The Sorrows of an American

by Siri Hustvedt

  ROSALIE DROVE. THE navy blue suit and sturdy shoes she had worn to the burial had been replaced by what Midwesterners call slacks, no-iron trousers fashioned from some synthetic material, and a T-shirt embellished with a large mosquito, under which was written “The Minnesota State Bird.” Despite the fact that she wasn’t unattractive—short, curly brown hair, a round pleasant face that suited her round pleasant body—Rosalie had little use for the trappings of vanity. She was an unperfumed, unmade-up, thoroughly unadorned woman whose vision of the world was aided by a large pair of brown glasses that magnified her eyes. It seemed to me that I had always known Rosalie, and that despite getting older, she had remained remarkably unchanged over the years. The Geisters of the Geister Funeral Home were a prominent family with seven children, including a pair of twins, and I had sometimes wondered if the Geister fecundity hadn’t been a logical response to the lugubrious nature of the family business. Rosalie and Inga had been inseparable in junior high and high school and had remained close friends.

  As she drove (very fast, I noticed), she steered with one hand and waved with the other for emphasis. “I don’t know if the old guy is compos mentis. The lady from the nursing home would only say he welcomes visitors. ‘With a few exceptions, all our residents welcome visitors.’ ” Rosalie imitated the woman’s cloying tone. “Worked in a hardware store for years, according to Mom, who has access to a bubbling brook of Blue Wing gossip, rivaled only by the rushing torrents of Blooming Field. Bless her heart. A couple of days with her nose to the ground and good old Mom sniffed out a trail of scandal a mile wide.”

  Rosalie did not hesitate, I noticed, to shift her metaphors abruptly from bodies of water to dry land.

  Sonia removed her earphones. “You’re kidding.”

  “Rosalie is always kidding,” Inga said.

  “Not entirely,” she said to Inga. “Your Lisa Odland, after some years of not-being-in-town no-one-knows-where, became Mrs. Kavacek. Mom’s seven years younger, so they weren’t school chums. Mr. Kavacek died young. They had one child, a girl of some ill repute, according to Mom, but that could mean just about anything, as we well know.” Rosalie winked theatrically at Inga. “From a penchant for miniskirts or a butt with a little extra wiggle in it to a fullblown felony. In all events, Dubious Daughter skedaddled years ago, and after that, Mrs. Kavacek, a.k.a. Lisa Odland, became a shut-in, doesn’t set one little piggy out of her house. Doesn’t attend church. Doesn’t have the pastor in. No manure richer for the rumor garden than that. You know, ‘What’s the old bag doing in there?’ ” Rosalie hummed a dirge.

  “She’s still alive,” Inga said.

  “Yup, it seems so, but I think we better pay a call on Grandpa Walt first. She won’t see anybody.”

  Sonia’s eyes were wide. “She’s probably got agoraphobia or something, but how does she eat?”

  “Well, she found herself a companion, a niece on her husband’s side, Lorelei, a strange bird apparently, with a bum leg, who comes and goes, does the shopping and errands, and makes some money sewing for people.”

  “I think the word scandal might be an overstatement,” I said to Rosalie.

  She grinned at me in the rearview mirror. “Don’t rush me. There’s more. The two ladies, it seems, are manufacturing some item in the house. Packages come and go. Deliverymen drop off. Others pick up, but nobody knows what’s in those boxes.”

  Inga turned to Rosalie, opened her mouth, but said nothing.

  “There’s been trouble with kids on the property. The tried and true I-dare-you-to-go-look-in-Old-Lady-Kavacek’s-window routine. One boy fell out of a tree trying to get a glimpse inside.”

  “Nothing changes,” Inga said.

  “Nope,” Rosalie said merrily. “Remember snooping on Alvin Schadow while he practiced the waltz to those dance tapes, that poor cushion clasped tightly to his chest? Oh my God, it was hilarious.”

  “I didn’t look,” Inga said. “I thought it was awful.”

  “Oh, Mom,” Sonia groaned.

  “She did look,” Rosalie said, “But she didn’t laugh. That tender heart of hers was squeezed all out of shape.”

  “Well, poor Mr. Schadow,” Inga said. “I might have to take to cushions sometime soon, so I don’t think we should be too high and mighty.”

  Sonia gave her mother a troubled glance, replaced her earphones, lay back in her seat, and closed her eyes.

  WHEN WE ENTERED the room, Walter Odland was sitting in a chair in the narrow room, half of which belonged to another man, a wizened person with a long nose in striped pajamas, who lay on his back in a dead sleep, mouth open, a tray with a half-eaten meal on a small mobile table beside him. Odland had the sunken posture of the very old. His watery eyes had receded into his head, and his narrow lips were flanked by two flabby, mottled jowls, above which was a round and fleshy nose. Despite the fact that we had been told he suffered from some dementia, he appeared alert. When we told him that we had a few questions about our father, he nodded, but the name Davidsen didn’t do much for him. When we mentioned Bakkethun, however, it caused a tremor of recognition, and his sister’s name coupled with some inquiries about his parents’ marriage produced an outburst.

  “Ah, well,” Odland said, “was a mistake, as I see it, nah, it was a downright lie, don’t you know it. Was for her protection, I s’pose, but she had the scar right there on her neck. Said it was from a candle or some such nonsense. Didn’t know myself until years later, you understand. Went to her with it. Blamed me, too. We was never close.”

  Inga leaned near him and touched his arm gently. “What did you tell her?”

  Odland turned to Inga as if he were seeing her for the first time. “Why, you’re a looker, aren’t you?” he said. “Handsome woman.”

  “Thank you,” Inga said. “What did you tell her?”

  “About the fire.”

  “What fire?” Rosalie asked.

  “In Zumbrota.”

  I was standing in the small room and leaned over to speak to the man directly. “You and Lisa didn’t have the same mother, did you?” I said.

  His face changed, and the man avoided looking at me directly. “Weren’t right to neither of us.” His chin began to bob up and down as he looked out at the room, and then he shook his head. “Where am I?”

  “The Blue Wing Care Facility,” Rosalie said.

  “I forget,” he said simply, and I noticed then that his eyes were a flecked olive green.

  “Mr. Odland,” I continued, “what happened in the fire?”

  “They died.”

  Inga reached over again and placed her hand gently on his arm. “Who died?” she asked.

  Odland was agitated now, and a feeling of guilt washed over me. We had stirred up old family troubles, and he was shaking his head emphatically. “Weren’t right not to say.” I turned to Inga, shook my head at her, and mouthed the words “No more.” She nodded.

  Rosalie, who had taken in my noiseless message, promptly took both of Odland’s hands in hers and, maintaining a firm grip, looked into his eyes and said slowly, “Mr. Odland, you’ve done us a service, and we thank you. We’re grateful.”

  “You’re the other one,” he said.

  “Yes, I’m the other one. I’m telling you thank you.”

  “You bet,” he said, brightening. “Okay. Thank you.”

  A loud, high-pitched wheeze was heard from the little sleeper, and a nurse entered the room. She peered at the unconscious person and then turned to us. “So nice to see you have company,” she said to Odland.

  The man grinned and pointed to Sonia. “Come here, young lady,” he said.

  Sonia obediently approached him, and he reached his hands toward her, his face wrinkling into a smile. Then he patted his fallen cheek. “A smooch,” he said, “Right here.”

  “Now, Mr. Odland,” the nurse said.

  Sonia reddened, and I saw the conflict in her face, but she bent over, just as the nurse was closing in on him, and gave the old man a quick peck
.

  Odland chuckled happily, then came out with a surprisingly robust wolf whistle.

  Before we left, the woman turned to us and said, “I hope you come back. He doesn’t have many visitors, and it does him good.”

  SONIA KNOCKED ON my door around midnight. My niece looked grave when she entered the room barefoot, dressed in an enormous blue T-shirt that reached her thighs and a ragged pair of pajama bottoms. “I’m glad you’re up,” she said. After sitting down on the puffy chair near the window, she looked straight into my eyes. “I know about Dad and Edie Bly.”

  “Your mother told you?”

  “I had a feeling she knew when she kept looking at the film, but in case she didn’t, I wasn’t going to tell her.”

  “How do you know?”

  Sonia looked as if she was going to cry for a second, but she paused and took a breath. “I saw them together. It was in the third grade. On Varick Street.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  She nodded. “I was nine. Mom let me go around the block sometimes to visit Dad at his studio. She was always really nervous, but I begged and begged and we made a plan about it. He would call her as soon as I arrived. It was only two blocks. That day, we didn’t call him first. She said I could surprise him. I skipped over there, and at the end of the block, I saw him coming out the door. With her. He had his hands on her.”

  “What did you do?”

  Sonia stared straight ahead, but her eyes didn’t meet mine. “I ran home. I told Mom he must have gone out. It felt like the air had been kicked out of me.”

  “And you never said anything to anyone?”

  She shook her head, her eyes shiny. “The thing is, I was so angry at Dad, and then I kept thinking they’d get divorced, like all the other kids’ parents. I’d hear them fighting. I used to sing when I heard them. I’d sing at the top of my voice; then they’d get embarrassed and quiet down.” Sonia’s face was hard. “But it didn’t happen, the divorce, I mean, and I started to feel like what I saw wasn’t real—that maybe she hadn’t really been there. It started feeling like a movie or something, and Dad was his old self, just the same. Then he got sick.” Sonia folded her arms and let her head drop as she spoke to her feet. “I would watch Mom beside him in the hospital, talking to him, reading him stories, and kissing his hands . . .”

  “You were still angry with your father?”

  Sonia lifted her head. “No. Maybe. I don’t know. It was something else, like I couldn’t do anything, and I can’t take it back now. I wasn’t good to him. I was stupid. I didn’t even talk. The smell in the hospital, the nurses, those blue plastic bedpans, the tubes, I don’t know, I, I . . .” She stopped, then said, “When he got really bad, he didn’t even look like my father anymore.”

  “Before he died, he said to me that you and your mother were his soul. Those were his words: They’re my soul. Take care of them.”

  “I wonder what Edie Bly was, then,” she said.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know, Sonia.”

  “Everybody’s supposed to be cool about this stuff. Sally Reiser’s got a stepmother five years older than she is. Ari’s father is on his fourth wife, and his mother’s on her third husband. But we were different. We weren’t like that,” she said, shaking her head. “I always thought we were different.”

  The two of us sat in silence for some time. I planned several sentences about adults and their foibles, the passionate forays of older men that could dry up rather quickly, different kinds of love, and so on, and then didn’t say any of them.

  “You should talk to your mother.”

  “You can’t tell her I know,” she said forcefully.

  “I won’t. You should tell her. It will come as a relief to both of you.”

  Sonia looked down at her knees. I saw her chin wobble, and her mouth contorted as she tried to control it.

  I stood up from the bed, walked over to her, and put my hand on her shoulder. She reached for my hand and held it. “My poor girl,” I said.

  She raised her head and, although her eyes were wet, she didn’t cry. “You sounded just like Pappa when you said that, just like him.”

  AS I SAT in the small chair in the Andrews House the next day and made notes on my telephone conversation with Ms. L., I thought about what we called her “voids,” the hours she spent in limbo with her fantasies. “I thought about you leaning over me and touching me down there and then I was afraid I would piss, so I started slapping you hard.” I wrote down Bion’s word “container,” the analyst as a vessel, a place to put your mess. Me, the urinal. I missed work. Work was my skeleton, my musculature. Without it, I felt like a jellyfish. The forms of things—the outlines. We can’t live without them. “Don’t touch my nose, you shit!” one of the inpatients had screamed at me after I had briefly scratched my own during the interview. I was a young psychiatric resident then, and his words passed through me with a jolt. After that, I learned how precarious it all is—where we begin and end, our bodies, our words, inside and outside. Psychotic patients are often cosmologists, obsessed with the mysterious structures of the invisible, with God and Satan, the stars, a fourth dimension, what lies beneath or beyond. They’re looking for the bones of the world. Sometimes the hospital can build a temporary shelter of dull routine—meds and lunch and arts-and-crafts and movement class and visits from the social worker and the doctor—but then the world beckons. The patient walks into the open air, and the fragile ones go to pieces again.

  My father worked hard to order his world: early rising, long hours, proofreading backward, scrupulous notes, detailed maps, straight rows of corn, potatoes, beans, lettuce, and radishes. But when accident intervened—car trouble, a child’s bump or wound, a wrong turn, bad weather—he suffered inordinately. I remembered his face tightening, the catch of anguish in his voice, his fists clenched as he shook his head. Feeling travels. My mother’s voice: “Don’t be upset, Lars.” My sister’s stricken face in the backseat. I would shrink into myself. Sonia sang. I counted. It was never the event, so unimportant really, or what my father did or even said. His eruptions were controlled. It was the volcanic emotion we felt inside him.

  That night I dreamed that I was back on the units in the hospital and had just locked the glass door to the North ward when an intern tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a chest X-ray. I looked at the picture. The heart was so enormous, it filled the entire chest cavity. A radiologist suddenly appeared beside me, and I noticed that his coat was dirty, dripping with some vile yellow liquid. He leaned toward me and I pulled away, trying to avoid the filth on his coat. He whispered in my ear, “Atrioseptal defect.” I asked him what he was doing in psychiatry. Then, for some reason, I understood that the X-ray was of my heart, that the congenital lesion belonged to me. I grabbed a stethoscope from my pocket and began to auscultate my own chest. I heard the loud whoosh of the murmur, and then through the glass I saw my father lying in a hospital bed in the middle of the broad hallway in South. He shouldn’t be there. He’s in the wrong unit. I took out my key to unlock the door but found fifty keys of various sizes on the chain instead of one. I began to try one key after another, but they wouldn’t turn the lock. All at once, I couldn’t breathe, and then, in a panic, I started screaming for help. My father lay motionless, his mouth open. The radiologist was still there, but he had another face. He whispered to me, “Psychotic disorder following pulmonary hypertension.” With that nonsense in my ears, I woke up. As I wrote about the dream the next day, my first notation was “Physician, heal thyself.” But then I understood that the “hole” in my heart had also been a reference to the hole in my father’s chest when the doctor in Emergency reinflated his collapsed lung, and that I had desperately tried to open the door to him with “unknown keys.”

  INGA AND ROSALIE found an article about the fire in The Zumbrota Reporter. On May 14, 1920, a “tragic” fire had taken the lives of Sylvia Odland and her infant son, James. The two-year-old Lisa Odland had suffered burns but was r
escued by a fireman who had pulled her out of the house through the front door. Lisa’s parents were divorced, and the article mentioned that the child would go to live with her father and his second wife. They never told her about the deaths. Walter Odland had spoken the truth. “It wasn’t right.” The implicit memory of the fire, one she never consciously retrieved, must nevertheless have primed her emotional responses. The loss of her mother was never acknowledged, never openly mourned. She had been offered a replacement. Years later, her brother had come to her with the news. Now she was a shut-in. But as Inga pointed out, the story of the fire had nothing to do with the mystery of the note or our father.

  “I FEEL LARS,” my mother said. “And my mother. They’re both here with me in this place. I never feel them in New York.”

  Sonia looked at my mother with a puzzled expression. “Like ghosts?”

  “No. Presences. It isn’t frightening.”

  “I hear Max,” Inga said simply.

  “Really?” Sonia said.

  Inga nodded. “I hear him saying my name, not often, but every once in a while. Pappa once told me he heard his father. He heard his father calling him.”

  My mother was sitting on the sofa, hugging her knees to her chest. From my place in the chair across from her, I watched her turn her head toward the window, and in that instant I saw her as if she were a person I didn’t know. Her small head and the delicate features of her profile were illuminated for a moment in the shaft of sunlight that came through the window. I saw the deep wrinkles around her mouth and across her forehead and the intense blue iris in her visible eye. Her white hair was brushed back from her face. “Lotte once told me the story of the day your grandmother lost her savings. Ivar came home, delivered the bad news about the bank, and then he quoted a psalm: ‘The people asked and he brought quails and satisfied them with the bread of heaven.’ Hildy grabbed a plate off the table and smashed it on the floor.”