The Sorrows of an American

by Siri Hustvedt

  As we walked, Miranda told me her family had moved to New York after her uncle died. Her father and his younger brother had been in business together, and his death had been a terrible blow to her father, who had a sister in London, and another brother in Jamaica, but he had never been as close to them as to “Uncle Richard.” When she said his name, Miranda lowered her voice and turned her face away from me. Her father had sold the business and started over in Brooklyn, where he had a number of connections in the Jamaican community. The family bought a large Victorian house in Ditmas Park, where her parents still lived. Miranda’s paternal great-grandparents had both been active in the Pan-African movement and had known Marcus Garvey. It was obvious that Miranda was proud of them, especially her greatgrandmother Henrietta Casaubon. “She was very light skinned, and in those days that was status. She was well educated and got a degree in history—very pretty, too,” she said. “Then she met my great-grandfather, George, who was full of big ideas about black identity, and well, she became enlightened. I guess he ran after women, though, and the marriage wasn’t all that happy. They lived in Harlem for a while but ended up back in Jamaica. My father told me that when they were in New York, Henrietta had a first cousin she couldn’t visit because she was ‘passing.’ ”

  Eggy eventually grew tired, and I carried her several blocks on my shoulders as she gripped my chin with her hands and I held firmly onto her legs. After a while, she pressed her cheek against my head and began to sing in a small soft voice, “Oh, doctor Erik, he was a berik, deedle doo, bah, bah, loo, ferdle foo, ferdle foo, ferdle foo.” The ferdle foos then dropped off to a thin high hum with pauses in between.

  Reluctant to let them go, I persuaded them to share some food with me. We ordered from a Thai restaurant, and I realized that I liked the way Miranda ate. As she chewed patiently, she would look up at me with those dramatic eyes of hers and listen so intently that I became conscious of every word I uttered. After we had settled Eggy in front of a video of Singin’ in the Rain, she asked me about my work.

  “Why did you quit your job at the hospital?”

  “It was hard,” I said. “Long hours. One crisis after another. The bureaucracy got worse, and the care got worse. The insurance business. They don’t let people stay anymore. They throw them out too quickly. I also made less money than I do now.” And, I thought to myself, Sarah.

  I can’t say this word to you. I can’t say it because it’s forbidden and it makes no sense. I’ve written the word on paper. I look down at the word. Sarah had written the pronoun I.

  “Are you all right?” Miranda asked gently.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You probably think Jeff’s as crazy as your patients, but I don’t believe that. When he was sending the pictures, I was upset, but the fact is he was always working on some nutty project. He’s got a million photographs plastered all over the walls. He’d wipe out a nose or an object and replace it with something else. He’s followed lots of people around, taking their pictures and then manipulating the results. He’d say, ‘I’m remaking the world.’ ” Miranda looked past me toward the kitchen.

  I put my hand on hers. She glanced down at it and then tugged her fingers out from under mine. The song “Make ’Em Laugh” rang forth from the next room, and I wondered if Eggy had turned up the volume. Miranda looked at me and said, “I can’t tell you how grateful I am for your kindness to me and Eglantine.” I heard the return of the old formality in her voice and diction, and I looked away. “You’ve been wonderful.” My whole body hardened as she continued, and although I listened to her, I felt a part of me escape and leave the two of us behind. I was waiting for the word I knew was coming, and it did. “Your friendship is important to me. I don’t want to lose you as a friend, but things are very complicated for me now.” Miranda spoke at some length, but I don’t remember much of what she said after that because none of it mattered. I was being ordered into retreat, and as I sat there across from her, pretending to hear her words, I looked at the white boxes of half-eaten pork with basil and curried chicken and a lump of sticky rice left on Eggy’s plate, which she had shaped into a ball, and was vaguely aware of the song reaching its crescendo: “Make ’em laugh, make ’em laugh, make ’em laugh!” The pain just beneath my ribs arrived, dull and familiar, and an archaic word came back to me, dolor, from the Latin. Dolorous, I thought, dolorous Dr. Davidsen. After the two of them had left me, and I threw away the boxes and was scraping the dishes, I remembered a story my father once told me about a relative of ours, a Sjur Davidsen, who left Bergen, Norway, in 1893. My father had some letters the man had written to my grandparents, but in 1910 he stopped writing. My father tracked down one of Sjur’s nephews, wrote to him, and received a reply. In 1911, Sjur Davidsen had taken his own life in Minot, North Dakota. “They said the reason was kvinnesorg,” my father told me. Literally, the word means woman-grief.

  I DROVE MY mother to the airport. For a good part of the trip, she talked lightly about her return to Minnesota, the small apartment that was waiting for her, and various friends she looked forward to seeing again. We were silent for some time after that. Then she asked me what I knew about Henry, and after I said “Next to nothing,” she nodded thoughtfully.

  “Miranda has beautiful manners,” she said.

  “Yes, she does.”

  “Refined.”

  “Yes,” I said, looking at my mother and wondering where she was going. My mother’s thoroughly bourgeois childhood in Norway had made her ever sensitive to the nuances of social comportment.

  “It can be difficult,” she said.

  “Are you talking about the fact that Miranda is black?” I said.

  My mother turned to me and smiled. “That,” she said, “and the fact that she has a child from her first marriage and that from her I felt some . . .” She paused and picked her word. “Ambivalence.”

  She didn’t need to say “toward you.” I felt a pang of hurt pride mixed with irritation at my mother’s overly delicate reference to race. I also noticed that I didn’t correct her about the first marriage. We fell silent again.

  The traffic was moving well, but then, not long before the exit to LaGuardia, the cars slowed and, as we inched along, she said, “You know it took me a whole year to get the visa I needed to travel to the United States so I could marry your father.”

  “I remember,” I said.

  “I hadn’t seen Lars for a long time.” My mother fingered the purse she held in her lap. “When I came down the gangplank, he was there waiting. He walked up to me, and I looked into his face, and it was as if I didn’t really know him, as if he were a stranger to me. I can’t tell you how disturbing it was, Erik. But then your father started talking to me and gesturing with his hands, and all of a sudden, he was the same, dear Lars again.”

  “How long did it last—the period of not recognizing him?”

  “Well, I recognized him, of course, but it wasn’t him somehow. I don’t know. It was very brief, not even a minute, maybe just seconds, but I’ve never forgotten it.”

  When we parted outside the security check, my mother gave me a single strong hug and then looked me in the eyes. “Erik,” she said in a low, tender voice, “I’d cast a spell on her if I could,” and then she turned around, placed her purse and shoes on the conveyer belt, and waited for the uniformed woman to wave her through the arch.

  DESPITE THE JOY of coming home, my father wrote, I lived through a summer of pervasive discontent. I was homesick at home. I missed army life, not only my circle of friends, but the camaraderie that only military service can give. I missed the rough-and-tumble character of our daily life, the boisterous and good-natured banter that went with it, a pattern of working hard and playing hard without mixing the two. I had come to like military order and regimentation as long as it was fair. I even liked army over-kill when it came to maintenance of quarters, gear, equipment, and weapons. I found civilian life, my own home included, to be slipshod, and at times, chaotic.
r />   My father spent a good portion of the summer of 1946 chopping down trees. It began with a conversation between my grandfather and a neighbor. Old Larsen had said that a number of trees were dying on his property, and my father offered to buy some of those trees as standing timber. We met the next morning and marked those that would be mine, magnificent oldsters that shot up forty feet before the branch. The oak trees came to four dollars each. Basswood, a soft wood, went for three. Cutting timber is not proper summer work. The woods are hot and humid with little movement of air and mosquitoes and gnats are ever about. My tools were a crosscut saw, an ax, a maul, and a set of iron wedges. Save for help from Father and Fredrik in felling the trees, I worked alone. I savored the solitude of this work and I had endless energy that demanded use. I recall the satisfaction of going to bed physically worn. A one-man crosscut saw will do that to you. Unlike the twoman saw, you have to provide both the push and the pull.

  I remember my father behind me, his hands over mine as we lifted the ax together and then brought it down squarely onto a log, which split along the grain into even halves. Later, I learned to chop wood alone under my father’s watch. After a while, my arms would ache and my whole body would grow tired, but I never told him. And he was right: there was pleasure in hitting the mark just right and seeing the log fall open before you. I can see him now, smiling as the sweat pours down his face, his shirt rolled up above his elbows, his hands on his hips as he surveys the mounting woodpile. “Looking good, Erik, looking good.”

  Alone in the woods, the former sergeant thrust and heaved with his one-man cross-cut. He hacked and smote the bark of dying trees, his towering opponents in a game of emotional necessity. He had no idea what he was going to do with the lumber, but felling those oaks and basswood served a purpose beyond utility: work as exorcism. It was Uncle Fredrik who told me that he had no idea what my father had been through during the war until one night his brother rammed his fists through the ceiling tiles in his room while he was asleep. Fredrik didn’t elaborate, but I suspect my father’s devils were legion. Some had entered him in the Pacific, but there were others, too. After he had assured that half-assed military psychiatrist at Fort Snelling that he liked girls, he may have thought that he was leaving the old demons behind him forever. It may have been the place that brought them howling back, the sight of the tiny house and the sagging, empty barn “out home.”

  THE ACHE I’D felt during Miranda’s speech didn’t leave me. I understood that I had projected myself into a future that included her and Eggy, and without that imaginary time-yet-to-come, I was cast into the far bleaker mode of the loveless present. In the morning I woke to a cloud, and although it usually lifted when I was with my patients, I knew that I had entered a period of what in medical jargon is called anhedonia: joylessness. I was aware, too, that my response to Miranda’s declaration couldn’t be extricated from my father’s death, a death I felt I had insufficiently mourned. My scrutiny of his memoir and my daily jottings about the man were clearly forms of grief, but there was something missing in me, too, and that absence had turned into agitation. My nights were bad. Like a man possessed, I listened to myriad voices clamoring for room inside my head, a fragmented inner speech accompanied by images, which inevitably became more disjointed as I entered the borderland between wakefulness and sleep. One night, I saw a figure like my mother’s alone in the old house and then walking near the creek, her slender body striding ahead with determination, but then she slowed and began to weave on the path. I’d cast a spell on her if I could. How did she know? No one knows why we sleep or why we dream. I know you will never say nothing about what happened. It can’t matter now she’s in heaven or to the ones on earth. The words of Lisa’s letter plagued me, as if I were somehow involved, responsible. Sometimes, as I felt myself finally drift toward sleep, I would hear my father cough, a sound as unmistakable as his voice, and it would jolt me back to consciousness. An everchanging host of erotic phantasms kept me up as well, obedient bawds invented to relieve the sexual pressure I felt, tight as the straps on a straitjacket. But as my masturbatory lust soared, the figments would inevitably begin to resemble Miranda, and my imaginary copulations with her stand-in weren’t gentle, but hard and angry, and afterward, bitterness and guilt would settle in my chest like a cold iron bar. And so, one anxious thought climbed onto the next. I worried about Lane and thought I heard his footsteps on the roof. I dreamed I found a camera near my bed, and when I opened its back, it leaked blood and mucus all over my hands as if it were an injured animal. I worried about my sister and the unknown woman in the park, and wondered about Henry. The man’s eyes were hawklike. He was writing a book on Max. I think it’s about Dad. Max’s characters, Rodney Fallensworth, Dorothea Stone, Mrs. Hedgewater, and the clown, Green Man, fell under suspicion during my nighttime fits, as if they were fictional clues. I remembered the strange narrative of A Man at Home and wondered if Horace’s lost family concealed its author’s secret wish or dread. I saw Arkadi’s fingers forming words in Into the Blue as if the signs were a hidden message. What had Inga been looking for when she watched the film? What did that redheaded journalist with her shameful grin think she knew? I saw Sarah crawl out her mother’s window and watched her fall twelve stories as if I had been there to witness it. Then her mother, distraught and screaming in my office, “You were the one who released her! You killed her!” the stiffly coiffed hair motionless despite her hysterical gesturing. Ms. L.’s voice: a battering ram. My fear. Peter Fowler’s voice, his hand on my back. “Carbamazepine, buddy, helps with the anger.” Highhanded, self-important pharmacology Fowler. “Gotta keep up, Davidsen. New stuff on BPD coming every day.” My fist ramming his jaw. The man’s head hitting a wall and the fantasy giving relief as bits and pieces of articles would run through my head: “affect dysregulation, identity disturbance.” Neutrality, I thought. What does it mean? Another lie. Mr. T. channeling his revelations: “Derailed. I failed. She bailed. He’s afraid. Can’t make the grade.” And Ms. L.: “How can you believe in this therapy crap? I mean, it’s so stupid, sitting here watching you. You really think you’re something, don’t you?” I imagine her on the floor, my hands gripping her wrists. I hate you.

  In short, my nights became wrestling matches with myself, and I felt the strong lure of pharmacological oblivion: zolpidem—to sleep fast. I had taken it on occasions when I traveled to Europe for conferences, and the drug not only eliminated the wait for sleep, it banished the experience of sleep: no dim waking in the middle of the night, no sense of rising up out of a dream, no shrouded awareness of my body in the bed. The pill’s uncanny ability to shut me down for seven hours, a quality I had always mistrusted, now gleamed like a tiny, white promise of paradise.

  “MOM’S NOT HOME,” Sonia said over the telephone. “I’m really worried, Uncle Erik. It’s not like her. It’s nine o’clock. There was no note for me, no nothing. She’s not answering her cell phone. I’ve been home since six, just waiting and calling.”

  “Are you sure she didn’t mention a meeting or a dinner or something and you just forgot?”

  “No!” I could hear Sonia breathing loudly. “Maybe she’s hurt somewhere or got mugged. And then there’s that woman.”

  “What woman?”

  “That stupid journalist, Linda Somethingburger.”

  “The redhead?”

  “Yes. She’s been calling. The other day I overheard Mom say, ‘I have nothing to say to you. I’ve told you that many times.’ She sounded so rattled, and she looked so white afterward.” Sonia paused. “That night, I heard Mom talking to someone else in her bedroom, a long talk. She kept her voice down, but I could hear she was upset, and she’s been weird, distracted, writing like crazy, tiring herself out, and not really asking me about my work or anything. Something’s going on, something bad.” After another pause, Sonia said, “Uncle Erik, can you come over? You can go to your office from here, can’t you? I’ll make up the bed for you. I’m so scared something’s happened. I’m
going crazy.”

  I found Sonia in her pajamas walking back and forth in the large front room of the loft, which smelled of cigarette smoke and air freshener. The coffee table was littered with books, papers, orange peels, gum wrappers, and loose change. It wasn’t lost on me that for the second time I found myself waiting for someone’s mother to come home. I did my best to reassure Sonia, but I, too, was worried. Inga was responsible, never careless about time, and she was diligently protective of her daughter. It made no sense.

  “Maybe she’s with Henry,” I said.

  Sonia made a face.

  “You don’t like him?”

  “He’s okay. I already called, and she’s not there.”

  Sonia left several messages for Inga. She turned on the television, and we absently watched as greatly magnified earwigs wandered across the screen and a male voice droned on about their marvels. Sonia was twisting her hair at an alarming rate, and after searching through hundreds of channels and finding nothing we considered even remotely entertaining, I asked her if she would consider reading her poem to me. At first she balked, saying she couldn’t concentrate, that she was too nervous, but then she relented, and after explaining that she was still editing, that she wasn’t sure of every stanza, a very important one hadn’t been written yet, and that she had chosen a constrictive form in order to see if she could do it, she picked up a small sheaf of papers from the coffee table and began to read to me in a clear voice.