* * *
W
HO WAS
I? I came from—by blood, I mean—a long line of magic-working rabbis, men supposedly able to impose and lift curses, rabbis known for their great height and temperament: they were easily infuriated, often rhapsodic men.
On the other side I was descended from supposedly a thousand years or more of Talmudic scholars—men who never worked but only studied. Their families, their children, too, had to tend and support them. They were known for their inflexible contempt for humanity and their conceit; they pursued an accumulation of knowledge of the Unspeakable—that is to say, of God.
I didn’t like the way they sounded, either. In both lines, the children were often rebellious and ran away and nothing more was heard of them: my real father had refused to learn to read and write; he had been a semiprofessional gambler, a brawler, a drunk, a prizefighter before settling down to be a junkman. He shouted when he spoke; he wasn’t very clean. Only one or two in each generation had ever been Godly and carried on the rabbinical or scholarly line, the line of superiority and worth. Supposedly I was in that line. This was more important to Doris than it was to me; she was aware of it; it had meaning to her. Doris said, “If we’re good and don’t lie, if you pray for me, maybe God will make Joe and me well—it can’t hurt to try.”
We really didn’t know what to do or how to act. Some people, more ardently Jewish than we were, said God was punishing Joe and Doris for not being better Jews. My real relatives said Joe and Doris were being punished for not bringing me up as a rabbi, or a Jewish scholar, a pillar of Judaism. “I don’t think the Jews are the chosen people,” Joe would say, “and if they are, it doesn’t look as if they were chosen for anything good.” He said, “What the world doesn’t need is another rabbi.” At school, the resident psychologist asked my classmates and me to write a short paper about our home life, and I wrote,
It is our wont to have intelligent discussions after dinner about serious issues of the day.
The psychologist congratulated Doris on running a wonderful home from her sickbed, and Doris said to me, “Thank you for what you did for me—thank you for lying.” Maybe I didn’t do it for her but to see what I could get away with, what I could pass as. But in a way I was sincere. Life at home was concerned with serious questions. But in a way I wasn’t ever sincere. I was willing to practice any number of
impostures. I never referred to Doris as my
adopted
mother, only as my mother. I had a face that leaked information. I tried to be carefully inexpressive except to show concern toward Doris and Joe. I forgave everyone everything they did. I understood that everyone had the right to do and think as they did even if it harmed me or made me hate them. I was good at games sporadically—then mediocre, then good again, depending on how I regarded myself or on the amount of strain at home. Between moments of drama, I lived inside my new adolescence, surprised that my feet were so far from my head; I rested inside a logy narcissism; I would feel, tug at, and stroke the single, quite long blond hair that grew at the point of my chin. I would look at the new muscle of my right forearm and the vein that meandered across it. It seemed to me that sights did not come to my eyes but that I hurled my sight out like a braided rope and grappled things visually to me; my sight traveled unimaginable distances, up into the universe or into some friend’s motives and desires, only to collapse, with boredom, with a failure of will to see to the end, with shyness; it collapsed back inside me: I would go from the sky to inside my own chest. I had friends, good friends, but none understood me or wanted to; if I spoke about the way things were at home, or about my real father, they disbelieved me and then didn’t trust me; or if I made them believe, they felt sick, and often they would treat me as someone luckless, an object of charity, and I knew myself to be better than that. So I pitied them first. And got higher grades than they did, and I condescended to them. Doris said to me a number of times, “Don’t ever tell anybody what goes on in this house: they won’t give you any sympathy; they don’t know how—all
they
know is how to run away.… Take my advice and lie, say we’re all happy, lie a lot if you want to have any kind of life.” I did not see how it was possible for such things as curses to exist, but it seemed strange I was not ill or half crazy and my parents were: it didn’t seem reasonable that anything except the collapse of their own lives had made Joe and Doris act as they did or that my adoption had been the means of introducing a curse into the Brodkeys’ existences; but it seemed snotty to be certain. I didn’t blame myself exactly; but there was all that pain and misery to be lived with, and it was related to me, to my life; and I couldn’t help taking some responsibility for it. I don’t think I was neurotic about it.
It seemed to me there were only two social states, tact and madness; and madness was selfish. I fell from a cliff face once, rode my bicycle
into a truck on two occasions, was knocked out in a boxing match because I became bored and felt sorry for everyone and lowered my guard and stood there. I wanted to be brave and decent—it seemed braver to be cowardly and more decent not to add to the Brodkeys’ list of disasters by having any of my own or even by making an issue of grief or discomfort, but perhaps I was not a very loving person. Perhaps I was self-concerned and a hypocrite, and the sort of person you ought to stay away from, someone like the bastard villains in Shakespeare. Perhaps I just wanted to get out with a whole skin. I thought I kept on going for Doris and Joe’s sake but possibly that was a mealymouthed excuse. I didn’t know. I tended to rely on whatever audience there was; I figured if they gaped and said, “He’s a really good son,” I was close to human decency. I was clear in everything I did to make sure the audience understood and could make a good decision about it and me. I was safe in my own life only when there was no one to show off to.
Doris insisted I give her what money I earned. And usually I did, so that I would not have to listen to her self-righteous begging and angry persuasiveness. The sums involved were small—five dollars, ten; once it was eighty-nine cents. She had, as a good-looking woman, always tested herself by seeing what she could get from people; hysteria had inflected her old habits and made them grotesque, made her grotesque. No other man was left. No one else at all was left. Not her mother, not her own daughter by blood, not her sister: they ran away from her, moved out of town, hung up if she called. Her isolation was entire except for me. When a nephew of Joe’s sent me ten dollars for my birthday, Doris said, “I need it, I’m sick, I have terrible expenses. Don’t you want to give me the money? Don’t you want me to have a little pleasure? I could use a subscription to a good magazine.” I used to hide money from her, rolled up in socks, tucked behind photographs in picture frames, but it would always disappear. While I was at school, she would hunt it out: she was ill and housebound, as I said, and there wasn’t much for her to do.
Doris never said she was my mother; she never insisted that I had to love her; she asked things of me on the grounds that I was selfish by nature and cold and cut off from human feeling and despised people too much, and she said, “Be manly—that’s all I ask.” She said, “I don’t ask you things that aren’t good for you—it’s for your own good for you to be kind to me.” She would yell at me, “It won’t hurt you to help me! You have time for another chance!” Doris yelled, “What do you think
it does to me to see you exercising in your room—when I have to die?”
I said, “I don’t know. Does it bother you a lot?”
“You’re a fool!” she screamed. “Don’t make me wish you’d get cancer so you’d know what I’m going through!”
If I ignored her or argued with her, she became violent, and then temper and fright—even the breaths she drew—spoiled the balance of pain and morphine in her; sometimes then she would howl. If I went to her, she would scream, “Go away, don’t touch me—you’ll hurt me!” It was like having to stand somewhere and watch someone being eaten by wild dogs. I couldn’t believe I was seeing such pain. I would stop seeing: I would stand there and be without sight; the bottom of my stomach would drop away; there is a frightening cold shock that comes when you accept the reality of someone else’s pain. Twice I was sick, I threw up. But Doris used my regret at her pain as if it were love.
She would start to yell at me at times, and I would lift my arm, my hand, hold them rigidly toward her and say, “Momma, don’t … don’t …” She would say, “Then don’t make me yell at you. Don’t cause me that pain.”
It seemed the meagerest imaginable human decency not to be a party to further pain for her. But the list of things that she said caused her pain grew and grew: It upset her to see high spirits in me or a long face; and a neutral look made her think I’d forgotten her predicament; she hated any reference to sports, but she also hated it if I wasn’t athletic—it reflected on her if I was a momma’s boy. She hated to talk to me—I was a child—but she had no one else to talk to; that was a humiliation for her. She hated the sight of any pleasure near her, even daydreaming; she suspected that I had some notion of happiness in mind. And she hated it when anyone called me—that was evidence someone had a crush on me. She thought it would help her if I loved no one, was loved by no one, if I accepted help from no one. “How do you think it makes me feel? They don’t want to help me, and I’m the one who’s dying.” She could not bear any mention of the future, any reference especially to my future.
“Don’t you understand! I won’t be here!”
Sometimes she would apologize; she would say, “It’s not me who says those things; it’s the pain. It’s not fair for me to have this pain: you don’t know what it’s like. I can’t stand it, Buddy. I’m a fighter.”
She said, “Why don’t you know how to act so I don’t lose my temper? You aggravate me and then I scream at you and it’s not good for me. Why don’t you understand? What’s wrong with you? You’re supposed
to be so smart but I swear to God you don’t understand anything—you’re no help to me. Why don’t you put yourself in my place? Why don’t you cooperate with me?”
She had scorned whatever comfort—or blame—her family had offered her; she said it was incompetent; and she scorned the comfort tendered by the rabbi, who was, she said, “not a
man
—he’s silly” and she suspected the doctors of lying to her, and the treatments they gave her she thought were vile and careless and given with contempt for her. “They burned me,” Doris whimpered, “they burned
me.
” Her chest was coated with radium burns, with an unpliable, discolored shell. She was held within an enforced, enraged, fearful stiffness. She couldn’t take a deep breath. She could only whisper. Her wingspan was so great I could not get near her. I would come home from school and she would be lying on the couch in the living room, whimpering and abject, crying with great carefulness, but angry: She would berate me in whispers: “I hate to tell you this, but what you are is selfish, and it’s a problem you’re going to have all your life, believe me. You don’t care if anyone lives or dies. No one is important to you—but you. I would rather go through what I’m going through than be like you.” At two in the morning, she came into my room, turned on the ceiling light, and said, “Wake up! Help me. Buddy, wake up.” I opened my eyes. I was spread-eagled mentally, like someone half on one side of a high fence, half on the other, but between waking and sleeping. We sometimes had to go to the hospital in the middle of the night. The jumble of words in my head was:
emerging, urgent, murderer, emergency.
I did not call out.
She said, “Look what they’ve done to me. My God, look what they’ve done to me.” She lowered her nightgown to her waist. The eerie colors of her carapace and the jumble of scars moved into my consciousness like something in a movie advancing toward the camera, filling and overspreading the screen. That gargoylish torso. She spoke first piteously, then ragingly. Her eyes were averted, then she fixed them on me. She was on a flight of emotion, a drug passage, but I did not think of that: I felt her emotion like bat wings, leathery and foreign, filling the room; and I felt her animosity. It was directed at me, but at moments it was not and I was merely the only consciousness available to her to trespass upon. She said, “I scratched myself while I slept—look, there’s blood.”
She had not made me cry since I was a child; I had not let her; nothing had ever made me scream except dreams I’d had that my first mother
was not dead but was returning. Certain figures of speech are worn smooth but accurate: I was racked; everything was breaking; I was about to break.
I shouted, “Stop it.”
She said, enraged, “Am I bothering you? Are you complaining about me? Do you know what I’m suffering?”
I said, “No.” Then I said—I couldn’t think of anything sensible—“It doesn’t look so bad, Momma.”
She said, “What’s wrong with you? Why do you talk stupidly?” Locks of hair trailed over her face. She said, “No one wants to touch me.”
I raised my eyebrows and stuck my head forward and jerked it in a single nod, a gesture boys used then for O.K. when they weren’t too pleased, and I climbed out of bed. My mother told me at breakfast the next day not to mind what she had done, it had been the drug in her that made her do what she did; the bat wings of her drug flight seemed when I stood up to fold back, to retreat inside her: she was not so terrifying. Merely unlikable. And sickening. I put my arms around her and said, “See. I can hug you.”
She let out a small scream. “You’re hurting me.”
“O.K., but now go back to bed, Momma. You need your sleep.”
“I can’t sleep. Why don’t you want to kill the doctor for what he’s done to me …?”
She said for weeks, whenever she was drugged, “If I was a man, I’d be willing to be hanged for killing a man who did this to a woman I loved.”
She’d had five years of various illnesses and now cancer and she still wasn’t dead.
I would come home from school to the shadowy house, the curtains drawn and no lights on, or perhaps one, and she would be roaming barefooted with wisps of her hair sticking out and her robe lopsided and coming open; when I stood there, flushed with hurrying, and asked, “Momma, is it worse?” or whatever, she would look at me with pinched-face insanity and it would chill me. She would shout, “What do you mean, is it worse? Don’t you know yet what’s happened to me? What else can it be but worse! What’s wrong with you? You’re more of my punishment, you’re helping to kill me, do you think I’m made of iron? You come in here and want me to act like your valentine! I don’t need any more of your I-don’t-know-what! You’re driving me crazy, do you
hear me? On top of everything else, you’re driving me out of my mind.”