A Widow's Story

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Was this a contest of wills? In the classroom, I had learned to simulate a sort of playful authority; outside the classroom, to this day I am likely to be shy, even reticent. Powerful personalities roll over me and suck all the oxygen out of the room if I am not alert and able to defend myself.

  Here was a young man who thought well of himself: he allowed me to know within minutes of our meeting that he’d graduated with honors from the University of Michigan and, yet more impressively, he was a Woodrow Wilson fellow. (Immediately this seemed strange to me: why would a Woodrow Wilson fellow have elected to come to the University of Detroit for a degree in sociology, in an undistinguished department in an undistinguished university? Woodrow Wilson fellows can study virtually anywhere.) It soon became clear, in this and in subsequent conversations, that Richard’s interests ranged far beyond sociology: philosophy, religion, European literature, the Holocaust, Judaism. From the first it was also clear that Richard was both brilliant and unmoored; highly articulate, though often he spoke so rapidly that he almost stuttered, and saliva glittered on his lips; and highly contemptuous of most other people: “They are herd animals” was a frequent—(Nietzschean)—remark. He was scathing in his denunciation of suburban Detroit, in which he’d lived most of his life, except for four years at Ann Arbor—his Southfield family, relatives, friends and neighbors—the members of the affluent Shaarey Zadek synagogue, in Southfield. In 1965 it was rare for anyone to speak at such length, with such knowledge, of the Holocaust; most Jews, along with most non-Jews, were in a state of denial about the catastrophic Nazi genocidal campaign. Here was a vast cultural sinkhole very few had yet dared to explore. As a university instructor I was too young and inexperienced to recognize that this exciting young graduate student was in the grip of mania—set beside my less exuberant, and far less well-read Catholic undergraduates, Richard shone like a flame.

  Though Richard never enrolled formally in any course of mine, often he visited my larger, lecture courses in which I might be discussing Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov or The Possessed—(in those idyllic days of long ago when one could expect undergraduates to read such long novels); Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil or Thus Spake Zarathustra; novels and plays by Sartre, Camus, Beckett, and Ionesco; Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” Impatient with the younger, slower-witted students in the class, Richard had a habit of speaking out, addressing me personally as in an intense, intimate dialogue; as the other students listened in astonishment and resentment, Richard soared to heights of eloquence evoking Goethe, Aristotle, Heidegger, Nietzsche. Often he was close to disrupting the class, and I would have to ask him to speak more quietly, and to speak with me after class. It is thrilling—dangerously contagious—to be in the presence of mania, if one does not quite recognize what mania is.

  Of all the ideas raging in his head, Richard was most obsessed with two: the “disgusting hypocrisy” of “post-Holocaust” Jews in affluent America and the proclamation by Nietzsche’s prophet Zarathustra “God is dead.”

  In subsequent years, “God is dead” has come to be over-familiar as Edvard Munch’s The Scream—harrowing insights into the psyche of modern man that find their way, in popular culture, into the comic-satiric sensibility of a Woody Allen. Poor Richard Wishnetsky! He would pay a terrible price for living before his time.

  Late one afternoon when I returned to my office in the English department, there was Richard Wishnetsky sitting at my desk, brazenly looking through my papers. For all the semblance of egalitarianism between us, in our intellectual discussions, I was brought up short by the sight of Richard sitting at my desk; the violation of the professor-student relationship was startling to me, if petty. And there was something in Richard’s eyes that unnerved me.

  “Afraid of me, Joyce? Why are you afraid of me?”

  Richard’s laughter was high pitched, protracted. Perspiration shone on his face. I told him that I was not afraid of him. Though in that instant, alone in the office with Richard, I was afraid.

  I had told Ray about Richard Wishnetsky, from time to time. But I did not tell Ray about Richard sitting at my desk. I did not show Ray Richard’s carelessly typed diatribes and prophecies in the mode of Zarathustra.

  Only once, Ray had met Richard. He’d come to the U. of D. campus to pick me up and there was Richard who’d followed me outside, wanting to talk. Ray said, as we drove away, “I don’t think that you should encourage him. I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “He has no one to talk to but me.”

  “So he says.”

  “He’s very touching . . .”

  “He isn’t your student, is he?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “Whatever he wants from you, you can’t give him.”

  “But . . .”

  “You can’t.”

  It wasn’t like Ray to disapprove of me, or to tell me what to do. I did not argue with him—it isn’t in my nature to argue with anyone who is close to me, whom I respect—and if I discounted his intuition about Richard Wishnetsky, I did not tell him. Not until many years later would I realize that Ray must have recognized, in this tormented young man, some residue of his former adolescent self—not the flamboyance of Richard’s ideas, not the messianic contempt for others, but Richard’s essential loneliness, his estrangement from his parents, and his obsession with “religion.”

  It was so, Richard Wishnetsky was not my student. He appeared and disappeared in my life as he was becoming more disturbed, less able to coexist with the contemptible others who surrounded him. It was said that his parents tried to commit him to a mental hospital in Ypsilanti, but without success. Perhaps he was banned from the U. of D. campus for causing disruption in a classroom. There was one other professor to whom he felt a combative sort of kinship, in the German department.

  (My story “In the Region of Ice” was written at this time. It’s a curious hybrid of “reality” and “imagination”—clearly stimulated by the intrusion of Richard Wishnetsky into my life, though recounted from the point of view of a fictitious Catholic nun, who becomes involved with the brilliant, alienated young Jewish student to a degree to which I was not involved; the young man quarrels with his family, his friends, his professors, leaves his comfortable suburban home and flees across the border into Canada, where he commits suicide. If I’d been asked why I had written this story, I would have said, “Because Richard Wishnetsky is on my mind and this is my effort of exorcism.” I’d thought, too, that the story was a cautionary tale I might give to Richard, the next time I saw him.)

  I never saw Richard Wishnetsky again.

  On the morning of February 12, 1966—less than a year after he’d entered my life—Richard interrupted Sabbath services in the Shaarey Zadek synagogue in Southfield with the intention of committing a murder-suicide. Waving a .32-caliber pistol he’d purchased in Toledo, Ohio, Richard ascended the bimah where fifty-nine-year-old Rabbi Morris Adler had just finished speaking to a congregation of nearly eight hundred people, including Richard’s family; like a figure out of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed Richard defiantly addressed the congregation with a prepared statement that would long outlive him, being taped on a synagogue recorder:

  “This congregation is a travesty and an abomination. It has made a mockery by its hypocrisy of the beauty and spirit of Judaism . . . With this act I protest a humanly horrifying and therefore unacceptable situation.”

  Calmly then Richard shot Rabbi Adler twice, and then himself. Both men died of their wounds, though not immediately.

  It would be noted in the many articles about this tragedy that Richard Wishnetsky had had his bar mitzvah on that very bimah. It would be noted that Rabbi Adler had been a spiritual model in his life and was a friend of the Wishnetsky family.

  Why why why why why!

  What a loss! What folly! Killing the man he most admired, Rabbi Adler, and killing himself—for the sake of mere ideas.

  “In the Region of Ice
” has been anthologized frequently, received an O. Henry award, and was made into a starkly dramatic black-and-white short feature film by Peter Werner, that won an Academy Award in 1977 in the category Best Short Subject. When I reread this story written so long ago, immediately I am mesmerized by the dialogue, that so vividly recapitulates Richard’s speech, even as it has been severely abbreviated; again I am stricken with sympathy, sorrow, guilt. I could have done more. I could have done—something.

  To comfort me Ray assured me, it was not my fault. Richard Wishnetsky would have killed Rabbi Adler and then himself if he’d never met me—“He was very sick.”

  But he had met me, I thought. And it made no difference.

  Chapter 76

  Sinkholes

  The widow must learn: beware sinkholes!

  The terror of the sinkhole isn’t that it exists. You understand, sinkholes must exist. The terror of the sinkhole is that you fail to see it, each time you fail to see it, you don’t realize you have blundered into the sinkhole until it’s too late and you are being pulled down, down. . . .

  In the office suite shared by several doctors, on Harrison Street. And a tall slightly stooped gray-haired man, one of the resident doctors, stares at me and smiles—does he know me?—and my heart begins to clench, for often this sort of smile presages words that will hurt, words that will sting, words that will cause my throat to close, though those who utter such words mean only to be kind of course, like this gentlemanly gray-haired man in his sixties who comes forward, who will not be avoided coming forward, extending his hand, soft-spoken, somber, the most sympathetic of smiles, he introduces himself as one of Ray’s doctors, the name is familiar to me in a vague way, yes I say, yes of course, he is saying, “I was sorry to hear of your loss. I saw Ray’s picture in the paper. Ray was—very”—he pauses, searching for the right words, like a man searching in his pocket for his car keys, which he has misplaced; in the instant before he realizes he has misplaced the keys, frowning, insisting—“exceptionally nice.” He pauses again, smiling sadly. “I liked Ray—Raymond—very much.”

  Don’t tell me these things, my heart is broken.

  Of course I thank Dr. P_ for these words. Though I am stricken as if impaled by a sharpened steel rod, still I thank Dr. P_, blinking tears from my eyes I stagger away, I am not well, I think I will crawl away somewhere, I think I will hide in the women’s room or better yet leave, and return home.

  On an outdoor bench at the Princeton Junction train depot—wadded tissues.

  Someone has left behind a half-dozen damp, wadded tissues.

  No one notices except me. For what is there to notice?—just ordinary litter, debris. You might crinkle your nose in disgust. Left-behind tissues in this public place!

  I feel something pierce my heart, a sliver of ice, a bit of glass, so suddenly I’ve become weak, staggering. But I am not panicked—in this medicated state it isn’t possible to become panicked—picture a living creature—“turkey”—“calf”—so boxed into a tiny space in a vast agri-factory that it cannot move—or one of those laboratory monkeys whose vocal cords have been cut so that it cannot scream in pain.

  Still, I find myself moving away from the bench. I dare not glance back at the bench. I will hope to forget the bench. I think that I have avoided a treacherous sinkhole, so long as I can forget the bench.

  This was the first wrong thing. The scattered damp-wadded tissues.

  And I remember—I think—that, the previous night, when Ray had been sitting at his end of the sofa reading, he’d been blowing his nose also, there were scattered damp-wadded tissues on the table beside him which, when he rose to leave, he took with him, and disposed of. And this was the night before—the night before the emergency room. For already he’d been sick. Already it had begun. The wadded tissues were the sign, I did not understand just yet.

  Once begun, it cannot be halted. The inexorable plunge to death: the inexorable sinkhole.

  ***

  Depersonalization. Of the many side effects of psychotropic medication, this is surely the most beneficial.

  At the end of an evening, the ritual kissing-of-cheeks.

  At the edge of the gathering, I can slip away without being seen.

  Too late, this is a sinkhole I have blundered into—the kissing, the hugs, the bright exclamatory voices—I am plunged into a blackness ten times black—as Melville would have said the blackness of the soul without hope—staggering away seeing again with such hallucinatory vividness it’s as if I am there, again—I have never left—the Telemetry unit, the room outside which figures are standing so oddly motionless—and in the room there is Ray in the hospital bed so oddly motionless—This is not happening. This is not real, this cannot be happening even as I bend over Ray in the bed, bend to kiss his cheek, I am talking to him, I am lost in wonder speaking to him, my husband, I have come too late, for his skin has a waxy pallor and is just beginning to cool.

  Just beginning to cool! What can these words mean!

  In the sinkhole, time does not budge. In the sinkhole it is always that time. Even in my dazed-zombie state I am made to know that, like the roaring of blood in my ears, this is a time that is ever-present, unceasing.

  At the Pennington Market where we’d shopped for—can it have been thirty years?—and where Ray had befriended one of the older male cashiers, known to us as “Bob”—in his sixties or early seventies—who’d been retired but when his wife died became so lonely he’d decided to take a job at the local food market in order to meet people, as an antidote to being alone. And once, when I’d shopped at the market alone, before Ray died, Bob had sighted me—alone—and with an anxious expression asked me where Ray was and I said, cheerily—“Oh, Ray is just at home. I’m shopping alone today.”

  After Ray died, which seems to me like a very long time ago now, but also like the day before yesterday, when I come to the Pennington Market to shop, a task which I put off as long as possible, half-consciously I’ve avoided Bob—a sudden panicky sensation alerts me to Bob’s (innocent, innocuous) presence in the row of cashiers, which my eye has sighted before my brain has quite registered the sighting; as in the deepest core of our brain we react to the approach of danger, a threat to our well-being, mistaking a twisted stick for a venomous snake; I have even pushed my grocery cart to another cashier, to take my place behind other customers, when Bob is free. Of course I have avoided glancing at Bob—I am in terror that Bob will see me. (My assumption is: Bob has certainly noticed me shopping—alone—a number of times now; Bob must certainly know that “something has happened to Ray”—Ray has died. Therefore, I dare not lock eyes with Bob in this public place.) Yet this afternoon, who knows why, distracted by other things, the gauze-scrim less penetrable than usual in my dazed brain, or simple ineptitude, carelessness, stupidity—the basilisk is quick to register You are so utterly stupid, worthless—you have forgotten the grocery list—you have probably lost your car keys—again—I seem to have blundered into Bob’s checkout line; there is just one customer ahead of me, and Bob has seen me, I can’t suddenly push my cart away, certainly I can’t go to another checkout line; and so I am—suddenly, without preparation—obliged to meet Bob’s inquiring eye, and Bob’s friendly smile—(for Bob is the sweetest, most mild-mannered and courteous individual, one would not know the grief in the widower’s heart), and when Bob asks me about Ray—“Where’s Ray? I haven’t seen Ray in a while”—I am stunned that Bob doesn’t know, I have no choice but to stammer, “I’m afraid—Ray has died. Ray has—last month—Ray died . . .”

  This is wrong: Ray did not die last month. It’s late April now, Ray died more than two months ago.

  It’s as if I have struck Bob in the face. His expression registers shock, incredulity. His eyes clutch at mine, fearfully. “Ray has died?”

  For nearly two months I have avoided this confrontation. I have anticipated it and now I am overwhelmed with grief despite the 60-milligrams Cymbalta tablet I took this morning. My fingers are gr
ipping the handle of the grocery cart so hard that my knuckles have turned white.

  There is no escape. Bob continues to stare at me, stricken. This kindly man had not known Ray, really—they could not have spoken together more than a dozen times, and always briefly—yet Bob is as shocked by this news as an old friend might have been.

  “But—how did it happen? When . . . ?”

  These are prepared words many times uttered by now. Pneumonia, Princeton Medical Center, improving, soon to be discharged—infection, died.

  Infection, died.

  “I wondered why—haven’t seen Ray for a—a while . . .” Oblivious of other customers waiting behind me Bob continues to stare at me. My mouth has begun to make that gruesome-twitchy movement which signals danger. Stammering I tell Bob that I can’t talk right now, I have to leave—“I’m sorry—I can’t t-talk.”

  Seeing my distress, Bob apologizes. Bob rings up my purchases, frowning. It seems strange to continue with this procedure—credit card swipe, signature—when we are both so shaken. I know—from Ray—that when Bob’s wife of many years died—of cancer?—not long ago, Bob had become desperately lonely, and depressed, and physically ill for a while; I know that Bob lives alone in the Pennington area, and his children are grown, and scattered.

  This is a sinkhole that might have been avoided. An exhausting and upsetting sinkhole. Pushing the grocery cart out into the parking lot I am observed from a little distance by the ugly lizard-thing jeering at me as clumsily I unload the cart, place the grocery bags in the trunk of the car Do you think that you can continue like this? Are you so desperate to live, you want to continue like this?