A Private Sorcery
A Private Sorcery
A NOVEL BY
Lisa Gornick
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill  2002
For
Ken, Zack and Damon
As for the symptoms, they are a private sorcery.
They transform one thing into another.
Contents
Prologue
They come in the middle of the night. There's a ruckus on the stairs, then the bell ringing. Once, twice, quickly three more times. Saul, naked, sits up in the bed as Rena, lost in his pajamas, moves forward. She clutches the neck above the buttons, swipes the tangle from her eyes. Through the peephole, she sees men's faces: a pale, a dark. Behind them, more.
Chain in place, she opens the door a crack. The pale one, brillo hair, a faded strawberry mark on his cheek, stuffs a paper through the space. “Warrant. For Dr. Saul Dubinsky.”
“My robe.” She turns. There's a rush in her chest. From the rear, she hears the grates to the fire escape opening. A bullhorn blasts. A voice, loud, staccato: “At the window. He's at the window.”
Trash cans clatter. “Don't move, Dubinsky. Stay where you are.”
From the front: “Open the door.
Now
, missy.”
She swings around. Above the chain, the snout of a gun. The old guns explode inside her. The pistol Nick waved while her mother scrambled to gather her panties from the parking lot. The one Sammy kept loaded under the bed. Joe's rifle mounted in the room where she slept.
“I said
now
.”
She unlatches the chain. Men run past her toward the bedroom. The doughy rookie grabs her around the waist, an arm yanked sharply behind her, the other caught at the wrist.
“Let go of me.” Her voiceâa trickle of sound.
He tightens his grip. His boot touches her bare foot. “Don't struggle, ma'am. It'll only make it worse.”
The reverb from the bullhorn surrounds them. “Dubinsky, we're counting to ten. You better be off that fire escape by then.”
The rookie's heartbeat is on her back. He's scared, too.
“I'd recommend you get your naked butt inside.”
The grates bang closed.
“Okay, Doc. We're going to take this a step at a time.”
A few seconds later, Saul is pushed into the living room ringed by three of the men, his long neck spindly among their thick ones, his dark hair frizzed like a clown's. She can see the hollow where his breastbone is concave, just large enough for two robin's eggs, she'd once told him, her finger tracing the spot. His hands are cuffed behind him.
“Oh my God.”
“It's okay,” the rookie whispers. He pulls her closer as though she's his date, the two of them swaying together, and then she remembers that today is her birthday.
Saul's eyes are circles of panic.
Rena looks at the one with the brillo hair. “You can let him put some pants on, at least.”
Her left eyelid is twitching, the pajama top twisted under her arms. She can see Brillo taking her inâcalculating something.
“Bring her in to get Doc here some clothes.”
In the bedroom, she opens Saul's dresser drawers: the mismatched balls of socks, the T-shirts and jeans thrown willy-nilly. She searches for underwear without holes. From Saul's closet, she takes khaki pants, a button-down shirt, a tweed jacket worn at the elbows.
They undo the cuffs. Saul moves slowly, his fine fingers fumbling with the buttons. Brillo takes out a handkerchief and blows his nose. “All right, Pretty Boy. You'll get the fashion award down at MCC.”
The rookie takes the rear. At the door, he turns and tips his cap.
“Night, ma'am. Lock up tight.”
Part One
BURNING CHILD
1
Leonard
A regimented man, I rise as always at five, lowering my big white feet onto the cold wood floor. I am thinking of you, Saul, my second-born son. You would laugh to hear me call you my second-born.
So biblical
, you would say.
Begat, begat, begat.
Your motherâa flowered bonnet over her beauty parlor hair, her chin slack, the inhaled
clu-hah
with the slight gasp in the middle, the exhale through the Grecian nose that turned somewhere in the past thirty-seven years from regal to beakâstill has a morning's sleep before her and then her daily litany: not a wink all night, such a torture to lie there just watching the clock.
Downstairs, I make coffee and struggle to peel an orange. I toy with the night's dream fragment, partly a compulsion like a dog worrying a bone, partly an exercise from my old psychiatry days when residents still spent six months studying Chapter Seven of
The Interpretation of Dreams
. So different from your training three decades later when, you bitterly complained, no one read books, reading relegated to four-page articles in the green journal, terse pieces correlating drug dosages and symptom checklists. In the dream fragment, I'm with my sisters: Rose, Eunice and Lillian. We're in a room with pocket doors and a clawfoot dining table, so it must be when the six of us lived in the back of my Aunt Mindyl and Uncle Jack's apartmentâthe dining room, the maid's
room and the miniature maid's bath our delegated quarters. Then the scene changes and Carmelita Erendira Gomez, the subject of the accursed biography I've been trying to write these past twelve years, is sitting with my sisters, showing them something I either can't see or can't now recall.
I eat standing at the kitchen sink. It's a habit your mother has always hated. “Only laborers eat on their feet,” she would hiss in the years when I still existed enough in her consciousness to merit criticism, willfully dumb to the knowledge that my father had spent twenty-nine of his forty-two years breaking his back, the last six leaning over a pressing machine in my Uncle Jack's factoryâthe job, a gift in Depression years, bestowed only after my father had promised not to utter on the premises so much as a word of what Jack had called
your Commie union filth
.
I stare out the window, trying to lift the thick cheesy covering from my mind. A soapy light washes across the lawns, filtering through the two Japanese maples and the Canadian spruce we planted thirty-two years ago when the development was still new. I think, as I have every morning since, about how dissatisfied I feel with the view before me: the colors, muted and tasteful as befit a neighborhood where property values have consistently risen and the homes have gracefully aged, the uniformity of the colonials and ranches and split-levels hidden behind varying additions. How every person needs to live in a place imbued with substance, with personal meaning, how these surrounds have for me never ceased feeling weak, dilute, perfectly pleasant, with nothing discordant to the eye, but with nothing, either, upon which the eye would linger.
At six, I enter my study. Unable to face a blank page or yesterday's scrawl, I take out the red leather album where I keep the Mexican newspaper clippings about Carmelita. They're in chronological order, the first from a local paper when Carmelita started having visions, the last from a Oaxacan paper after her death in prison. I am midway through the album, feeling as always daunted about how to convey the many ways the events surrounding Carmelita were experiencedâher family
and the village priest saw her as a virgin saint with the baby miraculously conceived, the local police pointed to vindictive villagers jealous that her father had prospered in the new copper mine, the doctors suggested command hallucinations that had driven her to drown her own childâwhen the phone rings.
I pick up immediately.
“Leonard.”
Hearing your wife's soft, chilly voice at this hour, my stomach clutches. Rena is not the sort of daughter-in-law who calls simply to see how we are doing, perhaps because any call would involve listening to your mother's catalog of symptoms, each preceded by the phrase
I'm doing better, better than last week
, a reminder to callers that they'd failed her when she was really down.
“Leonard,” she repeats. I am envisioning the bluish skin under her gold-flecked eyes, so large they bulge slightly and make one wonder about thyroid levels, her willowy form, the almost-perfect posture broken every now and then by a slight slouch, pentimento, I've always imagined, of some earlier, awkward self.
“Are you sitting down? You should sit down.”
“I'm sitting.”
She sucks in air. “Saul's been arrested. Last night, in the middle of the night.”
“What?” I stammer, not because I haven't heard but rather because I can't connect this to anything I know about you: your blue lips at the neighborhood pool, your wobbly ankles and eyeglasses the butt of so many pranks.
Saul's been arrested.
The words sit outside my mind like three steamer trunks that cannot fit into an already packed car.
“Why?” I whisper. I hold the receiver in my hand, paralyzed, staring at the Japanese maples, their limbs knotted with baby buds.
“Something to do with drugs, a burglary of the pharmacy at his hospital. He tried to escape through the back window, but they had police in the garden.”
I'm gripping the phone, having the oddest sensation, as if I can't quite
make out what is being said. This uncomfortable thought I've had on occasion about your wife returns: that there'd been some other life before she came east, before you met her, things you hinted at when you married three years ago, black holes between the few facts you told usâthat she'd grown up over an Italian restaurant in San Francisco where her mother was a waitress, was helped to go to Yale by a community organizer who'd then died of breast cancer, had her half brother living with her for several years.
Did she say drugs?
“I need a lawyer. I thought maybe Marc would know someone. I ⦔ For the first time, her voice falters, a tiny fissure between the words. “I don't have his number.”
A surge of protectiveness wells up in me. It's a relief to feel something recognizable, to discern the outlines of something to grasp onto. “Wait,” I say. “I'll take the next train.”
I
SHOWER QUICKLY
. In reaction to your mother's hypochon-driasis, I have refused to purchase the blood pressure cuffs so many men my age keep in their bathroom cabinets but find myself now anxiously worrying about my diastolic reading. I soap my flabby chest, forcing myself to concentrate on the circles of suds I make over the gray hairs, duck under a showerhead not installed for men my height, remembering the years of taking you and Marc into the shower with me, when you were little little, still in diapers, being sure to clean all the creases, the indent where we once had tails.
My hands shake as I write a note to your mother: “Gone to the city to use the library. I'll call later to let you know when I'll be home.” I prop it next to the coffeemaker and lock the kitchen door behind me.
It takes twenty minutes to walk to the train station, the streets empty this early on a Sunday morning. I ride on the platform between the cars, staring out at the cruddy landscape grown around the tracksâthe junked cars, the aluminum-sided houses with their clotheslines and swing sets, at one spot something that looks like a dead dog. I'm feeling sorry for myself, that I can't tell your mother what with her hysterical
response to everything: the fainting or feigning of fainting, the need to call Dr. Stone for tranquilizers, the way anyone else's problems are immediately co-opted as her property, her tragedy. Guilty because I'm saved from another morning facing a blank page, as though Rena's call announced a snow day. We're in the tunnel coming into New York before I can focus on you and then I feel so awful, so sick in my soul, the air acrid with fumes, I have to move inside and take a seat.