Modern American Memoirs (13 page)

“Can you ladies let me have a thousand dollars for a martini?” he inquires.

My mother looks directly into his face. “I know we're in an inflation,” she says, “but a thousand dollars for a martini?”

His mouth drops. It's the first time in God knows how long that a mark has acknowledged his existence. “You're beautiful,” he burbles at her. “Beautiful.”

“Look on him,” she says to me in Yiddish. “Just look on him.”

He turns his bleary eyelids in my direction. “Whad-she-say?” he demands. “Whad-she-say?”

“She said you're breaking her heart,” I tell him.

“She-say-that?” His eyes nearly open. “She-say-that?”

I nod. He whirls at her. “Take me home and make love to me,” he croons, and right there in the street, in the middle of the day, he begins to bay at the moon. “I need you,” he howls at my mother and doubles over, his fist in his stomach. “I need you.”

She nods at him. “I need too,” she says dryly. “Fortunately or unfortunately, it is not you I need.” And she propels me around the
now motionless derelict. Paralyzed by recognition, he will no longer bar our progress down the street.

We cross Abingdon Square and walk into Bleecker Street. The gentrified West Village closes around us, makes us not peaceful but quiet. We walk through block after block of antique stores, gourmet shops, boutiques, not speaking. But for how long can my mother and I not speak?

“So I'm reading the biography you gave me,” she says. I look at her, puzzled, and then I remember. “Oh!” I smile in wide delight. “Are you enjoying it?”

“Listen,” she begins. The smile drops off my face and my stomach contracts. That “listen” means she is about to trash the book I gave her to read. She is going to say, “What. What's here? What's here that I don't already know? I
lived
through it. I know it all. What can this writer tell me that I don't already know? Nothing. To
you
it's interesting, but to me? How can this be interesting to me?”

On and on she'll go, the way she does when she thinks she doesn't understand something and she's scared, and she's taking refuge in scorn and hypercriticality.

The book I gave her to read is a biography of Josephine Herbst, a thirties writer, a stubborn willful raging woman grabbing at politics and love and writing, in there punching until the last minute.

“Listen,” my mother says now in the patronizing tone she thinks conciliatory. “Maybe this is interesting to you, but not to me. I lived through all this. I know it all. What can I learn from this? Nothing. To you it's interesting. Not to me.”

Invariably, when she speaks so, my head fills with blood and before the sentences have stopped pouring from her mouth I am lashing out at her. “You're an ignoramus, you know nothing, only a know-nothing talks the way you do. The point of having lived through it, as you say, is only that the background is familiar, so the book is made richer, not that you could have written the book. People a thousand times more educated than you have read and learned from this book, but
you
can't learn from it?” On and on I would go, thoroughly ruining the afternoon for both of us.

However, in the past year an odd circumstance has begun to obtain. On occasion, my head fails to fill with blood. I become irritated but remain calm. Not falling into a rage, I do not make a holo
caust of the afternoon. Today, it appears, one of those moments is upon us. I turn to my mother, throw my left arm around her still solid back, place my right hand on her upper arm, and say, “Ma, if this book is not interesting to you, that's fine. You can say that.” She looks coyly at me, eyes large, head half-turned;
now
she's interested. “But don't say it has nothing to teach you. That there's nothing here. That's unworthy of you, and of the book, and of me. You demean us all when you say that.” Listen to me. Such wisdom. And all of it gained ten minutes ago.

Silence. Long silence. We walk another block. Silence. She's looking off into that middle distance. I take my lead from her, matching my steps to hers. I do not speak, do not press her. Another silent block.

“That Josephine Herbst,” my mother says. “She certainly carried on, didn't she?”

Relieved and happy, I hug her. “She didn't know what she was doing either, Ma, but yes, she carried on.”

“I'm jealous,” my mother blurts at me. “I'm jealous she lived her life, I didn't live mine.”

Richard Selzer's father, a general practitioner, wanted him to enter medicine. His mother wanted him to be a writer. In 1984, Selzer retired as a surgeon and a professor at Yale's School of Medicine to devote himself to literature full time
.

He wrote a book of short stories
, Rituals of Surgery
(1974), and several extraordinary books of nonfiction, including
Mortal Lessons
(1977)
, Letters to a Young Doctor
(1982), and
Taking the World In for Repairs
(1986), which includes both essays and short stories
.

His memoir
Down from Troy: A Doctor Comes of Age
(1992) describes with humor and love his boyhood in Troy, New York. His most recent memoir is
Raising the Dead: A Doctor's Encounter with His Own Mortality.

 

Spoils of Troy

from C
ONFESSIONS OF A
K
NIFE

A
river casts its influence over those who dwell upon its banks. From each river, there is given off a personal drift that is the confusion of its numberless currents, the curves and recurves of its long traipse, the strew of its bed. Even the overhanging trees, the fish within it, the swallows and gulls above, the bridges and boats, all conspire to form that special efflorescence that is the
air
of the river. It is this air that is the influence of a river upon its people.

Rivers such as the Snake and the Salmon, above which eagles hang, and from which bears prong fish, such rivers let a clarity that is reflected in the eyes of the men who live nearby. The Nile, silted up and feculent, permeates its riverlands with a listlessness that is the precursor of fatalism. And so it goes. For us who grew up by the Hudson at Troy, there was the suspicion of ill to come. Up in the hills, the hyenas were laughing. That sort of thing. Still, it was by the banks of the green-eyed, many-turtled Hudson that I
learned of the resonance between a man and his river. Energy flows from one to the other and back again. In such a romance of electrons, the river-dweller becomes no other than the very tree that overhangs the bank of the stream, the weeds that tumble at its bottom, or the deep eels that lash its waters.

A man and a woman love themselves in each other; together, they become a home. A doctor gazes at his patient, and he sees himself; joined, they are one pilgrim in search of health. Just so do a man and his river become something else, a third, a confluence.

 

Not far from where I lived as a boy, a wooden footbridge arched halfway across the Hudson to Green Island, a dab of land midriver, inhabited only by a species of large rat. To walk across this footbridge was a very foretaste of Heaven. Had it something to do with death? So many children died in Troy in the nineteen-thirties. Tuberculosis, they said. But I suspect that monstrous irresistible footbridge.

There was so much death in the town. All those wreaths nailed to the lintels. You could not die without lilies exhaling their corruption up and down the street, the scent adhering to the skins of your neighbors like some blistering oil. And so much
handling
of corpses. To this day, it is the part of dying that I resent the most. This making free with the body, washing it, combing its hair, flipping it over to do the backside. Dragging it upstairs by its heels, perhaps, or kissing it. I do not share a tribal taste for matters funerary. Still, it ought not astonish that the survivors embrace and join not unwillingly in the rituals of death. What more tangible proof of one's own existence? He yet lives who bears the pall.

Sitting on the banks of the river, you grew used to departures, threatened and real. You watched so many pretty boats pass from view. It did not make it easier to bear.

 

Bobby Kinnicut was twelve when he drowned in the river. My brother Billy, Freddy Shires, Bobby, and I had sneaked off to go eel fishing. We did not see Bobby tumble. We heard only that single splash, as though a muskrat had jumped into the water. Bobby never once came up. Then we saw his empty shoe floating upside down, just beyond reach. We ran to follow it.

“I'll catch it,” said Billy, “with my fishing line. Don't worry, Bobby,” he called. “Here I come.”

As though catching the shoe would somehow be the same as pulling Bobby out of the water; as though by some magic, once caught, the shoe would be found to contain a foot which would be attached to Bobby. And he would be saved.

“Dear God,” I thought, “please let him catch it.”

At the very least, the shoe was a fact that, no matter how dreadful, must be retrieved from the river, as we had retrieved so many twig boats.

Billy snagged the shoe and reeled it in. He carried it that way, swinging from a hook. Freddy and I had the eels. We ran home and rang the Kinnicuts' doorbell. Mrs. Kinnicut opened the door and sagged against it when she saw that shoe dangling from the line. It looked like a flag that had been hung upside down to announce defeat. Later, Mrs. Kinnicut told Mother that she had known the day before it happened. She had received the message in a dream, she said. Mother nodded, understanding completely. All of the women of Troy were witches then.

“How I hate that old brute,” said Mother. “I wish it would dry up.”

The thought made me gasp. I tried to picture the Hudson like an empty eye socket or a dry trough down into which you could
walk
, just the way you could walk anyplace. A dead gully without lit, without sprint. What an awful thing to say, I thought. Besides, Billy and I didn't really believe that Bobby was drowned in any “all gone” or “nevermore” sense. For us he had become a kind of river nymph, wearing fish at his nose, scratching the bottom for nickels and dimes.

It was the river (I am sure of it) that made the men of Troy fight in the streets, and the women feed the pigeons. At the end of our block, where King Street and Jacob Street came together, there was a sloping square at the center of which stood a stone horse-trough. Here, two neighborhood women came to feed the pigeons. Mrs. Shires and Mrs. Russell could have been sisters, each one grayish white, plump, cooing. And each with her fringed shawl. Only their styles were different. Mrs. Shires was a shy disburser, frigid almost. From arms straight-elbowed, straight-wristed, without the least flair, she would let fall her crumbs. Having run out of grain, she
would march away without a single backward glance at the frenzy she had raised. With Mrs. Russell, clearly, something else was going on. Her passionate scatterings were unbridled. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, she would cast about, hands teasing through the curtain of birds, until with a reckless pirouette, she would give up her last bit. “All gone!” she would cry, and hold up her empty hands. “See?” For a long time she would stand with the pigeons boiling about her, spattered by them, her upturned face vacant with ecstasy.

 

The men of Troy fought often and with the immense generosity that only the Irish bring to brawling. They held back from each other nothing of their arms, their backs, and their long bellies. Walk in Troy in the evening, and you come upon a place of special stillness. There is a ring of quiet men. Only grunts and the thud of unseen blows, the scrabbling of shoes on the cobblestones suggest the business within the ring. Nudge between the circled watchers, and you will see them. Punch. Duck. Punch. Duck. All at once, one of the two is knocked off balance. He begins to fall, but he knows that he must not go down without pulling the other after him. Now they are rolling in bloody confabulation upon the cobblestones. These men are not ashamed to show their devotion to each other's flesh. All at once, a sigh comes from the little crowd which had hitherto been silent. It is not a sigh of sorrow or satisfaction, but rather like a mark of punctuation, a semicolon. It means that a certain point has been reached. With a single punch or kick, one of the men has gained irreversible ascendancy over the other. When you hear that sigh, you can tell who is going to win.

An hour later, you pass the tavern. You look in and see the two men toasting each other with beer. Soon, they will once again wrap around each other. This time they will sing. Outside, a woman comes with a pail and a brush. She scours the place where the cobblestones are stained with blood; then, she swings her pail to the gutter. A pink twine of scrub water races for the river.

There came the day when it was my turn. I enjoyed no great-muscled youth, but was of that frail and pallid look that is often deceptive in that it may be coincident with true good health. Barry McKenna was bigger than I by half, and with a face so handsome it seemed to have been chipped out with a clever Irish axe. He had
curly lion-colored hair and green eyes. We were fourteen and in the eighth grade. The schoolyard had become a fascist pen of cement where no citizen was safe. For a long moment, we faced each other while the ring of classmates formed and clanged shut about us. There was no escape.

“I'm going to kill you,” Barry said, and smiled with immense charm.

Then we closed, or rather, he bore down upon me. I raised my hands in a facsimile of boxing, holding them together lest my arms fly apart and I embrace my tragic destiny. His first punch hit me on the ear, stung, then scattered. The second punch landed on my shoulder. Minutes went by. Barry punched. He danced away. I swung. It was my obligation to do so. I missed. And so it went. At last I slipped, groped for him, and we were down. I no longer had to stand and face him. He sat astride, steadying me with his thighs and belling like a white stag. Just beyond one massy shoulder, something wild and gold hovered, then broke in the air. Straining, I listened for the sigh of the crowd. When it came, I welcomed it as a bedouin in the desert welcomes the flies that are the herald of an oasis. I had only to wait a little longer.

“Aw, let him go, Barry.” It was a voice from the ring.

“Come on, let the faggot go.”

Above me, Barry hesitated, weighing, I suppose, the pros and cons of the suggestion. But the words of that spectator had done what none of Barry's punches could. And from the ground, I drew my fist and threw it upward. It hit him in the Adam's apple. With the other fist, I hit him in the chest over the breastbone. Barry paused, as though listening to a sound far-off, barely audible. And raising one terrible fist above my face, he brought it down…to his own chest, pressing. Then he coughed, and blood ran from his mouth, dripping from his chin. Again he coughed, and I was splashed with his blood. Awkwardly, like a fat cow, he disengaged himself from my body and struggled to his feet.

Again and again he coughed, each time raising new and meatier gobs of blood. I thought of Miss Cleary's cranberry conserve with which she paid Father for her bee-venom treatments. For a long moment, Barry and I stared at each other. Then, pale and sweating, he backed away from where I lay like a small creature that has been
ripped and clenched, and dropped in midair. The ring of faces opened, and he was gone.

“You won,” Billy said later. “You made him bleed.”

“No,” I said. “I didn't win.”

The next week, they took Barry to the Pawling Sanatorium where my cousin Florence was a patient. First, we heard that they had collapsed his lung by injecting air into his chest.

“They're using ‘pneumo' on him,” said Billy. The next month they took out the upper six ribs on one side of his chest. He would have to stay in bed for a year. I tried to imagine what a chest looked like without six ribs. Something staved, dented.

“He's got a cavity,” said Mother to Mrs. Fogarty.

“Ah, the poor boy. Which side?”

“Both is what I hear.”

“Judas Priest! If it isn't the river, it's the chest. Is there no end to it?”

A cavity! I thought of a crater in the earth where a bomb had burst. At its base a shaggy pool where pale blind snails and cheesy beetles hopped. Creatures died in it and stank. I was certain I had done it to Barry with my fist, dislodged some essential plug that had been corking up that cavity. It was all my fault.

Near the end of the year that he was supposed to stay in bed, I saw Barry again. I had gone to visit my cousin Florence. The san was just inside the city limits, as far from the river as you could go and still be in Troy. To get to the san, you had to take the Albia bus all the way to the end of the line. From there the hospital van took the handful of visitors and the patients returning from weekend passes the rest of the way. The Pawling Sanatorium was a complex of gray-shingled buildings squatting atop the highest in a range of hills. There was a main hospital of two stories and a dozen or so “cottages” strung in a broken chain about it. There it sprawled like some loose-jointed dragon that each day demanded appeasement. Each day, one more beautiful youth. Between the river and the san lay Troy, spoiling.

The hospital van was an ancient green converted truck which was doubtless so contaminated it could have been fueled by its own germs. Billy said he could smell the fever in it.

“Don't touch anything on that bus,” said Mother.

The ruts and potholes in this road just
had
to be bad for the patients, shaking loose whatever bacteria had been painstakingly herded inside rings of scar, and turning them out for yet more marauding. The driver of the van was a chronic “lunger.” Now and then he would cough wetly and “raise” out the driver's window.

“He's not contagious,” said Billy.

“I don't care whether he is or he isn't, said Mother. “You are not to sit near an open window on the same side of the bus.”

Florence was in one of the “cottages” getting “arrested” for the second time. She greeted us with a smile.

“Guess what?” she said. “My sputum is negative.”

I asked a nurse whether Barry McKenna was still there and where I could find him. He was in the main building, she said.

Barry's name was one of six on the swinging double doors. From outside the room, I could hear the ruckling of phlegm sliding to and fro in hollow bronchi. I cleared my throat and went in. It was horribly bright and sunny in that room, and every window was wide open. It had something to do with the beneficial effect of country air. Searching out Barry, I eliminated the five patients whose faces I could see. The sixth lay facing the wall, turned away from the door. A towel had been wrapped around his head like a cowl and tucked into the top of his hospital gown. I bent to peer within. What lay shrouded there was scarcely more than chin and cheekbone. But I knew him.