Winter Journal (14 page)

third more rapidly than the second, and swallow by swallow the liquid splashes into your empty stomach like acid. You can feel the caffeine accelerating your heart rate, agitating your nerves, and beginning to light you up. You are awake now, fully awake and yet still weary, drained but ever more alert, and in your head there is a buzzing that wasn’t there before, a low-pitched mechanical sound, a humming, a whining, as if from a distant, out-of-tune radio, and the more you drink, the more you feel your body changing, the less you feel that you are made of flesh and blood. You are turning into something metallic now, a rusty contraption that simulates human life, a thing put together with wires and fuses, vast circuits of wires controlled by random electrical impulses, and now that you have finished the third cup of coffee, you pour yourself another—which turns out to be the last one, the lethal one. The attack begins simultaneously from the inside and the outside, a sudden feeling of pressure from the air around you, as if an invisible force were trying to push you through the chair and knock you to the ground, but at the same time an unearthly lightness in your head, a vertiginous jangle thrumming against the walls of your skull, and all the while the outside continues to press in on you, even as the inside grows empty, ever more dark and empty, as if you are about to pass out. Then your pulse quickens, you can feel your heart trying to burst through your chest, and a moment after that there is no more air in your lungs, you can no longer breathe. That is when the panic overwhelms you, when your body shuts down and you fall to the floor. Lying on your
back, you feel the blood stop flowing in your veins, and little by little your limbs turn to cement. That is when you start to howl. You are made of stone now, and as you lie there on the dining room floor, rigid, your mouth open, unable to move or think, you howl in terror as you wait for your body to drown in the deep black waters of death.

You couldn’t cry. You couldn’t grieve in the way people normally do, and so your body broke down and did the grieving for you. If not for the various incidental factors that preceded the onset of panic (your wife’s absence, the alcohol, the lack of sleep, your cousin’s phone call, the coffee), it is possible the attack never would have taken place. But in the end those elements are of only secondary importance. The question is why you couldn’t let yourself go in the minutes and hours that followed your mother’s death, why, for two full days, you were unable to shed any tears for her. Was it because a part of you was secretly glad she was dead? A dark thought, a thought so dark and disturbing that it scares you even to express it, but even if you are willing to entertain the possibility that it is true, you doubt that it would account for your failure to cry. You didn’t cry after your father’s death either. Nor after the deaths of your grandparents, nor after the death of your most beloved cousin, who died of breast cancer when she was thirty-eight, nor after the deaths of the many friends who have left you over the years. Not even at fourteen, when you were less than a foot away from a boy who was struck and killed by lightning, the boy whose dead body
you sat next to and watched over for the next hour in a rain-drenched meadow, desperately trying to warm up his body and revive him because you didn’t understand he was dead—not even that monstrous death could coax a single tear from you. Your eyes water up when you watch certain movies, you have dropped tears onto the pages of numerous books, you have cried at moments of immense personal sorrow, but death freezes you and shuts you down, robbing you of all emotion, all affect, all connection to your own heart. From the very beginning, you have gone dead in the face of death, and that is what happened to you with your mother’s death as well. At least for the first little while, the first two days and nights, but then lightning struck again, and you were scorched.

Forget what your cousin said to you on the phone. You were angry at her, yes, appalled that she would stoop to slinging mud at such an inappropriate time, revolted by her nastiness, her sanctimonious contempt for a person who never did her an ounce of harm, but her accusations of infidelity against your mother were old business to you by then, and even if you had no proof, no evidence to support or deny the charges, you had long suspected that your mother
might
have strayed during her marriage to your father. You were fifty-five years old when you had that conversation with your cousin, and with so much time to have pondered the details of your parents’ unfortunate marriage, you in fact hoped that your mother had found some comfort with another man (or men). But nothing was certain, and only once did you have any inkling that
something might be amiss, a single moment when you were twelve or thirteen, which thoroughly perplexed you at the time: walking into the house one day after school, thinking no one else was there, picking up the telephone to make a call, and hearing a man’s voice on the line, a voice that did not belong to your father, saying no more than
Good-bye
, an altogether neutral word perhaps, but spoken with great tenderness, and then your mother saying back to him,
Good-bye, darling
. That was the end of the conversation. You had no idea what the context was, could not identify the man, had heard almost nothing, and yet you worried about it for days, so much so that you finally found the courage to ask your mother about it, she who had always been honest and direct with you, you felt, who had never refused to answer your questions, but this time, this one time, she looked puzzled when you told her what you had heard, as if she had been caught off guard, and then a moment later she laughed, saying she couldn’t remember, she didn’t know what you were talking about. It was entirely possible that she didn’t remember, that the conversation was of no importance and the endearment had not meant what you thought it had, but a tiny germ of doubt was planted in your head that day, doubt that quickly vanished in the weeks and months that followed, but four or five years later, when your mother announced that she was leaving your father, you couldn’t help thinking back to the last sentences of that accidentally overheard conversation. Did any of it matter? No, not that you could think of. Your parents had been destined to split up from the day they were married, and
whether your mother had slept with the man she called
darling
, whether there was another man or several men or no man at all, did not play a part in their divorce. Symptoms are not causes, and whatever ugly little thoughts your cousin might have harbored against your mother, she knew nothing about anything. It is undeniable that her call helped to unleash your panic attack—the timing of the call, the circumstances of the call—but what she said to you that morning was stale news.

On the other hand, even though you happened to be her son, you know next to nothing yourself. Too many gaps, too many silences and evasions, too many threads lost over the years for you to stitch together a coherent story. Useless to talk about her from the outside, then. Whatever can be told must be pulled from the inside, from your insides, the accumulation of memories and perceptions you continue to carry around in your body—and which left you, for reasons that will never be entirely known, gasping for breath on the dining room floor, certain you were about to die.

A hasty, ill-considered marriage, an impetuous marriage between two incompatible souls that ran out of steam before the honeymoon was over. A twenty-one-year-old girl from New York (born and bred in Brooklyn, translated to Manhattan at sixteen) and a thirty-four-year-old bachelor from Newark who had begun life in Wisconsin and had left there, fatherless, at the age of seven, when your grandmother shot and
killed your grandfather in the kitchen of their house. The bride was the younger of two daughters, the product of yet another ill-considered, mismatched marriage (
Your father would be such a wonderful man—if only he were different
) who had dropped out of high school to work (clerical jobs in offices, later a photographer’s assistant) and never told you much about her earlier loves and romances. A vague story about a boyfriend who had died in the war, an even vaguer story about a brief flirtation with actor Steve Cochran, but beyond that nothing at all. She finished up her diploma by going to school at night (Commercial High), but no college afterward, and no college for your father either, who was still a boy when he entered the Land of Work and began supporting himself as soon as he graduated from high school at eighteen. Those are the known facts, the few bits of verifiable information that have been passed down to you. Then come the invisible years, the first three or four years of your life, the blank time before any possibility of recall, and therefore you have nothing to go on but the various stories your mother told you later: your near death at sixteen months from tonsillitis (106° fever, and the doctor telling her:
It’s in God’s hands now
), the vagaries of your cranky, disobedient stomach, a condition that was diagnosed as an allergy or intolerance to something (wheat? gluten?) and forced you to subsist for two and a half years on a diet limited almost exclusively to bananas (so many bananas consumed in that time before memory that you still recoil from the sight and smell of them and have not eaten one in sixty years), the jutting nail that
tore apart your cheek in the Newark department store in 1950, your remarkable ability at age three to identify the make and model of every car on the road (remarkable to your mother, who read it as a sign of incipient genius), but most of all the pleasure she communicated to you in the telling of these stories, the way she seemed to exult in the mere fact of your existence, and because her marriage was such an unhappy one, you realize now that she turned to you as a form of consolation, to give her life a meaning and a purpose it was otherwise lacking. You were the beneficiary of her unhappiness, and you were well loved, especially well loved, without question deeply loved. That first of all, that above and beyond everything else there might be to say: she was an ardent and dedicated mother to you during your infancy and early childhood, and whatever is good in you now, whatever strengths you might possess, come from that time before you can remember who you were.

Some early glimmers, a few small islands of recollection in an otherwise endless sea of black. Waiting for your newborn sister to come home from the hospital with your parents (age: three years and nine months), looking through the slats of the venetian blinds in the living room with your mother’s mother and leaping up and down when the car finally stopped in front of the house. According to your mother, you were an enthusiastic older brother, not at all envious of the new baby who had entered your midst, but she seems to have handled the matter with great intelligence, not shutting you out but turning you into her
helper
, which gave you the illusion
that you were actively participating in your sister’s care. Some months later, you were asked if you wanted to give nursery school a try. You said yes, not quite sure what nursery school was, since preschools were far less common in 1951 than they are now, but after one day you had had enough. You remember having to line up with a group of other children and pretend you were in a grocery store, and when your turn finally came, after what seemed to have been hours, you handed a pile of pretend money to someone standing behind a pretend cash register, who gave you a bag of pretend food in return. You told your mother that nursery school was an idiotic waste of time, and she didn’t try to talk you into going back. Then your family moved to the house on Irving Avenue, and when you started kindergarten the following September, you were ready for school, not the least bit fazed by the prospect of spending time away from your mother. You remember the chaotic prelude to the first morning, the children who ranted and screamed when their mothers said good-bye to them, the anguished cries of the abandoned echoing off the walls as you calmly waved good-bye to your own mother, and all that fuss was incomprehensible to you, since you were happy to be there and felt like a big person now. You were five years old, and already you were pulling away, no longer living exclusively in your mother’s orbit. Better health, new friends, the freedom of the yard behind the house, and the beginnings of an autonomous life. You still wet the bed, of course, you still cried when you fell down and cut your knee, but the inner dialogue had begun, and you had
crossed into the domain of conscious selfhood. Nevertheless, because of the hours he put in at work, and because of his penchant for taking long naps whenever he was at home, your father was largely absent from the household, and your mother continued to be the central force of authority and wisdom for all things that counted most. She was the one who put you to bed, the one who taught you how to ride a bicycle, the one who helped you with your piano lessons, the one you unburdened yourself to, the rock you clung to whenever the seas grew rough. But you were developing a mind of your own, and you were no longer in thrall to her every pronouncement and opinion. You hated practicing the piano, you wanted to be outside playing with your friends, and when you told her that you would prefer to quit, that baseball was vastly more important to you than music, she relented without putting up much of an argument. Then there was the issue of clothes. You mostly ran around in a T-shirt and a pair of jeans (called dungarees back then), but for special occasions—holidays, birthday parties, the visits to your grandparents in New York—she insisted on dressing you in finely tailored outfits, clothes that began to embarrass you by the time you reached six, especially the white-shirt-and-short-pants combo with the knee socks and sandals, and when you began to protest, claiming that you felt ridiculous in those things, that all you wanted was to look like every other American boy, she eventually gave ground and allowed you to have a say in what you wore. But she was pulling away by then, too, and not
long after you turned six, she went off to the Land of Work, and you began seeing less and less of her. You don’t remember feeling sad about it, but then again, what do you really know about what you felt? The important thing to keep in mind is that you know next to nothing—and nothing whatsoever about the state of her marriage, the depth of her unhappiness with your father. Years later, she told you that she tried to talk him into moving to California, that she felt there would be no hope for them unless he got away from his family, the suffocating presence of his mother and older brothers, and when he refused to consider it, she resigned herself to a marriage of no hope. The children were too small for her to contemplate divorce (not then, not there, not in middle-class America of the early fifties), and so she found another solution. She was only twenty-eight years old, and work opened the door, let her out of the house, and gave her a chance to build a life of her own.