The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  Philip seems pleased she no longer enjoys her work. He actually says to her once, “Now you know how it feels.” She goes into their bedroom and cries. He comes in and from behind so she can’t see him gather her up in his arms. “What’s happened to us, Riv?” he coarsely whispers. She wants to let go of the even larger amount of tears inside her waiting to flow out, but she pulls away from him and runs to the bathroom, where she locks the door.

  Once she thinks she might be on to something. Someone or something named Dye evidently knows Brinestalker. Brinestalker was meant to be in business in Germany. Philip mentioned his name when she forced his confession. She saw his name written on an envelope that had come to Philip at Masturbov Gardens. The return address was Brinestalker c/o Dye, Puttsig Partekla. She asked him about it and he went into his silent mode, not that they lived by any other. She can finally get through a whole night sleeping by his side in their double bed without waking up feeling sorry for herself. Is she now so accustomed to the peculiar that she can sleep like a normal person?

  She really has few friends. And for some reason ARB closed this office down, sent her downtown, and has sent her back here to her old office in Hykoryville, now an empty house where she sits alone in her ARB uniform with its jaunty cap and insignia pins and waits for more deliveries.

  Rivka is noticing that more and more she’s filled with less and less of the milk of human kindness. If President Roosevelt and The New York Truth and The Washington Monument aren’t taking care of her people, as even Rabbi Chesterfield is now saying out loud, she’s feeling less charitable about taking care of theirs. No, no, she mustn’t think like this.

  Is Philip’s “friend” now back on the “home front”? She shudders involuntarily. What does that mean, if he is? Well, the father may be back but his son is not, and the father isn’t talking about that either. She tries to consider this a good omen that David is somehow safe. Wouldn’t her own husband and the boy’s father tell her if it was otherwise? She realizes that she honestly doesn’t know the answer to this.

  She had recently received a phone call from a Mrs. Purvis, inquiring about a place called Partekla, in Idaho, “where young men are being murdered because they are homosexual. Does American Red Blood know anything about this? I have a young boy who wears my dresses when I’m not at home and I worry for him.” Rivka finds herself being impolite. “American Red Blood does not deal in homosexuality or inquire about our clients’ private lives.” And she says goodbye, almost hanging up the phone before she does. She sits in her office for some time staring into space. It’s getting dark outside. Is David in a place like this now? She has always suspected down deep he’s homosexual like his father. Does it run in families? She picks up the phone and calls the main office.

  “Partekla?” Miss von Lutz exclaims questioningly. “I don’t know where such a hideous story comes from. That we in America should be killing our own young, of whatever stripe, is absurd!” And she hangs up just as Rivka had, not wanting to discuss it further.

  She prays David isn’t there. Don’t be ridiculous, she tries to tell herself again; how could he get from Germany to Idaho?

  MORE

  My dear colleagues:

  I have been very busy here at Schmuck because we are seeing so many soldiers and sailors sent home in terrible condition, awful wounds and strange illnesses. And of course much more syphilis. I have not forgotten Grace’s and my visit outside the White House and the many interesting and unanswered questions it raised. Several of my sailors (although several could be soldiers; it is difficult to distinguish which in hospital gowns; also their medical records often are lost and missing) are afflicted with symptoms that hark back to my early cases with your late cousin, Mercy, and with Evvilleena Stadtdotter.

  I have gone back and made additional slides. I have discovered that all of the cases, Mercy, Evvilleena, the nuns, my sick sailors or soldiers, are equal on the Guttman Scale. Yes, this applies to my new soldier (or sailor) cases. Twelve in one month.

  Grace, when last we met (or should I say when first we met) I spoke of this word glause and proposed it might have something to do with your mismitosis. If you consult your Meritorium Ancien Atticus, which I suddenly had the instinct to do, you will see that the ancient Greeks make mention of glause as a devastating illness, almost invariably fatal! The symptoms were cancerous skin sores, and “a mismitosis” which means “fatal weakness in the limbs.”

  From my armed forces, I have also scraped samples. With our powerful Ivanospitch I have discovered infinitesimal dots, like the tiniest of points from the tip of my pen. They look black at first, then red, then their true color, deep purple. The Greeks, using mirrors and rays from the sun, mention purple glause dots.

  I still await the blood sample.

  PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

  Mr. Y’Idstein and Rabbi Chesterfield meet with Eugene Template at his office at The Washington Monument.

  “I have been approached by sources abroad that must remain confidential,” Mr. Y’Idstein begins. “Eight hundred thousand of my Jewish Hungarian brethren are in great danger in my homeland. My sources, who are safe and free, have been made the repository of an extremely valuable collection of great art, given them for safekeeping by many Jews from France and Germany and even Italy, who my sources tell me are no longer alive. They would like to use some of the art to bargain for the lives of these Jewish people. You will know that this offer is legitimate because the art is worth many tens of millions of dollars and Hungarians do not give away their valuables so casually even when they do not actually own them. Perhaps you can give me some notion of how to proceed with this offer. On their behalf, of course.”

  Various plans like this have been regularly discussed over the years, to no avail. This suggestion of Y’Idstein’s is made in March 1944, just as these Hungarians are facing a change in their formerly relatively safe status. The War Refugee Board has just been formed to deal with information that Template and Dunkelheim and their newspapers are ignoring. Indeed, Adolph Arthur Dunkelheim is on the WRB, although that has made no difference in the Truth’s silence.

  Y’Idstein’s plan is turned down without discussion. Template won’t touch it and bluntly tells him so. Rabbi Chesterfield, well, one wonders what’s going on inside his mind or in that house with its closet holding its own stash of great art, including that bunch of Rembrandts. (It appears that Mr. Y’Idstein isn’t including the Rembrandts.)

  In New York, Virgil Vindicator has also managed to get his own meeting with Adolph Arthur Dunkelheim. In real life he’s an accountant and knows one of the Truth’s accountants. Virgil Vindicator is perhaps the tenth or twentieth Virgil Vindicator out there trying to fight the good fight for his people. Each knows that all of his predecessors have been eliminated along their way. Somehow more and more is leaking out about his brothers and sisters.

  “Richard Otto in Dresden. Does that name ring a bell? And Oskar Petzer. He lived in Bavaria somewhere. He was the son of your cousin Estelle Petzer.”

  Adolph Arthur stares at Virgil before curtly nodding.

  “These two men were homosexuals.”

  Adolph Arthur does not nod.

  “Of the sixteen million ‘homeless victims’ in camps or some form of incarceration, my sources believe that easily three million of them are homosexuals, Jewish and otherwise. Can you help us get this information out to the world? This number includes your cousins Dick and Oskar, as well as Fraulein Anna-Maria Sorberg, a Swedish lesbian who was loved by…”

  Adolph Arthur gets up and leaves the room. Virgil remains seated. After twenty minutes or so Adolph Arthur returns. His cold eyes reveal nothing. Virgil thought he might detect redness or a hint of tears. The word is that he and Anna-Maria had been particularly close.

  Virgil is ushered out. His mutilated body will be found in the town dump not far from the town in New Jersey where he’d lived all his life.

  At the annual meeting of the Association of Newspaper Publishers,
this year in Roanoke, Virginia, a young nurse, who is not identified in the program, commandeers the microphone to speak to the several hundred in attendance.

  “At an army hospital in Chicago, Illinois, where I currently work, it has been discovered that wounded soldiers returning from action are, in increasing numbers, coming back with something called HSJ, homologous serum jaundice, which is being spread through plasma transfusions drawn from different pools, each pool made up of donations from fifty or more different donors. It’s discovered that the larger the plasma pool, the more likely it is to contain this HBJ stuff. Captain Emmanuel M. Rappaport of the U.S. Army Medical Corps, one of my bosses, has concluded not only that transfusions are to blame but also that the pooling of plasma probably increases considerably the incidence of this deteriorating and often fatal illness. Nearly a quarter of a million soldiers inoculated with the yellow fever vaccine, made from the pooled plasma of many donors, have developed HSJ.

  “And our COD, our Center of Disease, established to prevent the importation of syphilis into our country by returning soldiers, has prevented nothing, but no one notices. No one notices how many soldiers have venereal disease and the HBJ stuff that indicates hepatitis…”

  At this point, she’s gently ushered out. She’s crying. She rushes back to the microphone.

  “I know you’re all in a bind! I know! I know it must be hard for you to work and be a human being. But what I’m talking about is infectious! And we don’t know much about it. This hepatitis shit is now in the blood supply. And we have no way to get it out of the blood supply. And more and more soldiers with it are coming home. And we need blood very badly. And … and … and…”

  And this time the guards are not so gentle as they pull her out, crying even more, trying to yell out, “Please help, please help!” but her own tears stifle her words.

  IF IT’S NOT ONE THING, IT’S ANOTHER

  It is Dr. Korah Ludens’s misfortune to have been in love with one of America’s greatest artists, who is locked up in a loony bin for yelling about Nazi twats being preferable to kikes’. This sentence, set down, looks awful, but it is factually correct. Barnett Ludens, when he was free, walked down the streets of Washington yelling out such things. His wife finally had to commit him.

  Poor Korah. She doesn’t have much luck with husbands. Lessie, the first one, was so boring that she didn’t notice when he disappeared. He did not return, and after sufficient time she was able to divorce him legally. Barnett, the great writer, is Lessie’s, that is Lester Ludens’s, brother. They bonded while collaborating on looking for Lessie; she was touched by how much he seemed to care. To her recollection, Lessie had rarely evinced much feeling or sentiment over family matters. Perhaps she’d married the wrong brother. She’d find out. “Shrinks are the worst at looking out for their own lives,” she is to write. “One wonders why so many have so much faith in us. But that’s our secret, and we keep it.”

  She’s tried to convince herself that Barnett wasn’t loony, except about sex. Since that marriage, he’s written long novels that are—there’s no two ways about it—filthy beyond belief; he’d have them privately printed and leave piles of them off at bookstores to be sold any which way or handed out for free. Many of the plots involve Hitler being “queer as a kike, fucking little boys’ heinies and sucking their tiny pee pee wangers as if they’re lollipops.” The moral of all his plots is something like this: “I encourage all you handsome young women of pure blood to give your services to any man of noble brain and body, blond and blue-eyed and naturally sane, listen to me, listen, it’s important, if we’re ever going to get anywhere…”

  Barnett has been in this particular loony bin, St. Purdah’s Hospital in Anacostia, his room overlooking that still-filthy muddy river, since 1938. In a sense you could say that his early labeling of Hitler as a nutcase was certainly prescient. He’d lived in Germany and in Italy, where he’d picked up a fondness for Mussolini and fascist chitchat in general. “Benito was a pig but he was a secondary pig, subservient to adorable Adolf, who fascinated me far more because he kowtowed to no one. You try and run an army and then a government and not kiss ass! What a gift, my Korah, can’t you see that?” Barnett’s paintings from this period hang in the Guggenheim and the Modern. He’s particularly praised for his palette, which, as Clement Greenberg wrote in The New Gotham, “caught that era dead center. There are few modernists who use colors so effectively as messengers.”

  In those earlier days, Korah would sneak into St. Purdah’s late at night from an embassy ball, wearing, say, the black velvet evening gown given to her in Paris by Colonel Molyneaux that made her look like that Sargent portrait in the Mellon, not all that far from here. She’d sit in his dingy room—it’s still the same one—looking down through the iron bars at the garbage the inmates tossed out onto the grounds. She’d bring along a beaded sachet purse filled with money to pay off the staff to treat Barnett nicely, which wasn’t easy.

  She still wears a gown from time to time, when it’s been too long since she got dressed up. By now the guards are used to her. Barnett thinks she’s still wearing the same gown. He still stares into space with those piercing eyes that condemn the world. His white hair still spikes up like it’s electrified.

  “You asleep, Barney?”

  “Take me dancing.”

  “Right here. I’ll sing the song.”

  “I’m composing a letter to Roosevelt and I don’t want to lose the flow.”

  “He doesn’t want to hear from you, Barney. Nobody does. They’d just as soon you were dead, but you’re too famous and you know too many people, so they don’t know what to do with you.”

  “Let me feel your titties. You used to giggle.”

  “That’s before I met you. What’s giggly at ‘21’ doesn’t last.”

  “How’m I going to get out?”

  “You’re not.”

  “Can’t you help?”

  “The general feeling is you’re here to stay.”

  “I encourage you as a young and handsome woman of pure blood to give yourself to any Nordic officer who wants you. Listen. Adolf sucked my cock. If you fuck with a Jew, it’s punishable by death. End of September that’ll be the law. Got to finish my book by then.”

  “You’re not a Jew. Why’d you write those putrid books?”

  “You think I’m crazy?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s a blessing.”

  He pulls up his pajama top and shows her his chest. He points to one of his nipples.

  “See this tattooed number? 1123456. That means I’m next.”

  “No, you’re not.” It was when he paid someone to tattoo him that she first knew she’d made another terrible choice.

  “Suck, suck, suck,” he says. “Twats, twats, twats,” he chants. This from the man who once painted as well as Gorky and wrote of love more passionately than Henry Miller. Rothko and Jackson Pollock will bow down to him and Hemingway will call him a genius. Heidegger will call him “the poet in the time of distress.” Makes for a complicated case, being so multifactorily gifted.

  “Of course I cry,” Korah tells Doris Hardware, one of her patients (although “client” is coming to be the more preferred description, just like her whores now call theirs … clients), during one of their luncheons at Garfinkel’s, as the models parade around in the latest fashions. “Now he thinks the world’s being taken over by the masses. He hears them on the radio. ‘They come out of nowhere and take my world away. I’ve lost my power.’ He looked at me last night and said, ‘I am constantly surprised that you are not hefty, raucous, marceled, minked, and shooting Derringers straight from your hip.’ Great poets can get away with talking like this.”

  Doris pours her more tea.

  “Here’s looking at us,” Korah says. “How did I wind up like this? And I’m a psychoanalyst. At least we know why you became a madam.”

  And then she asks Doris, as she always does at their lunches and their weekly sessions, “And what�
��s new in your life?” To which Doris responds, as always, “Nothing much.” Korah wonders why she bothers with Doris anymore. She never seems to say anything new.

  But then, what is she, Korah Ludens, still mentioned in the same breath as Karen Horney, so far the only woman analyst to make a great and respected name for herself in a field dominated by men, what is she, Korah Ludens, doing to make herself interesting, if only to herself? What is it about this woman across from her gently sipping tea that allows her to run such a profitable business so efficiently and safely? What is it about herself, Korah, that draws clients like Doris and Mordy and Stuartgene Dye? Is there one of them who could change a world so much in need of changing? Is this her only true criterion for her choice of clients? If so, she’s certainly failed, both them and herself. She can recite the daily palaver of each of them by heart. Each is so different and so strange, and Korah could not tell you, as they could not tell themselves (which is why they come to Korah), what they want from life, what is missing for them. She would like to talk to Dr. Freud about his system. Something is not working, Sigmund. No one can ever hit a bull’s-eye. And yet, down deep, that is what you wanted for them, for us, we all want the same. What’s the missing piece, Sigmund? Where is it? How do I find it?