Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  ‘Hello, dear,’ my mother said, kissing me on the cheek. She was dressed up, as if for a night at the opera, all canti-levered silk, diamonds and pearls. ‘You’ve come casual,’ she said, ‘as usual.’ I was wearing clothes I’d bought with Jill in Tampa – Italian shirt with the greens and browns of Tuscany, baggy Italian pants. ‘Have you gained weight?’

  Boom. First hit. Righting myself, I introduced Jill. My father was friendly to her, as if greeting a new patient with the potential for some expensive bridgework. My mother was a little too friendly, as if doing Heiler Opposites. We went in.

  The condo was meticulously neat, ordering a constricted space for utility and purpose, the purpose being order. The wall-to-wall facing mirrors gave the image of doubling the space, fooling the eye and then fooling the fooled eye, and the beige shag rug and beige furniture gave a sense of soft welcome.

  My brother the banker looked good, tan and fit, his athletic body filling out a suit. His wife, a Realtor, looked healthy too, tanner and fitter. Their cute little girl wore a shimmering dress labeled ‘Baby Dior.’ My father offered us drinks. ‘I myself have never been drunk, and people drink more in Florida.’

  Jill and I took Jack Daniel’s.

  ‘Let’s have a toast,’ my father said as we sat down to eat, ‘and to my two successful boys.’

  ‘And to our parents,’ my brother said.

  ‘To Mom and Dad,’ I said, raising my glass. We drank, and started to eat.

  ‘The achievements of my boys make me proud,’ my father said, ‘and when I’m asked, I always comment that even though my younger boy is more successful in money and the other is successful as a physician, they’re both successful.’

  ‘He talks about you both so much,’ my mother said. ‘Talks a blue streak to strangers. But as soon as we get in the car to come home, nothing. Why won’t he talk to me?’

  ‘Stupid bitch,’ my father said under his breath.

  Jill grabbed my knee. I looked at my brother and saw the alarm in his eyes. My father’s words hit me in the gut. I started to sink.

  ‘His mother never talked,’ my mother went on, not having heard it, for she was deaf in one ear, the ear toward him. ‘Except to Ga-Ga, her maid. She never cooked a meal herself, ever. Ga-Ga cooked.’

  ‘Stupid idiot.’

  ‘More stuffing, Roy dear?’

  ‘So how’s the golf, Dad?’ my brother asked. I appreciated this, his trying to pull us all back onto the shore.

  ‘Not so good, and I always say it doesn’t matter how you score as long as you can keep playing. They keep the course in great shape – it’s lush and the greens are fast – but they’ve got a few peasants as members and there’s nothing I hate so much as a refugee on a golf course. You should see Mother’s short swing and the way she is hitting the ball is just great.’

  ‘It hasn’t been that easy,’ my mother said, ‘to make new friends.’

  ‘Moron!’

  I felt paralyzed, wanting to confront him on this, but on the other hand not wanting to bring it to my mother’s attention. What should we do? Pretend we didn’t hear what we heard? Say something? What? We all kept silent, paralyzed and guilty, accomplices in the denial. It was hell.

  Luckily my niece soon rescued us, first making a big pile of all of our bamboo napkin rings and then suddenly hurling them one after another at each of us in turn. We tried to duck and weave out of the way, but in the infinity of the facing mirrors and with the wine boosting the high from the bourbon it was hard to figure the angles. Jill and I thought it was funny, my brother and his wife were less amused, and my mother and father were upset and tried to control her. As we gathered the napkin rings, my niece plopped a golf ball into her melted chocolate ice cream, splashing it on the beige carpet, and was taken to the TV room to chill out with Barney. My brother then did a smart thing, bringing out the latest photos of his daughter. Everyone was enthralled, poring over the images.

  Soon it was almost nine at night. Fearing that Berry would call and find out that Jill was there, I excused myself and called her in Maine. We talked about our Thanksgivings. Her friend Chandra was there, something Berry hadn’t mentioned before – in my mind, it helped justify Jill. Sixteen people, total – her mother and father were good at making friends. There were artists and musicians, Chinese students, and people who were still working at the liberal causes that had started in the thirties. I loved her family. In comparison, Thanksgiving with my little nuclear group seemed lonely, and sad.

  ‘I’m sorry, Roy,’ Berry said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Your pain. Wish I could be there to help. Give everybody there my love.’

  ‘I will. And mine to everybody there.’ We hung up. I felt like a rat.

  My father suggested we call his father in a nursing home in Connecticut. First my father talked to him and then I, the oldest son, talked to him. I’d always loved my grandfather, a tough old guy who’d come from the old country and made it as a grocer in New York. But now I hardly recognized his voice, it was so shaky and faint, like a scratchy old record.

  ‘I’m dead,’ he said.

  ‘What? Who’s dead?’

  ‘Not dead, bed – b-a-d – bed. Dey just keep you here and let you die.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Gramps.’

  ‘Can you get me out of here?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Tell your pop.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Why you never come visit me?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘I promise. Soon.’

  ‘Berry dere wit’ you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. You’ll marry her, I know. Nice goil. Did I tell you that when I proposed to my wife, she said no. So I got a gun, and went over dere – Washington Heights, Magaw Place – and I said, Geiger, marry me or I’ll kill you. So she did. When dey moved finally, you know dey found dat gun in the chandelier?’

  ‘I love you, Gramps.’ He told me this story every time we talked.

  ‘You need a permit now, don’t you?’

  ‘A wedding permit?’

  ‘A gun permit. You didn’t need ’em, back den. So long.’ I handed the phone to the next in line, my brother.

  While I had been on the phone with my grandfather, my mother had cornered Jill. She’d tried to edge her toward the guest bedroom. Forewarned, Jill had faked toward the bedroom and cut toward my sister-in-law. My mother nabbed me and took me into the guest bedroom. As the door closed I heard my father say:

  ‘Stupid idiot.’

  ‘Where’s Berry?’ my mother asked.

  ‘With her parents in Maine.’

  ‘You’re not breaking up with her? Not after all this time?’

  ‘I’m not thinking about it in that way,’ I said, suddenly feeling a surge of love for Berry and my mother, wanting to be close to both.

  ‘I’ve always before stayed out of it, but this! This girl, Roy?’

  ‘She’s a friend.’

  ‘This kind of girl is not a friend. Don’t you think I love you?’

  Boom. Another hit. ‘Of course you love me, Mom.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ She sighed. ‘I don’t know what happened to you. I remember once, you were about six, and you were late coming home from school, and you walked in and I could see that you’d been crying – something had happened – and I said, “What’s wrong, dear?” and the strangest thing happened – I could see you wanted to tell me, but then it was like a wall went up, and you didn’t. You said, “Nothing,” you turned away and walked out. Do you remember?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ I had gotten beaten up at school, and, walking home along the railroad tracks crying, I couldn’t wait to tell her. But then, as I walked into the kitchen and I saw the concern in her eyes, and as she’d asked me, something happened in me and I stiffened and made my face stiff, and said nothing. I had felt caught, frozen in the spotlight of her love.

  ‘So what was it?’ she asked expectantly, as if my te
lling her now could set everything right.

  ‘I’d gotten beaten up by some kids at school, that’s all.’

  ‘And you couldn’t tell me? Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, feeling, all these years later, the same thing – caught, frozen, full of dread – like Cherokee with Lily on the beach: dreadlock.

  ‘It’s a shame,’ she said, ‘the way that wall went up. It never has come down. Like with your father. And now? What’s going on now?’

  ‘Just trying to learn to be a psychiatrist, Mom.’

  ‘But this girl? I am your mother. Can’t we discuss things anymore?’

  ‘I’d like to, but it’s really hard to talk.’

  She started to cry. ‘You’ve gotten like your father; you don’t talk to me. How often do I see you? Three times a year? Your visits are never long enough. I feel, Roy, that you’ve gotten into total selfishness. You don’t smile. You need to grow up and settle down. And not with this one, no.’

  ‘I hear you, Mom. But it’s late and we’ve got an early flight tomorrow.’

  ‘Any words of wisdom? Any words of wisdom, Doctor, for your mom?’

  As used to her quick switches as I was, they always caught me off guard. Now, I tried to hang in. I felt for her, and wanted to say something – say a million kind, wise, funny, generous, empathic things to her – but could not.

  ‘Stupid bitch,’ my father said outside the door.

  A toy crashed against a wall.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Gotta go. It was a wonderful dinner.’

  ‘You all ate it so fast. Six hours to cook, six minutes it disappears.’ She sighed. ‘Maybe, if you’d stayed a doctor, we could talk?’

  ‘A psychiatrist is a doctor, Mom!’ I said, trying to hang in, hang on.

  ‘You know what I mean – a real doctor. You keep hurting me but it’s all right.’ She started to cry. I felt such pain. I moved to her, put my arm around her to comfort her. She seemed small, her shoulders fragile, as if the bones were precariously connected, the flesh full of doubt. Guilt tore at me.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mom, really.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Don’t worry about me. Worry about your father.’

  ‘My father?’

  ‘He’s gotten so bitter lately. He always wanted this and now that he’s gotten it he’s angry all the time. He loves his golf and is playing well, although for the first time ever, yesterday, he quit on the fifteenth hole.’

  ‘He didn’t finish the round?’

  ‘Said he was tired. But he’s so bitter. Maybe you, Mr Psychiatrist, can understand.’ We walked out.

  I found my father in the bathroom, guzzling Maalox.

  ‘Hiatus hernia and it’s killing me. Every night and three bottles a week.’

  ‘Every night?’ I said. This was alarming. ‘Have you had it checked out?’

  ‘What’s to check? A lot of the Jewish men have it and the professional men especially seem to have it. There’s something I want to talk to you about and usually I do it in the dental chair but there’s no chair anymore.’

  ‘You miss it?’

  ‘No. So.’ He took out a list.

  When I was an adolescent, into sports and girls and rarely home, my behavior had driven him nuts, but he would never say anything about it at home. Only on Sunday mornings, under the guise of working on my teeth, would he talk to me directly. We would drive downtown to the old grain-and-feed building that housed his second-floor office. Is there anything more bereft than a dentist’s office on a Sunday morning? There, with the sweet fermenting scent of hay and grain mixing with the acrid antiseptic scent rising from the sterilizer, he’d put me in the chair and, as the Novocain froze my gums then my mouth and even my lips and tongue, he would sit beside me on his stool and take out a list and read me, one after the other, my failures. At his mercy – and fearing that if I protested, the drill would do its work with a lot less mercy – I listened, enraged. Finished, he would drill. I’d always thought this normal. Always felt he was a good father.

  Now, referring to his list, he said, ‘It was a waste when you took all those years off and I hope now you’ll go straight through.’ His words, without the anesthesia, hit me harder. ‘Three years on the Rhodes in Oxford and another year off last year, and each year off is a year less of earnings and so forth. Don’t mind your mother and she’s just upset. Her side of the family is always upset and they’re too sensitive.’

  ‘Is there something bothering you, Dad?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You seem so bitter, so unhappy.’

  ‘No, no, I’m happy, very happy here and the weather’s great.’

  ‘Maybe retirement’s not living up to your expectations?’

  ‘It’s great and the fairways here are so lush. My golf could be better but otherwise there’s a lot to do with concerts and so forth and I’m very happy.’

  ‘But what about the cursing?’

  ‘What cursing?’

  ‘The cursing under your breath at Mom? It’s terrible to hear.’

  ‘I don’t curse under my breath at your mother and why would I?’

  ‘You do. She can’t hear it, but we can.’

  ‘I’m not aware of my doing that and if I do I’ll stop.’

  The lit-up condos in the muggy night seemed like mausoleums. Jill and I sat in the car outside. The old people were out on their lime-tinted balconies, but I had an image of the three floors of screened balconies as cages. From somewhere came a tune from Fiddler on the Roof and from somewhere else came a woman’s voice saying, ‘You never talk to me it’s like living with a dead man and I can’t stand it!’ – followed by jagged sobs. The night seemed polluted. I started driving. Slowly, aimlessly.

  ‘He-lo-oh,’ Jill said. ‘Hi there. Remember me? Where are you?’

  ‘I feel like I failed, totally.’

  ‘It was intense. That cursing is something else. But hey, at least it’s a family. Mine’s gone.’

  ‘I remember once – or think I remember – sitting at the kitchen table with my father and brother, and my mother screamed and next thing I knew there was a knife sailing through the air at us, and it stuck in the wall above our heads. I thought it was normal. It was crazy.’

  ‘Mine was just as crazy. Except for the UFOs.’

  ‘My father used to be a photo nut, took thousands of pictures, and there’s not a single picture of me as a kid that shows me smiling. How can he live, with all that bitterness? What’s eating him up? Her? Lousy golf? Me? Does he miss dentistry? What? And whatever I do, it’s never enough.’

  ‘Never “normal” enough?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So maybe they’re helping you break out.’

  ‘No joke. Being with them makes me want to be totally outrageous, totally crazy, risk everything, self-destruct! Makes me want to run, leave the country, leave the whole damn planet!’

  ‘Now you’re talkin’. Kiss me here.’ She led my hand to her belly.

  ‘I can’t do that while I’m driving.’

  ‘No foolin’. C’mon. I need handling.’

  ‘Handling?’

  ‘Women need handling, like horses.’

  ‘Now? Can’t you wait till we get back to the hotel?’

  ‘No. Hot weather makes me hot.’ She grabbed the steering wheel and ran us up onto a shoulder, in the lee of a stone wall around a low barracks of condos. Across the way was an empty lot, with a sign announcing that another nine holes were coming soon. A Winn Dixie glowed in the distance. We went backseat and were soon doing what was sure to be illegal on this public thoroughfare, and in my mind was a question:

  What is all this perfect order, this utopia of houses and cars and weather, a denial of?

  At first I thought it was a denial of dying and death. But no, death was familiar to these senior citizens; in fact it brought out their best in terms of funeral arrangements and shipping bodies back up north and the widows banding together to adjust to the good life
alone. Then I realized that with everything on the physical level having been taken care of as meticulously as making a house safe for a baby, what was being denied was whatever else there was after every material object including luxury items had been satisfied. Malik might say – and say with sorrow – that here alas was a denial of purpose, a denial even of joy, under the guise of the pursuit of happiness.

  Misery was a ghost mountain the next day, deserted by shrinks, except for me in Admissions. Not having Nash and Tunaba around made it easier. Compared to dealing with my family, dealing with people with severe mental illness was easy, for I had the authority of being their doctor. Some of it was even fun, like my Number 3, the new young editor of The Town Crier, Toby Updike. Immobilized recently by a broken leg – he’d slipped on the freakish ice outside the barbershop one afternoon as he was hustling along to a tryst with the wife of the town treasurer – he came in psychotic, with a Chief Complaint: ‘Someone sent me a memo saying: “Name all your employees broken down by sex.”’

  Viv and Primo were there, and the day took on a kind of festive tone as we worked together to handle the holiday horrors of all the happy families. I started enjoying myself, rocking and rolling along to the tune of whatever insurance would pay for, in terms of what was normal mental illness. But then, late in the day, I got a shock, in the form of my buddy Henry Solini.

  He had been doing his scheduled rotation on Thoreau, the Family Unit, run by the classical Freudian psychoanalyst A. K. Lowell. Now he appeared in Toshiba to evaluate Toby Updike, for transfer to Thoreau. At first I didn’t recognize him.

  Henry Solini, the Henry Solini whom I’d last seen dressed in Rastafarian-cool, was now wearing Misery-tight: a new, three-piece suit and a red tie with dark blue regimental stripes, which, as I looked closer, I saw were in fact row upon row of Misery logos – half-moon, pine tree, duck rampant. His pony-tail and curly hair had been shorn to an ominous fuzz, accentuating his male-pattern baldness, and he was growing a goatee and moustache. His earring was gone, and in his breast pocket was a thick cigar.

  ‘Solini!’ I cried out. ‘What happened?’

  He stared at me blankly. Two seconds. ‘What makes you ask?’