“He is rejecting the world,” Berners says. “And I shall die of it.”
Berners wishes to add he is almost sure that, reverting to his childhood training under the Protestant Fathers of Berne, he said that last in Latin.
It is answered.
“I keep that table. Fo’ you an’ him. An’ me an’ mine.”
Payment is refused.
Beyond is his car, on the hood of which four small boys sit. They are about eight, the age of Mei-ling. Their eyes are the same velvet glass, their small nostrils and lips carved in the same shared substance which keeps all of them alike for a time. Berners looks closer. At one of them. What a surgeon knows best and before all techniques, he reminds us, is the look of the successive stages of flesh. In sickness and in health. His mind is married to it. Is it deeper than fancy that in this one the cornea already itches; the maze of a twofold torture is ready to bud behind that thought-scabied eye?
“Have you a mumma and dadda?” The child turns down the corners of his little frog-mouth. Berners swears to himself there is a spatial knowledge in the smile.
“Mumma.”
In time, Berners is now ready to believe, the child and she will die of it.
Berners is in other words—new and dangerous words—ready to believe that his is not a special situation. He is fully aware of the source of his brooding—a succession of undiagnosed autopsies in the Chinese district last year. Whatever the cause, certain ones down there fall like flies to it; they go down before it as the Indians here are said first to have succumbed to measles—like them they must have had no antibodies for it. All men and women of a certain age and circumstance. Not unlike his. Parental disease of the heart? A pathologist smiled, and said no.
He has even been foolish enough to coin himself a secret name for it, no doubt grubbed from some submerged Graeco-Roman prowl of his boyhood. Parentation, or the performance of the funeral rites of parents. By—or with—the child. He believes himself to be not merely in a personal situation, but a process—as in so many of the circumstances of life we really are. Of the dangers of this sort of thinking he is also fully aware. But he has come to it. Perhaps the process has brought him there? Yes, in the operating room, those small or larger amphitheaters where observers are allowed, any who ask him for theory, student or staff, still get a hissed “Watch!” But these days he carries us, his own amphitheater with him everywhere, its members changing or added to daily. We are that hypothetical arena to which even the lowest of humans makes his report.
The boys want him to pay them something. On the stoops of the sour night, people stand, offering their breasts passively to the cool traffic wind, sorry perhaps they are not machines. He thinks of the four of us he has approached. Only four of course, in a total staff of two hundred, but all outwardly hearty, positive, supervisory people like Berners himself, sturdy enough for a physical rehabilitation unit in a slum hospital. And each—until that spate of Chinese bodies last winter—harboring at the secret dead-center of himself, his own core of child-woe. Each—Berners now posits—going to die like that, with not a cell disarranged, on the child-vine.
We are participating, he will suggest, in the cacoethes, or malignant death, of the species. He will say he finds it almost exhilarating, that the atom may not be our last abyss. We are humans; it would be fitting that we disappear humanly. In human agony.
In the coal-gas night, Berners copes with this enormous dream funeral, still looking at the child. Once imagined, he has had to deal with it like a man receiving by messenger a giant bouquet the size of his small house. One summons back other funerals, of smaller scope:
A family line on a summer porch, never photographed—and now dust which has escaped this greater dust. Two students he once roomed with at separate times: one stupid, saturnine and dead, the other dead and criminal. They turn their backs on him. The reverend headfather, then eighty, bending toward two novices, brought before him for flagellating themselves, who will die in next year’s avalanche; all three stare at him. His own father, now a whistle and a cheroot on the alpine air.
All, all what innocents, on the far, safe side! Old-fashioned, valetudinarian deaths. From small sicknesses. But in the domesday light of this other, wouldn’t the interpenetration of all suffering become clear?
He asks us to consider whether we may not now be finishing that Voyage of the Beagle which Darwin made. Ask ourselves, he says—Have the fittest survived? Or is this nature’s quick “Price raised!” for having made that unique life-doll, an individual—as those faces he took us to see in the morgue and the Mott Street mortuaries all seemed to say? They were all middle-aged, like us. All on the edge of “a culture,” no longer in the golden mean of any. Maybe those go first, he brooded, who in their lifetime have had more than one, and can no longer manage it. Or was it merely that lesser decline of the West which Berners’ grandfather, a classmate of Spengler, claimed he too saw dragging its curved shadow up against the sun’s curve? There the bodies lay, in what might be a Darwinian death—or only something caught from a mote in a basket of fruit. “All parents—” as that fact-fool of a social worker read out to them, “—of one or more child”—as if it was possible to the state of parent to have less than one. Berners will ask us what would be the most fitting human agony? Or a death the most Darwinian.
Would it be in a reversal of the roles between cadaver and child? Would it be—that our children become our cadavers, and we are forced to dance with them?
But he reminds us that his is only a first report, from a man of median imagination. Maybe those are the only ones to imagine it. Meanwhile, the hospitals round the world continue their search for the nonfilterable viruses, hoping to find an orderly degeneration in the ordinary tissues of men. When we listen to him, we must consider whether or not his is merely that.
What does the rotunda know?—he will say, concluding. Man is a rotunda. That is what it knows best.
Now he asks us to put aside scalpel, microscope, maybe even the hospital, and come outside with him, into a ward growing ever larger.
Follow him please into a group of ordinary parents, casting their nets for blame. Remember? This is a full report.
He paid the boys two dollars to mind the car, promising more when he comes back. Can they stay out that late? Nodding, sitting on its prow like small boatmen soon to be lost in the dark, they watch him go.
Walking to Baba’s, he already feels the usual irritation with these people who share his lot. Fools who sit in their misery as in a church. And would have let any local expert from the “Y” lead their interdenominational chorale. Who let him.
He had first seen the group’s placard, all over town now, up in Boston. Yes, he admits that for him it was like the tea. An associative link. “Parent’s Movement! Touch and Talk!” He had just come from Mott Street. So the card had interested him. Little cries, little clues from a flesh trying to tell us something? In the tortured street-cries vended anywhere. Why were people so hurriedly dividing their freedom into separate cells, for the man or woman in them, for the eater and the yogi in themselves, the worker and the idler, the aging and the young? While all the while, in some honeycomb cell hiding from the pathologist …? A man and a woman, not paired, had joined him there, reading over his shoulder—new types for placards, elegant. Berners had left them to it. On the way out of his son’s alley, he came back.
There are similar groups now all over this city. One down here, on our western edge. None on Mott Street—they resist. Berners goes to one outside his district, telling himself it’s the proper scientific thing; he does it for us.
Examine carefully, Berners says, what I did by that. We are to pretend we are back in the simplest high school biologies, zoologies, being told of how the first platypus flops up out of the Australian shallows onto its first riverbank—or how a small arctic rodent, myodus lemmus, resembling a fieldmouse with a short tail, very prolific, makes a remarkable annual migration, to a sea. He asks us kindly to examine—while p
erhaps holding our breath in analogy—the actions of all returning animals. He pleads with us to examine everything he does from now on in a physical light. He believes we must reexamine all human action, as animal.
He went back uptown. To his old habitat.
Of all that group who waited in a rented room at the 94th Street “Y”—he didn’t know they were waiting for him—five now remain, including him. Two couples who went along for a while have now departed. The Laskys without further communication. The Hatches, on a hunch returning in winter to a Lake Michigan summerhouse which before sale had been in the family for four generations, had found their son and daughter there, and have since been reunited with yet another child. They have no idea why such remission should occur, but are staying there—close.
Two men, one Berners himself, and three women, have attended the group’s sessions steadily this past winter. All but one happens to be living in single circumstances; he doubts this has any significance in the process, other than that these are the ones who have no mate to suffer it with. The other four in his group believe they are in a circumstance, not a process. They still believe the group helps.
They are: Jacob Taylor; married, one daughter; Rebecca Ruge, unmarried, indeterminate number of scattered children, one son remaining; Sylvia Fisher, honorably widowed, one daughter; Mrs. Mimi Killeen, deserted, twin boys.
He knew he had returned, the minute he entered that small rented meeting room at the “Y.” They could any of them have been his former patients. The same tweeds, purses, rings, postures as had come to him for years, wanting newer noses, smoother skin; he had learned never to be sure, at a glance into his waiting room, of who wanted what. And down there in the last row, in her cheap black, his usual tithe in those days—the patient he would do for charity. The room was filled with their silent, clamorous need.
Taking a seat next to the woman in the back row, he listens with bent head. From the pressure of feeling around him he would have said there were fifty there. Actually there were twelve. When Berners was a boy sitting in the Evangelical church of a Sunday, he had always thought of it as a dispensary somewhat larger than his father’s, where all applicants gave names, livelihood and need, pulling either at forelocks or impatient gold watches, while God at the top of the steeple doled out the calomel. Not being sick, he had never asked for anything. And being his father’s son. Often, in his later student days, the clinic had reminded him of a church. And now, waiting his turn among these people already busy confessing what prior doors they had knocked on, he saw that they too were confused, no longer knowing the difference.
They were all new here, leaderless, and at the wry suggestion of a man whose daughter was in prison, were just voting whether or not to call themselves The Lookouts—“Because we look out for them. We are their lookouts.” All were people whose children had refused to have more to do with them. Again and again. In mimes and games and murderous language. And arts of silence. This last interested Berners. He imagined a solid line of children joining hands, turning their backs against this wailing wall. Opening his eyes, he saw the wall itself—a line of mothers and fathers made sensitive to the touch, hollow in the sphincter, leaking in the aorta, by their kids. He didn’t need a steeple to see it. With open or closed eyes he could look down into those ords, that blubber, that stool.
“Why shouldn’t we have a place to tell it?” a woman says.
The vote was six for the proposition, four against it, two, including Berners, abstaining. The name was never mentioned again.
Next to him the charity patient, on closer inspection a big bass blond behind her dead black, had identified herself to him, Mimi Killeen, legal wife of a vaudeville man. “I was his straight girl. When the twins was born he skipped.” Now she worked as a cleaner, theaters mostly, and for “a few good people on Fifth.”
But when it came her turn, she couldn’t bring herself to public talk. “Everybody says twins is so jolly!” she said, and stopped.
The group was ready to love her for breaking down. Berners guessed rather that she had no vocabulary for their kind of emotion. It had taken two more sessions for them to rid themselves of their first image of her—pulling one of those good-for-a-laugh double perambulators with the two jollies in it. In the picture she brought the twins were slim boys of twenty-eight, as flawlessly together in their pointed shoes, high cravats and long-lashed ephebe eyes, as they were in their suicide pacts, endlessly unsuccessful, except on her.
“And the telephone, my God the telephone,” one man had said, taking up his turn. “Our house, we have an extension the phone company knows from nothing. My wife here has it, in the head. All night she sits up and waits for it to ring.”
And at last she dials, Berners thought, walking. He knows that umbilical cord. And in the months since that night, how all the group suffer from it—the terrible symbiosis of the telephones, side by side in life, and not ringing. Or saying the unspeakable. Asking it. Those two had been the Laskys; they had disappeared.
But I, Berners, don’t do that telephone act anymore. There is a progression; maybe we are getting closer to the body of it. I don’t even go up there anymore, I let Jacob. That’s how I save myself from it. And Jacob, letting one or the other of us visit his prison daughter, does the same.
“Doctor, welcome,” this man said when it was Berners’ turn.
To Berners that first time, Jacob’s snub phiz looked like the official busts of Socrates or the portraits of Tolstoi, in the final rogueries of their lives—that compressed Slav face with whose planes one could do nothing. Berners remembers thinking then that a daughter could never get over it. She hadn’t. In this new phase the group is now in—in which they see each other’s children where possible, or help hunt for them—Berners has seen her. What profile there is to the two faces, if fitted together nose over nose and tilted as in a medical photograph done to guide some impossible grafting, would dovetail at brows, lips and chins—a perfect seal. Or kiss.
“We have no leader,” this man repeated. He wore a star sapphire ring down one knuckle, too small for him. “We should organize.”
“Why should he do it?” a woman said. “Doctors are mortal.”
If you think it over—this woman, Sylvia Fisher, said to Berners later—parenthood brings out your theme. She said many reasonable things, silly style, with the clubwoman’s inability to find her own.
That first time, he saw her merely as a pretty forty—face set deep in a gray-blond coifed head too big for the rest of her, elegant legs and the short, peculiarly obese body whose shape to Berners had the melted, almost transient look of tranquilizer fat. The worry-fat that people put on in ordinary life was more sebaceous, based on food. Chlorpromazine, Thorazine, and even some of the lesser drugs, put a watery fat on mental patients; he had seen these standing about on the wards, rocking on their ankles in uneven calm.
Raoul, put in hospital by the school for hunger striking, had refused any such drugs, Berners thought rightly so, as usual getting himself into trouble with the resident staff, for half-abetting his son. And into deeper waters with the son. While, over the years since, hunger, abstention from the world, had become ever more sane than hospitals.
Actually, as Berners now knew, he had been wrong about Sylvia, whose fat came from the failed sexual activity of widowhood, put too soon on those pouter-pigeon bones. Why had such a woman’s vanity failed her? That little domestic Pompadour with her luminous scarves and mouth, and clean, pillowy house—why didn’t she get herself a man? Why didn’t he, Berners, have a steady woman, or Jacob, with that wife, a girl? The group, holding onto each other in handfest all winter, had helped Berners find out.
“Doctor—” the man with the phiz said again, extending his hand—“I’m Jacob Taylor, doctor, I live in the Majestic.” Later he told them his daughter “made fun” when he said that, his shrewd, beaten eyes meanwhile watching them. Except for that shrewdness, which sat on his back directing him to more and more city real estate, which in
turn sat in his head like the Pole forests of his childhood—he was a plain man. The sapphire had been flung at him by the daughter, as the prison gates closed on her. “The matron started to pick it up. But I said no, I bent down for it. Like a story in the Bible, in my shoulders I felt it.” His face was weatherbeaten, sick with fatherhood. “Like what’s that play with the king’s daughters—I gave her what I had, so now I get bitched.”
“Lear.” Lasky and his telephone wife sat entwined like a lover’s knot, the fingers of both hands interlaced with the others. She never said anything. But if one watched her, one could hear it ringing. Eventually the two of them must have followed it.
“Yeah, Lear.” Taylor, originally a contractor from the Bronx, had given his daughter a Greenwich Village flat with a chandelier—“You know Leroy Street? They don’t come any better, that old-New-York stuff”—and three abortions. “She has done everything,” he said, with the grimace a man’s face has when it is just barely not weeping—a physiognomy Berners remembers from civilian faces in war. The military, more released, often weep. Months go by before Taylor was able to tell them what his daughter is in prison for.
“I think maybe this group is too intellectual.” If they had all been lying on the “Y” ’s floor, trying to feel the earth nine stories down, Rebecca Ruge would still have felt impelled to say that; like many people in handicrafts (according to Baba who worked with them) Rebecca felt herself to be the original custodian of earth-vibes. She was easier with them after they visited her house, a kind of mole tunnel built around a central stove made of the brown-green clay she used for everything; if Berners had told her that her mind resembled her house, she would have been pleased. She was one of those women whose last lover leaves them for the same reason as the first. The gloomy-graceful pots she made were to be respected rather than used; internationally famous now, they were to be A.D. 4000’s shards of us. Ranged in rows differing only in size, they were an obsession exuded like a daily egg. But she was viviparous too; she had had half a dozen children, named for fruits and flowers and scattered like seeds—and one she had clung to and suffered from. He was an intellectual.
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