The Anatomy Lesson (7 page)

Zuckerman waited for Carol to look up at him and say,
“
This woman, this touching, harmless woman who saved this picture in this box, who wrote
‘
N. ON HIS WAY TO COLLEGE
,
’
that was her reward.
”
But Carol, who after all these years had still not spoken with Nathan, in English or French, about her brother
’
s tragic death, or the waning of the Middle Ages, or stocks, or bonds, or landscape gardening, was not about to open her heart about his shortcomings as a son. not to a trigger-happy novelist like him. But then Carol, as everyone knew, wouldn
’
t fight with anyone, which was why Henry had left her behind to settle the touchy business of who should take home what from their mother
’
s dresser. Perhaps Henry had also left her behind because of the touchier business of the mistress—either another mistress, or maybe stilt the same one—whom he could more readily arrange to see with a wife away in Florida a few more days. It had been an exemplary eulogy, deserving all of the praise it received—nor did Zuckerman mean to cast doubt upon the sincerity of his brother
’
s grief; still, Henry was only human, however heroically he tried not to show it. Indeed, a son of Henry
’
s filial devotion might even find in the hollow aftermath of such a sudden loss the need for dizzying, obliterating raptures categorically beyond the means of any wife, with or without a Ph.D.

Two hours later Zuckerman was out the door with his overnight bag and his knitting instructions. In his free hand he carried a cardboard-covered book about the size of the school composition books he used for taking notes. Carol had found it at the bottom of the lingerie drawer under some boxes of winter gloves still in their original store wrappings. Reproduced on the cover was a pinkish pastel drawing of a sleeping infant, angelically blond and endowed with regulation ringlets, lashes, and globular cheeks; an empty bottle lay to the side of the billowing coverlet, and one of the infant
’
s little fi
sts rested half open beside its
cherry-red tiny bow lips. The book was called
Your Baby
’
s Care.
Printed near the bottom of the cover was the name of the hospital where he
’
d been
born
.
Your Baby
’
s Care
must have been presented to her in her room shortly after his delivery. Use had weakened the binding and she had fastened the covers back together with transparent tape—two old strips of tape that had gone brownish-yellow over the decades and that cracked at the spine when Zuckerman opened the book and saw on the reverse of the cover the footprint he
’
d left there in the first week of life. On the first page, in her symmetrical handwriting, his mother had recorded the details of his birth—day, hour, name of parents and attending physician; on the next page, beneath the title
“
Notes on Development of the Baby,
”
was recorded his weekly weight throughout his first year, then the day he held up his head, the day he sat up, crept, stood alone, spoke his first word, walked, and cut his first and second teeth. Then the contents—a hundred pages of
“
rules
”
for raising and training a newborn child.
“
Baby care is a great art,
”
the new mother was told;
“
… these rules have resulted from the experience of physicians over many years …
”
Zuckerman put his suitcase on the floor of the elevator and began to turn the pages.
“
Let the baby sleep in the sun all morning … To weigh the baby, undress him completely … After the bath, dry him gently with soft, warm towels, patting the skin gently… The best stockings for a baby are cotton … There are two kinds of croup… The morning is the best time for play …
”

The elevator stopped, the door opened, but Zuckerman
’
s attention was fixed on a small colorless blot halfway down the page headed
“
Feeding.
”
“
It is important that each breast be emptied completely every 24 hours in order to keep up the supply of milk. To empty the breast by hand …
”

His mother
’
s milk had stained the page. He had no hard evidence to prove it, but then he was not an archaeologist presenting a paper: he was the son who had learned to live on her body, and that body was now in a box underground, and he didn
’
t need hard evidence. If he who had spoken his first word in her presence on March 3, 1934—and his last word on the phone to her the previous Sunday—if he should choose to believe that a drop of her milk had fallen just there while she followed the paragraph instructing a young mother in how to empty her breasts, what was to stop him? Closing his eyes, he put his tongue to the page, and when he opened them again saw that he was being watched through th
e elevator door by an emaciated
old woman across the lobby, leaning in exhaustion on her aluminum walker. Well, if she knew what she
’
d just seen she could now tell everyone in the building that she
’
d seen everything.

In the lobby there was a sign up for an Israel Bond Rally at a Bal Harbour Hotel, and hanging beside it a crayoned notice, now out of date, for a Hanukkah festival party in the condominium lobby sponsored by the building
’
s Social Committee. He passed the bank of mailboxes and then came back and looked for hers.
“
ZUCKERMAN S. / 414
.
”
He set down his suitcase, placed the baby book beside it, and touched the raised letters of the nameplate with his fingers. When World War
I
began, she was ten. When it ended, she was fourteen. When the stock market crashed, she was twenty-five. She was twenty-nine when I was born and thirty-seven on December 7, 1941. When Eisenhower invaded Europe, she was just my age… But none of this answered the cradle-question of where Mama had gone.

The day before, Henry had left instructions for the post office to forward her mail to South Orange. There was a plain white envelope, however, down in the box, probably a condolence note dropped through the slot by a neighbor that morning. In his jacket pocket Nathan had her extra set of house keys; one of her little tags was still attached, labeling them
“
Extra set of house keys.
”
With the tiniest of the keys he opened the box. The envelope was not addressed. Inside was a pale green index card on which someone who preferred remaining anonymous had printed with a fountain pen

MAY YOUR MOTHER SUCK

COCKS IN HELL—

AND YOU SOON

JOIN HER!

YOU DESERVE
IT
.

ONE O
F
YOUR

MANY FOES

In hell no less. An act she never even committed on earth, you stupid son of a bitch. Who
’
d written him this? The fastest way to find out was to go back upstairs and ask Esther. She knew everybody
’
s business. She also had no aversion to reprisals; her success in life was founded on them. They
’
d check together through the building directory until Essie had figured out who it was, who living in which apartment, then he
’
d walk over to Meyer Lansky
’
s hotel to find out
from the bell captain who could
be hired to do a little job. Why not that for a change, instead of flying back to New York to file the green index card under
“
Mother
’
s Death
”
? You could not be a nothing writer fellow forever, doing nothing with the strongest feelings but turning them over to characters to deal with in books. It
’
d be worth a couple thousand to have the ten fingers that wrote those twenty words smashed beneath some moron
’
s boot. You could probably do it down here on your Diners Club card.

Only whose maimed fingers would they turn out to be? What would the comedy come up with this time—one of the widowers she
’
d taught how to fold laundry, or the old guy tottering around the parking lot who
’
d waved to Zuckerman up by the window while he was watering her plants?

A nothing fellow, he flew home to his files. A nasty, nothing fellow, surreptitiously vindictive, covertly malicious, who behind the mask of fiction had punished his adoring mother for no reason. True or false? In a school debate, he could have argued persuasively for either proposition.

* * *

Gone. Mother, father, brother, birthplace, subject, health, hair
—
according to the critic Milton Appel, his talent too. According to Appel, there hadn
’
t been much talent to lose. In
Inquiry,
the Jewish cultural monthly that fifteen years earlier had published Zuckerman
’
s first stories, Milton Appel had unleashed an attack upon Zuckerman
’
s career that made Macduff
’
s assault upon Macbeth look almost lackadaisical. Zuckerman should have been so lucky as to come away with decapitation. A head wasn
’
t enough for Appel; he tore you limb from limb.

Zuckerman didn
’
t know Appel. They
’
d met only twice—one August out in the Springs on Long Island, strolling by each other at the Barnes Hole beach, then briefly at a big college arts festival where each was sitting on a different panel. These meetings came some years after Appel
’
s review of Zuckerman
’
s first book had appeared in the Sunday
Times.
That review had thrilled him. In the
Times
in 1959. the twenty-six-year-old author had looked to Appel like a wunderkind, the stories in
Higher Education
“
fresh, authoritative, exact
”
—for Appel, almost too pointed in their portraiture of American Jews clamoring to enter Pig Heaven: because the world Zuckerman knew still remained insufficiently transformed by the young writer
’
s imagination, the book, for all its freshness, seemed to Appel more like social documentation, finally, than a work of art.

Fourteen years on, following the success of
Carnovsky,
Appel reconsidered what he called Zuckerman
’
s
“
case
”
: now the Jews represented in
Higher Education
had been twisted out of human recognition by a willful vulgar imagination largely indifferent to social accuracy and the tenets of realistic fiction. Except for a single readable story, that First collection was tendentious junk, the by-product of a pervasive and unfocused hostility. The three books that followed had nothing to redeem them at all—mean, joyless, patronizing little novels, contemptuously dismissive of the complex depths. No Jews like Zuckerman
’
s had ever existed other than as caricature; as literature that could interest grown people, none of the books could be said to exist at all, but were contrived as a species of sub-literature for the newly
“
liberated
”
middle class, for an
“
audience,
”
as distinguished from serious readers. Though probably himself not an outright anti-Semite, Zuckerman was certainly no friend of the Jews:
Carnovsky
’
s
ugly animus proved that.

Since Zuckerman had heard most of this before—and usually in
Inquiry,
whose editorial admiration he
’
d lost long ago—he tried being reasonable for fifteen minutes.
He doesn
’
t find me funny. Well, no sense writing to tell him to laugh. He thinks I depict Jewish lives for the sake of belittling them. He thinks I lower the tone to please the crowd. To him it
’
s vulgar desecration. Horseplay as heresy. He thinks i m
“
superior
”
and
“
nasty
”
and no more. Weil, he
’
s under no obligation to think otherwise. I never set myself up as Elie Wiesel.

But long after the reasonable quarter hour had passed, he remained shocked and outraged and hurt, not so much by Appel
’
s reconsidered judgment as by the polemical overkill, the exhaustive reprimand that just asked for a fight. This set Zuckerman
’
s teeth on edge. It couldn
’
t miss. What hurt most was that Milton Appel had been a leading wunderkind of the Jewish generation preceding his own, a contributing editor to Rahv
’
s
Partisan Review,
a fellow at Ransom
’
s Indiana School of Letters, already publishing essays on European modernism and analyses of the exploding American mass culture while Zuckerman was still in high school taking insurgency training from Philip Wylie and his Finnley Wren. In the early fifties, during a two-year stint at Fort Dix, Zuckerman composed a fifteen-page
“
Letter from the Army,
”
describing the bristling class resentment between black cadre just back from Korea, white commanding officers recalled to active duty, and the
young college-educated draftees
like himself. Though rejected by
Partisan,
the manuscript was returned with a note which, when he read it, excited him nearly as much as if it had been a letter of acceptance:
“
Study more Orwell and try us again. M.A.
”