by Herbert Gold
“It's okay, Herb,” he said, “it's okay.” Since we were brothers, I understood him. It was not okay, we both knew it was not okay, but Sid and Herb would always be brothers and that could be counted on. For a while, I gave up judgment of him—all the judgment I had in stock was turned against myself. I told him thanks and his lips moved, murmuring like a soothing parent. I wrapped myself in an overcoat and sank into the dusty couch.
In later years, we went for long rambles in the neighborhood where we had lived as children—here was the Homestead Theater, remember the candy store over there, let's have lunch in this diner. I said we ought to order meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and fruit Jell-o to cure the nostalgia disease. But for me there was another intention in these trips to Cleveland and these walks. I tried to tell him I was grateful to him for being my brother. I could release for a time the older-brother advice, urgings, nagging, which so often seized me like a tic. I apologized for my bad older-brother habits. “It's okay, Herb,” he would say, embarrassed. I told him it was fun to explore the world, the exotic terrains of Cleveland, and let's do more of it, even elsewhere. “Right, right, Herb.”
“When?”
One time he managed to work things out, get his novel temporarily in order, date this completion by putting a sheet of newspaper—one of his geological layers—over the pile on a long plank table. He felt free to take a vacation. He had never been out of the country. He applied for a passport, he read some guidebooks, he navigated airline reservations, and although the process was exhausting, he managed to meet me in Paris. I urged him to stay on a few days after I left. He had survived for three years in traveling carnivals, hadn't he? Yes, but that was different, now the novel needed attention, he had some new ideas; time to get back to Cleveland. “Won't it wait a few days?” I asked.
“I had a good time. This was enough,” he said. “There's a couple things I want to get down just right.”
On his last visit to San Francisco, we went for a hike in the Marin headlands. He was amazed by my sons, who were scrambling off the path and down into gulleys to pick up the litter left by careless campers, gathering junk in their arms to carry it out to the trash cans. “I don't think in Cleveland…” he said. “In California, do people do this sort of thing a lot?” He was flushed with pleasure, obliterating the peculiar grayness of recent years. He didn't know what an uncle does, but he liked doing it. Hiking here again the next time, great, great, a great thing to do; for sure next time, soon, Herb.
Instead, he died. Amnesty International and my children were his heirs.
In Cleveland, at the memorial ceremony, I found that this man who lived alone, seemed so lonely, had a life filled with companionship. The king of the Cleveland beatniks had held court daily at his table in Arabica. A chess player, a genial loafer, a pronouncer of verdicts, a man with ambitions, he hung with those who were like him. Single mothers and rock band roadies, crazed stock market and racetrack fanatics, guys with surefire systems and those who knew how to work other people's systems to get various kinds of public assistance, genial easers who pretended to be psychologically disabled but really were, they were his colleagues through the vicissitudes. Sid counseled them on how to trade their food stamps for necessities, if cigarettes happened to be a necessity; how to avoid the fines for overdue books or tapes at the public library; how to duck the hassles.
I should have remembered that he knew his way around. On one of my visits to Cleveland, he took me to a karmic health, organic, all-natural, New Age, vegetarian restaurant, which noted on its calligraphic menu that due to a temporary difficulty in finding organic peas, they were serving Libby's canned peas. Similar problems affected the bean, spinach, and beet crops; oh well. “It's just like San Francisco, right, Herb? Do you have Libby's peas in San Francisco?” This was the Cleveland I loved and left. “Give peas a chance, Herb. You heard that one in San Francisco?” But he also showed me the world's largest used book warehouse (maybe it wasn't) and a Slovakian family-style restaurant where I asked him not to sop up the gravy with his bread. “Why, Herb? This is ethnic gravy.”
“It's pork fat melted with flour and sugar.”
“Oh. I thought it was healthy ethnic gravy, like macro-biotic.”
“Healthful,” I said. “And it isn't.”
My kid brother, the closest to me. That older brother–kid brother unequal tug-of-war altered as we traveled through boyhood, youth, middle age, on the road to our shared inevitable destination; the rules of the play were also set down. For years I nagged him and finally resolved to stop asking to see The Novel. I managed to carry out my resolution. It ate at both of us when I brought it up; anger rose in me, hurt rose in him, when I would say, “Okay, just a piece of it, feedback helps. Okay, just a few pages. It doesn't have to be retyped.”
“Pretty soon, Herb. Next time I see you. Right now my allergies are bothering me.”
So finally I stopped. He seemed to miss my asking; I wasn't playing by the rules, so he brought it up himself, he would tell me anyway. “I'm having trouble organizing. The story keeps changing. I got a good story going, but… I've got it in geological layers.”
“Geological layers?”
“What I do, my plan of action, when I finish a section and it starts to take off in another direction, is I spread the Plain Dealer for that day over that section—I pick up the paper in the morning at Arabica—so I know when I finished that section, just when it was, a way of keeping things straight, and then I put the next section on top of that, and then when it's done or maybe I'm temporarily stuck, I spread a sheet of paper over that one. It's good to have a system like that, what do you think, Herb? I get going at Arabica, a couple cups of coffee, the Plain Dealer, what a rotten newspaper —”
But there's the date at the top of the page. So when he looked back, he would know when, what year, what day, he stopped, completed, or gave up on a certain line of narrative, sheaf of paper. Later, when his allergies let up, or he finished with some dental work, or this holiday season was over and he felt better, he would get back to it. Finish the section, organize the story, make sure everything was tidy and clear.
It seemed that he never looked back. He carried the feeling in his head, but he didn't reread the geological layers. That would only add to the confusion. The important thing was to keep the line going until it came time to organize it, because organization is important, too. Pretty soon. But when I went to gather up the mass of manuscript, the piles on the long plank table, and the other piles transferred to the floor near his closet, there was dust undisturbed, probably the source of his allergies, and some of the deeper geological layers, written on rough copy paper years ago, were crumbling with the infections of coffee spills, tobacco stains, ants, time passing. I read headlines in the Plain Dealer about Sputnik, Cuba, Viet Nam, and the hair of a mayor of Cleveland that caught fire over a birthday cake.
Sid was the boy that his parents and his older brother tried to push into getting organized, getting an education, getting a job, getting his life in order. (“What're you, a baby?” our mother asked. “So stop dreaming,” our father commanded. “Sid, you've got to start something and then keep at it, little by little, one step at a time,” said the older brother, thinking he was more helpful than parents; he wasn't.) One afternoon on a visit to Cleveland, I went to his apartment to wake him, and he made instant coffee, served in jelly glasses, probably because the cups and other glasses were dirty. He stood stirring the coffee and I resisted saying, Hey, it's dissolved. Somehow he got to talking about the wish to have a wife, a family, a body of work. “You come back here, Herb, and we walk around a lot, go to movies, it's like we're kids again. Then you go back to San Francisco —”
He lifted a glass of coffee to his mouth and winced and I thought he had burned himself. But his face was wet with tears. We were raised in the Midwest, in regular-folks America, where men did not weep (they may have been learning lately). I was startled and confused. My own throat was congested. It was not because
of the dust in the room, our family allergies. His eyes suddenly swollen, he squinted at me, struggled to compose himself, and said, “Don't feel sorry for me, Herb. These are only selfish tears, Herb.”
I was watching a silent earthquake convulse my brother's face. I had seen him cry as a child oppressed by family, by our parents, by me. I had seen him skin his knees and cry. But not since he was ten years old, while I was still saying, “Hey. Hey, watch it there,” when, in my bullying opinion at age twelve, he was doing or not doing whatever he should not have been or should have been doing.
Now he was an old man with a shaggy beatnik beard; the King of the Cleveland Beatniks, who had been memorialized in a comic strip by his friend R. Crumb. It was a beatnik beard flecked in gray, a face sallow and lined, the eyes pressed shut behind thick glasses, the boy he still seemed to me demanding that no attention be paid because these were only selfish tears.
I reached for him and he pulled away.
I wanted to end the long habit of apologies, which he seemed to reserve for me. I had often watched him speak angrily, contemptuously, sarcastically about large, abstract, international matters or local air pollution from what he called “the smokeless foundries that blacken the sky.” With me, he adopted a style of agreeable cajoling when he was not launched into a theory or the history of something. I liked it best when he sat back and recalled adventures, his telling often funny or sharp as he riffed around the point. Sometimes he just stopped or went past the end or people impatiently stopped him before he got there. He unraveled his stories in a slightly raised voice, worried that people had given up listening. At Arabica he usually had a rapt audience, seeking distraction. Sometimes they tired of listening, but he went on anyway—it didn't make much difference. He wasn't skilled at measuring his audience. At family dinners, our mother, still shrewd and bossy at age ninety, would say, “Sid, enough already, we're eating.”
He looked startled and paused for the inevitable: “Sid, you're dropping your food. It goes from the fork to the mouth, no side trips.”
He would swipe at the table with his napkin.
Now the older cohort was gone and the boy was crying and I reached for him. In the Midwest, in our suburb of Cleveland, brothers don't do that. He pulled away and said sharply, almost commandingly: “No! Selfish tears, Herb.”
In the months after he died, his friends from Arabica sent me drawings they had made of him, photographs, even a tape recording of one of his political rants. In the comic strip drawn by R. Crumb, Sid's name was unchanged, the beatnik beard a little less gray than it became, but still looking as if it had been trimmed with toenail scissors. Crumb, working as an artist for American Greetings in Cleveland, had been part of the radical bohemia in the Paris of Northeastern Ohio until he moved first to San Francisco and then to the south of France. An outpost of Arabica philosophers kept the faith in the North Coast, the Great Lake Erie country.
I carried his ashes back to San Francisco. I shipped his manuscript in four large boxes, which stand in a corner of my bedroom. Sometimes I carry one of the boxes into the sunny front room and excavate one geological layer or another. Stuck among the haphazard piles of paper, file folders, and notebooks are old letters from me, some dating back to my Army days during the War. I reread my letters, remembering myself as an eighteen-year-old stranger; I read a geological layer of the novel. The story abruptly shifts from Appalachia to Pittsburgh to Columbus. The plan is not revealed; the people, sometimes vividly evoked, just disappear and give way to new characters.
There are also journals in which he records his daydreams, his disputes with our mother and father, his ambitions. He writes about not sleeping, about sleeping too much, about passing time and not knowing how it has passed. As a freshman at Ohio State University, he describes riding a motorcycle—whose?—into the farm country outside Columbus instead of going to classes. He makes resolutions. He complains about not being able to keep his resolutions. He discusses Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and Faulkner with himself. He promises to get organized. “Weather permitting,” he writes, with an echo of our father's lugubrious humor.
The manuscript (“The Novel”) was stealing his life, his dreams taking over his world; at the same time, The Novel gave him a life, his hope that somehow, someday, he would carve out of this accumulating mass of paper his being in the world. As time went by, it diminished him, the rivulets of fantasy draining down the slope of years. The young man became an old man and remained a boy. He was afflicted with an impatient lyricism that never stopped to say: this much and no more; here's the beginning and here comes the need for an end; and now, wait, there is a way to stop.
After a while, I load the paper back into its box and think to myself: I've got to go at this systematically, try to figure out where something begins and where it ends. When he writes about the weather in Cleveland, I remember our hikes through the snow and our destination to hot chocolate at Clark's on Detroit Avenue; the snow is always new-fallen and white when I remember it. He was the guardian of childhood, the only person who still remembered our lives together in family. Now no one keeps me company in these memories, though his presence keeps flooding back in avalanches of geological layers, a lava flow of discovery, eagerness, hope, pain. I excavate in the California sun and find only more headlines from the Plain Dealer, more geological layers.
Sometimes I talk about him. I tell my children, his nieces and nephews, that he wasn't unhappy, and they tilt their heads and try to figure out why their dad is telling them something they know not to be the case. Okay, so he was unhappy, yes, but within the depression, kids… Let's see how I can explain this. Within the gloom and stasis… no. Within the unhappiness, he took pleasure in the newspaper, gossiping, coffee, his daydreams, his moments of resolute note taking and the clattering bursts of his garage-sale manual typewriter. Bits of envelopes, torn edges of newsprint stuck out of his pockets. Restlessly he gathered and sorted the materials for his geological layers. He never gave up. I love him “like a brother”—what an ambiguous expression that is.
His nephew, my son Ethan, strapped a guitar to his back when we hiked again into the Marin headlands to scatter Sid's ashes on the earth, in a stream, on a hillside. I carried the metal container from the mortuary in Cleveland and each of us reached into it for a handful. I remembered a Bob Dylan song for another loved one, asking for what cannot be given, “One more cup of coffee ’fore I go/To the valley below.”
My daydream was interrupted by Ethan. He unsheathed his guitar and sang the song he had written, with the refrain, “It's okay, Sid. Sid, it's okay.”
I keep a photograph in a place where I pass seldom so that familiarity won't make it invisible. It's from a time before he grew his beard; he is grinning, holding a pipe, poking the air with the pipe, telling a story. He's in command of an audience. The face I see when I remember him is the more recent one, perturbed and gray, his eyes squinting behind heavy glasses, not in command. The autopsy showed many problems—emphysema, arteries clogged, heart swollen, a malignancy. A doctor who interpreted the autopsy report for me said he would probably have died of the brain tumor and, hesitating, added, “You could think of a one-time heart attack as a blessing, if you like.”
But that isn't what I think. I think of my telling him about a book and his saying, “Right, right, I'll get it at the library tomorrow.” I think tomorrow he'll go to Arabica, hold his cup of black coffee (black coffee makes people crazy, our mother insisted), tell stories to his friends, tell a story he has just told once again, shout afterthoughts to the stories, vent opinions, and not know he was dying. He was just gonna get the book I recommended. He was just gonna call or write to me about it. He was just gonna see his travel agent about a ticket for a visit to San Francisco.
In recent years his face was deeply furrowed and I noted wrinkled grooves in his earlobes. I asked my doctor friend: “Was that a sign of heart—I read somewhere—circulation? Arteries?”
He answered: “I bet you have a subscription to Pr
evention with all those postcards so you can order herbal remedies. Keep up the ginkgo biloba, pal, especially if it makes you happy.”
Not that my friend wasn't sympathetic; it's just that he was tired of perpetual seekers.
Sid was presented with gifts of sympathy, humor, understanding, and concern, but what he needed to understand, narrate, laugh about, and care for was too much for him to manage. He emitted opinions, often stubbornly wrong, distracted by his melancholy. He had lost pride. He had found grief early. His life was a long retreat. His sadness grew more intense as time went by. I want to think he never lost hope, although alone one morning, choking on his blood, struggling to sit up, he must have understood that his fifty-year-long unfinished novel was finally done with. The weather didn't permit.
In my bedroom sit these four crates of my brother's life, the uncharted universe of his dreaming. I carry the boxes into a sunnier room and try to read some of the mass of manuscript and then put the papers in their boxes and carry them back into the dark where he still lives in his geological layers.
8
Ghosts
Some marriages are best forgotten but unforgettable. An early first marriage gave me two children; that sums up the good part of it unless I include inoculation against certain future errors. (Not to be mean about it… but when I meet someone who looks, sounds, moves, or in some mysterious way reminds me of that first wife, there is only a blur in the universe as I run like the greatest track champion at the Marital Olympics staged on lovely Mount Agonistes.) I no longer need rage or nightmare starring the mother of the two daughters. Peace be on her soul.
My second wife, the one I loved, gave me three children, gave them to us together. We divorced and then, in an accident, she died. With an effort, I can bring some of our bad times forward in memory, like a recollected movie, but the vivid and lasting part of that marriage is the good and loving times. Her memory is still a treasure.
