So I didn’t have metaphysical thoughts. You
can say, as Harvey was going to say endlessly, that the past is as
real as the present, but not with new English shoes on your feet it
isn’t. Acuity of suffering is the vast superiority of the present
over the past.
I got lost in the grids of new streets named
after national heroes and lined with adolescent trees garroted to
stakes. I judged it to be a housing development for the
$30,000-$40,000 salary-bracket. Finally I asked a pot-bellied bald
man standing in the middle of the sidewalk setting his watch with
an outthrust lower lip. His eyes shot up at me from the dial.
“Three Wilson Road? And how I know where it
is. Everybody here knows where the Morgenstern place is. You a
friend of his?”
“I wouldn’t exactly say a friend.”
I played it carefully because of his tone of
voice. It was no lie either, no shameful disavowal as to the
hard-fisted Polack kid long ago in the time of the tracks.
“Turn left there. Keep heading for the big
pylon. You can see that crazy pylon of his ten miles away. With the
noise either you can’t miss it. He’s got the police in his pocket.
Morgenstern. Watch out for the woman.”
I was halfway down the street when he
yelled:
“Hey, tell him I still get TV interference
and it better stop. Tell him Lawson told you to tell him. You can
bet he knows who I am. It better stop.”
The pylon was a good guide all right. So was
the noise after a while. It sounded like a giant defective organ
playing a duo in the deepest registers with a revved-up racing-car.
It wasn’t a suburban sound.
I hardly recognized the house when I got
there. It had been practically new the last and only time I’d seen
it, thirty years before, a big white frame house. Harvey’s father
was in the lumber business. He’d started building it before what
happened to the old house. Otherwise it would have been brick.
It stood exactly where our science shack had
stood. I summoned up the shack dimly and also dimly the house (the
second one) as it had been, two successive time-strata.
Now the house as it was in this time-stratum
emerged out of a sea of weeds, once a big lawn and flower garden.
It stood in partial gloom that sunny September afternoon.
The “memory-tree” as Mrs Morgenstern had
called it, some kind of elm, had been planted too close to the
house and now shaded half of it. It was lopsided from the
amputation of house-side branches. A tall ladder shrouded in
bindweed to the top rung leaned against it. A rusty saw lay in
nettles nearby. She said they’d planted the tree the fall following
the fire. That made it almost forty years old now.
The house had aged very badly. The paint was
peeling like a skin-disease. There were rusty dribbles down the
wall beneath the gutters. They must have been clogged with leaves
from that tree. Most of the faded shutters were closed and some
were cockeyed. The few windowpanes you could see were grimy.
Normally neighborliness is an obligatory
suburban virtue. If there’s a separation between lots it’s
something symbolic, apologetic almost, like knee-high shrubs. There
was nothing symbolic about what separated Harvey’s house from his
neighbors. Strands of barbed wire topped the high hurricane fence.
The effect was unintentionally softened by the white bellflowers of
bindweed that had twined almost up to the barbed wire. They
half-covered the warnings: “Keep out!” “Private Property!”
That was the back of the house. I limped to
the front. The noise worsened. The front-gate was just more
hurricane-fence but framed and on hinges with another warning sign.
It looked like the entrance to a military base. The gate was shut.
There was a big brass padlock. Through the meshes of the fence I
saw the vestiges of Mrs Morgenstern’s big flower garden. Everything
was weeds now except for a minimum patch of lawn next to the front
door.
A gigantic woman of about forty was mowing
it. She was wearing jeans and an overflowing unstrapped bra. She
had beefy red sweating shoulders and a mean face. She was doing a
sloppy zig-zaggy job. On a plastic table stood five uncapped beer
bottles.
A thin washed-out blonde crouched behind the
hurricane fence on the lot where the old Morgenstern house had once
stood. Behind her was a big two-story house with a sheet-iron
Disney deer and a white bench on an impeccable lawn. I tried to
visualize the old burned-down house, the Morgenstern’s first house.
The blonde’s house, built on its blackened foundations, kept it
under.
The blonde was gripping the meshes with one
hand like a prisoner. In the other hand she was holding a bag of
tulip-bulbs. Veins stood out in her neck as she tried to compete
against the racket. The giant beefy woman in the bra couldn’t help
seeing her but pretended she wasn’t there. She was giving me the
same treatment even though I was crying too, for her to let me in.
At least I wasn’t crying tears as the blonde was doing. The woman
reached the end of the lawn. She wrenched the mower about and
turned her back to me and to the blonde. She started a new
swathe.
The big brass padlock wasn’t snapped shut. I
pushed the gate open and limped into the high grass, avoiding
molehills and empty beer-bottles. I stood in front of her, in the
path of the roaring machine, smiling politely.
She kept on coming. Maybe she would have
stopped at the last moment but I wasn’t taking any chances. I
jumped aside like a matador in a suit of light and administrated
the estoque by bending down, spry for my age, and switching the
mower off. There was partial relief to my eardrums. But the deep
organ sounds coming from the house kept up and now the woman
pitched in.
“Are you crazy or something?”
It was a surprisingly lightweight voice for
the bulk and vehemence that produced it. It was the voice I’d heard
on the phone the day before.
“Who the hell are you? Who let you in? What
did you stop the mower for?” Now she passionately addressed
invisible witnesses, a trick of hers I was to get to know. “Is he
crazy or something?”
I almost told her I hadn’t felt like buying
new hand-stitched Churches and maybe a foot-prosthesis. I played
the cold dignity gambit instead. “Mr Morgenstern is expecting me.
My name is Professor Weizman.”
She wasn’t impressed. She made me show her my
driver’s license and had the gall to say suspiciously that she
didn’t see “Professor” in front of my name. Then she turned around
and went into the house.
“You were very brave,” said the faded blonde
through the meshes. “I thought she was going to mutilate you. She’s
crazy.” She wiped her eyes with a lacy blue handkerchief. She had
great vulnerable wet blue eyes. A strand of blonde-gray hair was
plastered to her forehead. She was anywhere between thirty-five and
fifty.
“I shouldn’t cry like that,” she said. “I
shouldn’t give her that satisfaction. But I’m just not accustomed
to abuse. And I can’t bear the noise. I think all this noise is
deliberate. He tells her to do it. He knows about my nerves. I
shouldn’t tell people about it. He’s trying to drive me away.”
“Why would he want to do that?”
“
He’s been trying to buy my house for years
now. I used to get an offer every week practically. It’s crazy. If
he wants to live in a nice house why doesn’t he fix up the one he’s
got? Look at those shutters. And, gosh, the garden. What wouldn’t I
do with that garden? They say it’s a pig-sty inside.” She clapped
her hand to her mouth. “Oh I’m s
o
rry! You’re a friend of his, maybe?”
“Not exactly,” I said.
So for the second time that day I denied him.
Would there be a third time? Did they have cocks (roosters) in
these suburbs? She moistened her lips with a shy pink tip of the
tongue.
“Sir, do you mind if I ask? I couldn’t help
hearing. What are you a Professor of?”
I told her that I professed English
Literature. Predictably, she looked impressed. She said she loved
literature and started asking me which poets I particularly
recommended when the woman came back and growled:
“He’s still down in the cellar. He’s always
down in the cellar. Says he can’t come up. He never comes up. Says
you should come on down.”
She went back to the mower and yanked the
starter-cord. The blonde started to protest. She turned up the
machine full blast and shoved it past me. My legs were bombarded
with bits of twigs and beer-caps.
The vestibule was crammed with heavy coils of
wire, pipes, sacks of cement, salvaged switch-panels, gauges and
electronic components. The chaos went on in the living room but
wasn’t as visible because of the half-closed shutters and the dirty
panes that strangled the little light the tree let through. The
wallpaper had big blisters. The ceiling was cracked. Newspapers and
magazines were scattered over the carpet. It was worn and stained.
On a table were more newspapers and a dish with Rice Krispies stuck
to the sides and a spoon. A woman’s blouse had been flung across a
lumpish armchair in front of a giant new TV.
I advanced in the gloom of the corridor
toward the sound which, that close, was less a sound than violent
vibrations in your bones.
It stopped suddenly. The cellar door was
open.
“Harvey?”
“Jerry? That you, Jerry?” His voice was a
hoarse whisper but stronger than on the phone. “Just in time, pal.
Don’t turn. The light on. Come on down. You don’t want to miss
this. Show you something. In six-and-a-half minutes. Something you
won’t forget.”
As Harvey called me down into that reddish
gloom I remembered how he’d done it thirty-odd years before in a
younger less pathological voice. But I didn’t make the full
connection, didn’t imagine that what he wanted to show me now,
after all that time, could be the same thing as then.
I was twenty-eight and teaching in a
fraudulent private school for juvenile actors in Los Angeles when
my aunt on my mother’s side died. When I thought of goodness I
thought of Aunt Ruth and at the time was still young enough to
wonder how the world, so radically lessened, could go on. I
couldn’t help going to Forest Hill for the funeral.
Sure enough, Harvey’s mother was there. I
hadn’t seen her for years. When our eyes met, the diffused guilt I
always feel at funerals (as though survival were an act of
callousness on my part) focused sharply. But she gathered me in her
arms. She was a woman of easy but authentic tears.
Her mind was a memorious cemetery. She wept
quietly for Aunt Ruth, for my mother. Also for Rachel of course but
with an expression of mixed grief, bewilderment and hurt. Hurt for
what Rachel had done, naturally. But maybe also hurt for what I’d
been obliged to say I hadn’t done. Wasn’t that the real cause of my
sharply focused guilt?
I couldn’t avoid recalling her weeping
outburst over the phone a week after the fire when she made me
confirm that no, I hadn’t come over that evening to see Rachel as
she (Mrs Morgenstern) had begged me to do during their absence. I
forget the excuse I invented. I couldn’t think straight. Oh Jerry,
you promised. We’d never have left her by herself. I thought you
liked her so much. Etc. Etc.
But now, nine years later, she insisted I
come back home for dinner. She said: “You and Harvey were such
great friends. Harvey would be so sorry to have missed you. You
haven’t seen each other for ages. Morris’ll be so happy too.”
She was another one of those women who always
get situations and relationships wrong but in the generous
direction.
She must have guessed what I was thinking
(Aunt Ruth used to bake custard for him) because she said Harvey
couldn’t take an afternoon off for whatever reason. He was working
for the Government. She darted quick glances right and left and
lowered her voice to a whisper: on a top-secret scientific project,
she couldn’t tell me what it was about. From her tone, I guessed
that “I can’t tell you” wasn’t a confession of ignorance but meant
that she was in on the secret but bound to silence like her
son.
“Besides, you remember how Harvey is about
funerals. He didn’t even go to poor Rachel’s.”
Here the tears and the look of bewilderment
and hurt came again, but also uneasiness. She must have remembered
that I hadn’t gone to her funeral either. Did that remind her of
the other confessed omission?
“How is the new house?” I asked to take the
pressure off both of us.
“Oh, it’s not so new anymore. Time passes so
fast.”
That was true. Already at twenty-eight time
was accelerating for me.
Thinking of Harvey and his father I tried to
resist her invitation. She lured me with strawberry shortcake as
though I were still twelve. If I finally accepted I told myself it
was more for the pleasure she would get baking it for me than for
the pleasure I would get eating it. Nice middle-aged women disarmed
me even then. My mother had been her best friend.
Wasn’t there something else? By accepting
wasn’t I confirming absolution? I saw it in those theological terms
even though I knew that she saw that long-ago thing as a fault of
omission rather than some unforgivable sin of commission. Even then
I was known to be a person of omissions, not commissions.
Anyhow, my return flight was the next day.
I’d save money on a hotel and restaurant.
The lot next to their not-so-new new house
was the first thing you noticed. Nine years after the fire there
was still that vestigial cellar with the blackened walls. (The
blonde’s house was in the future.) There was something shamelessly
public about it. It wasn’t like discreetly keeping up a room in
memory. It was true none of the rooms had survived to be kept
up.
Why did Mr Morgenstern keep up that eyesore
and what other sore? He’d been crazy about her. I remember
thinking: whatever you believe at the start and maybe even a year
or two (or three) after, new involvements end by getting the better
of grief. Not selling the lot must have represented a big financial
sacrifice as well.