You Are My Heart and Other Stories (10 page)

I agreed, of course. Yes, I said. Oh sure. Of course.
Bien sûr
. Whatever you say. Whatever you
want
! And then we were two, and I picked you up, set you down on the changing table, changed your diaper, and rocked you in my arms, and thought, were this a story, what suggestion could I make that would lend it credibility, or, better still, sympathy for its protagonist? And as soon as I asked, the answer was there—the old writer's standby, courtesy of Messrs. Twain and Faulkner: You must kill your darlings.

The fantasy, along with drink, did, as I said earlier, help get me through. What part of me believed, you see, was that the best and only way to get back at her and hurt her
badly
was to hurt
you
(her son, after all). But no Medea,
moi
—and, give thanks to whatever gods that be, no Greek tragedy in the House of Klein either. At the time I didn't think through the idea of doing away with us, or believe in it—it seemed, simply, the only solution to ending the pain, which dragged with it a thunderous noise that had taken to traveling in a continual, merciless loop through the marrow of my bones.

In truth, I don't think I believed much of anything that year, which may be why it seems missing. And it has always seemed
missing, obviously, because
I
was missing—in action, and in
in
-action. Though I try now and then to summon up memories—
à la recherche
, Sam, I cry out silently;
à la recherche
!—I recall few details: I slept, I ate, I taught, I shaved, I pissed, I shat, and I drank; I shopped, I cooked, I fed us, I put you to sleep, I took you to nursery school, I picked you up from nursery school, I took you to the doctor, I talked to you, I talked
with
you, I bought you clothes, I dressed you, I changed your diapers, I toilet-trained you, I helped you learn to walk and to ride a tricycle, and I probably took some delight in your development. You were the best and brightest of them all, the nursery school ladies told me, as did a coterie of grad student babysitters (several of whom offered to stay the night, invitations I wisely, though not without ambivalence, declined): before you were fifteen months old, you could play simple games of cards (‘War,' ‘Go-Fish'), pick out favorite CDs, sing songs on-key and hold to your part in rounds, ice-skate on double runners, and laugh at jokes. You were also enormously responsive, affectionate, and trusting, though given our circumstances, who can figure why.

A for-instance: Once, putting you to bed at night, a glass of Jim Beam in hand (seven and a half months following your mother's departure, in a decision I considered to be a mark of incipient maturity, I had switched from Scotch to bourbon), you asked for a taste, and I dipped my finger in, let you lick it.

So what's your daddy's favorite drink? I asked, and when you looked puzzled, I gave you the answer: Why, the
next
one, of course—!

You cracked up—a bubbling belly laugh that had you clapping your hands and rolling around in your crib. Did you understand the joke? Were you just being silly? Were you reacting to the way I was laughing at my own joke? Were you laughing because you thought laughing would please me…?

Six weeks and two days after your first birthday, I received papers from a lawyer, informing me that your mother wanted
nothing from me except my agreement to a divorce, and to be able to retrieve some personal possessions. In this, I suppose, her behavior was admirable. If I agreed not to contest the divorce, we could take legal and permanent leave of each other within ninety days, with no monies or properties exchanged or owed.

It was done, and the finality of documents and signatures, once processed and approved by a court, went a long way in helping to thicken the heavy, sooty fog in which I lived. No matter what words I or anyone put on it, let me tell you: there is nothing as awful as feeling so deeply sad that to leave the world seems not only, in prospect, a relief, but
just
! How much better life would be for everyone else were I gone! What a gift to the world my absence would be! But if I did it solo, I feared, she would get you, or, if she demurred, the courts would get you, and such thoughts also held me back.

And there was also time—the
passage
of time, more exactly. At some point in the thirteenth month of my sorrows, the beast inside mind and body seemed to tire of me a bit (out of boredom, I hypothesized), and I noticed, too, that I was taking occasional pleasure from simple things—eating, sleeping, holding your hand on walks, watching you eat, or sleep, or play with your toy cars and building blocks—and I began to have a distaste, not for bourbon—never, never, never—but for the foggy dizziness it induced. Then you fell.

I was, as usual, moderately sloshed, and it was your bedtime, and I had a stack of papers to grade, a few rolled and tucked snugly under my left arm, and I was
very
upset with you because you'd soiled yourself.
Why?
Why were you doing this to me? You'd been toilet-trained for six or seven weeks, we'd both taken pride in the achievement, and you'd graduated from your crib to a bed—the top half of the old hi-riser that had served as
my
childhood bed. Why
now
? Had I not been paying you enough attention? Were you angry with me? Were you missing your
mother, or one of our babysitters (you'd taken an especial shine to a vixenish young woman named Robyn Henderson, who, by infiltrating your affections, was determined to have your father infiltrate her moist, secret places), or…

Who knew? What I do know is that when I smelled the presence of the foul deed, and asked if you had done it, I was already too angry for anyone's good, and when you grinned with a fiendish look of feigned innocence, and said, ‘I don't
know
, Daddy,' I lost it.

So I did what I did sometimes: I let loose with words as if I were battering a punching bag with them—How many times have I told you this or that, and What's the matter with you, you ungrateful little
schmuck
, and When the fuck are you going to grow up, and I have no patience left for you, and additional choice and self-pitying gabble about having to do everything, everything, everything by myself. Give me a break, you little shithead, you and your shit-filled pants! I screamed. Just give me a fucking break, you stupid lump of clumped, rotten turds! In my fury, and without at first letting go of the student papers, I grabbed you—
snatched
you—and carried you in the crook of my right arm up the stairs and into your room, where I tried to hoist you up onto the changing table. But the flight of stairs had made the bourbon produce a major shimmer of nausea—Hey, I wanted to shout to the world: Look at the noble, dead drunk dumb daddy doing his goddamned dumb thing!—and as I lifted you with the intent of slamming you down on the table—smashing you!—you slipped out of my grasp, and for an instant, as in the memory of car crashes, all went into sickly slow motion: I saw you falling, and I saw that your head had turned upside down, and that the exposed and sharp iron corner of your bed was in perfect position to receive your skull—and yet you smiled at me with the most loving, trusting smile I had ever seen or expect ever to see again.

You had no fear, Charlie. You seemed to believe that if I were
taking care of you, no harm could come your way. How ever, ever forget your sublime calm—the loving trust in your eyes?

I dropped the student papers, scooped you up before you hit the bed's flanged corner (‘A fumble recovered, folks!' I heard an announcer proclaim), cleaned you up, and dressed you in freshly laundered pajamas. ‘Sorry, Daddy,' you said and, when you noticed the glimmering film in my eyes, you asked if I'd hurt myself.

Not at all, I said. Not at all.

I stopped drinking the next morning. The glooms retreated, defeated by your trust in me, which was, in that moment, certainly greater than
my
trust in me. Three weeks later, I received galleys for
Prizefighter
, and you and I celebrated by driving to Maine for lunch (clam rolls became your favorite food well into your teens). I waded into revisions with gusto, and within a year I married again—Inez Palenco, a sweet, bright woman four years older than I (a social worker at an agency in Holyoke, a competent oboist, and a master gardener), whom you may remember only through photos, for within seventeen months of our marriage, she was done in by that cunning variety of breast cancer that can sneak in and take over
between
regular check-ups.

Somehow you grew up, went to school, graduated, and set off to seek your fortune, and what I have since thought of as The Great Glooms never returned with any marked force, though I feared their return, as now, every day when I woke and every night before I slept—and you turned into as fine a son as any man might be lucky enough to have.

Let me note something else that contributed to the fading away of my missing year, and I note it not to deprive you of credit for having helped me—us!—come to a better place, but to put what happened, and how it happened, into a somewhat larger context. I had, perhaps two years before the night on which you fell, come under the spell of Primo Levi, who, as man and writer, had become my hero. As you know, he wrote
about his experiences in Auschwitz and journey home from Auschwitz, but also about myriad other matters: his career as a chemist, his family, other people's vocations, his friendships, his beloved city of Turin.

It has occurred to me of late—when I have, happily, been able to give freer rein to my ruminative disposition—that the slight lessening of depressive pain I began to experience may have come from reading, not about Levi's life as victim, survivor, and witness, but about his views on suicide, along with what in him is so life-affirming (to use an apt if banal phrase): his fierce ability to see the differences in other people—their particularities and idiosyncracies—in a time when they were put to death because they were judged, as Jews, to be
no
different, one from the other.

Though, of course, they were also exterminated because they were just that:
other
. We always fear, and despise, whatever we perceive as different from who we are, and in this, he has explained, we are not that different from animals, who are much more intolerant of members of their own species than they are of those of other species. Thus, anti-Semitism, he has suggested, is simply a horrific example of a more general phenomenon.

But suicide—what about suicide? There were, I was surprised to learn, few suicides in the camps—and generally, Levi points out, fewer suicides in wartime than in times of peace. His reasoning as to why this was so appears in a self-interview I came across a few evenings before the night on which you fell, and long before—inexplicable, profoundly disturbing mystery!—
he
fell down a stairwell in a self-willed act I trust neither of us will emulate—one that ended his life in the place he loved: the house in which he'd been born and, before and after Auschwitz, had lived.

Yet some years before this, Levi wrote that he considered suicide a distinctively human act (we had never seen evidence that animals committed suicide), and that because, in the camps,
human beings, both victims and oppressors, tended more toward the level of animals—of
animality
—it was the business of the day—essentials—that ruled: what you were going to eat and if you were going to eat, how cold it would be, what you would wear against the cold, how heavy was the work and of what kind, et cetera. In short: you thought, if ‘thought' is the right word, of how you were going to make it through the day and into the evening and through the night. There was, simply, no time to think about killing yourself.

So I became busy. I began exercising regularly. I began preparing, in earnest, for the book I would write about Henry James as Irishman; I began making notes for new stories and novels; I began planting a garden, and learning carpentry; I began seeking out women who would make suitable helpmates for me, and loving (step-)mothers for you. I began cooking meals regularly, breakfast and dinner, and planning vacations, and asking my department chair if I could teach new courses that would require I put myself to school in the work of authors (Howells, Dos Passos, Proust, Beckett) with whom I had, until then, only cursory acquaintance. I took tennis lessons, joined a co-ed softball team, took a course in auto repair, and searched out (in vain for the most part) lost cousins, aunts, and uncles. I painted rooms, repaired furniture, built bookcases, created file systems, learned to do my own taxes, and to play the piano.

Not all at once, of course, and after a while—when the demon of depression seemed to have increasing difficulty finding its way back into my daily life, I began to let some of the new activities fall away. But this happened over the course of several years, and I mark what has, until this moment, been its
definitive
departure (though daily
wariness
remains), from the third month of my third marriage—to Pamela Fullerton, whom you will recall as perhaps the most animated and lively of my five wives, though herself—the aphrodisiacal cue and clue to my infatuation and our romance?—a lifelong victim of chronic depression,
which, in the glory days of falling in love, departed, only to return when a bit of the bloom, as was inevitable, began to wear off the rose of our bliss.

Pamela never became suicidal—her condition was more like a ground bass, or low-grade hum—a Baroque ostinato I came to think I could actually
hear
, and some twenty-one months after our wedding, she left us, saying it was simply not fair—not
fair
!
—
can you
imagine
?—that it was
not fair
for anyone to have to live with someone so plagued with sadness, and with such catastrophic changes of mood. (Why, she would write in a note a month or two later, should we have to live
our
lives on the nauseating sine-curve of
her
feelings?)