The Sorrows of an American

by Siri Hustvedt

  Language is often flimsy, I thought, a thin drool of received knowledge empty of any real meaning, but when we are heavy with emotion, it can be excruciating to speak. We don’t want to let the words out, because then they will also belong to other people, and that is a danger we can’t risk.

  TO INGA’S GREAT disappointment, we weren’t allowed to visit the Kavacek house or see “Aunt Lisa,” but Lorelei agreed to bring some toys to Rosalie’s, where we would all be permitted to view them. We didn’t learn until we arrived, however, that Rosalie had lured the dollmaker by telling her that we were “loaded” and that she might make a sale. The last afternoon of our visit, Sonia, Inga, my mother, and I drove to the large white house on the east side of town where Rosalie, her veterinarian husband, Larry, and her three sons, Derek, Peter, and Michael, nicknamed Rusty, had lived for years.

  We settled into the commodious living room, which appeared to double as a repository for sports equipment, numerous sweatshirts, several pairs of large sneakers, a month’s supply of newspapers and a year’s worth of magazines, as well as several objects usually found in a kitchen: a frying pan, measuring cups, and three or four spice jars, one of which had spilled its dead green leaves onto the coffee table near a bowl that contained a repugnant-looking brown liquid.

  With a glance at the table, Rosalie raised her hands palms outward and exclaimed in mock horror, “Good Lord, Rusty’s science project seems to be multiplying.” Then, in a deep voice, she bellowed, “Rusty!”

  When Rusty failed to appear, she howled again. While Sonia and Inga looked deeply amused, my mother, true to her upbringing, carefully removed three dirty sweat socks from the chair Rosalie had offered her, laid them on the table, sat down in her seat, and folded her hands in her lap.

  When the young scientist entered the room, he was dressed in wide shorts and a T-shirt with a skull on it. The symbol of death was not at all in keeping with his soft, sheepish, well-formed face and athletic body. The boy, who looked to be around thirteen or fourteen, glanced a couple of times at the lovely Sonia as he cleared away the remnants of his experimentation, muttering, “I didn’t know people were coming.”

  When the doorbell rang, Rosalie snatched up several garments that were lying on the remaining unoccupied chair, rushed to a closet, threw them into it, and, with a wink at us, waltzed off to open the door.

  Lorelei appeared, looking very much as she had the first time, except now she was a bit more dressed up, wearing a neat, starched blouse the color of honey and a green skirt. She placed three shoebox-sized containers on the table, and one by one proceeded to open them.

  The first figure to emerge was about six inches tall, a girl doll with long braids made from shiny brown thread, wearing a blue dress with a full skirt. As far as I could tell, it had been constructed entirely from cloth, but there must have been a wire interior that allowed the toy to hold its shape. I’d never given much thought to dolls, but seeing this one made me aware that most of them exaggerate one feature or another—large heads and eyes, for example, or bodies that are too short or too long. This figure’s proportions looked accurate. The detail, not only in the clothes, but in the tiny embroidered face, was so fine that my mother let out a gasp when it was put down in front of us. The doll had a cast on its leg, and a moment later Lorelei retrieved two wooden crutches from the box and tucked them under the doll’s arms.

  “Ruth. She fell down the stairs at home.” She mumbled this comment darkly, as if to herself.

  No one answered her. The more I looked at the figure, the more I saw. She appeared to have a scab on her left knee which, when examined closely, turned out to be embroidery, but there were some painted details, too—the flush of her cheeks, tiny freckles, a blue bruise on her elbow, and tiny fingernails. It wasn’t that the doll looked like a miniature person but rather that the multiple gestures toward realism had an uncanny effect. It was as if the toy belonged to a universe with laws and logic similar to our own. She was a mortal toy who came from a world where children fell, broke bones, wore casts, and needed crutches.

  After that, Lorelei took out an old-woman doll in a long flannel gown, which she placed on a narrow bed. The fabric of the face had been folded and sewn to mimic networks of wrinkles, and its thread hair was short, white, and ragged. I also noticed the shape of the doll’s body under the nightclothes—its fallen breasts, distended belly, and long, thin legs. Lorelei covered the figure with a quilt and turned its head to one side.

  “Look at the veins on her hands and wrists,” Sonia said. She had left her chair and was kneeling on the floor beside the coffee table. Rusty hovered over her, his face a mixture of distaste and awe. “It’s sad,” Sonia said. “Poor thing.”

  “Milly,” Lorelei said, “on the day she died.”

  I began to feel that I had been mistaken about Lorelei Kavacek. The steady, pragmatic matron with her brown shoes and support hose had a story for every toy. The whole venture was steeped in eccentricity, at the very least, and I wondered what the two women were living through with these figures. I recalled a patient who had told me that when he watched movies, he “went into them, really in. I’m there. I’m them.”

  The third figure was a middle-aged man in overalls and work boots. Lorelei put him in a stuffed chair, where he sat, hunched over with one hand on his forehead, the other in his lap, which loosely held a tiny piece of paper. By far the most disturbing doll of the three, this one had closed eyes and a mouth contorted into an expression of grief. My mother, who was standing over the table, leaned down and asked Lorelei whether she could touch him.

  Lorelei nodded, and my mother briefly put her index finger on the doll’s flannel shirt, then withdrew it. “Who is he?” she asked.

  Rosalie was only inches away from the small letter. “We regret to inform you,” she said. “It’s a war story.”

  “Arlen,” Lorelei said. “It’s right after he got the news about his boy, Frank.”

  “What comes first,” I asked, “the story or the doll?”

  “Why, the story, of course. Couldn’t make ’em without knowing who they are and what’s happened to them.”

  “They must be very expensive,” Inga said. I thought her face looked a little wan, and her voice had a breathless quality. “How long does it take you to do them?”

  “Months. We’ve got Buster who does the furniture for us—to order. He lives here in Blooming Field.”

  “And the price?” Inga said.

  “Depends. They start at around five hundred.”

  “I can imagine,” Inga said. She looked down at the old-woman doll and, in a gesture jarringly similar to my mother’s only seconds before, touched its sleeve. “Thank you so much,” she said. “I’ll have to think about it.”

  “There are more,” Lorelei said. “I could send photos.”

  “Yes,” Inga said, looking rather stunned. “Yes, I’ll give you my address.”

  After Lorelei had written down Inga’s information, she carefully packed the figures into their boxes. Then, without ceremony of any kind, she nodded at us and said, as she had once before, “Best be going.” We watched her walk to the door. She limped, but with a decided air of triumph in her step.

  Once we heard her car engine turn over, Sonia said, “Were they really as strange as I thought?”

  “Yes,” my mother said, “they were.”

  “You aren’t actually thinking of buying one of those dolls, are you?” Rosalie was speaking to Inga.

  My sister didn’t hear her. She was in one of her “departed moods,” as I used to call them when we were children. Her eyes were focused, but not on anything in the room. She was deeply concentrated on some internal thought. When the question was repeated more loudly, Inga looked at her friend and said, “Yes, I think I am. I think I want one of those damaged little people for myself.”

  “WE FOUND THE wrong story,” Inga said to me on the plane back to New York. “We were looking for one story and ran into another.”

  �
�The fire, the deaths, the hiding, and the lies.”

  “I’m sure they felt they were protecting her.”

  “No doubt,” I said, “but that kind of protection never works. Lisa always felt something was wrong.”

  “Lorelei knows,” Inga said. “I’m sure of it, but I doubt she’ll ever tell us. Did you see her face when she wrapped up those little people? It was as if she were saying, ‘I’ve got these uppity folks from New York just where I want them.’ ”

  “The dolls were testimonies of some sort.”

  Inga nodded. “Telling but not telling. If we knew what happened between Pappa and Lisa, if we knew who died and how, we might understand him better. Secrets can define people.” She glanced at Sonia who was fast asleep in the window seat across from us. “Every day, I think about the fact that she knew about them and didn’t say anything. It’s like a knife in me. And still, when we talked, I couldn’t bring myself to mention Joel to her.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “What if she has a brother? I’ve been thinking about it. Wouldn’t it be terribly wrong to keep siblings apart? And yet, what are they to each other, really? I mean, what does biology mean in a case like this?”

  “It has a strong hold on people,” I said. “Think of all the adopted children who go looking for their ‘real’ parents.”

  “DNA would tell for sure whether there’s a genetic connection?”

  “Yes.”

  “That seems a little brutal, too. We’ll be kind to you if your genes show you’re related to us, and if you’re not, we’ll ignore you.” Inga fingered the book on her lap. I noticed that it was about Hegel and looked down at a drawing of the philosopher’s face on the cover.

  “He had an illegitimate son.” She tapped the book. “Ludwig. Hegel and his wife took him in for a while, but it didn’t go well.” Inga sounded tired. She turned to the window as if to tell me she didn’t want to talk anymore.

  “You have to tell her,” I said.

  “I know,” she answered. “I will.”

  So many things to hide, I thought, and then I remembered sitting across from P. in the North ward, listening to her small, earnest voice. I don’t remember when I started hurting myself. I wish I did.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “A girl I treated at Payne Whitney.”

  “It must be a relief not to be there anymore. It wore you out.”

  “I miss it.”

  “Really?”

  “I miss the patients. It’s hard to describe, but when people are in desperate need, something falls away. The posing that’s part of the ordinary world vanishes, that How-are-you?-I’m-fine falseness.” I paused. “The patients might be raving or mute or even violent, but there’s an existential urgency to them that’s invigorating. You feel close to the raw truth of what human beings are.”

  “No hypocrisy, as Pappa would have said.”

  “That’s right, no hypocrisy. But I have to admit that I don’t miss the paperwork or the commands that came down from on high. I ran into an old colleague about a month ago, Nancy Lomax. She’s still working on the units. She told me that patients are now officially referred to as customers.”

  “That’s revolting.”

  “That’s America.”

  WHEN I ARRIVED home, the house felt empty. I heard no noises from downstairs, and I wondered if my two tenants had also taken a vacation. Woe to the mitten! I thought, and reentered my solitary existence. Although I heard them return late Sunday, I didn’t see Miranda and Eggy until the following Saturday. I had turned up Garfield from Eighth Avenue and spotted them with Lane near the park. He was crouched with his camera poised while Miranda made a defensive gesture with her hands and Eggy hid her face in her mother’s dress. Seconds later, Lane lowered the camera, and the three of them assumed different and more relaxed positions, but it was the first image that stayed with me—Miranda with her palms turned outward in front of her face, Eggy’s clinging form, and the intense, almost explosive energy of Lane’s body as he took his shots. It may have been that I wanted to focus on those seconds of discord, that they reassured me. Whatever the reason, that view of them in the sunshine has fixed itself in my memory and hardened over time until it is now as static and isolated as a color photograph in a family album.

  ON SUNDAY IN the late afternoon, I was reading an article Burton had sent me a few days earlier when the doorbell rang. Through the glass door, I saw Eggy standing on the steps, a stuffed backpack lying at her feet. She was wearing a baseball cap, a fluffy pink skirt that looked too large for her, and black rubber boots. When I opened the door, she looked up at me, her eyes tragic. She didn’t answer my greeting, but when I invited her in I noticed that she turned her head to look behind her. I said nothing, but I suspected that Miranda knew her girl had come to my door.

  Eggy dragged the stuffed backpack into the hallway, dropped it there, removed her cap, and walked slowly into the living room with her hand on her heart. She took several loud breaths before she sat down and leaned her head against the pillows, her eyelids fluttering feebly.

  “I see you’re not feeling well,” I said.

  Eggy placed the back of her hand on her forehead and blew a long stream of air out of her mouth. I thought of The Mitten. I also suddenly remembered faking a limp after a fall in the third grade. I had kept it up for hours.

  “My chest hurts inside, and my eyes aren’t working too well.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Yes,” Eggy said, glancing at the hallway before she continued. “I might need pills like Granddad. He has blood pressure, you know.”

  “That doesn’t happen to children very often.”

  She looked thoughtful for a few seconds and then spoke in a low voice, “My other grandma and grandpa were killed by a car crash.” With this statement her expression changed, and her distress looked genuine. Eglantine leaned forward, her eyes on mine. “They died instantly.” This must have been a quote. Had her father told her that, her mother?

  “It must be scary to think about that.”

  “It is.” She seemed to be searching for more to say. “I might go live with my daddy.”

  “You’re leaving your mother?”

  Eggy’s booted feet dangled several inches above the floor, and she started to swing them back and forth nervously. “He lets me do stuff. He’s going to take me to Six Flags.” Despite the optimism of this sentence, Eggy looked miserable.

  “That sounds nice,” I said, “but you don’t look too happy about it. You look sad.”

  Eggy turned to the window. Her face lit up, and a second later I heard the doorbell. I answered it, ushered Miranda into the living room, and we both looked over at Eggy, who was now collapsed on the sofa, her hand on her chest again, blinking furiously.

  “Eglantine is suffering from some physical symptoms,” I said to Miranda.

  Miranda stopped a few feet from her daughter and folded her arms. “Yes, she’s been spending a lot of time with the nurse at day camp, haven’t you, Eggy? Her heart, her eyes, her stomach, her head, her arms, her legs, all going bad.”

  Miranda smiled at me for an instant and then turned to Eggy, who was breathing loudly and had begun to moan. Miranda walked over to the sofa, and after adjusting Eggy’s legs, moved in beside her. She picked up one of her daughter’s arms and began to stroke it. “Does this help?” she asked.

  Eglantine nodded.

  She put her lips to her daughter’s forehead and began to kiss it. Then she kissed her nose and her cheeks and her chin. “How about this?”

  Eggy closed her eyes. Her mother continued to kiss her arms and hands and the naked spot between her T-shirt and the skirt.

  “Is this good?” Miranda murmured.

  I watched Eggy’s arms enfold her mother. “You’re not fed up with me, Mommy, are you?” She pronounced the words fed up very carefully, as if they were foreign.

  Miranda leaned back a few inches and looked at Eglantine. “What?”

 
“Fed up, you said you were fed up.”

  “When?”

  “When you were drawing. I heard you.”

  “I’m not fed up with you. I could never get enough of you, Eggy Weggy. What are you talking about?”

  I sat down in a chair and looked over at them. Eglantine’s eyes were huge as she examined her mother’s face. “I thought you were fed up because I’m so . . .” Eglantine took in a breath and let it out. “Difficult.”

  “You, difficult?” Miranda’s face broke into a smile, and she laughed. “What a thought.”

  Her daughter smiled back at her, then buried her head in her mother’s neck and began to kiss Miranda passionately. “Mommy,” she said, “Oh, my own mommy.”

  “Should we go home now?” Miranda said. “I’m sure Erik has other things to do.”

  “Carry me,” Eggy said. “Please carry me down. I want to be carried.”

  “You’re big, Eggy,” Miranda said.

  And so we carried the small malingerer together. Miranda grabbed the child under her arms, and I took her legs. We hauled her down the stairs, swung her back and forth in the hallway, and ran with her into the front room of the apartment. Eggy laughed the whole way. I left the two of them entwined on the blue sofa. When I closed the door, I heard Miranda singing a sweet tune I’d never heard before. She had a thin voice, higher than I would have expected, and she carried every note.

  THAT SAME EVENING, I called Laura Capelli. The little scene that had taken place in my living room between Eggy and Miranda was no doubt behind my sudden decision to take out another woman. During the afternoon, I had seen a different Miranda. With her daughter, she had been tender, open, affectionate, and full of humor. Her instincts with Eggy had been unerring, and I realized that those same instincts made her guarded and remote with me. Laura lived only seven blocks away, and when I asked her if she would have dinner with me in the neighborhood, she said, “Sure, why not?” In spite of her equivocal answer, the tone of her voice was warm, and on Friday, the day of our rendezvous, I found myself looking forward to seeing her.