The Sorrows of an American

by Siri Hustvedt

  “Pappa never told you about it?” Inga said.

  “No. I wish he could have told me more, but he couldn’t. I once said to him, ‘It must have been hard growing up with so much animosity between your parents.”

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “He wouldn’t hear of it.” The sun must have been obscured by a cloud, because the room darkened suddenly.

  I made an effort to think back, to remember something, a clue from my childhood. I had loved my grandmother, loved her arms with their hanging flesh and her long white hair that she always put up with wide hairpins she kept in a little bowl on her dresser. I had loved her laugh, her stories about her girlhood, and I had loved when she put on her straw hat with flowers on it before she took us out for a drive. She had never been able to pronounce the “th” sound in English. It was just a plain “t.” I thought of my father’s paternal grandfather lowering the trunk he would take to America down the mountain at Voss by rope and pulley, and the dugout where he first lived, a hole in the earth covered with grass, and then the log house that burned after his wife died. In the fall of 1924, a faulty stove or chimney set his house on fire. The details are not clear. Two neighbors, Hiram Pedersen and Knut Hougo, fortunately drove by and saw the fire. They found Olaf trapped behind a table that he was trying to push out a door. By this time he was badly burned, especially his hands and portions of his face. He was in bed the last time I saw him, unable to speak. He put his scarred hand on my head as if to bless me. He did the same for my sister, Lotte.

  “I don’t blame her for throwing the plate,” Sonia said. “God didn’t feed them, did he? They lost everything.”

  My mother shook her head. “They were so different, those two. Hildy could be irrational, but she had spirit. When Ivar was dying, when he was in a coma, he seemed to come up out of it every once in a while and see us. He couldn’t speak, and the look in his eyes was terrible, so hurt, as if he just wanted it to end.”

  Not one of us spoke for at least a minute, and then my mother turned to Sonia and continued. “My father got sick during the war. It was his heart. He’d been so athletic, you see. He could run like a goat up the mountain. He never lost his footing, but then . . .” My mother put her hand to her chest. “He found it hard to catch his breath, and I’d hear him breathing too fast, and I remember thinking, he can’t die. Pappa can’t really die.”

  “Like Dad,” Sonia whispered. “That’s what I kept saying about Dad.”

  My mother pulled Sonia into her and stroked her hair. Inga watched the two of them, her face stretched with emotion.

  My mother didn’t stop. Her steady voice carried the cadence and lilt of the language that lay beneath the one she was using, and I think as she talked to us, she was talking to herself as well. “In those days, when someone died, the body was dressed and laid out for viewing. People came to say good-bye. It was a ritual, of course. I remember looking at my father lying there, without himself. My dead father was a stranger.” She paused. “There was no embalming or gruesome American thing like that, you understand. After you died, you were wrapped in a white shroud and put in a simple wooden coffin and buried.” My mother took a breath. “As I looked at the body, my mother said, Kyss Pappa. Kiss Pappa,” my mother translated for Sonia.

  “I know that, Mormor,” she said.

  “I didn’t want to,” my mother said. Her face stiffened.

  Sonia, who had been listening with her head against her grandmother’s chest, looked up.

  “Mamma said it again, Kyss Pappa.” My mother turned her eyes away, and she gazed at the candlestick sitting on the table in front of her. “I didn’t want to, but I did it.” She looked down at Sonia and said, “My mother was wonderful. I loved her very much, you know, but she shouldn’t have said that.”

  The enduring light of the June day had vanished as we talked, and I realized suddenly that we were sitting in a darkened room. Not one of us moved to turn on a lamp, however. Sonia moved away from her grandmother’s embrace, and I noticed how erect my mother’s posture was as she sat perfectly still on the sofa, her shadowed face taut with memory.

  Marit, Marit, Marit, Marit. As I closed my eyes that night, my father’s incantation came unbidden to my mind, the strange involuntary repetition of a woman’s name. Lifeline: Marit, Marit, Marit.

  Tanya Bluestone wanders here.

  Nobody’s muse, she howls

  Mute—dreams awake in fear.

  Locked throat and streaming bowels,

  A twin ablaze inside of me.

  The burn recast in memory.

  Sonia Blaustein

  P.S. I told Mom.

  I found Sonia’s poem and postscript under my door when I got out of bed. I read it several times, then folded the paper carefully and put it inside my journal. For a while I stood at the window and looked down onto Division Street, still empty at seven in the morning. I remembered the smoke rising in the sky, the dry choking rain of paper, a haze in the Brooklyn sky, and the hush that fell over the neighborhood. On Seventh Avenue, the pedestrians that day reminded me of sleepwalkers, mechanical, alien drifters, their faces covered with handkerchiefs and surgical masks.

  IT WAS ROSALIE, with some help from her dauntless mother, who arranged the meeting at the Ideal Café in Blooming Field. Lorelei Kavacek had business to take care of in town and had granted us an interview. Despite the fact that the woman was a cipher to me, I had conjured for her a vague persona based on the scanty information we had gleaned. Lorelei lived with a reclusive woman connected to my father and the community where he’d grown up. She was lame and, at least by association, secretive. These fragments must have pulled me back to the old people I had met as a child and to the stories I had heard about them. I remembered seeing the ancient Bondestad sisters as they walked arm in arm on the dirt road in their long black dresses. When their father died in 1920, they donned their mourning clothes and never took them off. They had cooked, plowed, and harvested in black. I think I mingled those sisters with Norbert Engel, the local hermit, of whom I retain a single memory: a wiry little man sits on a stump under the trees—wrinkled brown face, a few brown teeth, wearing clothes, if not brown, then drab. He rolls a cigarette between yellow fingers, and their deft motion amazes me. The name Lorelei had no doubt added an aura of legend to the Gothic image that hovered dimly in my awareness: an aged, sun-baked rail of a woman, dragging a dead leg behind her, dressed in garments that resembled the Bondestad weeds. I wasn’t aware of this fantasy, however, until Lorelei Kavacek thoroughly dispelled it when she walked through the door.

  She limped, but had clearly mastered her gait to minimize the appearance of a handicap. The rest of her resembled nothing so much as a respectable Minnesota woman of the old style. She was full-bodied, but not fat. She wore a short-sleeved cotton blouse of a pastel plaid, a navy blue skirt well below her knees, stockings, and solid shoes. I guessed her age at around sixty, but she could have been older or younger. After she sat down at the table, she smoothed her skirt and placed her purse, a stiff rectangular affair with a large clasp, in her lap. When we introduced ourselves, she looked at each of us for a moment with her large, slightly protruding eyes. I decided that she had never been pretty, but despite her drooping cheeks and neck, she had even white skin that looked as if the sun had never touched it. We ordered coffee, and she said in a voice rich with long Minnesota vowels. “My aunt remembers yer dad, but she said she never saw him since before the war, read some articles on him in the papers though.”

  While Inga talked about the letter and its contents, I continued to look at Lorelei, and despite the fact that she was nothing like the half-conscious image I had seen in my mind, her presence evoked a feeling of my childhood. At first I couldn’t understand what it was, but after a few seconds I realized that she smelled of a cologne I couldn’t name, but which had wafted about in the basement of St. John’s Lutheran Church “many a Sunday.” The expression appeared to me in the moment, no doubt an effect of the memory, w
hich in the same instant brought with it a feeling close to affection. “She don’t see anybody, you know,” Lorelei Kavacek said to me. “Never.”

  Inga leaned forward. “We know about the fire and Mrs. Kavacek’s mother. We spoke to Mr. Odland a few days ago.” My sister gave the name its Norwegian inflection, with a long “O.” “It must have been hard for her to find out so many years later.”

  “Around here we say Odd-land.”

  Inga blushed. “Of course,” she said.

  The woman’s face changed, and her big pale eyes looked suddenly rheumy. “As for the other—a bad business. Like being the wrong person all yer life long. She says she always had a feeling about it, though, like she was missing her liver or some such organ in her.” After a pause, she sighed and looked at Rosalie. “Let me see, I’ve been living with my aunt Lisa going on thirty years now. Not long before I moved in with her, Walter found the divorce papers and put two and two together.”

  “Why won’t she see anyone?” Inga asked.

  Lorelei shook her head, but she avoided Inga’s eyes, and I noticed that she held her purse with two hands as if to steady herself. “One day she just stopped leavin’ the house. She won’t say, but she’s got fears. I tried to get her to talk to Pastor Wee, but she’d have nothing of it.” The woman looked at the white coffee mug. “It’s upset her, this business about yer dad. Those were hard times. She’s an old woman, and she’s got a right to fix her life how she wants it. We’ve got things pretty well arranged now, and our little business has been good for her.”

  “What business is that?” I asked.

  “Toys,” she said matter-of-factly. “Not just any toys. We’ve sent some to New York City.” She eyed Inga suspiciously. “That’s where you’re from, isn’t it?” she said curtly.

  “Erik and I live there now,” Inga said. “We’re from here.”

  Lorelei raised her eyebrows in an expression that could have signified disapproval, disbelief, or irritation. She gave Inga a hard look, sniffed, but said nothing, “Aunt Lisa’s been doin’ it all along, but it was my idea to sell them. I had a sewing shop for twenty years with Doris Goodly, couldn’t keep it going after Doris died, but I have a knack for it and the energy to do it. It’s given my aunt some pride.” The woman straightened herself, as if the business had added something to her as well.

  “You manufacture toys in your house?” I asked.

  “All handmade. We’re not getting rich off it, heaven knows, but it’s keeping us fed and clothed. I sent off a pair to Berlin, Germany, well, let me see, it was two weeks back.”

  “A pair?” Inga said. My sister leaned forward, put her elbows on the table, and cupped her chin in her hands.

  “A mother and her boy,” Lorelei said.

  “Dolls.” Inga breathed the word happily. “You make dolls.”

  “Figures of all kinds,” the woman answered.

  “Can we see them?” Inga asked.

  “Wouldn’t hurt, I don’t suppose. I’ll speak to Aunt Lisa. Some of them are off limits—legacy items. Nobody sees them but us.”

  “Legacy items,” Inga repeated, her eyes wide. “What does that mean?”

  In answer, Lorelei patted her purse. “Private collection.”

  Inga reached out and very gently touched Lorelei’s plump white arm with her three middle fingers. I had seen her make the gesture hundreds of times. I sometimes wondered whether she knew she was doing it; it confirmed for her, I think, that she really was having a dialogue, really engaging with someone else. I half expected her interlocutor to flinch, but she didn’t. “You know, don’t you?” Inga said. “You know what happened with Lisa and our father.”

  Lorelei Kavacek’s face turned masklike, and she squeezed her purse more tightly. “I wouldn’t be free to say,” she said, “wouldn’t be free to say one way or the other.”

  Not much of consequence happened after that. We agreed that we would call Lorelei to see if it was possible to look at the toys. We watched her walk toward her car. She opened the front door, sliding sideways, and pushed herself backward before manipulating her bad leg into driving position. After her car pulled away, I saw that the weather had changed. The sky had turned a twilight hue, and the spindly tree outside the window bent in a strong new wind. It’s going to rain, I thought, a real June storm. A few minutes later, when we left the Ideal Café, the sky opened, and the rain came down in dense soaking sheets. My last memory of that coffee date with Lorelei Kavacek is not of her, but of my sister and Rosalie running across the street together, hand in hand, their faces turned upward as they shrieked and laughed like a pair of schoolgirls.

  “DID YOU SEE the look Lorelei gave me?” Inga asked that evening as the rain fell outside my mother’s window. It seemed that a door to an entire world of provincial cruelty had been opened by that single glance. Inga remembered her sixth-grade nemesis, Carla Screttleberg, and the other mean girls who had called her “weird,” “fake,” and “snob.” She remembered the teacher who had declared her “uppity” in high school for writing a paper on Merleau-Ponty, and the cold stares from fellow students at Martin Luther College. The irony was that, if anything, Inga suffered from a lack of protective artifice and a surfeit of sincerity and passion, a quality of too-muchness that intimidated some people and made others hostile. Beneath Lorelei’s look, which I had read as insecurity and Inga as contempt, lay a tangle of class relations, prairie egalitarianism, and just plain human nature. As I looked at my sister across the table, I noticed that she was wearing a white sleeveless shirt and narrow dark blue pants, which, despite their innocuous simplicity, had an expensive shine, a quality in clothing that has always mystified me but that is nevertheless immediately apparent. Lorelei was probably only ten years older than my sister, but in appearance the gulf between them was immense, and I understood that just by being herself, Inga could be taken as an affront. Inga, on the other hand, who felt her age and loneliness intensely, could hardly be expected to have sympathy for the prejudices against her.

  “Our own father used to talk about city slickers,” I said, smiling at my sister. “But every perceived difference, no matter how slight, can become an argument for Otherness—money, education, skin color, religion, political party, hairstyle, anything. Enemies are enlivening. Evil-doers, jihadists, barbarians. Hatred is exciting and contagious and conveniently eliminates all ambiguity. You just spew your own garbage onto someone else.”

  “After the war,” my mother said, “they ostracized the children of German soldiers and Norwegian women. Tyskerunger. German brats. As if those children were guilty of anything.”

  “Injustice eats your soul,” Inga said. “I’ve been thinking about the fact that Pappa didn’t write about the hoof-and-mouth disaster in his memoir. He left it out.”

  “What was that?” Sonia said.

  “A government inspector came to the farm. I don’t know what year it was. He claimed the animals had hoof-and-mouth disease and had to be destroyed.” I said. “There was nothing they could do. He had the power, and the animals were killed. It turned out the man was wrong. The animals were slaughtered for nothing.”

  Sonia spoke slowly. “So Pappa must have seen them dead.”

  I imagined their immense carcasses, the cows and the horses, then the empty barn, the eyesore.

  “Some memories hurt too much,” Inga said.

  “When he left, where did he go?” I asked my mother. “Where did you find him the time he stayed out all night?”

  My mother looked at me sharply. “I didn’t know you knew. I didn’t want to worry you, and your father always left for work so early in the morning. I thought you didn’t know.”

  “The time I’m thinking about, I heard him leave,” Inga said. “I stayed awake waiting for him to come home.”

  “In the morning,” my mother said, “I started looking for him, first at his office, then in the library. He had no classes that day. I was standing in the stacks trying to think of where he might have gone, and then i
t came to me. It was a few months after your grandfather died, and your grandmother had started leaving the farm in the cold months, so nobody was living there. It was late October, I think.”

  “And Pappa was there?” Sonia said. “At the farm?”

  “I found him asleep upstairs in his father’s bed.”

  “Seventeen miles,” Inga said. “He must have walked all night.”

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” my mother said. “He seemed disoriented after I woke him, but when I started saying how worried and upset I had been, he didn’t answer, or rather he acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.”

  He went home. Nobody was there, but he went home. It wasn’t that he loved it there, but something about the place drew him toward it.

  “When Hildy was very old,” my mother continued, “years after Ivar was dead and not long before she died herself, I was sitting near her bed, and we were talking. All at once, she burst out in a loud voice, ‘I should have been nicer to Ivar. I should have been nicer to Ivar.’ ”

  Sonia’s face fell. I saw her mouth and chin tremble. In the same instant, my mother turned her head to look at her granddaughter. Inga, her eyes on Sonia, hesitated, then placed her fingers on her daughter’s plate, not on her arm or hand. “I have to go to the bathroom,” Sonia said, then stood up and left the table.