The Storm at the Door (18 page)

When Schultz was eighteen, the world had begun to quiet again. Or else, at least, he had learned how to coexist with both human language and the other, truer language. The people of Bolbirosok smiled at his attempts at conversation, limited though they might have been. The other language continued to call to Schultz, but he knew that, if he wanted ever to capture the affection of Irit Mendelsohn, he couldn’t come to her muttering in some unknown tongue. For love, he would have to speak as she spoke.

This was still Bolbirosok as it once was; there were rules in place for such things. Schultz knew that the only way to Irit was through her father. And so, young Schultz, in the summer before he would leave for the University of Vilnius, accepted Reb Menachem Mendelsohn’s invitation, with the pretense of curiosity about his strange mode of Torah studies. More truly, he wanted only the proximity to Irit that an audience with Reb Mendelsohn would afford. To this end, Schultz found great success, for Irit was her father’s daughter, their fascinations shared. Each time he visited the Mendelsohn house, he was led to the study, where father and daughter sat, marking Torah scrolls with red pens.

The Torah we have is not the True Torah
, Reb Mendelsohn told Schultz.
The True Torah has been lost to us, but it is concealed within this text we are given. The True Torah would be illegible to us, written in the language that was lost at the fall of Babel. And it is up to us, the Chosen People, to resurrect it
.

Reb Mendelsohn and Irit showed Schultz how the two of them sought strange numerical connections between Hebrew characters, how they tried rolling around the Hebrew words in their mouths, seeking a revelation of the true lost language.
The
True Torah
, Reb Mendelsohn said,
is not just a text, or at least not as you would think of a text. The True Torah is the universe, or rather, the mold from which the universe was formed. The language of the True Torah is the opposite of how we think of language. Instead of words attached inadequately to the things they try and fail to describe, the things themselves—you, me, Irit, this house, Bolbirosok, this entire world—try and fail to grasp at this lost, true language. The division and incompleteness we feel is all things yearning for the words that made us, but are now lost to us. When this language is resurrected it will be
tikkun olam,
the universe will be healed
.

When Reb Mendelsohn and Irit told him these things, Schultz and the Mendelsohns feigned a purely intellectual curiosity; none discussed the subtext for the invitation, the language that spoke only to Schultz. They let that truth remain, like the true and lost language, just behind the words they actually spoke.

The parallels between Schultz’s strange form of awareness and the language Mendelsohn described might be uncanny, but even to this day, even now as Schultz sits at his desk in the Mayflower Home, he does not know if the sounds that he discerns have any godly derivation, or whether they are simply a hidden truth of the physical universe, like Newton’s laws of motion, or Einstein’s relativity. He cannot know, but Schultz hopes that, once the full language is in place, once his work is complete, this truth will be obvious to him.

Still, Schultz sometimes now wishes that he had told Reb Mendelsohn the full truth about his private noises; likely the great scholar would have understood. Perhaps he would even have been proud to have his daughter become the wife of a man who was thus gifted. But at least Reb Mendelsohn had known another, more commonplace pride: that, after all their conversations
about texts and language, Schultz had set off for the university, wanting only to study linguistics. A study that would lead him, in postgraduate years, to a thesis that would revolutionize the scholarly pursuit of linguistics. With Irit as his wife in Vilnius and, later, in Cambridge, Schultz performed research that upended standard linguistic practices, research that sought out that which is essential and common to all languages, that which all languages, and thus all human minds, require. Research that, Schultz now realizes, had merely been the groundwork to prepare the field, the world, for his true study. His study of the fundamental language, the one true language, to which all lesser languages, every tongue of the world, aspire and fail to reach.

It may be the fundamental language, but learning it is like learning any other. Once one builds a decent vocabulary and grasps the basic principles—the derivations, the conjugations, the syntax, and the grammar—sentences can start to come to the lips when they must. Just the other week in group therapy, for example, in an unexpected moment of passion, words came to Schultz and conveyed what they sought to convey. The words served their purpose fully, at least for a moment. For a moment, there was a part of her name, a part of her face, and she—Well, he cannot yet even allow himself to think it. What is important is not his personal needs. For example, Schultz knows people think him mad. He knows he is in a home for the mad, but those perceptions will soon enough be irrelevant when people realize the true scope of his work.

But Schultz does not delight in the importance assigned to him. He is merely an instrument, a sort of human radio tower. Simply, it took a man like Schultz, a man informed by the long tradition of his people’s linguistic scholarship, a man who has lost
everything and thus expects, like a true bodhisattva, absolutely nothing, to receive this truth.

•   •   •

All around him, each of the bricks of which Ingersoll House is constructed sighs in a low register, dully performing its task. Outside, each of the particles of the atmosphere—O
₂
, H
₂
O, CO
₂
—is a faint, unique soprano, each singing a sound like the English sound
ah
, which is further dividable into subparticles, some contributing to the
a
, some the
h
, all the way down to the vibrating wavelengths, at the base of everything, modulated into different notes, but all, as the Vedic mystics gleaned long before there was such a thing as a Jew, constituted of the sound
Om
. Beyond are planets and stars, galaxies birthing, galaxies dying. Schultz receives them all, coming so quickly in the diverse chorus he has no time to differentiate and transcribe them. They all come together to make a sound identical to the tiniest wavelength,
om
, but at mighty volume.
Om!

Schultz turns from his journal, tilts his head toward the shut door, the sonic texture of night in this hospital. Somewhere, not so far away, a cigarette lighter speaks a sprightly
galooop
. A lighter that was carelessly dropped as a fired orderly
(kanoowa)
sucked an angry cigarette
(carooo)
in the main corridor of Ingersoll
(booloo)
.

There is a hand,
drrrr
, as it lights the lighter with a cheery song in E-flat.
Eeee
. The hand holds the flame,
drrr-eee
, as it moves in a deliberate inward arc, toward the hospital gown,
drr-eee-who
. As it harmonizes with the flame’s song, the hospital gown cries,
who-eeeee
. And then the sound of the body, a shriek cried out amid the low hum of night, rushing down the hall in flames, a guttural
cheeee
sound, gaining volume.

The sounds of the other men, startling awake. And the voice, which speaks that dreadful name, the inverse, the cancellation of
om
. It is a terrible voice, the familiar voice that is death, yet Schultz tries to remind himself that the death-voice may be a destroyer but it is also a creator. Birth and death: complex things, each neither entirely just birth nor entirely just death, each always holding the other. The death-voice is speaking, and so Schultz senses that the change is coming, that soon his project will reach its completion.

It isn’t until well after they put out the fire—one of the night-shift orderlies rushing in with blankets—that the men can calm enough to comprehend what has happened. In the dissipating smoke that still lingers after the ambulance has left, the men of Ingersoll agree that it was no accident. The fact of what has happened is as astonishing as it is obvious: Marvin Foulds, the celebrated creator of Mango Diablo, the Admiral, Guy DeVille, and so many others, has invented yet another identity, has put on a new costume and a new persona, when his old wardrobe was denied him. Out of a forced hospital gown and a dropped lighter, he has made a costume of fire. Out of the ashes of the hospital that Mayflower had just recently been, the lost hospital that had done so much to foster his creative development, Marvin has risen in his most daring persona yet. The Phoenix. The avenger. Marvin may have had a short run in this particular role,
the costume may have been extinguished within moments of its creation, but the men have seen the Phoenix, just as Schultz has heard its name. In the ammoniated linoleum halls of Canon’s Mayflower, a sound, a notion, the principle of entropy performed. The Phoenix may be extinguished, but what had birthed it will only continue to spread, as fire.

It is Columbus Day, 1962, and my grandmother is back at Echo Cottage, pulling the horsehair mattresses from the upstairs sleeping porch to the front bedroom, to protect them from the winter. This weekend will be their last at Echo for the year, and Katharine has a list of such chores to complete. In past years, they have hired a woman from town to help with these tasks, but with Frederick at Mayflower, her family’s savings have dwindled to alarming balances, and so she must do all this by herself. Katharine moves quickly to check off her list, rushing to return to her daughters and her cousins, out sailing the whitecapped lake on the
Pea-quod
, the aging family boat, a relic of a more prosperous time.

Between the screen windows of the sleeping porch and the vast wind-furred plain of the lake is a curtain of autumn, a riotous pointillism of leaves. It is a cliché, Katharine knows, to talk of how autumn is her favorite season, and yet, this weekend, she often finds herself spontaneously rhapsodizing about the fall. It is perhaps also a cliché to speak of a figurative autumn, how things become most beautiful just before they end. Still, Katharine cannot help but think that the atmosphere along Barvel Bay, this weekend, is like that too: a temporary revival of summer revelry, heightened and giddy in the autumn chill, the knowledge this will be the last time at Winnipesaukee for a long while.

A temporary revival, an autumnal blush to distract from the daylight’s dimming. Almost daily now, she and her father fight about money. Her relatives, all those men who were so confident in Mayflower on that night now nearly four months ago, who that night pledged their allegiance to Katharine and to Frederick’s therapy, seem to have swayed to the perspective of Katharine’s father. Just this morning, Lieutenant General Pointer and George Carlyle came to the porch, where Katharine and her father argued the possibility of Frederick’s transfer to a cheaper hospital, and the two men gently bolstered her father’s thesis.

Frederick seems no closer to a return; her father seems only days away from refusing all payment; her daughters have begun frequently to ask, in more worried tones, when their father will return. A lovely weekend now, but it won’t hold.

As she removes and folds sheets, Katharine thinks of another figurative autumn. She thinks of that one night in Boston, a year after she and her great teenage love, Lars Jensen, had split up. That night, with no letter or telephone call to prepare her for his visit, Lars presented himself at her door. It was the last time they would be together, but in the other sense of the word
together
, it was also the first. Futureless, that night, they allowed themselves new freedoms.

But, as it has turned out, they were not then futureless together, not entirely.

Katharine has a secret. Four weeks ago, in mid-September, Lars Jensen phoned her. Lars Jensen, to whom she had given all of herself, just once. One day, while the girls were at school, the phone had rung, and she had lifted it to hear the voice of a man so distant from this life she has made, he had come nearly to seem abstract, only a character from a film she had once seen.

Had Lars, now living two hours away in Exeter, somehow
learned of her situation? Lars called just as she had become truly desperate, as she no longer could imagine an escape from her present circumstance, as she had begun to comprehend that they were now one of those failed families about whom gossip filled every Graveton living room. He called her, and she talked. He asked for nothing, and listened. She told herself, many times during that two-hour conversation, not to give away too much. And yet, she told him everything: her foiled ambitions, her fears for her daughters, her financial despair. She even told him about Frederick, everything about Frederick. In return, Lars offered little of his own story.
Things aren’t working out with Anna
, he said glibly,
but at least work is keeping me stable, and that couldn’t be going better
.