The Sorrows of an American

by Siri Hustvedt

  I gave Burton the speech he was expecting: intrusions like his could lead to unhappiness for most of the people involved; amateur sleuthing might take him to places he didn’t really want to go; and perhaps he, too, was “trafficking in private stories” by trailing people without their knowledge. Although he understood me perfectly and acknowledged as much, Burton had come to regard his surreptitious activities through the lens of chivalry. He was on a mission for his Lady. According to that code, it mattered little whether the Lady wanted him or not. He was acting in her name.

  Since it was obvious that Burton hadn’t spoken to Inga, I asked him what he expected me to do with this information, which was sketchy at best.

  “Why,” he said with surprising directness, “whatever you like. I trust you.”

  When our coffee arrived, Burton asked me how Miranda was and said that he had found her “lovely, interesting,” and after several qualifications, arrived at the word “alluring.”

  “Me, too,” I said to him. “But I’m afraid she has no romantic interest in me whatsoever.”

  Burton looked me in the eyes, reached across the small table, and clapped his damp hand on top of mine before he hastily withdrew it.

  “IT’S A QUESTION of censorship,” Ms. W. remarked in her brittle voice. “Maisie says anything that pops into her head, sometimes silly, stupid things, but I see that people listen to her. She smiles and nods and laughs all the time. I stop before I speak and deliberate, but I can tell people find me boring, even though what I’m saying is far more intelligent.”

  “Conversation isn’t just words. It’s often a way of playing freely with another person,” I said. “You stop yourself before you can play.”

  Ms. W.’s hands were folded in her lap. She didn’t speak for several seconds. “A barrier,” she said in a soft voice. “A fence in front of the playground.” She crossed her legs, and I felt a rush of sexual feeling I had never felt for her before. Ms. W. was in her fifties, rather heavy, and had never attracted me. What had happened?

  “One you remember?” I said.

  “I don’t know. I’ve told you that I’ve forgotten so much—hardly anything is there, in childhood, I mean, that’s particular.” She looked tired all of a sudden.

  “I think perhaps you were playing just now, with me. When you mentioned the fence, I felt alive with you, interested, personally involved.”

  Ms. W. blinked. A small smile lifted her mouth at its corners for an instant, then it vanished, and I thought she might be falling asleep. She closed her eyes. I watched her breathe. For some reason, I thought about my father in the yard, sawing boards. Then an image of a barbed-wire fence came to my mind.

  When she opened her eyes, she said, “I’m exhausted.”

  “Sleep keeps you from me in the playground, which is frightening. I’m dangerous right now.”

  “I’m curious about what you say; it seems that there’s something in it, and yet I get confused and then sleepy.”

  “Do you remember you told me that you didn’t like your father to help you with your homework when you were in high school?”

  “He would get too involved.”

  “You’re using the word I used earlier, involved. Maybe today I’m taking the part of your father.”

  She squinted. “It’s also that my mother didn’t like it. She would always come into the room.”

  “She was anxious?”

  I watched as Ms. W. pressed her fingers to her mouth.

  “Both you and your mother felt uncomfortable about your father’s involvement?”

  “He stopped hugging me,” she said, with her eyes closed, her voice cool. “He never hugged me after the seventh grade. He stopped.”

  “I think,” I said, “that your father was protecting you.” I paused, then added, “From his feelings. You were growing up. There was an attraction, and he put up a fence.”

  As she looked at me, I felt an incalculable sadness for all of us. Although her expression remained the same, I saw that her eyes were wet. Then the tears ran down her cheeks in two thin streams. She didn’t hunch over or lift a hand to wipe the tears away. She remained perfectly still, as inert as a statue of the Virgin that suddenly begins to weep in the town square.

  IN A LOW voice over the telephone, Inga said, “Burton was sure, sure it was Edie?”

  “Yes. Do you understand what’s going on?” I asked her.

  “No,” she said slowly. “Henry didn’t mention seeing her for his book.”

  “How would he even know about the letters?”

  “I told him,” Inga said, her voice rising. “I told him. The question is why he didn’t tell me he’d gone to see her.”

  “Maybe he went to her to try to protect you,” I said, “to reason with her.”

  “He said the smart thing was to let it go, that it was possible there were no letters at all, since I’d never seen them. As for her son, he said, short of a DNA test, paternity couldn’t be proved, and they would need Sonia for that. Literary scandals come and go. There’s a brief moment of titillation, and then it’s over. The work is what matters, except in cases of suicide young, then the suicide colors everything. . . .”

  “It sounds rather callous to me,” I said. “He’s talking about your life, after all.”

  “It is,” she said. “But detachment can be comforting.” Inga fell silent.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “I don’t think you should jump to any conclusions, Inga.”

  “Erik?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve been happy. I’ve felt young again after years of feeling old. You know that excitement you get, and it’s hard to eat. You keep thinking about the person, lusting after him, hoping that he really likes you . . .”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I’m afraid it’s about Max.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Henry really loves his work. It’s terribly important to him. We have that in common, and it’s been a pleasure talking to him about it.”

  “And?”

  “What if being close to me is more about Max than it is about me? Sleeping with the widow, you see what I mean?”

  I did, and the thought distressed me. “You’ll have to talk to him.”

  “Yes,” she said, and I heard a small gasp of anguish in her voice.

  Before she hung up, she said, “It’s strange, isn’t it, that Burton just happened to see the two of them in that restaurant, but I guess those things happen.”

  “All the time,” I said. “They happen all the time.”

  FOR A FEW years after the war, veterans inundated the campus of Martin Luther College. War-tough, hard-drinking, often scarred, and years older than the boys and girls who arrived straight from Midwestern farms and cities to embark on their educations, the ex-soldiers took the place by storm. I distinctly remember my father laughing as he told me a story about a night with the boys. A fellow vet, who later became a physics professor, rigged up a pulley system in the rafters of an attic that had been converted into a dormitory for the new breed of students. Bottle of whiskey in one hand, the future author of Contemporary Debates in Science and Religion sailed over his comrades’ heads bellowing like Tarzan. The campus was dry. It’s still dry, but my guess is that the administration feigned blindness when it came to the alcoholic high jinks of its returning heroes. Poker games proliferated, and no doubt more than a few townie broads were smuggled in for midnight trysts.

  Throughout the memoir, my father refers to himself as “a plodder.” For me, clarity about things came only after much effort and even then I had little sense of arrival. I became a repository for facts, details, and trivia. I like to believe that slower learners like myself can make reliable teachers. We understand the ordeals of learning. My own struggles, the difficult moments I would rather have been spared, became useful to me later as a teacher and student advisor. And yet, my father joined an informal seminar of five or six vets,
who read everything from Augustine’s Confessions to Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. He gained a reputation as a wit, was an excellent student, won prizes, was admitted to the honor society, and received a Fulbright grant after graduation. Plodding evokes a man trudging forward in heavy boots. Earthbound. There are weights in us that other people never see.

  I saw Marit with increasing frequency, my father wrote. The year was 1950, and his Fulbright had taken him to Norway. An incident stands out. On one of our dates, Marit wore a shaggy pink sweater that shed like a collie in spring. I must have held her close when we said goodnight, because on the following morning, I discovered that my jacket was all but pink from clinging fibers. During the half hour or so it took me to remove these strands, one by one, there welled up in me an overpowering feeling of tenderness, the kind that swallows you whole and turns you into mush. If I were told that I could only save one memory from my life and all others would have to go, I would choose this one, not so much out of romantic nostalgia, but because the event marked a seminal moment in my life. It pointed forward to our marriage, to the two children we would have together, to the home we founded, and to the joys and sorrows we later shared.

  I imagine my father in a small room, sitting on a chair or the edge of a bed with the jacket on his lap. As he takes the fibers of what was probably angora between his thumb and index finger and flicks them into a wastebasket or gathers them into a ball to discard later, he understands that he is in love. It doesn’t happen while he is looking at the young woman or kissing her, or even as he lies on that same bed thinking about her after the evening is over. It happens the following morning when he discovers that her sweater has mingled with his coat. Together, the garments become the vehicle in a metaphor I suspect my father felt only subliminally. Hidden behind the “all but pink” overcoat is the promise of two passionate bodies, one inside the other. As an old man he will remember the intensity of his feeling and understand that a turn was made in that moment. I think there were many things my father regretted, rightly or wrongly, but not that half hour spent alone in his room in Oslo with a linty jacket.

  BY THE TIME I arrived for Eggy’s play, the folding chairs had all been filled and I stood at the back of the room near the door. Before The Mitten, I watched The Maple Leaf, a production that included six feminine cardboard leaves prancing about the room “fluttering” and “falling,” and one badly confused male leaf who continually hissed into what would have been wings if they had been performing on a stage, “Do I do it now? Now?” When the cue came at last from a woman sitting off to the side (long gray hair, wire-rimmed glasses, forehead wrinkled into a permanent expression of concern), the hapless leaf thudded to the floor, his face awash with relief at having completed his theatrical mission. Eggy’s play, following the logic of seasonal change, came next. A little blond girl, heavily overdressed for the early June day in a snowsuit, skipped across the stage waving two red mittens in her hands. Then she casually let one of them fall to the floor. I understood that the highly calculated gesture was meant to be an inadvertent one, because a moment later Eggy, in a large red-knit costume that covered her entirely—except for her ankles, her feet, and her intense little face sticking out of a hole—waddled in, placed her sneaker directly on the small mitten to hide it from view, and launched into her soliloquy. With one arm straight out to provide the necessary protuberance of a very large thumb, she faced her audience and began her speech. “Woe to the mitten,” she exclaimed in a surprisingly commanding voice. “Woe to the mitten that has lost its mate.” She paused and wailed, “Woe! Woe!” Eyes to the ceiling, arm cum thumb beating her breast, Eglantine bemoaned her sorry fate. Her tortured expression shifted to one of ineffable joy when Bundled Blonde reappeared, waving a small version of Eggy herself. Thunderous applause, considerable laughter, and a couple of whistles were then heard from the gathered audience of highly appreciative relatives and friends.

  After the winter drama, I watched The Tulip and The Sprinkler, and located Miranda in the audience near the front. When I identified the back of her head, I felt a flash of excitement, followed instantly by agitation. Why had I come? When the leaves, water drops, tulips, mitten owner, and mitten had taken their final bows and the applause subsided, the room erupted into noisy and chaotic congratulations. Lilliputian thespians squealed, shouted, and ran. I watched Miranda embrace Eggy and was able to pick out the child’s grandparents, a corpulent man with pale skin, a scattering of moles on his face, and the grandmother, as tall as her husband, but slender, darker-skinned, and dressed in an elegant tunic of some kind. Some of the others who hugged Eggy must have been Miranda’s sisters and their husbands. A baby with wild hair, who I gathered belonged to the family, was happily using the chairs as props to cruise up and down a row. No Lane, however, and his absence made me momentarily glad. Eggy spotted me then. “I told Mom you’d come!”she called out, her mouth stretching into a wide smile. Introductions were made. I noticed that Miranda’s father had a strong handshake and her mother’s low voice was attractive. The three sisters were not as pretty as Miranda, to my mind, but all seemed affable. Although we had exchanged polite, easy kisses before, that afternoon I shook Miranda’s hand good-bye. The presence of her family acted as a mysterious constriction. “You may be raising an actress,” I said to her. With Miranda, I inevitably fell into banalities. The more I wished to charm, the more my wits failed me, and the more I regretted my dullness. She smiled graciously, however, and in a near whisper said, “Ham might be more accurate.”

  On the sidewalk, Eggy gave me a casual wave. Miranda smiled, nodded, and turned around. In the heat her skirt, made of some thin material, clung to her buttocks and was caught between her thighs. An instant later, I saw her snatch at the skirt with both hands, and my glimpse of a veiled paradise vanished. I watched as she went with the rest of the Casaubon clan to various vehicles parked somewhere in the neighborhood. They were off to a family dinner. Chilean sea bass had been mentioned, and a cricket game on cable television. As I watched them leave, I suffered a feeling of exile, and when I turned away, I realized I didn’t want to go home, so I made my way to the park. As I walked, I remembered sitting on the bench game after game, remembered finally getting my chance, rushing onto the court and being so rattled I gave up the ball. I remembered my parents’ sympathetic faces, the cold taunts of my teammates, the heat of humilation. I thought of that asshole Kornblum’s attack on my paper at the Brain and Mind Conference, his refusal to engage me, his patient, condescending tone as he pointed out my “errors.” I remembered Genie telling me she couldn’t stand the sight of my body anymore. “I’m fucking Allan. It’s time you knew. Everyone else does.” I walked fast and hard, first on the road and then on paths into the woods, my fury and bitterness rising with every step. It wasn’t until I had walked for an hour that I thought of my father and his fugues. I know how strongly you identify with your father. My step slowed then. I changed direction. My anger turned into dull misery. When I returned to Garfield Place, I opened my notebook and began to write. I wrote for close to an hour, moving from subject to subject. The last thing I recorded was a memory I hadn’t thought about for a long time.

  I’m back on the farm and it’s summer. Inga and I are in the crawl space above the garage. I don’t think we’d ever been up there before, nor did we ever go again. Just that once. Light is coming from somewhere. A small window, its glass opaque with mire. We find an old trunk covered with a thick layer of dust the color of charcoal. I pull open the leather straps, then the lid. Inside is a brown jacket made of stiff, heavy cloth. It feels rough against my fingers. I lift it up and first see the stripes on the sleeve, then the medals pinned to its front. I know it’s my father’s uniform from the war, and I feel a quiver of pride. We climb down with the treasure and run past the grape arbor and the apple trees with the jacket between us, each holding the end of an empty sleeve as if it were a headless companion. We yell for our father. “Look what we’ve found! Look, Pappa, look!” An
d then our father is standing in front of us. I lift my eyes to his face and am startled to see that he’s angry.

  “Put it back,” he barks at us. “Right now!”

  “But the medals,” I managed to say. “What about the medals?”

  But there is no familiar softening in the face, no tender smile. This is another father. He repeats the order, and we walk back to the garage. O Day Full of Grace.

  THAT WEDNESDAY WHEN I left the office, my head was full of patients. Ms. L. had been more talkative. “Some days, it’s like I don’t have any skin. I’m all raw and bleeding.” This comment had helped me. I had talked to her about following a metaphor. No skin, no barrier, no protection. The borders are important. I mentioned the rag doll, too, as a good metaphor for her mother’s neglect. “She couldn’t recognize you as a whole separate person with needs and desires of your own, someone with a real inside.” Ms. L. had wanted to hug me at the end of the session, but I said it wasn’t a good idea, and after she had delivered a few barbs about the stupid rules of therapy, she aquiesced. I was thinking, too, of the eight-year-old boy I had interviewed that day. He had not spoken to any adults except his mother and father for two years. Although he did his homework, he never answered his teachers or any grown-up friends of the family. He didn’t speak to me, either. He shook his head, nodded, grinned, or glowered, his mouth clamped tightly shut. When I asked him to draw a self-portrait, he etched a tiny figure in the corner of the page with a straight line for a mouth crossed by short ragged strokes of the crayon that reminded me of barbed wire. I was thinking about that mouth when I heard a voice behind me. “Hey, Dr. Davidsen.”