by Daniel Stern
“Neither does dying,” Katherine said. “I wish I could go for some therapy and I wish I could finish my novel.”
“Me too,” Jackson said. “I’m writing fiction, now. After you died I got tired of compiling anthologies. Myrna thought I should be a real writer. I started a novel. I haven’t finished it yet. That was twenty-two years ago.”
“Novels are hard,” Katherine said.
“I know. I’m back to my old bread and butter. Right now I have an assignment to do a children’s version of Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The research is fascinating.”
“My God!”
“I have to make a living.”
“Of course. Tell Tulip I’m proud my baby’s having a baby.”
“You know I can’t do that,” he said.
“I guess not,” Katherine said.
It was chilly and the trek back from the cemetery made Jackson hungry. He went back via Manhattan and found himself at the Russian Rendezvous. It was six o’clock, Thursday evening, fall in New York. All of those things. Standing on the sidewalk in front of the RR, Jackson Eudemie shivered and loved them all passionately at that moment: twilight, midweek, autumn, midtown New York; loved them as you can only love such things right after a visit to the cemetery. He faced East and it was as if the long line of “civilians”—that’s what Lew Krale used to call ordinary people with no claim to an art form, whose names would never appear in either The Hudson Review or Variety—it was as if they were all heading up the slight slope of Fifty-seventh Street, all the way from the East River, toward a dinner at The Russian Rendezvous. He saw them all as “going-to-bes” in that twilight hallucination. After all everyone is en route to something. He was en route to becoming a grandfather and had just come from a conversation in a cemetery. Everyone is hungry for something if only dinner.
Jackson sat in a front booth and ordered a giant meal: zakuska—spicy Russian hors d’oeuvres, borscht, hot in honor of the first cool fall evening, karsky shashlik, and tea. By the time he finished, the pre-concert crowd was thick in the front waiting for tables, his included. But when he went to pay the check Jackson found that his wallet had not made it back with him from the graveyards of Long Island.
How embarrassing! He had not seen Lew Krale for a couple of years. Lew was gray and gaunt but with a tranquil air, no longer so frantic. He sipped a Seven-up and grinned.
“I see you haven’t changed, Jackson,” he said. “You still can’t pay.”
“I see you have changed,” Jackson said. He waved at the crowd. “You’re drinking Seven-up and I’m the only one who can’t pay. I’ll send you a check tomorrow.”
“Don’t sweat it,” he said. “I’m up to my ass in checks. Somebody offered to buy me out the other day for three million dollars. I gave him a drink instead.”
Jackson told Lew about Tulip getting pregnant and Lew bought them both vodkas. They toasted the impending grandchild.
“Is this okay?” Jackson asked. “You drinking again?”
“I can take it or leave it. Since Tulip. That kid changed everything.”
Jackson asked him how it felt to be such a grand success. Lew’s face went dark.
“Don’t make fun of an old friend.”
Jackson swore he’d meant it kindly.
“It doesn’t feel right,” Lew said. “It feels good—but not right. You can’t change at my age. How about you and Myrna?”
“We’re always just getting by. I almost had a best-seller: a book on Great Teas of the World. But it fizzled out. I’m the only publisher in the world who would try to make a coffee table book out of tea. I’m too old to change.”
“Listen,” Lew Krale said. “Just not dying young is a kind of success.”
“It’s a kind of failure, too.”
His eyes opened wide: the old Lew. “You think so?” he said, a hint of hope in the question.
On the strength of that question the two of them drank the evening to its end. Jackson called Myrna twice with a revised schedule. The headwaiter changed tables around them three times. At last they began to be a problem. Too noisy, old jokes and memories too raucous, and they ended up climbing over the ledge of the hat check room.
“It’s okay,” Lew muttered to the astonished young woman attendant. “This man’s kid used to live here.” From the inside looking out they surveyed the debris of their lives. The coat room was three times the size it had been in the Grand Old Period. Lew lay down on the floor, embedded in some of the light topcoats of the season, remembering, aloud, Krasner’s moment of dramatic intervention, Tulip’s momentous diarrhea.
Drunk and sad, Jackson Eudemie lay down next to Lew. The events of the day made him think of his children’s book on Freud, which was, as usual, late. It was a small jump from Lew’s mumbled memories to thinking about Freud—the Freud of 1887, turning from the bizarre and terrifying discoveries of hysterical, often paralyzed women delivering up the dark twisted truths they’d spent their lives, their balance, their physical health trying to suppress. He thought of that self-named conquistadore turning from this exotic jungle to the still unexplored jungle of the every day: the tongue slipping into the repressed expressed wish … the umbrella forgotten on a rainy day summing up a life of denial …
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life! In his silly little children’s book he would describe to the young people of the world how the ambitiousness of the title went unnoticed in its familiarity. He thought of Lew Krale drinking himself out of business saved by Tulip, growing old crucified by success; of Krasner lurking in the forest of his shyness and ego, a hero waiting to happen to his own drama. All of these and most of all of his first wife, Katherine Eudemie. She’d come to New York to be a writer like Lionel Trilling, Delmore Schwartz, Bernard Malamud—the great shadow-Jews of her Midwest imagination. She’d come to contribute and willy-nilly she will have contributed.
She’d come to New York for grandeur and forgot what she came for. Parapraxis Found was her most lasting work and she’d ended up helping to save Lew Krale’s dying restaurant … had written, instead of the Great Jewish/Goyish Novel, a chapter in the history of a café; the Necessary Place, where those with a song to sing rest their voices in gossip and laughter. It was the dream of artistic achievement writ small, not in ink but in caviar and canapés.
Thus go most dreams when they encounter the Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Remembering all this he began to laugh not unkindly and Lew joined in with a loose, wet laugh, creating the kind of ruckus the place had not heard or seen in years.
“How’d you get home?” Myrna said.
“Lew lent me some money. It was like the old days. Go to sleep.”
But before they slept he told her about the crazy evening. He left out the cemetery part; told her everything else, though, including the drunken sprawl with Lew Krale in the hat check room. He felt old and happy and unreasonably pleased with the past.
“I hope Tulip appreciates being pregnant,” Myrna said. “I wanted that so much.”
“Yes. Everything begins in passion and hunger,” Jackson Eudemie said.
“I was never a mother and now I’m going to be a grandmother,” Myrna murmured. “Everything ends in comedy,” she said and went back to sleep.
About the Author
Daniel Stern (1928–2007) was an American novelist and scholar. Raised in New York City, he was an accomplished cellist and promising composer before he began his writing career. After graduating from the High School of Music and Art in New York, he earned positions with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and the Houston Symphony and played with renowned jazz musician Charlie Parker. He also served as the vice president of major media companies including Warner Bros. and CBS. In addition to publishing nine novels and three collections of short fiction, Stern also served as the editor of Hampton Shorts. As an author, Stern is celebrated for his explorations of post–World War II Jewish-American life; his novels’ formal experimentation; and, in the short-story genre, his innovati
on of the “twice-told tale.”
His writing won many awards throughout his career, including the International Prix du Souvenir from the Bergen Belsen Society and the French government; the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; two Pushcart Prizes; two O. Henry Awards; and the honor of publication in The Best American Short Stories. In addition to serving on the faculty of the University of Houston’s creative writing program, he taught at Wesleyan, Pace, New York, and Harvard Universities.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling: a Story” was first published in the magazine New Letters. “The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud: a Story” was first published in The Ontario Review and was included in O. Henry Prize Stories: 1987, The Best American Short Stories: 1987, and The Ways We Live Now: Contemporary Short Fiction from The Ontario Review. “Brooksmith by Henry James: a Story” was first published in the magazine Raritan. “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life by Sigmund Freud: a Story” was first published in The Paris Review.
Copyright © 1989 by Daniel Stern
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
978-1-4804-4422-5
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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