The Sorrows of an American

by Siri Hustvedt

  Lorelei followed us out, her stiff leg moving briskly. Before leaving, my sister lingered for a moment on the porch. “Where’s the burnt Lisa?” she asked Lorelei.

  “In another place. Can’t see her, just the ones with yer dad.”

  “She must have done those figures some time ago,” I said, “before her cataracts made it impossible.”

  Lorelei looked for an instant as if she had been hit. Then she said, “Yes, I’ve taken over the work now, but Aunt Lisa has ideas, you know. Direction.”

  There was no handshake, not even a goodbye that I remember. Inga and I wandered out onto the porch and waded through the brown leaves toward our white rented car. It looked forlorn to me, parked alone on that unprepossessing street in the heart of Blue Wing.

  Inga and I didn’t speak for several minutes. I watched the black road under the moving car, the long lines of telephone wires ahead, noted the red and yellow that remained on some of the clusters of trees here and there, which broke the flat landscape, and felt the cold air rush past my ear from the open window.

  I broke the silence. “I treated a patient once who hadn’t spoken to anyone for four years when he was admitted to the hospital. He had threatened his stepmother with a shovel in the family garage. She and his father brought him in. For the first few months, he answered me only with a nod or a shake of his head. Because he was so silent, I would sometimes read something to him, usually a poem. He was completely inert, but I sensed he liked it. His story was very sketchy. According to the father, his mother had died when Mr. B. was seven of ‘a bad heart.’ Everything was fine, he said, and then one day, his son stopped talking. When I brought up the incident in the garage, Mr. B. didn’t respond. I’d been treating him for weeks when I asked again. He took a piece of paper and a pen off my desk and wrote, ‘It wasn’t me.’ ”

  Inga didn’t say anything for a few seconds. She nodded. “It sounds as if Lisa left herself after the birth, floated out of her body. She didn’t feel anything.” Inga turned to look out the window. “It was a secret, all right, kept for years and years, but it doesn’t explain much about Pappa, does it?” she said finally.

  “Except that he kept his word.”

  “And we knew that already,” Inga said.

  “Yes,” I said. “We knew that already.”

  I COULDN’T SLEEP that night. Battered by confused, restless thoughts, I lay under the flowered quilt in the Andrews House for a couple of hours before I dressed and walked down the stairs, through the dim lobby, and out onto Division Street. Then I drove to the farm. I was lucky there was a moon that night, or I would have been forced to leave the headlights on. As I turned into the driveway, I wondered what I was looking for. There’s nothing to be found out here, I thought, except perhaps an idea. The house was locked. It had been robbed long ago of the homely objects that over time had gained value as “antiques” or “semi-antiques.” Vandals had done their business, too, had gone at the few pieces of furniture with an ax. My grandmother was still alive then, living in St. Paul with my uncle, and I had seen her fury mingle with tears when she heard what they had done. For as long as he was able, my father had come to mow the lawn and paint the vacant house when the white enamel blistered and the gray wood began to show through. He had replaced the cracked windows and razed a storage shed that was going to pieces. He had enlisted my uncle in the chores, but maintaining the place was my father’s obsession, and no one questioned it. Now I pay the meager taxes and the bills for minimal upkeep. I do it because my father would have wanted me to do it. No doubt he had wished for more, had hoped the carpentry skills he taught me would be given over to the farmstead. As I sat on the door to the root cellar, I turned my eyes to the pump’s silhouette and beyond it to the field and the outline of the church against the sky, and I thought of the unmarked grave, the nameless infant, and the strange soft dolls. Birth, however, can’t be conveyed through the inanimate—the feel of the wet, dark head, resistant under your fingers as you guide it out of a woman’s gaping vagina until the infant’s jaw is suddenly released, then the gush of blood and amniotic fluid as the small writhing body slips into your arms, its tiny chest cavity heaving as it fights for its first breaths, the strange hoarse cry, the clamp and the cut, then the tug at the umbilical cord to release the placenta, which slides out from between the mother’s swollen labia in a gelatinous heap. He must have known all about it, I thought, from the farm animals, must have seen instantly that the small body he held in his arms was a corpse, must have dug the birth waste into the ground and then wrapped the motionless infant in his handkerchief. The two of them must have walked before they buried the child in a location close to the woods, where the mound of dirt wouldn’t be plowed and tilled. By her own admission, Lisa had felt little or nothing. She must have hobbled beside him in a stupor until she thought to swear him to secrecy, and unless my father or Lisa was carrying a Bible, which I doubted, the oath was taken in the book’s name. It can’t matter now she’s in heaven or to the ones here on earth. I believe in your promise. The rest of the story belonged to the inscrutable “legacy,” the same word Inga had used for Max’s “remains”—his art. Miranda’s tale of Cut Hill came back to me then. The story collapses time. “Me a man.” The fetus redeems his mother’s life. Omen becomes legend: The Maroon warriors will beat back the British slavers and force them into a treaty, and this triumph will mark generation after generation. We’ll have to clean the knife. Lisa Odland waited a lifetime to return to infancy, and now Lorelei played the role of revenant, the dead mother returned to swaddle her child. Tight enough? The air was cold. I felt a wind come up from the west, and I lifted my collar. Mr. B.’s mother had opened her veins in the bath. Her husband discovered her body when the bloody water leaked from under the door. After turning off the tap, his father had found his son downstairs in the kitchen and announced tersely, “Your mother is dead.” Then he shut the boy in his room, where he sat for hours. The adults lied to him about his mother’s death, although “heart” problems had served as an efficient metaphor for what had ailed Mr. B.’s mother. So many mutes. It happens that we all need to hold ourselves together, to shore up the walls of our houses, to patch and to paint, to erect a silent fortress where no one leaves and no one enters. I remembered Sonia’s swollen eyes. I don’t want this world. When it became too cold to sit still, I stood up and walked around the property. After that, I moved into the car to protect myself from the wind. I don’t know how long I sat there, but I had the feeling I was waiting for something—a thought.

  And then I was walking into the house. The screen door opened easily, and I stepped into the summer kitchen. A beam had fallen to the floor. The walls were peeling badly, and I noticed an old sawhorse in front of the great black stove. As I turned slowly to my right, I saw my father, not my old father but my young father, sitting in a chair beside the water bowl. He was wearing the black glasses I remembered from my childhood, and I drew closer to him. “Pappa?” He began to speak to me about footnotes, but I found it difficult to follow what he said, and his voice sounded distant, as if he were in another room, despite the fact that his unlined face was close to mine and appeared oddly magnified. There was no oxygen tank near him, no scar on his nose from the cancer, no hearing aids in his ears. His left leg wasn’t stiff. He aged as I stood in front of him. My old father replaced the young man. The glasses he was wearing changed to the wire ones I had last seen him in, his face deeply wrinkled. I could see the purplish tint on the right side of his nose where the surgeons had grafted skin from his head to repair the damage made after they cut out the malignancy. He smiled.

  “Father,” I said to him. “Aren’t you dead?”

  “Yes,” he said, leaning forward and reaching out for me, taking my hands in his and squeezing them. I felt the long bones of his fingers, his firm grip, and an intense aching happiness. His eyes were lit with the old affection, and he said to me, “Erik, this is how we can be together now.” I was nodding hard. His warm hands did
not let me go. And then he said solemnly, “But never on Fridays.”

  Through the windshield, I saw the first streaks of dawn on the horizon and noted the time on the dashboard. Sleep had come and gone without my knowing it. Startled by the lost hours, I turned the key in the ignition, backed out of the driveway, and headed toward Blooming Field. My father’s ghost had been so vivid, I continued to feel its breathing presence, and as I drove, I was glad for the silent road and the minutes that allowed me to recover. When I passed the familiar sign that said “Blooming Field, Home of Cows, Colleges, and Contentment,” the phantom’s last words came back to me. They struck me as comic now that I was awake, and I had the thought that the distance needed for humor is always missing from dreams. Then I remembered Good Friday. The Christian story of death, burial, and resurrection lay hidden inside that peculiar sentence. That was the day my father could not visit me. He had come instead during the early hours of a Sunday. How strange the mind is, I thought, as I looked at the low-lying clouds in pink and blue that colored the sunrise above the squat, still-sleeping town.

  AS WE DROVE to the airport, Inga said slowly, “Maybe you’ve kept a secret in your heart that you felt in all its joy or pain was too precious to share with someone else.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m quoting Kierkegaard, the preface to Either/Or. He’s making a philosophical point about the internal and the external. He says that he’s always had doubts that the two are the same. He’s certainly right about that. Then, after making us think about not speaking, he begins the second paragraph by saying that gradually the sense of hearing has come to be his favorite sense. Just as the voice best reveals human inwardness, the ear detects it. He writes about the confessional, which separates the speaker and the listener with a screen. When you can’t see a person’s face, he says, there’s no dissonance between vision and hearing; the listener makes an imaginary picture of the speaker; which is, of course, what we do when we read, but he doesn’t say that. And then, without warning, he launches into a story. It begins when he sees a fine piece of furniture in a store window, a secretary. He finds himself passing the shop often, gazing at the handsome object. After a while, he breaks down and buys it. He’s very happy with the thing, time passes, and then the morning he’s supposed to leave for the countryside, he oversleeps. When he wakes up, he jumps out of bed, hurries around, and realizes that he needs to take a bit more money with him, so he goes to his cash drawer in the secretary, but he can’t open it. The driver’s waiting outside, and in his frustration and anger, he bangs his beloved secretary with a hatchet. That’s when a hidden drawer pops open, complete with a pigeonhole stuffed with papers that turn out to be two manuscripts written by two men. You remember?”

  “Vaguely,” I said. Actually, I remembered nothing, although it seemed to me that I had once read at least a part of the book.

  “Well, it’s all made up, of course. The preface is written under a pseudonym, a fictional editor named Victor Eremita, a screen between the writer and the reader.”

  “Are you telling me this for some reason?”

  “Bear with me,” she said curtly. “I’ve always felt that the secretary is standing in for a living body, a person giving up secrets under duress, like Kierkegaard’s brooding, guilty father before he died. After he injures the chest, Eremita says that he begs its forgiveness and then goes away to the country. He leaves the broken, hurt piece of furniture behind, but he takes the documents, its hidden contents, its inner voice, with him.”

  “We all have secret drawers.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “And most of the time they’re never found. Eremita says that luck usually plays a role in such discoveries, and it’s true.”

  “You’re thinking about our father?”

  She nodded. “And Max.

  “You see, there’s another point that Eremita makes. He says that the papers of both men, whom he calls A and B, can be looked at as the work of a single man. He admits this is unhistorical, improbable, and unreasonable, and yet this is what he proposes, either/or, a doubling or internal dialogue, two inner voices in one, the Seducer and the Ethicist combined. Aside from the ironic unveiling—K. coming into the mix—it’s true, isn’t it, that we’re always looking for one person when there’s more than one, several contentious voices in a single body. Time is part of it. We have different selves over the course of a life, but even all at once. Max was several people. He had hundreds of masks—all his characters—but day to day, too.” She lowered her voice. “When we were in Paris, not long before he got really sick, we left the little movie house on the rue Christine near our hotel. When we stepped out into the bright street, I looked at him and his face had gone gray. He lit a cigarette, leaned against the wall of the theater, looked me in the eyes, and said, ‘They’ll try to take it all away, baby. But you and I know better, don’t we?’ I laughed. He sounded like a film noir hero, and we’d just seen one of Jules Dassin’s American movies. He didn’t laugh with me. His expression was sad, and he looked at me with his gray eyes and his gray face, and it was as if I wasn’t his wife. I wasn’t Inga.” My sister smiled to herself.

  “As if he was seeing you for the first time,” I said.

  “Could be.” Inga took a breath. “I’ve never told anyone this. Certainly not Henry. We went back to the hotel, and we made love. The afternoon light in the room was beautiful. Afterward, I went into the bathroom, and when I came out, he was sitting, still naked, on the edge of the bed, turned away from me toward the window. His head was down and he had his hands on his lap. He didn’t hear or see me. I stood in the doorway and looked at him. He was signing to himself. He had learned American Sign Language—well, not fluently, but some—when he was working on the script. It fascinated him.”

  “Did you know what he was saying?”

  “I knew only because it’s a line from the film. It’s when Arkadi is searching for Lili and he finds himself in that strange warehouse full of faceless mannequins dressed in all the clothes she’s worn earlier in the film. In a corner of that huge room, there’s a chest of drawers.”

  “I remember. He yanks open the drawers, finds them empty, and starts heaving them onto the floor. When he gets to the last one, he pulls it open, and hears a strange voice say, ‘I can’t tell you.’ ”

  “Then Arkadi signs the same words,” Inga said.

  “Max was sitting on the bed, signing, ‘I can’t tell you.’ ”

  She nodded. “He did it several times.”

  “So you think he was quashing a desire to confess about Edie or something else, and that’s what Edie is hiding from you?”

  When I glanced over at Inga, she didn’t turn to me. “Erik, I know you sometimes think I don’t get to the point, but I started my little story about Max with Either/Or for a reason. ‘One author,’ ” she quoted, “ ‘seems to be enclosed in another, like the parts in a Chinese puzzle box.’ I stood there in the doorway, looking at my husband as he gestured those words, and wondered, ‘Which I and which you? There are too many.’ ”

  “But you didn’t ask?”

  “He didn’t know that I was watching him.” She smiled to herself. “Anyway, I wasn’t in a greedy, prying mood. That day I had him for my own, you see. I remember distinctly that I walked over to him and put my hands on his shoulders. We both looked out the window at the rooftops and the clouds, and I said to myself: Never forget this happiness.” My sister’s voice was low and ruminative. “Never forget, because soon it will be gone.”

  WHEN I WALKED into the house late Sunday, a part of me was still back on the prairie with my father. I took out his well-worn memoir and paged through it. We were children of the seasons, he wrote, sometimes its victims. He wrote about mud in spring so deep his boots sank into it until he couldn’t take another step. He wrote about the grasshoppers, army worms, crows, and squirrels that attacked the crops in summer, and the snows that kept them off the roads in winter. He wrote about how to brew Christmas beer and
he wrote about shivarees and square dances and barley beards that stuck in your clothing and clung to your skin and the Hooverville nearby with its hobos and their fires, but I was looking for more, more than descriptions of a way of life that’s now gone, more than the story of Lisa and her dead child. I was looking for a path that would take me inside a man.

  Father was kind. Many are kind, but often to a select group. Father’s kindness drew no lines. Strangers captured it and warmed to him. Those who knew him well took it for granted and of course there were those who exploited his generous nature. He was also a man steeped in regional lore, and he passed on the tales he had heard. His closest friends were also storytellers, but he outlived them all, and there were no replacements. As he aged, he agonized over the distintegration of the neighborhood he had known and once said that one of the most overlooked evils in the world was loneliness.

  My father could well have been writing about himself. Perhaps, without knowing it, he was.

  “YOU’RE IN LOVE with that woman downstairs,” Laura said to me, her voice indignant.

  “I thought you weren’t interested in anything serious,” I mumbled to her from the other side of the bed.

  “Erik, whatever’s going on between us, it’s something important to me and to you, or so I thought.” Laura sat up in bed and turned to me, her eyes alive with feeling. “Good grief, we do this for a living. We talk—a little openness might be good.” Her voice grew softer. “Listen, I don’t know where we’re going, but I don’t think I want to go anywhere with you if there’s some fantasy object hanging over us.”

  I sat up slowly. Laura had folded her arms across her naked breasts, as if to conceal them now that our conversation had taken on a dire tone. I looked down at her round belly and the curls of her pubic hair, took her in my arms, and kissed her neck, but she pulled away.