We Are What We Pretend to Be

by Kurt Vonnegut

  He said of talent in general: “Beware of gods bearing gifts.”

  So, although Magda Lanz continued to practice piano for three hours every day, until botched shock treatments following the birth of a comedian zapped her memory and aplomb to flinders, she set out to become a physician. She attended Knightsbridge’s superb public schools and then drove daily in her own Mercedes convertible to and from Boston University, where she studied premedicine. A plain woman, and somewhat dumpy, albeit coming and going in a $60,000 form of transportation, she fell in love with a pretty-faced, redheaded, baritone, predental student: Bob “Paddy” Berman. As luck would have it, this “paragon of manly schmaltz,” as his own son would come to call him, was also a former Junior Golf Champion of Barnstable County, Cape Cod, where his folks lived. His dad owned a shoe store in Hyannis. It isn’t there anymore. And did Magda’s duffer father and her sandtrap Romeo ever hit it off!

  Bob and Magda were given a $45,000 wedding at the Knightsbridge Golf and Country Club, and then the shit hit the fan big time! Magda found herself pregnant, and the rest is history. Berman: “Imagine how my father felt, only twenty-two, in his first year of dental school. How would you feel if you stuck your dingdong into a woman, with the best of intentions, and she exploded?” Or, conversely, one might wish to ask: “How would you like it if, through no fault of your own, you were booby-trapped protoplasm? Or her son?”

  Gil Berman on the subject of his birth, which ruined the lives of both his parents: “When the doctor dangled me upside down and spanked my butt to start my breathing, I didn’t cry. I said, ‘A funny thing happened on the way down the birth canal. A bum came up to me and said he hadn’t had a bite for two days. So I bit him.’”

  After the booby trap went off, Magda and Bob Berman, one has to say, both behaved honorably and resourcefully within the strict existential limits Fate had set for them. As luck would have it, those limits, according to Berman, were “more like inner tubes stretched between fence posts than like barbed-wire such as once ringed Auschwitz and Alcatraz, because they had plenty of money. Money is dehydrated mercy. If you have plenty of it, you just add tears, and people come out of the woodwork to comfort you.”

  Yes, and each of his parents made the most of such momentum as he or she had been maintaining before, and again, shit hit the fan. His mother continued to play the piano for hours every day, and she took up making artistic scrapbooks of current events, and she was a queen bee in a hive of doctor and lawyer bees, and nurse and hairdresser bees, and a nanny bee and then a tutor-and-companion bee for her child, and on and on. And there was already a gymnasium in the basement, and an aerobics instructor bee to make her and her child stay in shape. One odd rule she made—and she got a lot of what she asked for—was that although her son could sit next to her on the piano bench while she played—she liked that—he was never ever to touch the keys. If he reached for the keyboard when he was very little, she would grab his wrist and say, “No, no, no, Gilly-willy. Gilly-willy be very unhappy if he touch the keys. Gilly-willy-woo cry and cry all night like Mama.” That sort of thing, as though the Steinway grand were, in Berman’s words, “a red-hot, potbellied, cast-iron stove in a hick-town hardware store.”

  Also, if he made any friends in the outside world, he wasn’t to bring them home with him. A former kindergarten teacher would recall him as having been “a rather unusual child.” She was unable to be more specific than that. She was eighty years old.

  It is Gil Berman who is responsible for the analogy above: a childhood home like a beehive. It must have surely occurred to his dad as well. “Anyone preparing for a career in the healing arts,” he said, “is bound to have heard about the lives of social insects at some point in his or her education, as the case may be. I don’t see how Dad could not have thought of Mother as a queen bee surrounded by workers. So fucking obvious! That would make him a drone. As a drone he had done all a drone was supposed to do, which was knock up the queen. But he was not a bee, and so he stayed in dental school at Boston University, to which he had just been admitted. What else was he supposed to do?

  “He asked his gaga wife if he could borrow her Mercedes to drive to and from BU, since she was never going to drive again, and there were four other cars. She said, ‘You’ll have to ask my lawyer.’ So he did. The lawyer said he could. That was the last time he asked his wife for anything. If there was something he really needed, like money for gas or lunch, he asked her lawyer.”

  He asked the lawyer, “How about tuition? Should my parents keep paying that? They will if they have to.” Berman: “He was just a kid, you realize, only twenty-three years old when the excrement hit the air-conditioning. He felt he had done terrible damage with his dingdong, and he had had zero opportunity to establish himself as head or even co-head of a biological family. At least Bob Berman could become an orthodontist instead of sitting around the beehive with his thumb up his ass. Could he actually ask for money?”

  Bob Berman’s strikingly specific boyhood dream of becoming an orthodontist formed on a golf course when he was only a caddy, had been about money, and lots of time for golf, and being a doctor, but a kind of doctor whose patients weren’t sick, who could never up and croak on him. But in defending his career choice against funsters since the eighth grade, Gil Berman’s dad had become, in Gil Berman’s words, “operatically arioso on the subject of how important smiles were, and what meticulous planning and patience and surgical skills it took to fix one.” A professor of his at BU Dental likened orthodontics to “civil engineering in a teacup.” Gil Berman’s dad loved hearing that. It was the truth.

  Gill Berman: “The only proof my dad needed of the existence of God was a birdie or an overbite. And after he bought another man’s practice in Boston with Mom’s money, he started chasing women with his own money. Why not? He was warm and beautiful. He came back to the Knightsbridge apiary maybe once a month. I’d sit next to Mom on the piano bench while she hammered out a thunderstorm. Or I’d watch TV. I didn’t have a clue as to who or what he was. Neither did Mom.”

  Dr. Robert Berman, DDS, did in fact attempt to relate to his biological son when the son was a sophomore at Knightsbridge High. He took him for a ride in what had been the boy’s mother’s convertible Mercedes, “so they could talk.” That’s right! You got it! Dr. Berman was still driving what had become a priceless antique, not because he was cheap but because the car was glamorous. Gil Berman would say of that trip that he himself might as well have been the machine, and the Mercedes the fascinating personality, since his father talked to the car all the time. “The car had lost a lot of its pickup,” said the comedian. “So when we were stopped at a stoplight with other cars around, Dr. Berman would say to the old Mercedes something like, ‘Listen, old girl, in a moment that light is going to turn green, and nice people on important errands behind us will expect us as good citizens to jump ahead with all possible alacrity. Can you possibly do it this one last time? That’s my baby.’”

  When in Barnstable High School on the Cape, Dr. Berman had had what almost none of his classmates had, unless they had some kind of business to inherit: a blueprint for a future he could surely build—orthodontics. Others who played golf as well as he did, or could sing as well, might easily ruin their lives in sports or entertainment, where even more gifted people would surely cut them new assholes, would make them feel like something the cat drug in. That wasn’t going to happen to young Bob Berman, and it didn’t.

  Gil Berman on his dad: “He was staunch! He held his course through all kinds of weather until he could at last drop anchor in the tranquil marina of orthodontics, where every patient has deep pockets, and no one dies.” There in the Calvin Theater on December 11, 2000, Gil Berman might have been his father when his father was a teenager: “Let us pray: Our Father, which art in Heaven: Lead us not into the temptation of outsize expectations.”

  Magda Lanz Berman, Gil Berman’s mother, died of cancer on April 9, 2000, having been a widow for twenty-three years. Sh
e had been a wife for only about half that long. She had been smoking two packs of unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes since she was twenty, but she didn’t die of cancer of the lung. She died of the quickie: pancreas. She died three months before her son the comedian entered the Caldwell Institute for the second time. That’s right! You got it! Gil Berman had committed himself to Caldwell once before.

  He committed himself the first time “when,” in his own words, “I was a preemie, a neonate.” He was also a newlywed, twenty-four years old. While in Las Vegas, Nevada, for the first time in his life, as a warm-up act for Marie Osmond, he had married a topless dancer named “Wanda Lightfoot,” if you can believe it, when they were both tiddley-poo on LSD. During the wedding ceremony, during which they had promised to have and to hold and so on, he at least had the presence of mind to whisper hoarsely to his bride, who had a terrific set of knockers, “No kids, no kids.”

  Berman: “The next thing I knew, the knockers and I were somehow in a suite at the Ritz Carlton in Boston, one of my dad’s old stomping grounds with babes. Monkey see, monkey do. The knockers, who was chain-smoking weed, may have asked to meet my mother out in Knightsbridge. That seems possible. I mean, what the hell? I had by then sworn off LSD and was limiting my intake to a crystal-clear detox medicine called ‘Absolut.’

  “So she said she was pregnant, and was so happy because she had always wanted a little baby to cuddle and nurse and so on. ‘No abortion.’ If she said ‘No abortion,’ it stands to reason that at some point in time I might have recommended that identical surgical procedure. Sometimes time flies, sometimes it creeps. On that particular occasion, time chose to fly, and the next thing I knew I was in a jail cell, just like the ones in the movies, and they told me my wife was in Massachusetts General Hospital with several teeth missing and a broken jaw, but that the baby inside her was still O.K. In my baroque experience, it is only in jokes that there’s both good news and bad news: ‘There’s good news and there’s bad news. The bad news is such-and-such, but the good news is such-and-such.”

  None of the above has been part of a public performance. It is a transcript of Berman’s recorded admissions interview sixteen years ago, again: the first time he committed himself to Caldwell. Had he and his psychiatric social worker wished to fill in gaps in the tale, they had only to read accounts in the Boston Globe. When three policemen and a reporter brought Berman down from his suite at the Ritz on a freight elevator, for example, he said over and over again, “I am not Lee Harvey Oswald, I am not Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  On his “perp walk” through the lobby to the street, he said to the many people who just happened to be there, people of all ages, mostly educated and well-to-do, “Completely atypical, folks, utterly out of character, one hundred percent anomalous. Keep calm, keep calm.”

  In his admissions interview he was able to recall at least the flavor of the perp walk: “I am captain of the unsinkable ship Titanic , which is sinking, and I want all the spoiled, ritzy motherfuckers aboard not to make things worse by going nuts.”

  In a long piece two days later, the Globe concluded that hitting anybody was for Gilbert Lanz Berman, from one of the most distinguished old families in Knightsbridge, indeed “uncharacteristic,” “atypical,” and “one hundred percent anomalous.” Ms. Florence Pate Glass, an English teacher at Knightsbridge High, where Berman had been president of the National Honor Society, testified: “Gilbert never fought, or even considered fighting. If there was a confrontation, Gilbert always turned the other cheek, although he was as manly and strong as three-quarters of the boys here. In one essay he wrote for me, and he was one of the eight best students I ever had, he said a formula as earthshaking as Einstein’s ‘E equals MC square.’ It was ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ No more ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ No more revenge!”

  The reporter asked Ms. Glass, since the business about forgiving trespasses was in the New Testament, if Berman had shown an interest in Christianity while in high school. “On a sub-zero Christmas day in Hell,” she said. “But I remember Gilbert asked me one time, ‘Ms. Glass, if what Jesus said was good, why should anybody care a rat’s ass whether he was God or not?’”

  Ms. Glass said: “One thing really puzzles me though, along with beating up that poor woman, of course, is that he is now a comedian. I saw him on the Tonight Show two weeks ago, and I couldn’t believe how funny he was. He used to be the most serious boy in Knightsbridge, too serious, I thought. I wanted to say to him, ‘Gilbert Lanz Berman, can’t you put down the world and all its troubles for at least ten minutes? It’ll still be there when you pick it up again.’”

  Ms. Glass asked the reporter what drugs Berman had been taking when he beat up his wife and was told it was alcohol and nothing else, and she said, “Sometimes all it takes is two martinis to transmogrify Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Berman’s Knightsbridge biology teacher, Dr. Aaron Edelman, termed him “an ardent Schweitzerite, a fully committed reverence-for-lifer.” Edelman said, “It could be said of Gilbert as literally as it could have been said of his hero, Dr. Albert Schweitzer: ‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly.’ I remember one time in the lab a cockroach ran across the floor, and a student named Cynthia Gottlieb stepped on it. And Gilbert said to her in that rich voice of his, ‘Cynthia, I can’t tell you how much I wish you hadn’t done that.’”

  A possible “extenuating circumstance,” according to the Globe: “His father, the prominent Boston orthodontist Dr. Robert Berman, also runner-up two years in a row in the Wianno Pro-Am Tournament on Cape Cod, 1968 and 1969, committed suicide four years ago.”

  The denouement? Wanda Lightfoot through her lawyers asked for and received in absentia an uncontested divorce, a flat $1 million settlement, no alimony, no child support, and an order of protection against her ex-husband. That last was purely symbolic, since she had already left the state with the baby still inside her, and was having her name legally changed so that Berman could never find her. Berman in the year 2000: “That was back when a million was a lot of money. Nowadays you couldn’t buy a cross-eyed shortstop for a season in the basement with the Seattle Mariners for twice that much.”

  In the year 1978 a reporter happened to spot Gil Berman at Logan Airport as Berman, in obedience to a court order, was about to leave for Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where a bus from the Caldwell Institute would meet him. He asked Berman what it felt like to give away a million dollars. And Gil Berman said this, appearing terribly weary and humbled, and not acting funny at all, according to the reporter: “Tabula rasa, friend. I feel like shit but my slate is clean.”

  Dr. Robert Berman, DDS, committed suicide in the autumn of 1977 at the age of forty-two, his son Gilbert’s age there onstage at the Calvin Theater in the year 2000. Dr. Berman, DDS, did the big trick by means of carbon monoxide while sitting in his BMW convertible, with his seatbelt fastened and the top down in a closed garage on Cape Cod. The garage belonged to Mrs. Arnold Kirschenberg, a young and recent widow, a former girlfriend from Barnstable High School who, like Dr. Berman, had married a lot of money. She lived next door to the waterfront estate of the Kennedys in Hyannis Port, where the murdered brothers John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Robert Francis Kennedy had learned to swim and sail.

  His son, Gilbert, was then nineteen, a freshman at Columbia. He had a daughter he didn’t even know he had, not that she could have made any difference, telling him how much she loved him, begging him not to do it and so on, that sort of thing. She was only three years old then. And she wouldn’t find out her biological father was a long-dead Boston orthodontist until, at the age of twenty-five, she tracked down her still unmarried biological mother, Mary Kathleen McCarthy, who worked as a receptionist for a veterinarian in Fresno, California, and who told her about him. So there was no biological father to whom she might introduce herself with all possible modesty. She did find out, at least, whence came her red hair. Mary Kathleen McCarthy’s hair wa
s brown. The name of the daughter, who was put up for adoption at the age of three months, was Kimberley Berlin.

  Here’s the story: Mary Kathleen McCarthy, an orphan, a Roman Catholic, had worked as a receptionist for Bob Berman in Boston for three years. She knew he was married and was devoted to his wife, although she did nothing but play the piano and make scrapbooks of items in the Boston Globe, and made no sense when she was talking, and they had a son who was at the top of his class in high school. But she could not help herself: She fell in love with him. He was indeed lovable, “a paragon of manly schmaltz,” as his son would call him: good looking and sexy, but overwhelmingly considerate, and sentimental about the human race in general, quick to reward, forgive or comfort, or boost a loser’s self-esteem. He was a people person if there ever was one.

  Even after Gil Berman’s dad fucked Mary Kathleen McCarthy on her desk after hours, in a moment of passion, her passion, with the telephone ringing and ringing, and knocked her up when she was twenty-four, she was still able to say to the redheaded Kimberley Berlin in Fresno: “Your father was a people person if there ever was one. He never took his eye off the sparrow. If you couldn’t get along with Dr. Berman, you couldn’t get along with anyone. And he could be so funny. Laugh, I thought I’d die.”

  And Mary Kathleen was surely not the first woman in history to find a man so lovable that she would have died for him, if that would help. More common, and more in practical harmony with the apparent intentions of evolution, one would think, have been women who died for children, children as children, not necessarily their own. The sacrifice Mary Kathleen performed for Bob Berman was a near-death experience for her, since she would never see him again. But it required only that she not tell him she was carrying his child, and that she quit her job and head for the other seacoast, where she would have that child and put her up for adoption.