Mr. Vertigo

by Paul Auster

  “You’re giving me goose bumps, master. When you talk like that, it sets my bones all atremble.”

  “Loft is only the half of it, son. Before you get carried away, stop and consider locomotion. By that I mean moving yourself through the air. Forward or backward, as the case may be, but preferably both. Speed is of no consequence, but duration is vital, the very nub of the matter. Imagine the spectacle of gliding through the air for ten seconds. People will gasp. They’ll point at you in disbelief, but before they can absorb the reality of what they’re witnessing, the miracle will be over. Now stretch the performance to thirty seconds or a minute. It gets better, doesn’t it? The soul begins to expand, the blood begins to flow more sweetly in your veins. Now stretch it to five minutes, to ten minutes, and imagine yourself turning figure eights and dancing pirouettes as you move, inexhaustible and free, with fifty thousand pairs of eyes trained on you as you float above the grass of the Polo Grounds in New York City. Try to imagine it, Walt, and you’ll see what I’ve been seeing for all these months and years.”

  “In the name of the Lord, Master Yehudi, I don’t think I can stand it.”

  “But wait, Walt, wait another second. Just suppose, for the sake of argument, just suppose that by some vast stroke of luck you were able to master both those things and perform them at the same time.”

  “Loft and locomotion together?”

  “That’s it, Walt. Loft and locomotion together. What then?”

  “I’d be flying, wouldn’t I? I’d be flying through the air like a bird.”

  “Not like a bird, my little man. Like a god. You’d be the wonder of wonders, Walt, the holy of holies. As long as men walked the earth, they’d worship you as the greatest man among them.”

  I spent most of the winter working alone in the barn. The animals were there, but they paid no attention to me, watching my antigravitational feats with dumb indifference. Every now and then, the master would stop in to see how I was doing, but other than a few words of encouragement, he rarely said much. January proved to be the hardest month, and I made no progress at all. Levitation was almost as simple as breathing for me by then, but I was stuck at the same paltry height of six inches, and the idea of moving through the air seemed out of the question. It wasn’t that I couldn’t get the hang of those things, I couldn’t even conceive of them, and work as I did to coax my body to express them, I couldn’t find a way to begin. Nor was the master in any position to help. “Trial and error,” he would say, “trial and error, that’s what it boils down to. You’ve come to the hard part now, and you can’t expect to reach the heavens overnight.”

  In early February, Aesop and Master Yehudi left the farm to go on a tour of colleges and universities back East. They wanted to make up their minds about where Aesop should be enrolled in September, and they were planning to be gone for a full month. I don’t need to add that I begged to go along with them. They would be visiting cities like Boston and New York, giant metropolises with major league ball clubs and trolley cars and pinball machines, and the idea of being stuck in the boondocks was a bit hard to swallow. If I’d been making some headway on my loft and locomotion, it might not have been so awful to be left behind, but I wasn’t getting anywhere, and I told the master that a change of scenery was just what I needed to get the juices flowing again. He laughed in that condescending way of his and said, “Your time is coming, champ, but it’s Aesop’s turn now. The poor boy hasn’t set eyes on a sidewalk or a traffic light for seven years, and it’s my duty as a father to show him a little of the world. Books can only go so far, after all. A moment comes when you have to experience things in the flesh.”

  “Talking about flesh,” I said, gulping back my disappointment, “be sure to take care of Aesop’s little pal. If there’s one experience he’s been craving, it’s the chance to put it somewhere other than in his own hand.”

  “Rest assured, Walt. It’s on the agenda. Mrs. Witherspoon gave me some extra cash for precisely that purpose.”

  “That was thoughtful of her. Maybe she’ll do the same for me one day.”

  “I’m sure she would, but I doubt you’re going to need her help.”

  “We’ll see about that. The way things stand now, I ain’t interested anyway.”

  “All the more reason to stay behind in Kansas and do your work. If you keep at it, there might be a surprise or two for me when I come back.”

  So I spent the month of February alone with Mother Sioux, watching the snow fall and listening to the wind blow across the prairie. For the first couple of weeks, the weather was so cold that I couldn’t bring myself to go out to the bam. I spent the better part of my time moping around the house, too dejected to think about practicing my stunts. Even with just the two of us, Mother Sioux had to keep up with her chores, and what with the extra effort required because of her bum leg, she tired more easily than she had before. Still, I pestered her to distraction, trying to get her to talk to me as she went about her work. For over two years I hadn’t given much thought to anyone but myself, accepting the people around me more or less as they appeared on the surface. I had never bothered to probe into their pasts, had never really cared to know who they’d been before I entered their lives. Now, suddenly, I was gripped by a compulsion to learn everything I could about each one of them. I think it started because I missed them so much—the master and Aesop most of all, but Mrs. Witherspoon as well. I’d liked having her around the house, and the place was a lot duller now that she was gone. Asking questions was a way to bring them back, and the more Mother Sioux talked about them, the less lonely I felt.

  For all my insistence and nagging, I didn’t get much out of her during the daytime. An occasional anecdote, a few dribs and drabs, suggestive hints. The evenings were more conducive to talk, and no matter how hard I pressed her, she rarely got going before we sat down to supper. Mother Sioux was a tight-lipped person, not given to idle chatter or shooting the breeze, but once she settled into the right mood, she wasn’t half bad at telling stories. Her delivery was flat, and she didn’t throw in many colorful details, but she had a knack for pausing every so often in the middle of a sentence or an idea, and those little breaks in the telling produced rather startling effects. They gave you a chance to think, to carry on with the story yourself, and by the time she started up again, you discovered that your head was filled with all kinds of vivid pictures that hadn’t been there before.

  One night, for no reason that I could understand, she took me up to her room on the second floor. She told me to sit on the bed, and once I’d made myself comfortable, she opened the lid of a battered old trunk that stood in the corner. I’d always thought it was a storage place for her sheets and blankets, but it turned out to be stuffed with objects from her past: photographs and beads, moccasins and rawhide dresses, arrowheads, newspaper clippings, and pressed flowers. One by one, she carried these mementoes over to the bed, sat down beside me, and explained what they meant. It was all true about her having worked for Buffalo Bill, I discovered, and the thing that got me when I looked through her old pictures was how pretty she’d been back then—pert and slim, with a full set of white teeth and two long, lovely braids. She’d been a regular Indian princess, a dream squaw like the girls in the movies, and it was hard to put that cute little package together with the roly-poly gimp who kept house for us, to accept the fact that they were one and the same person. It started when she was sixteen years old, she said, at the height of the Ghost Dance craze that swept through the Indian lands in the late 1880s. Those were the bad times, the years of the end of the world, and the red people believed that magic was the only thing that could save them from extinction. The cavalry was closing in from all sides, crowding them off the prairies onto small reservations, and the Blue-Coats had too many men to make a counterattack feasible. Dancing the Ghost Dance was the last line of resistance: to jiggle and shake yourself into a frenzy, to bounce and bob like the Holy Rollers and the screwballs who babble in tongues. You could fly out
of your body then, and the white man’s bullets would no longer touch you, no longer kill you, no longer empty your veins of blood. The Dance caught on everywhere, and eventually Sitting Bull himself threw in his lot with the shakers. The U.S. Army got scared, fearing rebellion was in the works, and ordered Mother Sioux’s great-uncle to stop. But the old boy told them to shove it, he could jitterbug in his own tepee if he wanted to, and who were they to meddle in his private business? So General Blue Coat (I think his name was Miles, or Niles) called in Buffalo Bill to powwow with the chief. They were’ buddies from back when Sitting Bull had worked in the Wild West Show, and Cody was about the only paleface he trusted. So Bill trekked out to the reservation in South Dakota like a good soldier, but once he got there, the general changed his mind and wouldn’t allow him to meet with Sitting Bull. Bill was understandably ticked off. Just as he was about to storm away, however, he caught sight of the young Mother Sioux (whose name back then was She Who Smiles like the Sun) and signed her on as a member of his troupe. At least the journey hadn’t gone entirely for nought. For Mother Sioux, it probably meant the difference between life and death. A few days after her departure into the world of show business, Sitting Bull was murdered in a scuffle with some of the soldiers who were holding him prisoner, and not long after that, three hundred women, children, and old men were mowed down by a cavalry regiment at the so-called Battle of Wounded Knee, which wasn’t a battle so much as a turkey shoot, a wholesale slaughter of the innocent.

  There were tears in Mother Sioux’s eyes when she spoke about this. “Custer’s revenge,” she muttered. “I was two years old when Crazy Horse filled his body with arrows, and by the time I was sixteen, there was nothing left.”

  “Aesop once explained it to me,” I said. “It’s a bit fuzzy now, but I recall him describing how there wouldn’t have been no black slaves from Africa if the white folks had been given a free hand with the Indians. He said they wanted to turn the redskins into slaves, but the Catholic boss man in the old country put the nix on it. So the pirates went to Africa instead and rounded up a lot of darkies and hauled them off in chains. That’s how Aesop told it, and I’ve never known him to lie about nothing. Indians were supposed to be treated good. Like that live-and-let-live stuff the master is always nattering about.”

  “Supposed to,” Mother Sioux answered. “But supposed to ain’t the same as is.”

  “You’ve got a point there, Ma. If you don’t put your money where your mouth is, you can make all the promises you want, and it still don’t add up to a mound of squash.”

  She pulled out more photos after that, and then she started in on the theater programs, poster bills, and newspaper clippings. Mother Sioux had been just about everywhere, not just in America and Canada, but on the other side of the ocean as well. She had performed in front of the king and queen of England, she had signed her autograph for the tsar of Russia, she had drunk champagne with Sarah Bernhardt. After five or six years of touring with Buffalo Bill, she married an Irishman named Ted, a little jockey who rode steeplechase up and down the British Isles. They had a daughter named Daffodil, a stone cottage with blue morning glories and pink climbing roses in the garden, and for seven years her happiness knew no bounds. Then disaster struck. Ted and Daffodil were killed in a train wreck, and Mother Sioux returned to America with a broken heart. She married a pipe fitter whose name was also Ted, but unlike Ted One, Ted Two was a sot and a roughneck, and by and by Mother Sioux took to drink herself, so great was her sorrow whenever she compared her new life to her old. They wound up living together in a tar-paper shack on the outskirts of Memphis, Tennessee, and if not for the sudden, wholly chance appearance of Master Yehudi on their road one morning in the summer of 1912, Mother Sioux would have been a corpse before her time. He was walking along with the young Aesop in his arms (just two days after he’d rescued him in the cotton field) when he heard shrieks and howls rising from the broken-down hut that Mother Sioux called her home. Ted Two had just commenced pummeling her with his hairy fists, knocking out six or seven teeth with the first blows, and Master Yehudi, who was never one to walk away from trouble, entered the shack, gently placed his crippled child on the floor, and put an end to the donnybrook by sneaking up behind Ted Two, clamping his thumb and middle finger onto the crumbum’s neck, and applying enough pressure to dispatch him to the land of dreams. The master then washed the blood from Mother Sioux’ gums and lips, helped her to her feet, and glanced about at the squalor of the room. He didn’t need more than twelve seconds to come to a decision. “I have a proposal to make,” he said to the battered woman. “Leave this louse on the floor and come with me. I have a rickets-plagued boy in want of a mother, and if you agree to take care of him, I’ll agree to take care of you. I don’t stay anywhere for very long, so you’ll have to acquire a taste for travel, but I promise on my father’s soul that I’ll never let you and the child go hungry.”

  The master was twenty-nine years old then, a radiant specimen of manhood sporting a waxed handlebar mustache and an impeccably knotted tie. Mother Sioux joined forces with him that morning, and for the next fifteen years she stuck with him through every twist and turn of his career, raising Aesop as if he were her own. I can’t remember all the places she talked about, but the best stories always seemed to be centered around Chicago, a town they visited often. That was where Mrs. Witherspoon hailed from, and once Mother Sioux got onto that subject, my head started to spin. She gave me only the sketchiest outline, but the bare facts were so curious, so weirdly theatrical, that it wasn’t long before I had embroidered them into a full-blown drama. Marion Witherspoon had married her late husband when she was twenty or twenty-one. He himself had been raised in Kansas, the son of a wealthy family from Wichita who had run off to the big city the moment he came into his inheritance. Mother Sioux described him as a handsome, fun-loving rake, one of those mealy-mouthed charmers who could talk his way into a woman’s skirt in less time than it took Jim Thorpe to tie his shoe. The young couple lived high on the hog for three or four years, but Mr. Witherspoon had a weakness for the ponies, not to speak of a penchant for dabbling in a friendly game of cards some fifteen or twenty nights a month, and since he demonstrated more enthusiasm than skill at his chosen vices, his once vast fortune shrank to a pittance. Toward the end, the situation became so desperate that it looked as if he and his wife would have to move back to the family home in Wichita and that he, Charlie Witherspoon, the polo-playing gadabout and jokester of the North Side, would actually have to look for nine-to-five employment in some dreary grain-belt insurance company. That was where Master Yehudi entered the picture—in the back room of a Rush Street pool hall at four in the morning with said Mr. Witherspoon and two or three anonymous others, all of them sitting around a green felt table holding cards in their hands. As they say in the funny papers, it wasn’t Charlie’s night, and there he was about to go belly-up, sitting on three jacks and a pair of kings without a dime to throw in the pot. Master Yehudi was the only one left in the game, and since this was clearly the last good chance Charlie would ever have, he decided to go for broke. First he bet his property in Cibola, Kansas (which had once been his grandparents’ farm), signing over the house and the land on a scrap of paper, and then, when Master Yehudi hung in there and raised him, the gentleman signed another scrap of paper whereby he relinquished all claims to his own wife. Master Yehudi was holding four sevens, and since four of a kind always beats a full house, no matter how much royalty is crammed into that house, he won the farm and the woman, and poor, defeated Charlie Witherspoon, at last at his wit’s end, wobbled home at dawn, entered the room where his wife lay asleep, and extracted a revolver from the bedside table, whereupon he blew his brains out right there on the bed.

  That was how Master Yehudi came to pitch his tent in Kansas. After years of wandering, he finally had a place to call his own, and while it wasn’t necessarily the place he’d had in mind, he wasn’t about to spurn what those four sevens had given him. What puzzl
ed me was how Mrs. Witherspoon fit into the setup. If her husband had died broke, from whence had sprung the wherewithal for her to live so comfortably in her Wichita mansion, to pamper herself with fine clothes and emerald-green sedans and still have enough left over to fund Master Yehudi’s projects? Mother Sioux had a ready answer for that one. Because she was smart. Once she caught on to the profligate ways of her husband, Mrs. Witherspoon had begun fiddling with the books, stashing away bits of their monthly income in high-yield investments, stocks, corporate bonds, and other financial transactions. By the time she was widowed, this hanky-panky had produced some robust profits, multiplying her initial outlay by a factor of four, and with this tidy little fortune tucked into her purse, she was more than able to eat, drink, and make merry. But what about Master Yehudi? I asked. He’d won her fair and square in that poker game, and if Mrs. Witherspoon belonged to him, why weren’t they married? Why wasn’t she here with us darning his socks and cooking his grub and carrying his babies in her womb?

  Mother Sioux shook her head slowly back and forth. “It’s a new world we’re living in,” she said. “Ain’t nobody can own another’s body no more. A woman ain’t chattel to be bought and sold by men, least of all one of them new women like the master’s lady. They love and hate, they grapple and spoon, they want and don’t want, and as time goes on they each sink deeper under the other’s skin. It’s a real show, patty-cake, the follies and the circus all rolled into one, and dollars to doughnuts it’s going to be like that till the day they die.”