by Mary Gordon
Thomas Mann. Horace Mann. Horace Mann was the name of our high school. Thomas Mann was a name I had never heard. But I knew I had been chosen.
My place in the school had been earned because I was considered the best actor, the star of all the plays, and I used my acting skills to pretend I knew all (or even something) about the great writer Thomas Mann. I had to pretend that I wasn’t completely out of my depth trying to understand why he had fled Germany, a man of his age, his mid-sixties, which felt ancient to me. I suppose I must have heard of Hitler, heard something of the Nazis, but I had to assume an expression of sage familiarity when Mr. Hauptmann told me how extraordinary it was that he had left everything. “And when I say everything, Bill, you can hardly even imagine what he had. Absolute prestige, a life of extraordinary comfort and ease; he is German literature and German literature is his. And he gave it all up to bear witness to the barbarity of those criminals. Uprooted himself and his family to stand up against the pure evil of it all.”
Mrs. Hauptmann, our French teacher, spoke more calmly; she provided more facts. He had left Germany four years ago and was living in Princeton, New Jersey. “Right there with Einstein, imagine,” she said. I could not imagine; but I had to pretend I could, and I shook my head back and forth, and I think I said, “Amazing,” or “My my.” He was going to be in Chicago because his daughter was married to a professor at the University of Chicago.
“And my husband,” she said, using the word with a sense of luxury, perhaps because it was new to her: they had been married only six months, “my husband was a student of Signore Borghese, who is Mann’s son-in-law. When he visited his old teacher, he happened to mention that Mann was eager to travel around America waking ordinary people up to what was going on in Germany. And when my husband suggested he come here, to Gary—pointing out that it was a city of steel mills, a city of immigrants, that he would have access to the real America—Signore Borghese said it sounded like just what his father-in-law wanted. So, Bill, can you believe it? He will be coming here. To Horace Mann. And my husband and I have suggested—and the principal was happy to agree—that a student should introduce him. And you were everybody’s choice.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was a bit in awe of the Hauptmanns. They were so unlike the other teachers, so unlike anyone I’d ever met. We knew he was born somewhere in Europe, but we didn’t know exactly where, and we were all much too polite, not to say abashed, to ask. He taught Latin and English and one class of German that was always rumored to be on the verge of cancellation. He was fluent as well in French and Italian. People couldn’t quite place his accent. It was not the accent of people who worked in the steel mills, people’s fathers whose speech embarrassed their sons. Nor could we place it from the accents of the foreigners we saw in movies.
Mrs. Hauptmann was from Chicago, but had lived in France. I’d never seen a woman who looked anything like her, who dressed the way she dressed. Every day she came to class in a straight skirt, black or gray, and a thin cardigan, black or gray, a thin strand of pearls around her neck, pearl earrings in her ears. She wore her hair pulled back in a severe bun at the base of her long white neck. Mr. Hauptmann dressed differently from other men as well. His shoes were heavier than those of the other nonworking men, polished, in all weathers, to a high dark chestnut gloss. Both of them seemed thinner and smaller than other teachers, as if they were conserving flesh for some future scarcity only they could name.
Somehow their looks, their way of dressing, their way of walking and holding their heads, were a sign to me of something, a larger, finer life I hoped one day to be a part of but had no idea how to approach. It’s quite incredible, how naïve I was. How innocent—although no one believes in innocence nowadays, they think it’s a joke, a trap, a way of covering up, covering over. But my God, I was naïve. I try to explain it to my children and my grandchildren—but they don’t quite believe me. I tell them the story of the first time I was invited to the Hauptmanns’ for wine and cheese. “What is your favorite cheese?” Mrs. Hauptmann said, cutting me a thin slice of something (Gorgonzola, Camembert?) whose smell alarmed me. “Velveeta,” I said, without a moment’s hesitation, anxious to tell the truth.
Mrs. Hauptmann walked up to me as if she wanted to slap me or at least take me by the lapels. “No, no, no, Billy, no, no, no. Your education will commence right here.”
And she gave me some of the smelly cheese (Gorgonzola, Camembert), whose taste excited me, as if it were a magic coach that would transport me to the finer world I knew the Hauptmanns lived in, owned.
How much I owe them! How they opened up the world for me. It pains me now to remember that there were times when I wasn’t sure whether they were providing me with gifts or stealing my treasure.
It probably wasn’t the wisest thing that Mrs. Hauptmann let me know how frustrated she was with Mrs. Ledbetter’s choice of plays. Mrs. Ledbetter was the head of the English Department, and even though Mrs. Hauptmann was in charge of plays, she didn’t get to choose which would be produced. Each year there had to be a Gilbert and Sullivan. My senior year we did The Mikado. The Mikado played by yours truly. “I am the emperor of Japan.” The second play was usually a light comedy. In my memory, we were always doing Charley’s Aunt.
Mrs. Hauptmann was the first person I ever heard use the word “middlebrow.” I was helping her pack up the scripts that we’d been using for rehearsal. “Why oh why must they foist this middlebrow garbage on me? And worse, on the students.”
Once I knew the term “middlebrow,” I started applying it to everyone and everything around me. I felt I had to look at everything through that lens, which meant I had to question everything. I had to question my mother.
Someone recently asked me, “Was your mother intelligent?” And before I could really think about it properly, the words jumped out of my mouth: “It doesn’t matter.” How could I have said that, living as I have lived, among people to whom intelligence is quite simply the most important thing? I am a pediatric neurologist, or I was for many years the head of a large academic department at a large, unquestionably great university. At my dinner table have sat Nobel Prize winners (I don’t tell them that I broke bread with my first Nobel Prize winner at the age of seventeen; it is at least likely that for them a Nobel Prize in Literature would count as nothing). And yet, I know that I was right, what I said about my mother. Was she intelligent? Was she middlebrow? Was her taste, well, quite frankly, bad? Did she love the sentimental? The corny? When she died I found a bundle of poems she had written, tied up with a piece of plain blue string. I’ve always been good at memorizing, and I memorized this one. She had written it to the switchboard operator—all the telephone calls in the Ogden Dunes, or the Dunes, as we called it, had to go through a switchboard operator—who’d been suffering a bout of ill health.
There’s something wrong with our telephone
It doesn’t sound at all like home
Whenever I ask for a number
I get a central, yes, by thunder
I used to get a voice of cheer,
“Say, how are you today, my dear?
I’m feeling fine, hope you’re the same.”
Oh dear, this central is so tame!
And so I say hope you are fine
And soon will be back on the line
To make us Dune bugs feel at home
When we take the hook off the telephone.
Of course it is a terrible poem, a perfectly terrible poem. But, you see, it’s also a wonderful poem, because it’s about my mother’s genius for connection, for making friends, for becoming a part of people’s lives. My mother had the gift of consolation. People came to her in time of grief, in great trouble. They felt free to weep in front of her, and they did weep. And they left, somehow refreshed, lightened, better able to get on with their lives. She lived to be old; she lived to see her old certainties fall apart. She lived to see a beloved granddaughter get pregnant, unmarried at eighteen, another marry a drug addict,
another die a hopeless alcoholic. They came to her with their troubles, and she said, “Oh, honey, I know you’re good, you’re a wonderful person. And it will be all right.” And for a while they would believe her, even though, perhaps it wasn’t true, in some cases things never were all right. And while my brother was horrified when one of his daughters became a lesbian, my mother said that she knew girls in college who ruined their lives marrying men they didn’t love instead of getting to live with their “best friends.” And when my daughter married a black man, in the years when this was unusual, and certainly something that had never happened to any of her friends, she embraced her new grandson-in-law saying she’d been waiting for years for someone in the family that could really listen to her stories. And when they put her new great-grandchild in her arms she said, “Isn’t it wonderful. The first Morton baby with brown eyes.”
When people complain of the decline of academic standards in colleges, I remember that my mother went to college, majored in German, and probably didn’t know a word of German. Certainly I never heard the word “Goethe” pass her lips. And when I thought that perhaps she’d want to read Thomas Mann in the original, she said, “Oh shoot, Billy, that was a long time ago and they never made us read anything that long.” It’s hard to remember that my mother went to college before the First World War and that, for Americans before the First World War, Germany was a place to admire, to idealize: the home of music and culture and high, idealized philosophy. That German was something an ordinary student might study because it might come in handy sometime.
And in that time, when I was obsessed with greatness, with the anguish that my life touched nothing of greatness, I never saw my mother’s greatness. The greatness of consolation. What is consolation, but the ability to be with, to accompany, to say, You are not alone. But that wasn’t all she had: she loved life, she wasn’t afraid of it. She was a person born of quite limited experience, perhaps even limited curiosity, but a limitless understanding of how hard it was for people to live a life, that the right thing was always to sympathize, and to enjoy life, because she believed there was much more to enjoy than not. Even now, I feel I have to struggle against the Hauptmanns’ long-since skeletons or ghosts and say, “My mother had greatness, and yes, my mother was middlebrow.”
Just after I heard Mrs. Hauptmann use the word “middlebrow”—“Why oh why must they foist this middlebrow garbage on me? And worse, on the students?”—Mr. Hauptmann walked in the classroom and sat down in one of the students’ desks. He crossed his legs, and I could see how much thinner his ankles were than my father’s, than those of any man I knew.
“Maybe they know their audience,” he said.
“Yes, of course they do. But isn’t it our job to show them something higher, something greater than what they’re used to. I asked them to let me do a Shakespeare. At least some scenes from Shakespeare.”
“Dream on, Macduff,” he said, and she walked over and gave him a fake slap, and he gave her a fake slap right back, and then she giggled—although it seems impossible to use the word “giggle” in connection with Mrs. Hauptmann. “You can call me Lena,” she said after graduation, though I never could.
I was thrilled when Mrs. Hauptmann chose a passage from O’Neill as my competition piece for the State Finals in Dramatic Interpretation. I had no idea what would be revealed to me, only by accident, when she and I were preparing my speech from The Hairy Ape.
“I wonder if you’d look at this O’Neill play. It’s a bit unusual, a bit daring for the competition, but I have a notion you can make something rather fine of it.”
I was terribly proud when she said that. When she used the word “fine.” The opposite of fine was coarse, and I’d been troubled by what I had newly given a name to: coarseness, the coarseness of my surroundings. I never applied the word to my family. Certainly not my mother and my brother, Sam. I didn’t like to put a name or a face to the word. I was a very nice boy, a kind boy. I understand that now. It took me quite a while to be able to be proud of it. And when I was that nice boy, I didn’t feel nice; I felt monstrous. Because I seemed to be thinking of sex all the time. Like the time that I saw the Hauptmanns share a slap and giggle, and I knew it had something to do with their life in bed, and I didn’t want to think about it. But I did think about it. And I believed I was a monster.
Almost anything could give me a hard-on. I remember my horror when I got hard while my mother was brushing my suit before I left the house to meet Thomas Mann.
It was because the thought of Laurel Jansen had come into my mind, and any thought of Laurel Jansen made me hard.
But how could it happen when my mother was brushing my clothes?
I was enjoying what she was doing, but I felt it was wrong for me to be enjoying it. That it was not quite manly. The manly was a crucial category to me then … probably because I was afraid I didn’t qualify.
It was the day I was to introduce and then accompany Thomas Mann. The great day. The greatest day of my life. My mother was brushing my shoulders, brushing the new suit (an electric blue, I now remember, and I’m sure Mr. Hauptmann probably thought it was “loud” … because now that I think of it, that particular shade of blue must have made a rather jarring noise in the muted manly room of charcoal gray and navy).
She was using the clothes brush that had belonged to her father. It was small and fit easily in her hand, those hands which were, even for a woman as small as she was, unusually small. “Delicate,” she would say when she would hold her hands up so the light fell behind them, fell through them, illumining them, turning them a reddish color like the sun going down. “My hands were the envy of all the girls I knew,” she would say. “Who would have believed I’d end up with the hands of an old washerwoman.”
What she didn’t say: it was because my father had lost all his money in the Depression, and she resented it, resented him, because her own father had been prosperous. A banker. A pillar of the small Illinois town where both my parents were born and reared.
I loved my mother’s hands, I thought they were lovely, not the hands of an old washerwoman at all. They were always wonderfully cool, the flesh was creamy, and her wedding ring sank into the softness of her fourth finger in a way that when I was a child seemed magical. Then we would sit on the couch sometimes holding hands, listening to the radio. It had made us both very happy.
But I had put a stop to it. I had to. It wasn’t “manly.” I knew that, after a while, with a clarity as clear as All Men Are Created Equal or A Penny Saved Is a Penny Earned. And that day I told her to stop fussing over me, although I really enjoyed her running the bristles of the silver brush over the shoulders of the jacket of my new suit. I’d always been very fond of that brush, I liked the design on its silver back, a border of raised Xs that when I was very little I’d mistaken for birds’ wings. I’d liked the plain cool feeling of the matte silver against my dry palm, and the rougher, raised texture of the Xs or wings that I would run my fingertips along. When I was little, I’d ask my mother if I could hold it sometimes, after she had used it to brush her own coat and hat, and I would hold it sometimes to keep myself from feeling sad that she was going out into the world without me and to distract myself so that I could forget that I was lonely.
“Billy, you are a caution,” she’d say when I asked to hold the brush. She would never tell my father because it wasn’t something my father would have liked. He would have thought it wasn’t quite manly, though he probably wouldn’t have said anything. My father spoke very little. My father was quite manly. He built houses. The letterhead which he used to send out his bills had the heading, “Build as if you knew that it would last forever.”
My father was a silent man, and I was both soothed and frightened by his silence. His silences. My brother, Sam, was much more silent than I; he was always on at me for talking too much. But my mother encouraged me to talk, to use words not just for information, but for pleasure. “Remember, you’re named for William Shakespeare,” she
would tell me although my father insisted I’d been named for a great-uncle who’d died working in the mines.
When I was six, she signed me up for something called Expression Lessons, taught by Mrs. Alma Ferguson. I’ve given up trying to explain what Expression Lessons were. They were a product, a sign of a vanished America. What I can never decide is whether it’s a good thing that it vanished, or bad.
Certainly there were good things about the lessons Mrs. Ferguson gave. They taught me to speak clearly and, as the name suggests, expressively. We began with breathing exercises and exercises to strengthen what she called “my midriff.” Then she would have me read aloud … passages from Shakespeare or Byron, for example, and then she’d correct my readings by reading them herself.
Who was she? She was distinctly, deliberately unmodern looking; her skirts were long and full, and her hair was piled on the top of her head. She was rather operatic in her presentation of herself. She was a large woman, not fat, but tall and broad. When I see Margaret Dumont in the Marx Brothers movies, I think of Mrs. Ferguson. Mrs. Ferguson was not ridiculous, though. She had great dignity. She stood for something that was not foolish, that ought not be laughed away.
What was her training? What gave her the right to give lessons to other people? To children. I don’t think she’d ever been on a stage, except perhaps the Little Theatre, where I remember her being very good playing Mrs. Alving in Ibsen’s Ghosts. I think my mother sent me to her for reasons that had everything to do with who my mother was. Certainly Mrs. Ferguson was one of my mother’s lame ducks. She’d been a widow for quite some time when I began studying with her. I can hardly believe that now, that my mother sent me for Expression Lessons when I was six. But she always wanted me to be an actor. She said that before I could talk, when she read me nursery rhymes, I would stand in my crib and act them out. It makes people laugh when I tell them that my mother is the only woman in America who was disappointed when her son gave up acting to become a doctor. But her disappointment was no laughing matter; it was deep, very deep. I hated causing her pain. I loved my mother.
