The Sorrows of an American

by Siri Hustvedt

  I turned around and was startled to see Jeffrey Lane standing behind me on the sidewalk. A combination of surprise and alarm caused me to freeze for an instant in silence. Then, in a cold voice, I said, “We’ve met.”

  He smiled, and I noticed that he was handsome. His black hair had been cut so that it stuck out in little spikes, a sign of the affected nonchalance the fashionable have and probably always have had in one form or another. He had a narrow face and clear tanned skin, and his teeth as he smiled at me had a gleaming bleached quality that reminded me of people on television. His arms, exposed by his gray T-shirt, had seen many hours in a gym. Looking at him made me feel huge and puny at once. “Sorry about that,” he said. “You left your fly open, so to speak. The temptation was too strong.”

  “Is there something you have to say?” I asked.

  “Yes.” He nodded. “There is. I want to invite you to my show. Family photographs. That’s the theme. It should be interesting material for a shrink. DID. That’s an acronym you throw around, isn’t it? Dissociative identity disorder, used to be multiple personality. My pictures are DID. It’s not for some time yet, but I wanted to make sure you put it down in your calendar, so you don’t miss it. November eighth at the Minot Gallery on West Twenty-fifth Street.”

  I said nothing for a second and then, “It’s June.”

  “I know, but guys like you are busy, right?”

  I stared at him.

  Lane tilted his head to one side. “I’m not kidding. I really want you to come. I apologize for scaring you that night. Really and truly, I didn’t mean to. I thought I could get in and see her.” He paused. “She’s my kid.” After another second, he reiterated, “She’s my kid.”

  “There are other ways of seeing one’s child besides breaking into people’s houses in the middle of the night,” I said. Every word I uttered sounded alien, as if someone else were speaking.

  “Not then there wasn’t.” Lane seemed earnest now. He had completely dropped his bantering tone, and it threw me off guard. Before I knew it, he had grabbed my arm. “I want you to talk to Miranda,” he said, gripping my shirtsleeve. “She admires you. She’ll listen to you.”

  “Talk to her about what?” I asked, shaking my arm loose.

  “About me, my rights. My life depends on it.”

  “I can recommend a family therapist. A mediator.”

  Lane groaned. “Come on,” he said. “You don’t have to play Mr. Expert here. I’ve seen you with her. I’ve photographed you, man. You’re an open book.” He stopped for a moment to collect his thoughts. “How do you think it feels to watch another man hanging out with my kid?” I noticed that Lane had rolled up onto his toes and then back onto his heels a couple of times as he spoke.

  I felt my fist grip my briefcase more tightly. “That’s for you to take up with her.” An image of the two of them on the sidewalk pulsed through my head.

  “You like black girls? Pretty exotic, huh, for a white-bread guy like you? You’re not really her type, though, sorry to say, a little on the tame side.” He drawled the word tame and rolled up on his toes again. “She’s a real banshee in bed.” He smiled. “And I say that as a one-eighth Native American.”

  My feeling of disgust during his first two sentences was followed by a burst of rage at the third, and before I knew it, I had lifted my right hand, briefcase and all, in a gesture of threat.

  Lane laughed. I lowered my arm, my face hot. I turned and began to stride toward the subway thinking, I wish I had decked him. I wish I had decked him.

  THE GROUND WAS frozen solid when my father died, so we waited to bury his ashes until my planned vacation in June, when I could stay for a while with my mother, Inga, and Sonia. All my patients had been notified well in advance. For a few of them, my absences were harrowing. As we drove south on 35W from the Minneapolis airport, I looked at the green fields on either side of me and thought, by August they’ll be turning yellow. The sun will scorch this landscape of corn and alfalfa fields. It happens every year, and then I imagined the snow—the white world of my childhood winters. Sonia slept in the back seat. I could see her face in the rearview mirror, soft and childlike in her nap. Inga leaned back in the passenger’s seat beside me, her eyes closed. She had learned to drive at the age of thirty-six but rarely took the wheel. Too nervous in traffic, she explained, and therefore too slow. I like driving. The vibration of the tires moving under me brought memories of early freedom, the days when, with a new license in my pocket, I’d take the back roads to nowhere, cruising aimlessly until I started worrying about the gas I was wasting. Some sadness accompanied this vague reminiscence. I wasn’t recalling a particular drive but dozens of them from my adolescence, and I suppose the longing and pathos of that time mingled with the release and pleasure I had found in my junk Chevy, bought for two hundred dollars, which I had earned at the Red Owl carrying groceries one long, sweltering summer. Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened.

  As I drove, I realized that the countryside beyond the windshield belonged to my father more than to me. He never really left it, couldn’t leave it. It wasn’t my mother’s landscape. She adopted a small part of what was there, the creek behind our house, the woods with its stones and moss and underbrush, and the bloodroot, bluebells, and violets that came up in the wet earth every spring. All this became intimate, but the fields with their endless rows that met the horizon under an immense sky held no real meaning for her. How does one love so much blankness?

  I’m not sure why I remembered the story at that moment. It might have been an awareness of my mother’s estrangement when she left the ship and for a few moments looked at a person she didn’t know, but the old man came to mind. I was sitting on the floor not far from the wood stove, looking up at his brown, wrinkled face with its prominent white stubble from cheek to chin. He was telling a story slowly in a telegraphic style, not to me but to the adults who were sitting in the room. I’ve lost a clear picture of who was there. “Couldn’t take no more was what they said. Went out of her mind two days after the funeral. Didn’t believe Hans was Hans.”

  “What are you thinking about, Erik?” My sister’s voice broke this reverie.

  “A story about a woman out here in the country, the grandmother or great-aunt of one of the neighbors. I think it was Hiram Flekkestad who told it that day. I couldn’t have been more than ten, but I’ve thought about it for years. When I asked Grandma about it, she explained that the woman broke down after she buried her third baby. She thought her husband wasn’t her husband, that he looked exactly like him but wasn’t him, that she was living with an imposter. In medical school, I discovered that it had a name—Capgras’s syndrome.”

  Inga shook her head. “I never knew such a thing existed.” She took a breath. “You’d think I’d remember that story, but I don’t.”

  “It’s probably a disconnection between the neural circuits for face recognition and the ones for emotion, so people recognize family members but don’t have the feeling about them they used to. They can’t make sense of what’s missing and explain it by saying the people are fakes.”

  My sister squinted as she looked straight ahead. “If I didn’t feel what I feel when I saw you, you’d be someone else. It would be horrible. It would mean that I’d lost the memory of loving you.”

  “That’s it exactly,” I said, and then, as we turned off the highway and took the road into town, Inga looked to her right through the window and said, “It’s all so familiar, it’s strange.”

  THE ANDREWS HOUSE had once been a hotel for men only. Its residents had remained largely unseen by the general population, but when they did appear on Division Street during my boyhood, they had seemed oddly interchangeable: unshaven, shuffling old geezers with stained pants and farmer hats that hid their vacant eyes. The building had since been renovated in a style that Inga called “Midwestern Tc
hotchke,” a décor that included silk flowers in crockery, embroidered pillows, liberal use of doilies, and paintings of wide-eyed children in nineteenth-century garb hugging dogs. As I sat down on the canopy bed in my room and stared at the flowered bedspread, I felt a sudden wave of dizziness. I lowered my head and waited for it to pass.

  “Oh my God, Uncle Erik!” Sonia was standing in the door. She threw her head back and laughed, her eyes bright with hilarity. “You think you’re going to fit in that bed?”

  Inga appeared beside her, glanced at the bed, and frowned. “Poor Erik, your feet will stick out.”

  Buoyed by sleep, Sonia danced across the room. She rolled her hips and waved her hands above her head, gestures that reminded me of a dancer in old Hollywood’s faux version of the exotic. As I watched her, still recovering from my wooziness, Sonia laughed again, stopped in front of the small window, and, with her nose against the pane, peered down on Division Street. “You know, I can’t believe you actually grew up here,” she said in an awed voice. Then she turned around to face us. “I mean, what did you do?”

  That was how our two weeks in Minnesota began, but my thoughts were back in New York. I had told Miranda about Lane’s appearance outside the hospital and that he had wanted me to intervene on Eggy’s behalf. With some awkwardness, I also managed to blurt out that I had found his manner “alienating.” Alienating? It had been despicable. But I knew that under my inhibition was a reluctance even to paraphrase his racial comments. Lane seemed to believe that by citing his fraction of nonwhite blood, he gained some right to speak that I didn’t have. He had also borrowed a racist notion to humiliate me, namely that “people of color” were sexually more potent than white-bread types like me, and I had risen to the bait. I remembered a story Magda once told me about Horace Cayton, a black sociologist, who had been in analysis with Helen V. McLean in Chicago. He had chosen McLean because she was a woman and because she had a withered arm, qualities that would help her understand his “handicap.” After five years of analysis, Cayton, who had struggled with the idea of race as a rationalization or excuse for personal inadequacy, came to feel instead that it had penetrated his very core. Pernicious ideas can become us. As I thought it over, I began to feel that I should have told Miranda everything Lane had said, that my withholding wasn’t only about protecting her but about my own cowardice, a quality that ironically supported Lane’s accusation that I was too “tame” for her.

  Some days after The Mitten, but before I spoke to Miranda, Eggy had been reunited with her father. Miranda said that at first her daughter had whispered, “That’s not him,” and fell silent. After he left, however, she had leapt around the room beating the air with her jump rope like an avenging Fury and had refused to go to bed. Eggy had no doubt expected someone else, the flying paternal creature of her drawing or the person stuck in a box, but not the man who came to the apartment. Miranda told me that Eggy had bad dreams, and more nights than not she would come crawling into her mother’s bed. “Maybe you could talk to her,” she had said, “as a doctor.” A dry feeling had come over me then—a sense of remoteness and renewed melancholy. “I can’t do that, but I can recommend someone I know.” Miranda’s inner life was far more tumultuous than I had imagined, and the morass of emotions she obviously felt for Lane had leaked into Eggy, who had to struggle with the belated appearance of a real, not imaginary father. And yet, I didn’t want to be their psychiatrist in residence. Twelve hundred miles from New York City, I continued to dream of Miranda. I imagined her mouth opening to mine, saw her naked body lying on my bed, and made furious love to her phantom double every night. The real Miranda was someone else. Before we said good-bye, I wrote down the names of two colleagues, both of whom worked in family therapy. As I handed the paper to her, I knew that I might as well have put on my white coat. She took the card between her long fingers and, without saying a word, looked me in the eyes. I saw more pain in her face than I had ever seen before.

  “I KNEW,” MY mother said, “because I heard the nurses talking in the hallway outside my room. I heard them say, ‘The foreign girl’s baby is in trouble.’ ”

  “They called you the foreign girl?” Sonia said. “I thought this town was full of Norwegians.”

  “Not real Norwegians,” I said. “They don’t speak the language anymore. They’re not foreigners.”

  “Still,” Sonia insisted. “You’d think they could have called her the Norwegian girl. Can you imagine anybody in New York saying something like that?”

  “In New York City,” I said, “almost half the population was born in another country. You’d have to call every other person a foreigner.”

  “I thought I was going to lose you,” my mother said to Inga. After a moment of silence, she continued, “Lars just shut off while we waited to find out if you would live or die.”

  My mother’s idioms sometimes wandered. Did we say shut off in English?

  “He couldn’t really do much for me, or even talk about it. It was like he disappeared.” I watched my mother’s neck move slightly as she swallowed.

  The story of Inga’s birth and near demise had come up around ten o’clock that first evening as we sat in my mother’s apartment and talked. Not long before we left for the hotel, Inga brought up Lisa and the note. She did it casually, as if she hadn’t been keeping it to herself for months. She told my mother that through Rosalie she had discovered that Walter Odland had moved to a nursing home and that we planned to talk to him there. Rosalie Geister was one of Inga’s oldest friends. Her family had run the funeral home in town for three generations, and she was now director of the business. Her mother came from Blue Wing, and she had promised to help look into the story of Lisa.

  My mother shook her head. “I don’t know anything about it. There were several suicides out there. Maybe that’s what this girl wanted to hide. The truth is they talked a lot about this person and that one, as if I should know which neighbor was which, but mostly I didn’t. Sometimes their words blew right through my ears. They were very good to me, your grandmother and grandfather, but it was a closed circle. Lars was different when he was with his family. It was as if he went back in time, the way he talked. Even his manners changed.”

  “When you met, Mamma,” Inga said, “did Pappa tell you about his family and the lost farm, about the Depression, their poverty?”

  Even before my mother spoke, I knew the answer by looking at her face. The handsome, articulate young American Marit Nodeland met at the University of Oslo after the war hadn’t told her much about the farm in Goodhue County, Minnesota, or much about his childhood, and what he had told her didn’t emphasize its sorrows.

  After we said good night to my mother, we walked down the silent corridor of the retirement center. A lone woman with a walker moved steadily toward us. When we passed, she smiled and nodded. “Davidsen children, aren’t you?” We agreed that we were, and then I suddenly remembered my father sitting on the edge of my bed, his fingers gently pressed against my forehead and the lilt in his softly accented voice, “Morning, my boy. It’s morning.”

  AS A WARM wind blew through the window of Inga’s fussy but comfortable room in the Andrews House, she told me the story of Edie Bly. After Into the Blue, the film roles Edie had hoped for didn’t materialize, but she was still young and promising and had whirled around the city’s nightspots in a toxic haze of legal and illegal drugs, juggling lovers, losing friends, and making hundreds of acquaintances. Edie told Inga that she had been a “little fool,” but at the time she had loved her power, loved men’s eyes on her, loved the kick of it all. This was when she “carried on” with Max, meeting him on the fly for sex in hallways, in elevators, on rooftops, but their affair hadn’t been without its troubles. Max had put up with a lot, Edie said. She ditched him at the last minute, called him for money at his studio, and told him endless sob stories to excuse her drinking and drugging. My brother-in-law had scolded her about her habits, which shows that there are degrees in all things. After a
year, fed up and bored with her aging lover, Edie cut their tie and moved in with a jazz guitarist in his late twenties. Her personal revolution arrived the day she woke up on the floor outside his apartment lying in her own vomit and later that week discovered she was two months pregnant. With help from “Mr. Jazz” and her parents in Cleveland, she had gone off to High Watch Farm for her twelve steps, where she found, not God exactly, but some version thereof, a miasmic “higher purpose.” Imbued with new spiritual courage, she had allowed the baby to grow inside her until he emerged seven months later as a person named Joel.

  When I asked Inga how Edie could be sure Max was the father, she said, “She insists that the dates are right, that the month it happened there was only one man in her life, Max.” When I said, “What about Mr. Jazz?” Inga replied, “Edie says they weren’t lovers until later.” I told her that it seemed unlikely. Ms. Bly probably had found a story to sell, perhaps even to herself, one which had definite financial advantages.

  “The funny thing is,” Inga said, “I kind of like her, even though she’s shaky. Makes me feel like a goddamned rock, which is something new. She touts that half-baked, naïve, shiny American brand of mysticism, you know, Far East via California and Hallmark. Max hated that stuff. She told me she tried to read one of Max’s books, but it confused her. Don’t you find that odd? She has a love affair with this man who she claims is the father of her son and then doesn’t even read his books? She’s still very pretty, but kind of worn looking. And yet, she has something in her, some light, some charm. She works in a real estate office and goes to AA meetings every day. I knew that I had to find out about her, that I had to keep seeing her for my own sake, to try and understand it, and in a way, it’s worked. In the last month, I’ve lost my rage. There’s too much pathos in her, and to be frank, she’s too ordinary. I can’t imagine Max wanting that for very long. On the other hand, it’s worse now, too, feeling sympathy for her and for Max. I keep remembering those months when he would leave for appointments. Of course it was Edie. The times when he came home late and would just roll into bed and fall asleep or sit up with a whiskey, his eyes all shrouded. I’d sometimes ask him what was wrong, and he wouldn’t say. I keep thinking of one night when I heard him come home, then found him on the sofa with a drink. I just put my hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Tell me, darling, tell me.’ He grabbed my hand and squeezed it, then shook his head, and for a second I saw his eyes fill with tears.” Inga put the back of her hand to her mouth and pressed it against her lips. “Anyway,” she continued, “sitting there in her little apartment in Queens, I had the strangest sense of unreality. I kept thinking that the story was so curious, so immaterial. A part of me doesn’t really believe that Max loved her. The other part knows he did and feels sick—a mucky combination of shame and hurt. And then there’s Joel.”