by David Plante
“A son?”
“A son, yes, yes, a son. There, you have the full blast of my ego. A son, a magnificently masculine son who will have sons, who will have sons, who will have sons. Do you at all understand this need?”
“No.” She lay still. She said, quietly, “I feel, instead, that I want to die.”
“You admit this finally. I have always sensed that in you. You’ve repressed it, you’ve repressed it very well, admirably well, but you’ve been defeated.”
“Yes,” Nancy agreed weakly.
“What defeated you? Did I?”
“Yes, you.” She again lay still. “No,” she said, “not you. I don’t know what defeated me.”
“But you won’t die.”
“No, I won’t die.”
“I couldn’t bear that, darling. That would break me. Though I can hardly bring myself to give it a name, you at one time recognized grief in me, the blame caused by grief. If that was all the expression of grief I was capable of, it was almost more than I could bear. I couldn’t bear more blame. You understand that, don’t you?”
“I understand. I understand because I have never stopped feeling blame for someone whose life I think I destroyed.”
“You’ve told me.”
“I’ve not told you, not really. I’ve repressed that, too. I left him when he most needed me, and I’m sure that destroyed him. And I’m to blame.”
Tim’s voice too went quiet. He said, “Do we exaggerate our sense of blame because we feel, all of us, that we were, that we are, to blame for the mass destruction forced on us? That we were, that we are, to blame for the world wanting us dead? Why, at some deep level, do we think we are to blame?”
“I don’t know, Tim. I don’t know anything.”
“You can say the same about me.”
“You know a lot.”
“I know nothing, but in my ignorance I am determined to force myself on the world.”
Her mind went out, far, to the edge of the vast, still hollow, from where she looked back at them both.
She asked in a dry whisper, “What did you mean when you once said your wife was an American mystic?”
He placed the back of his hand on his forehead. “As far as I sensed, which was not far, for I only had a sense of what she believed, which she kept from me—when she would withdraw into herself—or perhaps she didn’t withdraw, but, instead, expanded far outside herself, out into the views that seemed to be so meaningful to her, that became more and more meaningful to her the more ill she became—I sensed her need for more than I or anyone could give her, her need for, oh, everything, as if everything could be had. She wanted everything, I felt, everything all together. If she was Jewish, she was Jewish American, and she was vastly more American than she was Jewish. Sometimes I thought she was not at all Jewish.”
“And you, a Jew, thought what she believed nonsense.”
He dropped his hand to his chest. “It is nonsense, but I never told her so. She believed her death must have meaning in the ultimate union with everything, and I swear I never disabused her of the idea. Never. She died believing in the vast ultimate that her death had meaning. But death has no meaning, none. Destruction has no meaning, none. Suffering has no meaning, none. There is no meaning to life either, but we must live.”
“And you are determined to live.”
“I am.”
A sudden arousal in Nancy made her draw her hair back from her face and hold it together at her nape, and her voice, as of itself, rose. “But your life is all pretension.”
He raised a hand, as if to guard himself.
She lowered her voice and said, “I’m not condemning you. You need your pretensions, and, yes, I understand the need. Build on your pretensions, build and build and build, and maybe you’ll finally convince yourself that you’re no longer pretending, but are the real right thing. But you’ll never be the real right thing. Never. I wish that for you, I do, but you’ll never be the real right thing.”
He lowered his arm. “You’re right. And I know I’ll never convince myself I’m the real right thing. But, believe me, I’m not pretending when I say I want a son.”
“A Jewish son.”
“A Jewish son.”
“I would have loved to give you a Jewish son.”
He cried, “Oh my darling.”
She turned away from him.
“Do you forgive me?” he asked.
Her back to him, she laughed lightly and said, “I forgive you.”
He didn’t laugh. “Thank you.”
Nancy remained out at the far edge and didn’t sleep all night; her eyes remained open as if she were far out in space and looking back at the world, and as if it were looking back at the world that made her eyes fill up with tears. She didn’t move when, at dawn, Tim got up. She stayed in bed while he was out of the room. She, too, should get up and make sure their guests had breakfast, but she would let Tim do that. He came back into the room to dress, and she turned over to lie with her face in the pillow. The bedroom door closed, and she shifted onto her back and opened her eyes. She lay for a while longer.
The house was quiet when she got up. In her dressing gown she went downstairs and, on impulse, to the door to Tim’s study, and she leaned against it to listen for any movement inside, thinking he might be there. She dared herself to open the door as slowly and noiselessly as possible, to make her entrance unobtrusive even into a room with no one else present. The shutters on the window were closed, so the room was dim. She opened the shutters, and as she turned back into the room the Torah case drew her attention shining in the morning light beaming through the window. She approached the case carefully, as always to be unobtrusive, and she studied the case. She hadn’t noticed before that in places it was dented, in places the silver embossing worn. She touched a little gold bell, which gave off a faint, resonant clink. What, she asked herself, what did this mean to Tim? For her a resonating object, resonant of a religion constantly under scrutiny from outside, constantly debased from outside, constantly open to destruction from outside? She would never have been able to ask Tim the question; he already knew the answer. She ran a finger around the bells hanging on one of the elaborate globes, to make the gold bells ring together, a delicate carillon.
The guests had gone.
Deep in bath foam, she watched the rain hit the window. As she was putting on her robe, her body still a little moist, she was sure she heard someone walking downstairs, and she knew it couldn’t be Tim, who was out. Her scalp tight and tingling, Nancy did something that she knew was absurd, but she did it before her awareness of its absurdity could stop her: she picked up a bottle of cologne from a shelf, uncapped it, and poured some between her breasts, and as she went out of the bathroom and through her bedroom to the passage, she smeared the scent on her neck and her breasts and under her arms.
She stood at the top of the narrow stairs, listening. Hearing nothing for a long while but the beating of her pulse, she thought she had only imagined footsteps, and she turned away, then stopped, stark still, when the footsteps sounded from below, more and more faint as they went from one room to another. The footsteps stopped, and she descended the stairs, often pausing, one hand on the rail and the other holding her dressing gown closed over her breasts, to listen. At the bottom of the staircase she again stood still; then, as if suddenly and helplessly pulled forward by her fear, she went barefoot along the passage to the archway into the sitting room, which was filled with rain light that made the room appear empty. She went through the room into the dining room, her breathing as quick as her pulse. The dining room, too, was completely empty, and she rushed through it, excited, to open the door to the kitchen. No one was there.
Back in her room, she quickly dressed and went out, not quite knowing where she was going. All of London became a thin, moving cloud, with the pale white and red lights of cars
appearing and disappearing in it. On Park Road, across from the mosque in Regent’s Park, she saw, ahead of her in the mist, a man, alone, waiting at a bus stop, and all at once she was sure that the man was Yvon Gendreau. She did not know if she should hurry on to him or draw back, and as she stared at him a double-decker bus came along and stopped by him, and he boarded. The bus was lit up inside. It passed her and she looked through the wide windows for him, but she saw only an old woman sitting toward the back.
Four
From a window in the living room of her parents’ apartment, Nancy looked out at the autumnal trees in Central Park. When she turned back to the living room, she saw her mother standing in the dim light.
Nancy said, “You came in so quietly, I didn’t hear you.”
“You used to say that often when you’d turn around and see me standing in a room,” her mother said.
“Did I?”
“You don’t remember?”
Nancy smiled.
Her mother came to her and, taking Nancy by an arm, slowly drew her toward the light through the window, then drew away from her daughter and looked out the window and said, “Look, how the trees have become autumnal. I hadn’t noticed.”
Mother and daughter stood side by side at the window.
“Are you sure you don’t want to see Dr. Quinn?” Nancy’s mother said to her. “He’s known you since you were a little girl.”
“All I need is to be calm for a while.”
“I understand.”
Wind blew against the window, then blew out over Central Park.
Nancy asked, “Jews are not supposed to be concerned about an afterlife and all that, isn’t that so?”
“If you tell me it’s so.”
“Do you ever think of an afterlife?”
“If it’s Jewish not to, I guess I’m Jewish because, no, I don’t think about it.”
“And you don’t think of death?”
“I try not to.”
“You’re not frightened of death?”
Her mother said in her low, expressionless voice, “No.”
A burst of cold wind hurled itself against the glass trying to get in.
“You won’t call any of your old friends?” her mother asked.
“Not yet.”
On her way through the living room, she noted the Biedermeier furniture and, especially, on the mantelpiece one of the Berlin porcelain ice pails.
Her mother followed her, as if neither she nor Nancy knew why, and she stopped when Nancy stopped by the mantel to examine the figures of a diminutive couple walking away along a narrow road.
“Everything from Germany,” Nancy said.
And her mother said, softly, “From a Germany that no longer exists,” and left her, and Nancy felt very alone.
She remembered this: when she was young and in school she met the parents of friends who seemed to her more American than her own parents, her parents more and more foreign to her as she, at school and parties and out on dates, became more and more American. Even when she found out that her friends and the parents of her friends were Jewish, they seemed more American than Jewish. Nancy was once invited to a Sabbath dinner where white candles were lit and her school friend and his father wore skullcaps, and she thought that the Jews around the table were American Jews, and that her parents were not, but were German Jews. And as she grew up in America, it seemed to Nancy that, if she at odd moments did think, yes, her parents were Jewish, and, after all, had had to escape Germany for their lives, and had had relatives who weren’t able to escape, they were German Jews, were displaced German Jews, who would want displaced German furniture. And this made Nancy even lonelier for her lonely parents.
She thought of Aaron, Aaron Cohen, about whom she knew nothing but that he was the most displaced Jew she had ever met.
She dressed to go out, but before leaving she looked for her mother, whom she found sitting alone in the armchair she usually sat in for after-dinner coffee in her husband’s office, as if this was the place where she could be most private, and Nancy said, “I thought I’d go for a walk,” and her mother smiled and hoped she’d keep warm because there was a cold wind outside.
She went out into the cold wind in Central Park.
She would go to where Aaron Cohen had lived, and the wind seemed to impel her on her way across the park to the West Side and along Eighty-Ninth Street to where, her wide-brimmed hat and trailing scarf pulled by the wind, she climbed the steps to the stoop and rang the bell she remembered to Aaron’s room, and when she did she felt that she shouldn’t have come, that she must leave before anyone could answer. And she asked herself why had she come, because Aaron wouldn’t be there, Aaron would be somewhere else that she couldn’t imagine.
But Aaron appeared. He was more gaunt than she remembered, but, as in the past, he was wearing a sweatshirt and plain chinos.
He smiled and she laughed because she didn’t know what to say.
She thought she would leave when another gust of wind pulled at her and she said, “I suppose I can’t come up to your room because you’re a monk now.”
Smiling still, he said, “I’m sorry but, you’re right, it’s against my vows for you to come up to my room.”
“Vinnie would say you’ve become a real Catholic.”
“There’s more to it than Vinnie used to think.”
“Do you see him?”
“I do, sometimes for a walk along Riverside Park.”
“And what do you talk about?”
“About how unhappy he is.”
“And do you help him to be happy?”
“I try.”
She asked, “Can I at least come in out of the wind?”
“I should have asked you to,” he said, and opened the door wider for her to step into the entrance hall.
Nancy asked, “And how are the cows and pigs and sheep?”
“They’re pretty good, thanks.”
She turned away, as though to leave, but she turned back and asked, “Why did you become a monk? Can I just ask you that?”
“You can.”
“Tell me. I need to know. And then I’ll leave you, because I know you want me to leave.”
“No, I don’t want you to leave, but even if you stayed I don’t know if I could answer your question.”
“Try. Try for me.”
He leaned his head to the side and said, as if as an aside, “To pray.”
“To pray for what?” she asked.
“For you.”
She felt a little heave in her breath, but before she could speak a light was switched on in the entrance hall and the stairway, and someone was descending the stairs; he was wearing what she thought was a monk’s robe but with a padded coat over it. Aaron introduced Nancy to him, and she heard him call Aaron Damian. Something gave way in Nancy that weakened her, and she thought there was nothing for her here, nothing, and though the other monk, whose name she had already forgotten, was with Aaron, she said goodbye to him but not to the other monk, and quickly went down the steps to the pavement, from which she looked back at the two monks in the light of the entrance hall. She raised a hand and they both raised hands to her, then the door closed.
She felt too weak to walk and hailed a taxi whose headlights were beaming palely in the dusk.
She thought, on an impulse that needed no thinking about, she would go to Boston to find Yvon.
That evening at dinner, cooked by her mother and served by Nancy, her father said to her, “I don’t know why, but I never thought it’d work between you and Tim.”
“Because we’re so different?”
“You could say that.”
Before she went to bed, Nancy went into her parents’ bedroom, where they sat propped up in bed, her mother reading a novel and her father a news magazine. Going from one side of the
bed to the other, she kissed them good night.
“I’ve decided to go to Boston,” she said.
Her mother said, “Stay with us for a while, don’t hurry away.”
“We’d like you to stay,” her father said.
She stayed until autumn evolved into winter, and day after day she spent with her parents, to whom she thought she had never felt so close, and they to her, as if a deep sense of the unspoken had opened up between her and them. Not since she was a girl had she been out shopping with her mother, and she found herself as indecisive as her mother about a winter coat, and finally let her mother decide. And winter snow began.
As she drove to Boston, the awareness of difference caused by becoming used to cars driving on the other side of the road startled her when, for a second, she thought she was on the wrong side and felt she was both back in her country and outside it. The feeling deepened on the interstate highway, and she told herself she had driven this route over and over so had no reason to imagine she had never driven it before. Passing the waterworks with water fountaining in round pools, the electrical power installation behind a chain-link fence, the cinder-block warehouse covered with fading, spray-can graffiti, she thought she was experiencing déjà vu, and that she of course had seen these many times before in exactly the places where they were now.
Large blackbirds settled on the snow-white verges along either side of the highway only to fly off again. Stopping for coffee or lunch, or passing the wide green exit signs off the highway into Providence, she had the same sensation of knowing she had been in the place before but of not being able to remember when, and the sensation became overwhelming as she drove over highways toward what looked, at a distance, to be snow-bound Boston.
She parked her car in an underground parking garage and walked up to the Common where, it seemed to her, she noticed things she had never noticed when she lived in Boston: chains strung from pole to pole along the paths, lamps, benches, and she wondered how she could not remember ever having seen the monument to the Civil War, everything heaped with snow. She walked up to the snow-filled Frog Pond and farther up, to Beacon Street, and from Beacon Street farther up onto Beacon Hill.
