“Who will train him?”
“He’s already trained,” my father said.
“Who will pay for him?” my mother asked. When my father said that he would pay for the upkeep of the dog, I thought, as a child would and because I wanted the dog so badly, that with that, all outstanding issues had been resolved in favor of us keeping the dog. But instead it brought forth a verbal blitz from my mother, a storm of thunder against which reason, humor, and sentiment were powerless. Reason, humor, and sentiment were my father’s tools.
This was so typical of my father, she bellowed, all care and no responsibility. Who had asked him to bring a dog home? Who was going to care for the back lawn now, not that he ever did? This was another attempt to cast her as the disciplinarian, wasn’t it? He wasn’t even supposed to be there now. When she said that, my attention shifted away from the dog for the first time since my father’s arrival. She asked him, or really told him, to use the doorbell in future and not to just let himself in. Otherwise she would have to change the locks. And he was to keep to the arranged times and not to turn up just when he felt guilty. He said now she was finally talking about something she knew about. And she said what was the dog if not a bribe, and he said the dog was a dog and that, as far as guilt was concerned, she was the one who had started this, but she said no, she was just the one who had ended it. Neither of them was listening to the other. She yelled at him to get out or she would call the police. He said it was still his house too, and she pushed him. He said, “Not in front of the . . .” and pushed her back. He called out good-bye and said that he would be back when my mother had calmed down. I ran out after him to the front gate, crying, and the dog ran after me.
“Dad! Dad!” I screamed, and my father turned around, squatted down at the gate, hugged me, and wiped the tears from my face. The dog was barking. “What’s his name, Dad? You didn’t tell us his name. Does he have a name?”
“Yes, little one. He has a name.”
“What’s his name?”
“Empson.”
2. Empson was a refugee. Your little dog, an innocent victim of the upheaval in your life, suddenly found himself thrust into a suburban war zone or, if not a war zone, then at least the scene of the spontaneous clashes that erupted whenever my father came to visit us and of which we were the major casualties. Children of separated parents always hope their parents will reconcile. Well, we did, anyway, my sister and I. For what it’s worth all these years later, we did love your dog and we quickly came to think of him as ours. Even our mother came to love him, I think, despite the manner of his arrival, which seemed to symbolize to her much of what she thought was by then wrong with our father. The truth, at least when looked at from her perspective, is that it was inconsiderate of him not to check with her first before bringing home a dog, particularly since he wasn’t living there anymore. It wouldn’t have helped him had she learned, as she subsequently did, that Empson was the dog of one of his patients, the newly famous one, who had just been arrested for kidnapping a child.
Without being or needing to be a psychiatrist herself, she had long thought our father was getting too involved with his patients. That she was right nobody knows better than you. Broadly in agreement with his worldview, she was nevertheless more pragmatic than him, less resistant to compromise with the prevailing ethos, less eager to go into battle for what she believed. She wanted someone else to fight the good fight against the introduction of managed care, partly, I think, because it took up too much of his time and attention and partly, I suspect, because she knew that sooner or later, it would be introduced anyway. And then, not only would his efforts have been futile, but his practice would suffer disproportionately on account of what would be seen as his Ludditism. She’s sounding more and more reasonable, isn’t she? There was much more to it than that. She eventually got even more reasonable having been, for a while, far less. But at the time, she was the one who didn’t want us to have the dog despite our being just crazy about him. He was our first pet, excluding a quickly dead goldfish, and I suppose he served as a tangible manifestation of our absent father’s love for us. But a girl grows up, first romantic and then cynically hip and forever tyrannized by her own concerns. With these acting on her as an anesthetic, she acclimatizes to what she comes to label off-handedly, like a latter-day Holden Caulfield, as her “parental problems.” You can’t have known much about the circumstances of your dog and his new owners. There was a time, an important time, when you had so much more of our father’s attention than we did and we really missed him, especially at first, and especially me. Not as much as now, though.
Did you know he had children or how many he had? Did you know they were girls? Did you know that we grew up knowing of you primarily as “that nut who destroyed your father”? But now, knowing all about you and knowing that our parents’ problems were born before you came into our father’s life, I know that our mother’s method of identifying you gave you much more credit, or should I say blame, than you deserved. For all the time and effort that he put into you, his importance to you was far greater than your importance to him, at least in the sense of influencing the way things turned out for each of you. Don’t you agree? It’s in your interest to agree. Or will you say you don’t know?
I wonder, for example, if you know how old he was when he left Czechoslovakia? Do you know anything about his parents or the world they came from? Compared with the maelstrom they lived through, even your problems pale. His parents, whom I never knew, were married before the war. In 1941 they and their two children were sent to the ghetto at , in Poland. As I understand it, the younger of the two children died in the ghetto. The older child went with them to Auschwitz and died there. Miraculously, both my grandparents survived the Holocaust. Can you imagine living through that, being separated, herded like animals, starved, slaving in workshops beside the chimneys as they belched out the smoke of your gassed and burned children, along with the thousands of other Jews they belched out, twenty-four hours a day, day after day, till shortly before the end of the war? I have trouble imagining how they coped even after the war, when they managed to find each other and start again. How can people possibly start again after that?
My grandparents were educated middle-class professionals. He was a doctor, she a teacher of languages. They were non-communist Jewish leftists, children of the Enlightenment, for all the good it did them. After the war, they went back to Prague and tried to integrate into a society that had let them and their families be rounded up and taken away. Now that almost all their families were gone, distant cousins whom they barely knew grew in importance, in closeness. In between attempts to find out who was left, they had to go about their lives, with the numbers still on their arms, and try to reestablish careers, professional lives, among neighbors who resented their survival.
When Czechoslovakia slid into communism in the “victorious February” of 1948, my grandparents, by all accounts, did not yet feel part of whatever passed for normal society to fear the change. Even to mourn the mysterious death of the foreign minister Jan Masaryk was a self-indulgence they couldn’t fully allow themselves. My grandmother had a distant relative, some sort of cousin or cousin’s cousin whom the war had brought closer, and he was a communist, a leading member of the party. Whether this encouraged any optimism I can’t say but if it had, it would have been short-lived. The cousin or cousin’s cousin turned out to be Rudolf Slánsky, the deputy prime minister and general secretary of the Czech Communist Party. I don’t know how well they knew him or even if they ever met him. Having read up on him, I can tell you that my father would have been born around the time, almost to the day, that Slánsky and his thirteen codefendants went on trial for being “Trotskyist-Zionist-Titoist-bourgeois-nationalist” traitors, spies, and saboteurs, enemies of the Czechoslovakian nation, of its people’s democratic order, and of socialism. Eleven of the fourteen defendants were Jews. The trials were quite literally scripted. All the “actors” had to learn and rehearse their
lines. Apparently when the trial judge inadvertently skipped a question, Slánsky covered for him, answering the question the judge had meant to ask. Eventually they all confessed. Eleven of them were executed, and their property was appropriated for the families of newly promoted apparatchiks.
By the time my father was two, around one hundred and fifty thousand people had been imprisoned by the regime. It was in this climate of informers, denunciations, arbitrary arrests, blacklists, and unswerving, uncritical, unthinking loyalty to the party that my father grew up, in this climate and against the background of his parents’ wartime experiences. Those most at risk from the regime’s caprice were the intelligentsia, non-communist leftists—seen as bourgeois class enemies—and the Jews. My grandparents on my father’s side were all three. This was the world into which your psychiatrist was born. I thought you might want to know.
By the early to mid-1960s, things had relaxed slightly. My father was about twelve or thirteen when his parents managed to leave Czechoslovakia and settle here, bringing with them three or four suitcases filled to the brim with nothing, some tertiary qualifications of almost no value here, a lonely, cynical, bookish teenage son with faltering English, and each with his own custom-made memories of the nightmare of twentieth-century Europe. That the boy would one day grow up and be your psychiatrist should seem incredible to you, much more incredible than hearing from one of his daughters out of the blue some twelve or so years after he might be said to have saved your life.
I was seven years old, almost eight, when my father came home with a dog but could not stay. My mother shouted. The dog barked. The children cried, first at the sound of their parents’ raised voices and then at the sight of their parents pushing each other. You know the scene. You can imagine it; I know you can. We sure as hell needed something. Empson was a good place to start. There were many arguments, before and after my father left home, many before and after the one about Empson, but that one, the argument about whether or not we could keep a dog—and he was such a cute dog—that one stands out.
It stands out, I suppose, because I had such a vested interest in the outcome that I felt responsible for it. And from there, of course, for a little girl anyway, it is a short road to feeling responsible for the whole mess that was your parents’ youthful decision to bind themselves to each other and then to procreate so that other innocent people might not only witness it, but be bound too in a way that is, perhaps, more inescapable than anything else this side of death. After all, you can change your hair length and color, change your name and even the shape of your nose, but you can never change the identity of your parents. You heard your parents argue. You saw them push each other and worse. I know you did. How could I possibly know that? I could know it through your stepson. You’re very open with him. But that’s not how I know it. He’s another story. I’ll get to that, I’ll tell you that one too.
3. When I turned eighteen I became entitled to my share of my father’s estate. It won’t surprise you that he had nothing to leave, no assets, no money to speak of. I say it won’t surprise you, but I don’t know the extent to which you’ve ever considered what you cost him financially. Certainly the divorce took it out of him, but almost immediately after you were arrested your father stopped paying him and then, if anything, he started devoting even more of his time to you, what with the trips to Laverton and everything. There was less time left for his other patients. Even before you came along, for some reason, he didn’t seem to have had enough full-fee-paying patients. It hadn’t always been that way but my mother admits, when pushed, that his practice had gotten too quiet even before you arrived on the scene. So all there was for me to inherit were his genes and his book. You’ve seen the book; I’m sure you have. It’s not so much a book as a journal.
It seems he began it purely as a journal, a personal record of his private thoughts, but over time it seemed to have mutated into a memoir of everything that was going on in his life. He seems to have included notes about his patients, and not just you. At the beginning there are merely allusions to various patients, but by the end there are detailed notes about specific patients and specific sessions. You might be flattered to know you dominate the journal right to the end. There’s a while there where you’re more the subject than he is. Not just your sessions either, although they’re faithfully recorded as well. You would find parts of it interesting as a record of yourself at the time, everything from throwaway lines to deeply held convictions.
This is how I come to know about you and your parents and even their friends, Henry and Diane Osborne. This is how I come to know that you heard your parents argue and that you saw much worse than that. I know about your mother’s depression and how, as a boy, you tried to treat it with music, in particular with Billie Holiday. In fact, as I lay on my bed reading about your mother, I sort of half pictured her looking like Billie Holiday, as ridiculous as that might sound. When I thought about it later it occurred to me that your mother might well have been one of the whitest middle-class women ever to set foot on her son’s forehead, ever to lie back, close her eyes in the suburban day, and listen to that black singer. But, for all that, from what I’ve gleaned from the journal, she was the Billie Holiday of your family of origin. Unless it was you.
I don’t mean to embarrass you. This is all highly personal and not easily characterized as my business, but you and your story, your history, your taste, views, and opinions seemed to have become an integral part of my father’s business. His business became part of his history, and when he left me his history it became my business. Sometimes he must have taken down what you said as you were saying it. That’s the way it looks. Do you remember reciting the opening to “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg to him one day? My father didn’t know it. Do you remember?
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix . . .
Every first-year English literature student knows it. You’ll be pleased to know your stepson knows it. You said to my father, “I never even saw the best minds of my generation. They had to have been there somewhere, but they were too well disguised, hidden, blanketed, overshadowed, and overwhelmed by their intoxication with a fearsome self-interest to be recognized as the best of anything.”
The two of you then went on to explore the prevailing culture of every man for himself and to commiserate with each other over the demise of liberalism and its concern for the common good. You speculated about how much anger, how much alienation it would take to persuade society to reinvent the wheel, the commonweal. He attributes the pun to you. I read all this and wondered who was getting the therapy. At the bottom of that day’s entry in my father’s journal, almost as an afterthought, my father had written, “There is anger on the streets. You see it mostly inside cars.”
I said every first-year student knows the opening to “Howl.” I was a first-year student very, very recently. They should know it. They don’t. It’s probably worse than in your day. Or do we all say that? Does everybody say that things are worse than in “their day”? Or do they say that things are better? Allen Ginsberg wrote “Howl” in the mid-1950s. Were you saying that your generation had it worse than his or that they were themselves worse people? If people live long enough, “their day” encompasses lots of other people’s days and when you take account of geographical differences, that sort of talk becomes pretty meaningless. Was your day my father’s day? Was my father’s day his parents’ day? In his day he lived for a while under a kind of Stalinism. In his parents’ day people lived under Hitler and went up, up, and away out of chimneys as smoke. That’s how it was in their day.
So were things better or worse for you? Maybe you were just bleating on because your father was paying my father to listen to you? What was your problem, anyway?
In my day we never had Father’s Day, not after I was ten. Do you remember the way, just before Father’s Day, all those chain hardware stor
es used to advertise electric drills and circular saws on television? When I was about eleven I gave my mother a gift certificate from one of those hardware stores for her birthday to the value of sixteen dollars. She asked me what I thought she should buy with it. I told her she should put it toward an electric drill or a circular saw and she started to cry.
Within a few years of my father’s death, the official line, the one sanctioned and promoted by my mother, saw my father partially rehabilitated. He went from being bad to sad and a little mad. You were increasingly implicated. But she didn’t know about the journal or, if she did, she hadn’t read it.
While the journal is filled with you and with details of your thoughts concerning everything from your relationships, your parents and Anna, thoughts of and reflections on Billie Holiday, William Empson, Eliot, Swinburne, deconstructionism, neoclassical economics, Nazim Hikmet, E. L. Doctorow, and Abe Meeropol, you were not the only one to get a moment in the sun. You were not even the only patient he wrote about other than in a professional capacity. But, on balance, I would have to say you were his star patient and not only because you made it into the papers, or because of the time you took up, or even because of the money he lost on you. I say it really, I suppose, because of his great fondness for you. It’s clear from the journal. He liked you, and he agreed with so many of your views. They were his views. Possibly, he was comforted to hear them coming from you the way he did, by which I mean that not only was he impressed and maybe even charmed or entertained by your eloquence, but because you held many of the same opinions, he felt less alone in his.
Seven Types of Ambiguity Page 69
