.
Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes, he said. Do you mind? Just listen:
My mother and father came from a small town in Poland. They had three sons. My father decided to go to America, to (1) stay out of the army, (2) stay out of jail, (3) save his children from everyday wars and ordinary pogroms. He was helped by the savings of parents, uncles, grandmothers and set off like hundreds of thousands of others in that year. In America, New York City, he lived a hard but hopeful life. Sometimes he walked on Delancey Street. Sometimes like a bachelor he went to the theater on Second Avenue. Mostly he put his money away for the day he could bring his wife and sons to this place. Meanwhile, in Poland famine struck. Not hunger, which all Americans suffer six, seven times a day, but Famine, which tells the body to consume itself. First the fat, then the meat, the muscle, then the blood. Famine ate up the bodies of the little boys pretty quickly. My father met my mother at the boat. He looked at her face, her hands. There was no baby in her arms, no children dragging at her skirt. She was not wearing her hair in two long black braids. There was a kerchief over a dark wiry wig. She had shaved her head, like a backward Orthodox bride, though they had been serious advanced socialists like most of the youth of their town. He took her by the hand and brought her home. They never went anywhere alone, except to work or the grocer’s. They held each other’s hand when they sat down at the table, even at breakfast. Sometimes he patted her hand, sometimes she patted his. He read the paper to her every night.
