Authors: Paul Auster
For the first month, it was by no means dear that things would end so badly. Girdled in a huge plaster cast that was suspended from pulleys, Barber hovered in midair as though defying the laws of physics. He was immobilized to such a degree that he could not turn his head, could not eat without having tubes put down his throat; but for all that, he made progress, he seemed to be recovering. More than anything else, he told me, he was glad the truth had finally come out. If lying in a cast for a few months was the price he had to pay, he felt it was worth the trouble. “My bones might be broken,” he said to me one afternoon, “but my heart is finally on the mend.”
Those were the days when the story spilled out of him, and with nothing else for him to do but talk, he wound up giving me an exhaustive and meticulous account of his whole life. I heard every detail of his romance with my mother, I heard the depressing saga of his sojourn in the Cleveland YMCA, I heard the story of his subsequent travels through the heartlands of America. It probably goes without saying that my burst of anger against him in the cemetery had long since evaporated, but even though the evidence left little room for doubt, something in me hesitated to accept him as my father. Yes, it was certain that Barber had slept with my mother one night in 1946; and yes, it was also certain that I had been born nine months later; but how could I be sure that Barber was the only man she had slept with? The odds were against it, but it was nevertheless possible that my mother had been seeing two men at the same time. If so, then perhaps it was the other man who had made her pregnant. This was my only defense against total belief, and I was reluctant to let go of it. As
long as a sliver of skepticism remained, I would not have to admit that anything had happened. This was an unexpected response, but looking back on it now, I feel that it makes a peculiar kind of sense. For twenty-four years, I had lived with an unanswerable question, and little by little I had come to embrace that enigma as the central fact about myself. My origins were a mystery, and I would never know where I had come from. This was what defined me, and by now I was used to my own darkness, clinging to it as a source of knowledge and self-respect, trusting in it as an onto-logical necessity. No matter how hard I might have dreamed of finding my father, I had never thought it would be possible. Now that I had found him, the inner disruption was so great that my first impulse was to deny it. Barber was not the cause of the denial, it was the situation itself. He was the best friend I had, and I loved him. If there was any man in the world I would have chosen to be my father, he was the one. But still, I couldn’t do it. A shock had been sent through my entire system, and I didn’t know how to absorb the blow.
Weeks went by, and eventually it became impossible for me to close my eyes to the facts. With his body held rigid in its white plaster cast, Barber could not eat any solid food, and it wasn’t long before he started to lose weight. This was a man who was accustomed to gorging himself on thousands of calories a day, and the abrupt change in his diet caused an immediate and noticeable effect. It takes hard work to maintain such a mountainous excess of blubber, and once you slacken your consumption, the pounds drop off quite rapidly. Barber complained about it at first, and several times he even wept from hunger, but after a while he began to see this enforced starvation as a blessing in disguise. “It’s an opportunity to accomplish something I’ve never been able to do before,” he said. “Just think of it, M. S. If I can keep going at this rate, I’ll shed a hundred pounds by the time I get out of here. Maybe even a hundred and twenty. I’ll be a new man. I’ll never have to look like myself again.”
The hair grew back along the sides of his scalp (a mixture of
gray and ruddy brown), and the contrast between those colors and the color of his eyes (a dark, gunmetal blue) seemed to set off his head with a new clarity and definition, as though it were gradually emerging from the undifferentiated air that surrounded it. After ten or twelve days in the hospital, his skin turned a deathly white, but with this pallor came a new thinness to his cheeks, and as the bloat of fat cells and puffy flesh continued to subside, a second Barber came up to the surface, a secret self that had been locked inside him for years. It was a stunning transformation, and once it was fully underway, it unleashed a number of remarkable side-effects. I hardly noticed at first, but one morning after he had been in the hospital for about three weeks, I looked at him and saw something familiar. It was just a momentary flash, and before I could identify the thing I had seen, it was gone. Two days later, something similar occurred, but this time it lasted long enough for me to sense that the area of recognition was located somewhere around Barber’s eyes, perhaps even in the eyes themselves. I wondered if I hadn’t noticed a family resemblance with Effing, if something about the way Barber glanced at me just then had not reminded me of his father. Whatever it was, this brief moment was disturbing, and I was unable to shake myself free of it for the rest of the day. It haunted me like a fragment from some unremembered dream, a flicker of intelligibility that had risen up from the depths of my unconscious. Then, the very next morning, I finally understood what I had been seeing. I entered Barber’s room for my daily visit, and as he opened his eyes and smiled at me, his face all languid with the painkillers in his blood, I found myself studying the contours of his eyelids, concentrating on the space between the brows and the lashes, and all of a sudden I realized that I was looking at myself. Barber had the same eyes I did. Now that his face had shrunk, it was possible for me to see it. We looked like each other, and the similarity was unmistakable. Once I became aware of this, once the truth of it was finally thrown up against me, I had no choice but to accept it. I was Barber’s son, and I knew it now beyond a shadow of a doubt.
For the next two weeks, everything seemed to go well. The doctors were optimistic, and we began looking forward to the day when the cast would be removed. Some time in early August, however, Barber suddenly took a turn for the worse. He came down with an infection of some kind, and the medicine they gave him produced an allergic reaction, which pushed up his blood pressure to crisis levels. Further tests revealed a diabetic condition that had never been diagnosed before, and as the doctors went on probing him for further damage, new diseases and problems kept being added to the list: angina, incipient gout, circulatory trouble, God knows what else. It was as though his body simply couldn’t take it anymore. It had been through too much, and now the machinery was breaking down. His defenses had been weakened by the enormous weight loss, and there was nothing left for him to fight with, his blood cells refused to mount a counterattack. By the twentieth of August, he told me that he knew he was going to die, but I wouldn’t listen to him. “Just sit tight,” I said. “We’ll have you out of here before they throw the first pitch of the World Series.”
I didn’t know what I felt anymore. The strain of watching him fall apart left me numb, and by the third week of August I was walking around in a trance. The only thing that mattered to me at that point was to keep up an impassive front. No tears, no bouts of despair, no lapses of will. I exuded hope and confidence, but inwardly I must have known how impossible the situation really was. This was not brought home to me until the very end, however, and I learned it only in the most roundabout way. I had gone into a diner for a late-night supper. One of the specials that evening happened to be chicken pot pie, a dish I had not eaten since I was a small boy, perhaps not since the days when I was still living with my mother. The moment I read those words on the menu, I knew that no other food would do for me that night. I gave my order to the waitress, and for the next three or four minutes I sat there remembering the apartment in Boston where my mother and I had lived, seeing for the first time in years the
tiny kitchen table where the two of us had eaten our meals together. Then the waitress came back and told me they were out of chicken pot pies. It was nothing at all, of course. In the large scheme of things, it was a mere speck of dust, an infinitesimal crumb of antimatter, and yet I suddenly felt as though the roof had caved in on me. There were no more chicken pot pies. If someone had told me an earthquake had just killed twenty thousand people in California, I would not have been more upset than I was at that moment. I actually felt tears forming in my eyes, and it was only then, sitting in that diner and wrestling with my disappointment, that I understood how fragile my world had become. The egg was slipping through my fingers, and sooner or later it was bound to drop.
Barber died on September fourth, just three days after this incident in the restaurant. He weighed only 210 pounds at the time, and it was as though half of him had already disappeared, as though once the process had been set in motion, it was inevitable that the rest of him should disappear as well. I wanted to talk to someone, but the only person I could think of was Kitty. It was five o’clock in the morning when I called her, and even before she answered the phone, I knew that I wasn’t calling just to tell her the news. I had to find out if she was willing to take me back.
“I know you’re asleep,” I said, “but don’t hang up until you’ve heard what I have to say.”
“M. S.?” Her voice was muffled, groggy with confusion. “Is that you, M. S.?”
“I’m in Chicago. Sol died about an hour ago, and there wasn’t anyone else I could talk to.”
It took me a while to tell her the story. She wouldn’t believe me at first, and as I continued to give her the details, I understood how improbable the whole thing sounded. Yes, I said, he fell into an open grave and broke his back. Yes, he really was my father. Yes, he really died tonight. Yes, I’m calling from a pay phone at the hospital. There was a short interruption as the operator broke
in to ask me to deposit more coins, and when the line opened again, I could hear Kitty sobbing on the other end.
“Poor Sol,” she said. “Poor Sol and poor M. S. Poor everyone.”
“I’m sorry I had to tell you. But I wouldn’t have felt copy if I hadn’t called.”
“No, I’m glad you did. It’s just so hard to take. Oh God, M. S., if you only knew how long I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”
“I’ve made a mess of everything, haven’t I?”
“It’s not your fault. You can’t help what you feel, no one can.”
“You didn’t expect to hear from me again, did you?”
“Not anymore. For the first couple of months, I didn’t think about anything else. But you can’t live like that, it’s not possible. Little by little, I finally stopped hoping.”
“I’ve gone on loving you every minute. You know that, don’t you?”
Once more, there was a silence on the other end, and then I heard her start to sob again—wretched, broken sobs that seemed to suck the breath out of her. “Jesus Christ, M. S., what are you trying to do to me? I don’t hear from you since June, and then you call me up from Chicago at five o’clock in the morning, tear my guts out with what happened to Sol—and then you start talking about love? It’s not fair. You don’t have the copy to do that. Not now.”
“I can’t stand being without you anymore. I tried to do it, but I can’t.”
“Well, I tried to do it, too, and I can.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It was too hard for me, M. S. The only way I could survive was to make myself just as hard.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“It’s too late. I can’t open myself up to that anymore. You nearly killed me, you know, and I can’t risk anything like that again.”
“You’ve found someone else, haven’t you?”
“It’s been months. What did you want me to do while you were halfway across the country trying to make up your mind?”
“You’re in bed with him now, aren’t you?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“You are, aren’t you? Just tell me.”
“As a matter of fact, I’m not. But that doesn’t mean you have any copy to ask.”
“I don’t care who it is. It doesn’t make any difference.”
“No more, M. S. I can’t stand it, I can’t take another word.”
“I’m begging you, Kitty. Let me come back.”
“Good-bye, Marco. Be good to yourself. Please be good to yourself.”
And then she hung up.
I
buried Barber next to my mother. It took some doing to get him into Westlawn Cemetery, a lone Gentile in a sea of Russian and German Jews, but given that the Fogg family plot still had room for one more person, and given that I was technically the head of the family and therefore the owner of that land, I eventually got my way. In effect, I buried my father in the grave that had been destined for me. Considering all that had happened in the past few months, I felt it was the least I could do for him.
After the conversation with Kitty, I needed every distraction from my thoughts that I could find, and in lieu of anything else, the business of funeral arrangements helped to carry me through the next four days. Two weeks before his death, Barber had summoned the last bits of his remaining strength to turn his assets over to me, and so I had enough money to work with. Wills were too complicated, he said, and since he wanted me to have everything in any case, why not simply give it to me now? I tried to talk him out of it, knowing that this transaction was the ultimate acceptance of defeat, but I didn’t want to press too hard. Barber
was barely hanging on by then, and it wouldn’t have been fair to stand in his way.
I paid the hospital bills, I paid the mortuary, I paid for a gravestone in advance. To officiate at the burial service, I called up the rabbi who had presided over my bar mitzvah eleven years before. He was an old man now, well past seventy, I think, and he did not remember my name. I’m retired, he said, why don’t you ask someone else? No, I said, it has to be you, Rabbi Green, I don’t want anyone else. It took some persuading, but I finally wrangled him into doing it for twice his normal fee. This is highly unusual, he said. There are no usual cases, I answered. Every death is unique.
Rabbi Green and I were the only people at the funeral. I had thought of notifying Magnus College of Barber’s death, thinking that some of his colleagues might want to attend, but then I decided against it. I wasn’t up to spending the day with strangers, I didn’t want to talk to anyone. The rabbi agreed to my request not to deliver a eulogy in English, confining himself to a recitation of the traditional Hebrew prayers. My Hebrew had all but vanished by then, and I was glad I wasn’t able to understand what he said. It left me alone with my thoughts, which was all I finally wanted. Rabbi Green considered me insane, and during the hours we spent together, he kept as much distance between us as possible. I felt sorry for him, but not enough to do anything about it. All in all, I don’t think I said more than five or six words to him. When the limousine deposited him in front of his house after the ordeal, he reached out and shook my hand, patting my knuckles softly with his left palm. It was a gesture of consolation that must have been as natural to him as signing his name, and he hardly seemed to notice he was doing it. “You’re a very disturbed young man,” he said. “If you want my advice, I think you should go to a doctor.”