The Sorrows of an American

by Siri Hustvedt

  “That’s what you think of my father?” Sonia yelled these words, stood up, leaned toward Edie, and began to shake her hands in the air. “You didn’t give a shit about him, did you?” Then Inga stood up, reached for her daughter, and grabbed her by the arm. Sonia turned an angry face toward her mother. Edie cried more loudly, and Henry leaned back in his chair. He looked genuinely distraught.

  “Okay,” I said in a booming voice. “I think . . .” But before I could continue my sentence, Henry gave a small gasp, and I heard the door behind me slam against the wall. Startled, I wheeled around. Moving quickly toward us was a big disheveled woman with bright pink lipstick and rouge on her broad fleshy face. She was dressed in a huge gray coat, thick green socks covered only by slippers, and a red-and-white stocking cap that partially concealed what appeared to be a curly blond wig. She was carrying two large Macy’s bags and an umbrella, and she had a wild look in her eyes.

  “Dorothy!” Henry said, “What on earth are you doing here?”

  Linda raised her hands. “You’re the one,” she shrieked. “You’re the one who hit me!”

  Edie lifted her head, and her eyes, now blackened by smeared mascara and running eyeliner, widened in a look of puzzlement. “I’ve seen you,” she said, “I know you from somewhere.”

  Dorothy held up one of the bags and said in a clear deep voice, “I have them.”

  I suddenly knew who it was, but it was Inga who said it: “Burton?”

  It was Burton all right, skin shining with perspiration and in need of a shave. The man’s disguise was hardly brilliant. As I gaped at him, I wondered how anyone could mistake him for a woman, and yet an instant earlier, he had been someone I didn’t know. He removed his coat in a single gesture and then, with a flourish, pulled off his hat and wig. His makeup was still on, however, which gave him a clownlike appearance. Either he had forgotten this or perhaps the ghoulish paint didn’t matter to him. From one of his bags, he withdrew a manila envelope and handed it to Inga, who had remained sitting in her chair.

  “It happens,” he said to Inga, bending over to speak to her, the hem of his blue dress brushing against her shins, “that an opportunity presented itself to me in the form of an inheritance, and in this new financial state, I asked myself whether any good might come of it, aside from my own enjoyment of the greater comforts I am able to afford now that I am, shall we say, slightly flush, and it seemed that I might make up for that Thursday evening many years ago when I”—Burton took a deep breath—“when I humiliated myself in your presence.”

  Inga lifted a hand to Burton’s rouged face and stroked it. “Don’t say that. It doesn’t matter. It never mattered.”

  “Open it,” he said, and then, in a voice more excited than I had ever heard him use, he burst out, “I bought them. The letters. They’re yours. That’s my gift, my . . . my atonement.”

  Inga glanced down at the slender envelope in her lap. She turned it over. “I’m scared to read them.” She grimaced. Looking up at Burton, she said, “Should I be?”

  “I’m afraid that I’m not in a position to answer that question,” he said. “I am ignorant of their contents.”

  My friend, the cross-dressing amateur detective, had spied, snooped, shadowed, eavesdropped, and deceived, but his code of honor had kept him from reading the letters he had spent good money to procure. When he turned to me, I gestured toward my breast pocket and then my own cheeks and mouth to encourage him to wipe off what he could of the now very moist and gleaming pink stains on his face. He dutifully pulled out the omnipresent handkerchief and began to push it up and down his cheeks and across his mouth.

  With trembling hands, Inga withdrew the seven letters from the envelope. She removed the first one, looked down at it, and a bewildered look crossed her face. From where I sat, I could see Max’s tiny handwriting. She took out a second and a third, casting a quick glance at the top of each, then continued to the next until she had briefly looked at each one. She inhaled deeply and spoke to Edie, “They’re all addressed to Lili, not to you.”

  “Well, I’m Lili,” Edie said. “I was Lili, anyway.”

  Henry’s lips parted in amazement. “Seven letters to his character. Seven,” he said. “There are seven sightings of Lili early in the film; each time she’s different. Did you ever ask him why he wrote to Lili, not to you?”

  Edie’s eyes widened. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “They’re all different. I mean, it’s like he’s writing to different people.”

  Henry shook his head. “The wily devil.”

  “Seven incarnations,” I said.

  “So that’s the big secret you strung me along with?” Linda barked at Edie. “The big scoop is that Blaustein wrote letters to someone who doesn’t even exist?”

  Sonia looked at me and then at her mother. When she spoke, her voice was strangely hoarse. “He used to tell me that he heard them talking, his people. Even when the book is over, he said, they’re still there. It’s like he didn’t want the stories to end. He wanted to keep writing them. I think he hoped they would keep him alive.”

  Henry left first. He hugged Inga, and I noticed that she withdrew quickly from his embrace. Inga shook Linda’s hand and reiterated her apology, upon which the woman grabbed her multiple outer layers and escaped through the door. Inga, Sonia, and Edie left together. “The three of us are going to talk at home,” Inga told me. “I have the room until tomorrow. You two stay on and have a drink.”

  And so Burton and I stayed and ordered single-malt Scotch and settled in beside each other in two soft chairs. My plump companion in a dress and slippers excited no interest from the waiter, who served us in a polite, bored way that made it clear he had better things to worry about, probably his acting career. It was then that Burton told me about the many hours he had spent in the streets as Dorothy, his second self, a homeless woman he had named after the girl from Kansas who travels to Oz. He had considered naming his alter ego after another Baum character, the princess he first introduced to his readers as the boy Tip, later revealed to be Ozma, princess of Oz, who has been enchanted into the other sex. While we talked together, I understood that my friend had whole territories within him I had never known about. He didn’t think of Dorothy as a disguise anymore, he told me, but as aspects of himself come to light, both mad and feminine. “There is a delectable, yes, positively chewy pleasure to be derived from raving, Erik, from a lunatic discourse that swells up from God-knows-where, my manic features, I suppose, once suppressed, have been released into oratory of preposterous grandeur, delivered to any and to all. I reveled, Erik, in my false bosoms and preponderant behind, in my big, fat, uninhibited woman-ness roving the city streets. And even in the sorrow of it. Oh yes, in the lugubrious, doleful invisibility of my station, yes, that’s it, the Nobody effect, I call it. So few people look at you,” Burton said. “Blind and deaf public hordes with shopping bags and briefcases and backpacks pass you by—that is the lot, my friend, of the unseen, the unknown, the un-signified, and the forgotten.”

  When I asked why Henry had called him by name, or rather by his other name, Burton told me that while he was staking out the professor’s apartment building, Henry had stopped Dorothy on the street a couple of times and asked if she needed help. Burton confessed to some guilt about those incidents. He had turned down Henry’s change, he said, but was touched by his generosity. As for Edie, he thought her life was hard, an ongoing penance for her wild days. Her son had struck him as a delicate, sullen, difficult boy, and after making the deal with her, he felt confident the cash would help Joel, too. It may have been my Lutheran queasiness about money, but I refrained from asking how much the letters had cost him. All in all, his vigils had made him kinder toward those two, but he reserved his wrath for the journalist and admitted that Dorothy (he did not say “I”) had once “weakly tapped” the redhead with her umbrella.

  It was darkening outside when Burton and I left the hotel, a little tipsy in the twilight as we stood together on th
e sidewalk. The Walrus and the Carpenter, I said to myself. While we waited for cabs, we looked downtown, and I know we both thought not about what was there, but about what wasn’t, and neither of us said a word as we gazed at the empty sky above lower Manhattan. I watched Burton stop a cab. Dorothy had been mostly dismantled by then. Without the wig, makeup, and breast-and-buttock padding, his masculinity had been restored, but as he lifted his leg to enter the taxi, the long coat swung open, and I glimpsed his blue dress swish beneath it for an instant. I had a thought then, which as soon as it had passed through my mind, made me smile. It was this: The man is really coming into his own.

  THREE DAYS LATER, when I came out of the subway, I thought I saw Jeffrey Lane walking along Prospect Park, but I wasn’t sure. When a person occupies a subliminal presence in my mind, any number of strangers can take on his or her form. I saw Miranda several times in the two weeks that followed, but Eggy was always with her. Something had changed between Miranda and me, however, a thickening of knowledge that nevertheless kept us apart. We weren’t awkward or shy together. It was as if Miranda’s confession were locked up in a room that had become inaccessible by ordinary means, a sealed chamber we remembered but couldn’t return to. I knew that she was working hard, drawing into the night. When she spoke about the pictures, her voice grew vehement and her eyes took on a feverish glaze that made me deferent and quiet in her presence. When I asked to see what she was doing, she told me to wait.

  Eggy carried her ball of string everywhere, “just in case.” Her teacher at P.S. 321 let her keep it inside her desk during school hours, and Miranda had allowed her daughter to hang string in her bedroom that connected the ceiling lamp to the bedposts and chair. “It can’t be dangerous, that’s all,” Eggy told me. “I can’t trip in the night. I have to be able to get out in a fire, you see. That’s what Mommy says.” The child was sitting beside me fingering her ball when she spoke. “I don’t want to burn up.” Eggy clutched the ball harder. “Sometimes bad people turn into fire just like that. They don’t even need a match.”

  She turned her fierce, small face to mine, as if she were challenging me.

  “No, Eggy,” I said, “people don’t just burst into flames without a match. Did somebody tell you that?”

  “Frankie’s babysitter said that God makes bad people burn.”

  “I see, but it’s not true.”

  Eggy brought the ball to her nose and pressed it against her face. Then she whispered, “I’m bad.”

  We talked for a while about bad feelings and good ones. I stressed that every person has both, that having bad feelings didn’t make you bad. I don’t know if these therapeutic platitudes did any good, but by the time Miranda called her, Eggy seemed relieved. I know that what’s said is often less important than the tone of voice in which the words are spoken. There is music in dialogue, mysterious harmonies and dissonances that vibrate in the body like a tuning fork.

  AS THE ANNIVERSARY of my father’s death approached, I returned home from work in the dark November evenings. On the lined pages of my notebook, I recorded one dream after another, in which my father, whom I believe to be dead, is still alive. He sits across the room at a neuroscience lecture on East Eighty-second Street. I see him from behind as he writes in his study, but he can’t hear me when I speak to him. I find him wooden and inert on a sofa, and yet when I get close to him, he blinks. Every time I woke from one of these nocturnal sightings, I would remember the others, which had brought with them the same discomfort, an ambivalence so highly calibrated I felt that each side of the emotional strain could be mathematically measured into a perfect half. Unlike the ghostly presence in Minnesota, these paternal figures said nothing. They were mutes, dummies that barely breathed. When I spoke of them to Magda the day I went to see her, she said that my descriptions made her think of the word “deadlock.”

  Many of my childhood hours were spent with my father as he went about his work. I sat on his lap when he plowed, on top of the drill when he seeded, and trotted behind him and stumbled over clods of soil when he dragged. In winter, to the weak light of a kerosene lantern, my father milked in the barn while I sat beside him and asked him questions. Could a cat win in a fight with a weasel? Why did skunks invade chicken houses? Why were bulls dangerous while cows were not? How many rattlesnakes had my father killed and what was the safest way to do it?

  “Pappa, how can you tell it’s going to snow?”

  “Pappa, why is tobacco juice coming out of the grasshopper?”

  “Pappa, how come burning grass stings you?”

  I loved to ask my father questions. I was curious, but I wonder now if I didn’t also know that he loved to be asked, that he loved the adulation he felt from me when I asked, that the asking was a repetition of what he had loved as a child and had become: the incarnation of the gentle father who listened and answered during milking sessions in the barn. The answer was less important than the question. My father’s answers were often long and involved and I didn’t understand them, but I liked to be near him, liked the smell of him, the feel of his beard. It was hard for him when you grew up. “He has black moods,” Tante Lotte said once to my mother. “You’ll see.”

  “I wish I could remember more,” I said to Magda. “There’s a haze over things.” My father is in the garden, the garden that was far too big and bore many times what the family could eat. I heard my mother say, “I don’t know what to do with all these beans.” “They’ll go to the neighbors,” my father always answered, as if we were back on the prairie where there was rarely enough, where they canned and stored what they had for the long winter when the roads were blocked for weeks, sometimes months on end. I watched him weed with a fast hand around the cornstalks, saw the fields and the horizon behind him. “The garden was the farm,” I said to Magda. “He was doing it again, and doing it right.” I saw him stop weeding and stand up, saw him turn toward the woods, his hands deep in his pockets, and I saw a look of grief cross his face. He didn’t know that I was watching him from the garage, and I couldn’t go to him. We didn’t intrude. Intrusion would mean that I knew, and I couldn’t know that he suffered. “He never left the farm,” I said. “He was always trying to repair and restore and redo.”

  The Depression never seemed to end. In addition, there were years of drought, crop failures and dried-up pastures. When rain finally came, only weeds grew. High-velocity southwest winds brought dust from Nebraska and South Dakota and perhaps from as far away as Oklahoma. The sun disappeared for days. Dust, layers of it, covered everything everywhere. The farm animals got sores in their mouths from eating grit-covered grass. People spat black and said things were worse farther west.

  Magda was listening as I read the passage to her; her old face had wrinkled into that concentrated look I remembered from the years we had spent together.

  “It’s as if I’m looking for something,” I said, “but I don’t know what it is. Something that will release me.”

  “From the depression,” she said.

  I looked at her.

  “And the guilt and the black moods when the sun disappears for days, and from your father who refuses to die.”

  I wanted to weep then. I felt the tension in my chest and the pressure in my nose and eyes and the tightening around my mouth, but I had a sense that I wouldn’t stop if I began to cry and closed my eyes to press down the emotion.

  “In one of his essays,” Magda said, “Hans Loewald wrote, ‘The work of psychoanalysis can turn ghosts into ancestors.’ ”

  I TOOK NO notes the day Eggy fell, but I remember the alien cadence of Miranda’s voice on the message she left me and exactly where I was standing in the cold rain on East Fortieth Street. “Eggy fell at Jeff’s. She hit her head. She’s in pediatric emergency at Bellevue Hospital. They put a tube in her so she can breathe. They’re doing a CT scan.” She stopped talking then, and I heard nothing for a couple of seconds. “Erik, she’s unconscious.” Miranda didn’t say good-bye, and she didn’t ask me to com
e. At Jeff’s. Eggy fell at Jeff’s. As soon as I heard those words, an unformed accusation against Lane rose up in me, and the cloud of sinister possibility that had always hung about him thickened. Stalker, thief, poseur. I remembered Miranda’s bloody finger, Lane’s face in my hallway mirror as he delivered his soliloquy. I remembered the break-in, the photograph, the hammer, and my heart began to beat faster. I saw Eglantine on the floor, unconscious, saw paramedics leaning over her body as they intubated her. When I stepped into the street to hail a cab, I continued Eggy’s story in my mind, and although I knew it was irrational even to imagine an outcome until I knew more, I saw her in the ICU dead, saw a woman with a clipboard sit down beside Miranda and explain in a hushed voice about organ donation. The decision had to be made now. In the taxi, I rehearsed everything I could remember about the Glasgow Coma Scale and its relation to recovery rates, the possible impairments after head injury—seizures, cognitive deficits, memory problems, personality changes. I wasn’t an expert. Once I knew what had happened, I would call Fred Kaplan—that’s all he did, head injury day and night.

  As I walked through the doors and marched down the corridor, I realized I was praying—the automatic, half-hearted prayer of a nonbeliever beseeching the lost deity of his childhood to intervene on his behalf. Please let the child live. Please let her be okay. I had walked through hospital doors hundreds of times. I had seen hundreds of patients in dire need, but one of the secrets to good care is to not empathize too much, to keep your head, to remain calm. I wasn’t calm, and it was more than alarm for Eglantine. There was rage in my step, rage in my belly and chest, and the prayer changed to a chant against Lane. Monster, bad father, shit. I strode down the hall, rhythmic fury pushing me ahead. Completely absorbed, I knocked into an old woman, who was slowly propelling herself forward in a wheelchair. I leaned down and apologized. She lifted her wizened face to mine, smiled, and said in a thick accent I couldn’t identify, “Never mind, child.”