The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  Perhaps that’s why he went to Boston. Taking David, my twin brother, with him.

  No, that’s not the reason David went away.

  * * *

  Pearl Harbor brings Philip back home from Boston. David doesn’t come back with him. This is the third time this has happened. “He didn’t want to come home” is the most informative response offered by either of our parents. I understand that, and so do Lucas and Stephen, so we don’t ask questions. After all, we’ve sort of adjusted to life without him, as we certainly adjusted to not missing Philip. Whenever I tell Rivka I want to write to David, she looks out into space dreamily, in that way she has—I’m an adult before I realize it means she’s lying—and says, “David is not doing well in school and has to spend every moment working with a tutor at a private school in Boston near Aunt Grabele.” David is smarter than I am. I know instantly that this isn’t what he’s doing. And cranky Aunt Grabele has never given us the time of day.

  At dinner one Sunday, Lucas asks out of nowhere, “Is David sick?” Rivka and Philip exchange swift glances, which they rarely do. Rivka says, “He’s fine.” “Then why doesn’t he write or call?” Lucas, who always thought David clumsy and uninteresting, and Stephen, who always did Lucas one better by putting his older brother’s thoughts into words and throwing them in David’s face—“David, you’re such a drip,” that sort of thing—both join in persisting in their questions, each inquiry met by an answerless and obvious discomfort. “I think there’s something we’re not being told,” Stephen says, slamming a palm down on the table, as if he cares. He’s the most handsome of us boys with his dark curly hair and swooping lashes that win you over when he blinks at you, and a body that’s not inclined to the pudgy, like the rest of us are. Stephen can eat anything. “Yes, it sounds like there’s something we’re not being told,” Lucas agrees. “Are you calling us liars?” Philip uncharacteristically hurls back at Stephen. He rarely confronts his older sons. When he explodes it’s always at me. No one ever accuses Lucas of anything. Lucas is the saint. Lucas gets up and leaves the table and the room and the apartment, in a quiet dramatic exit, one he uses often; of all of us, he’s here the least. I’ve never been certain why Lucas never fights back in any ordinary way. I marvel at the serene effectiveness of his exit and wish, as always, that I might emulate it someday. Years later he tells me, “There was no use fighting with words. They had no knowledge of the world or of themselves. It was before Freud. They were helpless and sad.” But it’s Stephen who continues Lucas’s cross-examination of Philip: “Why did you come home without him again?”

  At this point, I feel compelled to hurl a dramatic statement of my own. “Something terrible is happening to David! Isn’t it?” “Do you miss David?” Rivka asks me. “If he does, it’s the first I’ve heard of it,” Philip retorts, finding a truth to wound with. I don’t miss David. In fact, I’m glad he’s not here. And this is the truth that’s bothering me. “I hardly remember what he looks like,” I say meekly, which after a moment of stark silence strikes us all as silly because David and I are identical twins. And so we laugh. Everyone laughs. You would think that in a happy family a laugh would heal the breach, but this isn’t a happy family and the smiles die on our faces. Philip and Rivka seem almost ashamed to have laughed. “But I didn’t know he wasn’t coming back,” I suddenly scream. I hadn’t planned on screaming. “Who says he isn’t coming back?” Rivka cries out as she goes back to the kitchen with our dirty plates. Now Philip leaves the table; he will listen to some ball game for the entire afternoon.

  I feel Stephen look at me. “What are you thinking, kid?” he asks me. “I don’t know.” “Don’t know because you don’t want to talk or don’t know because you don’t know?” He sounds like a lawyer from an early age. “I don’t know don’t know.” He continues to look at me. “What’s happening!” I hear myself cry out. Stephen nods in understanding. He gets up and goes. “I don’t know don’t know, too,” he says.

  I help Rivka with the dishes. “Can’t you tell me anything, Momma?” I surprise myself by asking her. Her response is as numbing as one of Philip’s outbursts at me. “Life is hard. Leave me alone. I have too much everywhere to contend with.” She washes another few dishes. “Everyone needs me now.”

  * * *

  Yes, our mother, the formidable Rivka, is saving lives to beat the band. Her bloodmobile is already achieving records for donations, and she’s been photographed in the local paper. There’s talk that if she continues so successfully she’ll be asked to join “the home office in Washington.” One day at the Masturbov Safeway a woman comes up to her and grabs her hand and kisses it. “My grandson’s life was saved by a blood donation!” My mother embraces her. Bystanders give Rivka a little round of applause. “I saw your picture in the paper,” another woman says. My mother beams in pride.

  All my life I’ll be distrustful of those, including myself, who devote their lives to taking care of others. The world regards this as selfless and admirable, but my mother is as selfish as they come. She does “good deeds” because it allows her to play queen, to lord it over her subjects, to be the purveyor of handouts, all strings attached. She bestows, and her hand is kissed in gratitude by a never-ending stream of her constituents. Her ego is constantly massaged and assuaged by her work for American Red Blood, where she is an important person. Which she is not in our apartment in Masturbov Gardens, where her husband is as weak and inattentive and unhappy as Rivka is strong and effusive, ceaselessly proclaiming the wonders of her world and her useful deeds. “This week I saved one hundred and six lives!” Yes, she’s the star of her movie, and I don’t mean to slight her contribution to the world. For every unhappy me I’m sure there were hundreds, thousands, millions whom Rivka’s good deeds cheered into a happier place.

  But not one of her sons ever believes she loves him. Four out of four is a perfect score. If anything bonds us, and we are certainly a foursome disunited in many things, it’s our resentment of Rivka Jerusalem, our mother.

  I never met a person who didn’t admire her. I said that at her funeral. Except her sons. I didn’t say that.

  * * *

  I’m the only son who really hates our father. In varying degrees, the other three put up with him. I think Stephen is actually fond of him. But then Stephen is perverse. Lucas ignores Philip completely, as if his father didn’t live here. Lucas can ignore people completely even when he’s asked a direct question, “which is like talking to air, I don’t know why I even bother,” I say to him often enough, even though I know that Lucas loves me perhaps above all of us. I’ll never stop loving Lucas. That’s really the way I should feel about David. But then Lucas, whom others would call withdrawn and I call someone thinking about deep important matters and thus not readily available to waste time over chitchat with the common man, has always been unavailable on a pretty broad basis to anyone who needs his emotional support. Like his own children. And his wife.

  The resentment I feel toward Rivka is nothing compared with the tangible hate I feel toward Philip. Hate is less complicated than they tell you. He beats me up when he’s angry with his wife, which is often. It’s Lucas who points that out to me. “It’s when he’s angry with her that he goes after you. There’s a James Joyce short story in Dubliners where that happens.” I don’t know who James Joyce is yet and he tells me that, too, on one of those rare occasions when he’s home. Long ago he established his own schedule, only coming home now and then to sleep. He’s captain of school teams and editor of the newspaper and an officer of his class. He has a lot of friends to spend the night with. It was only recently that I asked myself why Lucas never did anything about Philip beating me up. He wasn’t afraid of Philip. And why did I allow it myself? I was home more than my brothers, who’d learned the simple trick of staying away, so perhaps I must take some blame for being abused. I could have followed Lucas’s lead and stayed away. Why didn’t I? I have no idea. Perhaps because I didn’t have many friends and the few I had were with m
e here in Masturbov Gardens.

  Was I happy when David went away to Boston? David was almost beside the point.

  Years later Lucas said to me, “I had long since realized she was of no use to me. And while I had his approval, which you never had, I couldn’t stand watching him take all his antagonism out on you. And her allowing it.” He said that’s why he stayed away from home as much as he could. I cherished Lucas’s apology, never realizing it certainly came very late in the game.

  Philip hates me right back. Our interactions are belligerent and violent and constant. He yells. I yell back. He yells louder. I yell back louder. He starts to hit me and I try to hit him back. He slaps me. He gets me into a corner while I hold my hands up against his blows. He slugs me and I start to cry. He punches me. It doesn’t really hurt but it hurts a lot. Why does he have to do that? He punches me with a hand that’s part hand and part fist. Do we recognize each other’s unhappinesses? That we are both powerless weaklings? Which is what neither of us can abide. Yes, it is obvious to me from too early a time that my father is unhappy; and as I grow and watch him—surreptitiously, like the incarcerated citizen of the occupied territory observes the enemy, or like the good doctor I try to become observes the perennially dissatisfied patient—I put together the pieces of his life. I see that he’s never been happy, as a child, a son, a student, a lawyer, a man, a husband, a father, an American. Another perfect score.

  While Rivka extracts a certain satisfaction from her work if not her children (who take an almost perverse and retributive pleasure in ignoring her until she dies, something she will not accomplish until she’s a very active ninety-eight), Philip, in his whole life, never has success, or recognition for his considerable intelligence, or a wife who enjoys him, or children who run to him happily. He never has any of this and he dies. As I write this pathetically sad and short summation of a life that encompasses some seventy years, I still cannot find tears for him, my own father. He never gets an iota of what he wants. We, his sons, must at some point have sensed all this, even though we never knew what it was he wanted. But we never asked, and he never told us.

  From as long ago as I can remember I wish my father dead. And when he is dead—still some thirty years from the beginning of this war—I am, if not glad, not uncomfortable with this happening. I certainly do not mourn.

  I realize that these observations of both my parents speak poorly of me.

  * * *

  What does it mean, twins? People often think that identical twins are remarkable, of note, interesting to contemplate, but I don’t believe it goes further than that. I don’t think people fantasize having another person alongside them just like themselves. I fantasize not having that person beside me. That tells you something, doesn’t it?

  She didn’t dress us alike, mostly because we wore hand-me-downs and they didn’t come in twos. We talked to each other in our own made-up language for a while until it just stopped, the fun of it. We didn’t play tricks on people, each pretending we were the other. I wanted to but he didn’t think it was nice. She said things like, “You’re each your own person.” Everyone in the family knew which of us was which. Our brothers, well, they were older and tended to ignore us. They were always tripping over us, it seemed. “Get out of the way, kid.” Four kids in an apartment with one john. When David left it was still crowded. I can hear Philip saying about wherever he went to, “Thank God it’s not crowded there.” Nobody missed Philip when he was away. I don’t think any of us even thought about him.

  But when David left I felt horrible.

  I’ve said I was lonely. What makes me think he spoke much to me—the other one—or was as nosy as I am about everything and everyone and we laughed and giggled about things? What makes me think he loved me at all? I stage-managed all the attention paid me, negative though some of it was. If I hadn’t yelled back at Philip, he might have left me alone. David longed for attention and like our father he couldn’t put this into words. Now I see how lonely this made him. That’s why he was so quiet. He didn’t hate Philip like the rest of us did, and somehow he figured that if he wanted Philip’s love he’d have to have it elsewhere. He had to go away to save himself. I think he even worked it out that he had to go away so I might save myself. Had he stayed home we’d both be dead by now. That’s a gross exaggeration, but twins do figure in so many horror movies.

  I don’t know how he figured out how to save himself (which of course is not what he accomplished at all), and I don’t know how I figured out what I just said, except to say that—hey, we’re twins. After all is said and done, we’re twins.

  The world thinks twins are loving and united by invisible instinctual bonds, psyches wired together so that each knows what the other thinks and feels and if one should be having distress halfway around the globe the other senses it and immediately picks up the nearest phone. Yes, we’re closer to each other than to any other living thing. Does all this, any of this, bring … what am I trying to describe? Togetherness? Do we love each other as deeply and desperately and necessarily as twinned flesh is often meant to do? Is that, or the lack of it, or the interference with it, the problem? What is the problem? Nobody is picking up a phone. Some static interference has definitely broken the connection.

  Like the scientists I’ll come to hound and pester, men who match a second piece of “truth” to a shard discovered decades earlier, I finally realize that my twin made the greatest sacrifice in our family, but by then it’s too late for the discovery to do either of us any good. He who most longed for familial love gave his own family away because he knew almost from the day he was born that we couldn’t give it to him. And he thought he was the cause. That it was a better family without him. No, I didn’t see any of this.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself again. I was talking about her. She who performed for me the most interesting drama in my life. When did my worshipful adoration turn into the resentment that colors these pages? Perhaps the day I sensed—no, I knew!—that David wasn’t coming back. The day half of me left me and those who made it happen never confessed why. My father I didn’t love already; when my twin left, there remained only my mother to blame.

  * * *

  Rivka’s busyness pours over into weekends, when she teaches at Rabbi Chesterfield’s Washington Jewish Congregation. It’s an expensive congregation to belong to, and she teaches here so her children can “be instructed in the spiritual wisdom of your ancestors.” She “sacrifices” in order to make us “grateful.” These words are the jewels of her vocabulary.

  I’m the only dutiful one. Stephen plays hooky the third week and is rarely seen in temple again. Lucas becomes devoted to the more Orthodox Rabbi Grusskopf and elects a more rigid wisdom for a couple of years. I, who have already heard insistent whisperings in my ear that there is no God, spend my time at WJC observing the sons and daughters of “the best Jewish families of Washington,” as Rivka identifies them exaltingly. The rich. They have so much I want. They arrive in their chauffeured limousines. They live in grand palaces far from Masturbov Gardens. I am a very hungry child. To be in their presence, to be so near to plenty yet so far from it, becomes a sort of hell. My clothes are shabby next to theirs. Their mothers wear fur coats in winter while Rivka shivers. They are always taking vacations to places that are warm. They all go to schools that cost a lot of money. They dance and swim at a country club we can’t afford to join. How could Rivka think that all of this was something to be grateful for? Yes, WJC is how I am first thrown in with these chosen people. Through God. A God who wants me to know them but doesn’t want me to live like them, only worship Him with them. And then only one day a week. No wonder I refuse His help from an early age. I know a bad bargain when I see one.

  “You don’t have to work so much! I make a living, for Christ’s sake,” Philip invariably moans when she indicates that what he’s handing over to her every other Friday, on payday, in fresh new bills, is not going to cover “quite everything” this week. “I want you home!�
�� She just as invariably answers, “I like getting out!” Their fights are so predictable. Stephen even mouths their words behind their backs: “You’re such a stick-in-the-mud.”

  It’s Lucas who first puts it into words. “They don’t really love us, you know,” he says dispassionately, as if he’s learned this golden rule from a schoolbook for a test and committed it to memory.

  Our parents are out for the evening and Lucas is playing Chinese checkers with me. I’m in my pajamas. It’s never completely dark in my bedroom because light from the streetlamp just outside my window filters in even through closed Venetian blinds. Lucas and Stephen share another bedroom. For some reason Stephen has recently decided not to bathe. “I like the smell of my own schvitz,” he says, saying the word like Philip would, making sweat sound ugly. “I stink so much everyone stays away from me.” That’s why Lucas is sleeping in the next bed. I can reach out and touch him. Instead of David.

  Lucas is more my father than our own. He’s my protector, my Galahad, my guide through life. He’s the only person with enough patience never to get mad at me. Since he’s rarely to be found in any bed in our household, it’s a treat to have him home at all. He spends the night with friends “because they fight too much.” “They” and “them” are what we call Rivka and Philip. So I love the times when Lucas and I can be close. I can feel his warmth and breath and his special smell, the smell of comfort. I’m safe. Trust is sparse in my life.

  “They don’t love us?” I don’t want to believe him.

  He says, “Just watch them and you’ll see.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Every minute of my life.”

  And then my voice springs out of me: “Every minute of my life too!”

  I jump onto him, knocking over the Chinese checkers. He cradles me in his arms as I lean against his chest. He’s never embarrassed by my sudden outbursts.