Body & Soul

by Frank Conroy

  Weisfeld opened his eyes. They seemed unnaturally bright. "So here you are," he said.

  "What's happening? You look sick, you look very sick. You look like you need a doctor."

  "I am sick."

  "My God," Claude whispered.

  "The doctor has come and gone. One of many over a great many years. He left pills."

  "What's wrong with you?"

  "Did you see the pictures? In the front?"

  "Yes, but—"

  "That was my family. Father, mother, my aunt, my wife, and Freida, my little girl. We all lived together in Warsaw. It was a beautiful city then."

  Claude started to speak, but Weisfeld cut him off by raising his hand. "Let me tell you the story." His hand fell back. "You're a man now. I can tell you the story. This is the right time." He paused, staring down at the book, which he removed from his chest. Claude saw him wince as he did this.

  "Does it hurt? What hurts?"

  "My father was a doctor. He also taught at the university. A distinguished man, a leader in the community—you see the way he stands in the pictures. Upright. Proud. Also very rich from his father, who owned mines. My wife had been one of his students. Freida was seven years old. My mother and her sister ran the house—both houses, although we had more servants in the country. Everything was wonderful, and I had never known anything else. I was spoiled, really, I have to say. A young artist all wrapped up in music and taking everything for granted." He raised his chin and looked off into space. When he spoke his voice was choppy, coordinated with his breathing. "So strange. It was so far-fetched, so impossible, there was a single tiny second just as I saw the blur, just before it happened, when I felt an urge toward something like laughter. I can't explain that." He reached up and rubbed his stubbled chin. "September first, 1939. There'd been an air raid in the morning. Nothing serious, just a few scattered bombs, nobody hurt. A symbolic gesture since they'd started the invasion, which we didn't know about. Just a show, but to be on the safe side we decided to go to the country house. We had a big car, a big, black Daimler as big as a tank, plenty of room for everybody. I drove, north along the river. Freida saw airplanes in the sky up ahead and I remember my father saying they were ours, they were Polish planes, so she shouldn't worry." Now he pushed himself up a little higher in the bed, wincing again, and reached for a glass of water on the bedside table. He drank slowly. A bead of sweat ran from his hair down over his temple. "We were on the outskirts of town when my father realized he'd forgotten his cigars. So I watched for a tobacconist and pulled over and ran across the street to get him some. I got the cigars and stepped out onto the sidewalk. A roar as two or three airplanes came from the south. I stepped off the sidewalk. I could see their faces through the windows of the Daimler. Freida was laughing at something. And then I saw the blur, like the faintest shadow line in the air to the roof of the car. You understand, it was not the shadow of the plane, it was the bomb itself. There was an explosion. It must have blown me all the way back, because I remember using the wall to get up. The Daimler was gone. There was a crater in the street." He turned his head to find Claude's eyes. "Now you see it. Now you don't."

  Claude swallowed hard. Weisfeld's gaze seemed to paralyze him.

  "You see what I mean?" Weisfeld said. "Impossible. A freak."

  "What did you do?" Claude managed to find his voice.

  "I don't know. I can't remember. But I can reconstruct what I must have done—not at that moment, but later. I must have walked home."

  "You were in shock."

  "No doubt. But I left the next day with a suitcase on the back of my bicycle. And those photographs were in the suitcase, so I must have put them there."

  "My God ..."

  "I'm glad you came up here. You came up here all by yourself, so I don't have to feel guilty about it." He gave a wry smile.

  "I should have come up here a long time ago." Claude pulled his chair closer to the bed. "Why didn't you tell me?"

  "I didn't tell anybody." He thought for a moment. "Well, I told Bergman. He had worse. Believe me, two or three years later it was a lot worse. Him, I could tell."

  "I don't understand," Claude said. "You could have told me."

  "I know," Weisfeld said, but he did not explain further. "Ooof. I have to take a leak." In a series of careful procedures he sat up, shifted to the edge of the bed, and swung his legs over. "Could you get up for a second? I need the chair."

  Claude sprang from the chair and started to reach out, ready to help.

  "No, no. It's okay," Weisfeld said, grasping the back of the chair and pulling himself to his feet. "It takes a while, that's all." He moved slowly, one step at a time, pushing the chair in front of him for support.

  "What is it? Do you know what's wrong with you?" Claude followed him into the hall.

  "Yes. I know." He went into the bathroom and closed the door behind himself.

  After some time Claude could hear him urinating, and heard as well a couple of short, tight gasps: "Ah. Ah." Claude put his hands against the wall and bowed his head, trying to think what he should do. Maybe Bergman was in his shop, maybe he...

  The door opened and Weisfeld reached for the chair. "You can't win," he said. "Either it hurts because you can't take a leak, or it hurts because you can." He made his way back to the bed. As he lowered his head onto the pillow he closed his eyes. "Just give me a minute," he said, and instantly fell asleep.

  Toward evening, when Weisfeld had again drifted off, Claude sat in the armchair in the front room, staring at the el. It was now closed, the entrances down at street level boarded up. "I knew I'd miss the trains," Weisfeld had said that afternoon. "Once in a while somebody would wave, you know, or a kid would give me the finger while I'm sitting at the desk. Ha!" Claude was wound up very tight, his fingers digging into the upholstery, his whole body gathered in tension as if about to receive some powerful, painful blow. He jumped as he heard the sound of someone coming up the stairs.

  It was Bergman, carrying a cream soda and what appeared to be a container of soup. "Good," he said. "Very good. Is he awake?"

  "I don't think so. He goes off every hour or so. How long has he been like this?"

  "This bad? It started yesterday, maybe the night before."

  "What's wrong with him?"

  Bergman sat at the desk. "Tuberculosis."

  Claude felt a kind of shifting or sliding inside his body, as if something hot had been released from the base of his throat. "How can that be? He doesn't cough! He hasn't coughed once!"

  "It's not in his lungs. There are other kinds."

  "What? What kinds?"

  "His kidneys. His kidneys for a long time. It can hide there. But now Dr. Vogel says also maybe his heart."

  "His heart?" Disbelief.

  "I know, I know. You can have tuberculosis of the heart, it seems." Claude looked out the window, seeing nothing. "We have to get him to a hospital."

  "Sure." Bergman nodded. "That's a good idea. We should talk to him."

  "I can't believe this," Claude said, his voice breaking.

  "He thinks it goes back all the way to 1939, maybe. He got from Warsaw to the Baltic on a bicycle in the middle of the war. Some trip. Months. A miracle, you could say. In Sweden they thought he had typhus, but maybe that was it, and when he got better it went into hiding."

  They heard a sound from the back. They got up simultaneously and went into the room. Weisfeld had propped himself into a sitting position.

  "Soup, soup," he said, "wonderful soup. Soup of the evening..." He accepted the container and a spoon.

  "Turtle it's not," said Bergman, placing the cream soda within reach on the table. "You seem in a good mood. Feeling better?"

  "Claude has cheered me up." He took a taste.

  "Claude thinks you should go to the hospital," Bergman said from the foot of the bed. Weisfeld frowned as Claude sat down beside him. "Yes, right away," Claude said.

  "So now it's unanimous," Bergman said. "Me, Dr. Vogel, and C
laude. Everybody agrees."

  "I understand, but no thanks."

  "Aaron ...," Bergman began.

  "Look!" Weisfeld pointed the spoon at his breastbone. "What am I pointing at?" He used the tone of a schoolteacher. "Me, right? My body, right?" He stared at Bergman. "Who gets to say what happens to this body? Me, that's who. Do I have to explain to anybody? No, I do not." He ate a little more soup and put the container aside. "Next case."

  "Maybe they can help you," Claude said. "Maybe you'd be more comfortable."

  "You think so?" Weisfeld said gently. "It's good to be optimistic. I appreciate it, but all the same I'm staying here."

  Mr. Bergman sighed and shook his head.

  Claude wanted to speak, but stopped himself with great effort.

  "Somewhere," Weisfeld said, "Wittgenstein is talking about some people he disagrees with, some ... philosophers he disagrees with. I can't remember where. He uses the phrase 'abject optimism.' " Weisfeld separated the words for emphasis. "It's an interesting idea." He paused and gave a very slow nod. "This is an idea Bergman and I are familiar with. Am I right, Ira? Bergman, and me, and people we knew."

  "Shh," Bergman said softly. "Shh, now."

  "Yes, you're right. My mind is wandering."

  "Think of the boy."

  "Absolutely." He looked at Claude and smiled. "Much better."

  It took Claude a moment to realize they were talking about the Jews of Warsaw. The Jews of Europe, living and dead. He had an almost tangible sense of the unseen in Weisfeld, of the weight of the unspeakable past behind his dark eyes. No matter that Weisfeld had done his best to hide it all these years, Claude should have known, and now he felt shame for his self-absorption. There was a sense of everything collapsing down to the size of the room, as if they were drifting through space in a cube from one of Einstein's thought experiments, with no reference points except one another. For a moment those dark eyes seemed more than Claude could bear, but he held on and the moment passed.

  When Bergman announced he was leaving, Claude followed him out to the front and down the stairs.

  "I'm going to spend the night here," Claude said. "Upstairs."

  Bergman thought about it, even glancing up at the ceiling as if he could see into Weisfeld's sickroom. "That's a good idea. It's getting ... Someone should be with him. We can alternate nights, so I'll take tomorrow. What do you think? Vogel comes again tomorrow morning."

  "Good. I want to talk to him."

  "So we'll switch off, okay?"

  "Yes," Claude said. "And maybe a nurse too. I'll talk to Dr. Vogel."

  "Aaron can be very stubborn, you know. Very proud. So be careful with him. Something you think is no big deal can be important."

  "Like a nurse, you mean?"

  "Maybe. Who knows? It's important to him to get dressed in the morning even though he knows he isn't going anywhere, for instance. Little things."

  "I'll be careful," Claude said.

  "I was going to call you." Bergman patted Claude's arm. "He didn't want you to see him sick, but he wanted to see you, if you know what I mean. It's been like a little war."

  Claude bowed his head and nodded.

  Back upstairs, Weisfeld had drifted off. Claude sat in the chair beside the bed. Instinctively he picked up a book and opened it so as to appear to be reading. For a while he found his mind empty—thought and emotion temporarily suspended, even his body drained of tension. Eventually the words seemed to appear on the page as if out of invisible ink and he began to read. A biography of the Norwegian explorer Amundsen. Glaciers. White bears. White skies. White ice, white snow.

  "Claude," Weisfeld said, "do me a favor before you go. My feet hurt and I'm too lazy to take off my shoes."

  Claude got up. It was dark outside. He went to the end of the bed and unlaced Weisfeld's black shoes. "I'm going to sleep here tonight, in the other room, if that's all right with you."

  "That's not necessary."

  "I know it isn't. But I wouldn't be able to sleep at home. I'd be up all night worrying, so do me a favor." Gently, Claude eased one shoe off. The ankle was swollen. He removed the other shoe. There was a hole in the toe of Weisfeld's sock, and this ankle too was swollen, the skin blotchy.

  "Such melodrama," Weisfeld said.

  "It's just easier."

  "Well, don't forget to call your wife."

  Claude put the shoes on the floor by the side of the bed and sat down.

  "How goes it in that department, by the way?"

  Claude hesitated. It seemed wrong to talk about his own troubles, but then, perhaps because of what had happened inside himself when he had been pulled into those dark eyes, it seemed more wrong not to. "Not so good, I think." He told Weisfeld about his sterility, the bungled adoption effort, the sense of something hanging over them. When he'd finished Weisfeld didn't say anything for some time.

  "This sadness," he finally suggested, "this sadness should go in your music. You understand? So it shouldn't get the upper hand."

  "Oh, it's not so bad."

  "You say that."

  " I mean—"

  "You don't take yourself seriously," Weisfeld said. "When there's trouble, you should take it seriously. What is it with you?"

  "I'm sorry."

  "And don't be sorry."

  "The thing about sterility," Claude said, "it's important, of course it's important, but it doesn't seem pressing. It seems like something I'll be dealing with. With Lady, I don't know. It's almost like I'm her son or something. I know that sounds strange."

  "No, it doesn't."

  "It scares me. There's some kind of hollowness and I can't seem to do anything about it."

  "Does she still want to adopt a child?"

  "Oh, no," Claude said quickly. "All the stuff went to the Salvation Army the next day. She couldn't get it out fast enough."

  "I see." He seemed to be tiring now, and Claude felt a pang of guilt.

  "Things will work out," Claude said.

  "Sure," Weisfeld said, and then added, "but take yourself seriously, and at all times be ready for anything." He took a breath. "This is ancient Jewish wisdom you're getting here, believe me."

  "I understand. You've told me something like it before."

  "I have?"

  "Many times."

  "Good. So listen." He closed his eyes. "Maybe this time you'll listen better. After all, a dying old man."

  Claude watched the motionless face. "Are you dying, Aaron?"

  "I think so." He went to sleep, eyelids flickering.

  ***

  Claude slept little that night—episodes of dozing on the chaise longue punctuated by silent visits to the back room. Weisfeld was occasionally half awake, mumbling a few words, once giving a little wave with his right hand.

  Just at dawn Claude went in to find him sitting on the edge of the bed, staring down at his shoes.

  "What is it?" Claude asked. "What do you want?"

  "I was thinking of that old suitcase. The one on the back of my bicycle. It's here somewhere. All beat up. Coming apart."

  Claude moved forward and knelt before him. "You want me to find it? Should I get it?"

  Weisfeld lifted his arm, wincing until his hand came to rest against the side of Claude's neck. He smiled, and then his eyes seemed to shift focus and he grabbed his lower lip in his teeth.

  "Aaron—" Claude whispered.

  "Something," he began, "something is..." And then his eyes went flat and he fell over onto his side.

  Claude picked up Weisfeld's hand and held it between his own. That was how Dr. Vogel found them two hours later.

  19

  BIT BY BIT Claude began to close down. He wrote Otto Levits a card explaining that under the circumstances he felt it necessary to cancel all upcoming engagements, that as far as performing was concerned he should be considered on a leave of absence. Levits wrote back to say that he understood, but reminded Claude that in two months he was to record in the RCA sound studios. The time had been reserve
d and other people were counting on him. Levits had worked hard to put the deal together, and it was a significant engagement in terms of Claude's career. Claude did not respond.

  Lady seemed to spend more and more time outside the house on unspecified pursuits. At dinner she was more than ordinarily quiet, and in general seemed to acknowledge Claude's loss by tactfully backing off, leaving him space, making no demands. Sometimes he was aware of her looking at him with concern, but as the weeks went by he sank gradually into a dull lassitude, a kind of torpor that blocked off his perception of much of his surroundings. The simplest actions became difficult. He might sit before the empty fireplace in the living room for half an hour thinking about whether to make himself a cup of tea. He could not read anything more demanding than newspapers or magazines. An entire morning might be spun around something as simple as taking a bath. He slept fourteen hours a day.

  He was only minimally aware of what was on the television screen he watched much of the time. He did not answer the phone when it rang, nor did he open any of the growing pile of letters Lady had set aside for him on the hall table. When the letters began to spill off the table she got a basket.

  He did not touch the piano or even enter the music room. He lost track of time. He drifted. Without music there was no time.

  One night he awoke from a bad dream—a confused, surrealistic narrative of nameless dread—and was surprised to find his body in a state of sexual excitement. He saw that Lady was awake, lying, as she so often did, flat on her back with her arms crossed over her chest, staring at the window.

  "You were talking in your sleep," she said.

  "What did I say?"

  "It didn't make any sense. I couldn't make it out."

  "Bad dream."

  "My shrink says maybe you should see somebody." For a year or so Lady had been seeing a psychotherapist once a week, apparently to discuss why, given her ambition and intelligence, she was having so much trouble committing herself to meaningful, challenging, long-term work. "She thinks you're having trouble adjusting," she said softly.