The Professor of Desire (14 page)

“Don't be silly.”

“Because you left us, Davey, when you were seventeen years old and since then there has been no interfering with the kind of influences you let yourself under.”

“Dad, I'm not under any ‘influences.'”

“I want to ask you a question. Outright.”

“Go ahead.”

“It's not about Helen. I never asked you about that, and I don't want to start now. I always treated her like a daughter-in-law. Didn't I, didn't your mother, always with respect—?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“I held my tongue. We didn't want her to turn against us. She can have nothing against us to this day. All things considered, I think we did excellent. I am a liberal person, son—and in my politics even more than liberal. Do you know that in 1924 I voted for Norman Thomas for the governor of New York with the first vote I ever cast? And in '48 I voted for Henry Wallace—which maybe was meaningless and a mistake, but the point is that I was probably the only hotel owner in the whole country who voted for somebody that everybody was calling a Communist. Which he wasn't—but the point is, I have never been a narrow man, never. You know—and if you don't, you should—it was never that the woman was a shiksa that bothered me. Shiksas are a fact of life, and they are not going to go away just because Jewish parents might like it better that way. And why should they? I am a believer in all the races and religions living together in harmony, and that you married a Gentile girl was never the point to your mother and me. I think we did excellent on that score. But that doesn't mean I could stomach the rest of her and her attitudes. The truth of the matter, if you want to know, is that I didn't have a good night's sleep in the three years you were married.”

“Well, neither did I.”

“Is that true? Then why the hell didn't you get out right off the bat? Why did you get in that damn mess to begin with?”

“You want me to go over that territory, do you?”

“No, no—you're right—the hell with it. As far as I'm concerned, if I never hear her name again, that won't be too soon. You are all I care about.”

“What do you want to ask?”

“David, what is Tofrinal, that I see it in the medicine chest, a big bottle full? What are you taking this drug for?”

“It's an anti-depressant. Tofranil.”

He hisses. Disgust, frustration, disbelief, contempt. I must first have heard that sound out of him a hundred years ago, when he had to fire a waiter who wet his bed and stank up the attic where the help slept. “And
why
do you need that? Who told you to take a thing like that and put it in your bloodstream?”

“A psychiatrist.”

“You go to a psychiatrist?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”
he cries.

“To keep me afloat. To figure things out. To have someone to talk to … confidentially.”

“Why not a
wife
to talk to? That's what a wife is for! I mean this time a
real
wife, not somebody who it must have cost you your whole school salary just to pay the beauty parlors. All this is all
wrong,
son. It is no way to live! A psychiatrist, and being on strong drugs, and people showing up at all hours—people who aren't even people—”

“There is nothing to get worked up about.”

“There is
everything
to get worked up about.”

“No, no,” I say, lowering my voice. “Dad, there is only Mother…”

He puts a hand over his eyes and quietly begins to cry. With his other hand he makes a fist which he waves at me. “This is what I have had to be all my life!
Without
psychiatrists,
without
happy pills! I am a man who has never said die!”

And once again, the downstairs doorbell.

“Forget it. Let it ring. Dad, he'll go away.”

“And then come back? I'll crack his head open, and, believe me, then he'll go away for good!”

Here the bedroom door opens and my mother appears in her nightgown. “Who are you cracking in the head?”

“Some lousy stinking fairy who won't leave him alone!”

The bell again: two shorts, a long; two shorts, a long. Wally is drunk.

Her
eyes tearful now, my tiny mother says, “And how often does this go on?”

“Not often.”

“But—why don't you report him?”

“Because by the time the police come he'd be gone. You don't want the police for something like this.”

“And you swear to me,” says my father, “this is nobody you know?”

“I swear to you.”

My mother comes into the living room and sits beside me. She takes my hand and clutches it. The three of us listen to the bell—mother, father, and son.

“You know what would fix the son of a bitch once and for all?” my father says. “Boiling water.”

“Abe!”
cries my mother.

“But it would teach him where he don't belong!”

“Dad, you mustn't make too much of it.”

“And don't you make so little! Why do you hang
around
with such people?”

“But I don't.”

“Then why do you live in a place like this, where they show up and make trouble for you? Do you need more trouble still?”

“Calm down, please,” says my mother. “It isn't
his
fault some maniac rings his doorbell. This is New York. He told you. This is what happens.”

“That doesn't mean you leave yourself unprotected, Belle!” Jumping up from his chair, he rushes to the intercom. “Hey! You!” he shouts. “Cut it out! This is David's father—!”

Stroking her arm—already skeletal—I whisper, “It's okay, it's all right, he's not working the thing right anyway. Don't worry, Ma, please—the fellow can't even hear him.”

“—you want third-degree burns, we'll give them to you! Do what you want to do in some gutter somewhere, but if you know what's good for you, don't come near my son!”

Two months later, in the hospital in Kingston, my mother dies. After the funeral guests have all left, my father urges me to take the food she has frozen for me only the month before, the last things cooked by her on this earth. I say, “And what are
you
going to eat?” “I was a short-order man before you were even born. Take it. Take what she made for you.” “Dad, how are you going to live here by yourself? How are you possibly going to manage the season? Why did you shoo everybody away? Don't be so brave. You can't stay up here alone.” “I can look after myself fine. Her going is not something we didn't expect. Please, take it. Take it all. She wanted you to. She said whenever she remembered the inside of your refrigerator, she saw red. She cooked for you,” he says, his voice trembling, “and then she went away.” He begins to sob. I put my arms around him. “Nobody understood her,” he says, “the guests, never,
never.
She was a good person, Davey. When she was young, everything thrilled her, the littlest things even. She had a nervous nature only when the summer got hectic and out of control. So they made fun of her. But do you remember the winter? The peace and the quiet? The fun we had? Remember the letters at night?” Those words do it: for the first time since her death the morning before, I break down completely. “Of course I do, sure I do.” “Oh, sonny, that's when she was herself. Only who knew it?” “We did,” I tell him, but he repeats, with an angry sob, “And who knew it!”

He carries the frozen food in a shopping bag out to my car. “Here, please, in her memory.” And so I return to New York with the half-dozen containers each bearing the same typewritten label: “Tongue with Grandma's famous raisin sauce—2 portions.”

Within a week, I am driving back up to the country again, this time with my Uncle Larry, to take my father to Cedarhurst, where he will move in with his brother and sister-in-law. Though only temporarily, he says while we pack his suitcase in the car; just till he is over the shock. In a few days he is sure he will be himself. He has to be, that's all there is to it. “I've been working since I'm fourteen years old. You don't give in to a thing like this,” he says. “You tighten your belt and you go on.” Besides, it is winter, and there is always the risk up there of fire. Yes, the handyman and his wife will be living on the grounds, but that is no guarantee against the possibility of the hotel burning down in his absence.

It is true, of course, that dozens of mysterious fires have broken out in abandoned hotels and boardinghouses ever since the region began to pass out of fashion as a Jewish summer resort at about the time I was going off to college, but as he and my mother have been able, even in recent years, to hang on to a remnant of their aging clientele and to keep the main house open and the grounds respectable-looking, the arsonists had never before seemed to him a real threat. But now on the drive down the Thruway they are all he can think about. He names for my uncle and me the local hoodlums—“Men, thirty- and forty-year-old men!”—whom he has always suspected of setting the fires. “No, no,” he says to my uncle, who has offered his standard analysis as to where the trouble begins, “not even anti-Semites. Too stupid even for that! Just plain demented no-good idiots, fit for the lunatic asylum. Just people who like to see flames! And when it is in ashes, you know who they will accuse? I've seen it a dozen times. Me! That I did it for the insurance money! Because my wife is gone and I want to get out! The blame will fall on my good name! And half the time you know who else I sometimes think that does it? The volunteer fire fighters themselves! Yes—so they can rush out in the fire engines in the middle of the night and ride up and down the mountain in their helmets and boots!”

Even after he is comfortably installed in what used to be Lorraine's bedroom, there is no calming his fears for the empire built of his sweat and his blood. Every night I call him on the phone and he tells me he cannot get to sleep for worrying about a fire. And he has other things to worry about now as well. “That fairy never came back, did he?” “No,” I say, knowing it best to lie. “See—it paid to threaten him. Unfortunately that's all some people understand, is the fist,” says my father, who has never struck another person in his life. “And how are Uncle Larry and Aunt Sylvia?” I ask. “Wonderful. They couldn't be kinder. Every other word is ‘Stay.'” “Well, that sounds reassuring,” I say. But no, another ten days, he tells me, and the worst of being without her will be over. Has to be. He has to get back up there while the damn place is still in one piece!

And then it is another five days, and then another, until at last, following an emotional Sunday car ride alone with me, he agrees to put the Hungarian Royale up for sale. His face in his hands, he says, “But I never said die in my life.” “There's no shame in it, Dad. Things have just changed.” “But I don't
give
up,” he cries. “Nobody is going to see it that way,” I say, and drive him back to his brother's.

And during this time hardly a night passes when I do not think about the girl I knew for barely two months back when I was a twenty-two-year-old sexual prodigy, the girl who wore a locket around her neck with her father's picture in it. I even think of writing to her, in care of her parents. I even get up out of bed and search through my papers, looking for the Stockholm address. But by now Elisabeth must certainly be married and a mother two or three times over, and assuredly she does not think of me. No woman alive thinks of me, certainly not with love.

*   *   *

Though my department chairman Arthur Schonbrunn is a handsome and exquisitely groomed middle-aged man of unflagging charm and punctiliousness—as adroit and gracious a social being as I have ever seen in action—his wife, Deborah, is someone for whom I have never been able to work up much enthusiasm, even when I was Arthur's favorite graduate student and she was frequently my affectionate and hospitable hostess. In those first years at Stanford, I used to spend a certain amount of my time, in fact, trying to figure out what bound a man so scrupulous about the amenities, so tirelessly concerned to oppose, from the highest principles, the burgeoning political assaults upon university curriculum—what bound such a man of conscience to a woman whose very favorite public performance was in the role of the dizzy dame whose beguiling charm is her reckless and impudent “candor”? The very first time I was invited by Arthur to have dinner with the two of them, I remember thinking at the end of the evening's conversation—conversation consisting largely of Deborah's coquettishly “outrageous” chatter—“This is surely the loneliest man alive.” How pained and disenchanted I was at twenty-three by this first look into my fatherly professor's domestic life … only to be told by Arthur the following day about his wife's “wonderful powers of observation” and her “gift” for “getting right to the heart of the problem.” And, along these lines, I remember another night, years later, when Arthur and I were working late in our offices—that is, Arthur was at work, while I was immobile at my desk, hopeless as usual about the loveless impasse Helen and I had reached and hadn't the strength or the courage to resolve. When Arthur saw me apparently looking even more benumbed than usual, he came in and, until 3 a.m., tried his best to protect me from the crazier sort of solutions that might enter the head of a dreadfully unhappy husband having trouble getting himself to go home. Time and again he reminded me of the fine piece of work my thesis had been. The important thing now was to get back to revising it for book publication. Indeed, much that Arthur said to me that night sounded very like what Dr. Klinger was eventually to say to me about me, my work, and Helen. And I, in turn, poured out my grievances, and at one point lowered my face to my desk and wept. “I figured it was that bad,” said Arthur. “We both did. But much as we care for you, we never felt it was our business to say anything. We've had enough experience by now to know that always comes between friends, sooner or later. But still there were days when I wanted to shake you for being such a fool. You don't know how many times I talked to Debbie about what could be done to get you to save yourself from all this unhappiness. Nothing was more upsetting for us than remembering what you'd been like when you first got here, and then seeing what was happening to you with her. But I couldn't do a thing, David, unless you came to me—and that's not how you go about things. You're someone who goes so far with people, and no further, and the result is that you're rather more alone with yourself than many people are. I'm not so unlike that myself.”