May 7, 1948
For the
fourth time in as many years, they were confronted with the problem of what
birthday present to take to a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind.
Desires he had none. Man-made objects were to him either hives of evil, vibrant
with a malignant activity that he alone could perceive, or gross comforts for
which no use could be found in his abstract world. After eliminating a number
of articles that might offend him or frighten him (anything in the gadget line,
for instance, was taboo), his parents chose a dainty and innocent trifle—a
basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars.
At the
time of his birth, they had already been married for a long time; a score of
years had elapsed, and now they were quite old. Her drab gray hair was pinned
up carelessly. She wore cheap black dresses. Unlike other women of her age
(such as Mrs. Sol, their next-door neighbor, whose face was all pink and mauve
with paint and whose hat was a cluster of brookside flowers), she presented a
naked white countenance to the faultfinding light of spring. Her husband, who
in the old country had been a fairly successful businessman, was now, in New
York, wholly dependent on his brother Isaac, a real American of almost forty
years’ standing. They seldom saw Isaac and had nicknamed him the Prince.
That
Friday, their son’s birthday, everything went wrong. The subway train lost its
life current between two stations and for a quarter of an hour they could hear
nothing but the dutiful beating of their hearts and the rustling of newspapers.
The bus they had to take next was late and kept them waiting a long time on a
street corner, and when it did come, it was crammed with garrulous high-school
children. It began to rain as they walked up the brown path leading to the sanitarium.
There they waited again, and instead of their boy, shuffling into the room, as
he usually did (his poor face sullen, confused, ill-shaven, and blotched with
acne), a nurse they knew and did not care for appeared at last and brightly
explained that he had again attempted to take his life. He was all right, she
said, but a visit from his parents might disturb him. The place was so
miserably understaffed, and things got mislaid or mixed up so easily, that they
decided not to leave their present in the office but to bring it to him next
time they came.
Outside
the building, she waited for her husband to open his umbrella and then took his
arm. He kept clearing his throat, as he always did when he was upset. They
reached the bus-stop shelter on the other side of the street and he closed his
umbrella. A few feet away, under a swaying and dripping tree, a tiny unfledged
bird was helplessly twitching in a puddle.
During
the long ride to the subway station, she and her husband did not exchange a
word, and every time she glanced at his old hands, clasped and twitching upon
the handle of his umbrella, and saw their swollen veins and brown-spotted skin,
she felt the mounting pressure of tears. As she looked around, trying to hook
her mind onto something, it gave her a kind of soft shock, a mixture of
compassion and wonder, to notice that one of the passengers—a girl with dark
hair and grubby red toenails—was weeping on the shoulder of an older woman.
Whom did that woman resemble? She resembled Rebecca Borisovna, whose daughter
had married one of the Soloveichiks—in Minsk, years ago.
The
last time the boy had tried to do it, his method had been, in the doctor’s
words, a masterpiece of inventiveness; he would have succeeded had not an
envious fellow-patient thought he was learning to fly and stopped him just in
time. What he had really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and
escape.
The
system of his delusions had been the subject of an elaborate paper in a
scientific monthly, which the doctor at the sanitarium had given to them to
read. But long before that, she and her husband had puzzled it out for
themselves. “Referential mania,” the article had called it. In these very rare
cases, the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled
reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the
conspiracy, because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than
other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the
staring sky transmit to each other, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed
information regarding him. His in- most thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in
manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks
form patterns representing, in some awful way, messages that he must intercept.
Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. All around him, there
are spies. Some of them are detached observers, like glass surfaces and still
pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses,
lynchers at heart; others, again (running water, storms), are hysterical to the
point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him, and grotesquely
misinterpret his actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every
minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very
air he exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were
limited to his immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not! With distance, the
torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of
his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and
still farther away, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up,
in terms of granite and groaning firs, the ultimate truth of his being.
When
they emerged from the thunder and foul air of the subway, the last dregs of the
day were mixed with the street lights. She wanted to buy some fish for supper,
so she handed him the basket of jelly jars, telling him to go home.
Accordingly, he returned to their tenement house, walked up to the third
landing, and then remembered he had given her his keys earlier in the day.
In
silence he sat down on the steps and in silence rose when, some ten minutes
later, she came trudging heavily up the stairs, smiling wanly and shaking her
head in deprecation of her silliness. They entered their two-room flat and he
at once went to the mirror. Straining the corners of his mouth apart by means
of his thumbs, with a horrible, mask-like grimace, he removed his new,
hopelessly uncomfortable dental plate. He read his Russian-language newspaper
while she laid the table. Still reading, he ate the pale victuals that needed
no teeth. She knew his moods and was also silent.
When he
had gone to bed, she remained in the living room with her pack of soiled
playing cards and her old photograph albums. Across the narrow courtyard, where
the rain tinkled in the dark against some ash cans, windows were blandly
alight, and in one of them a black-trousered man, with his hands clasped under
his head and his elbows raised, could he seen lying supine on an untidy bed.
She pulled the blind down and examined the photographs. As a baby, he looked
more surprised than most babies. A photograph of a German maid they had had in
Leipzig and her fat-faced fiancé fell out of a fold of the album. She turned
the pages of the book: Minsk, the Revolution, Leipzig, Berlin, Leipzig again, a
slanting house front, badly out of focus. Here was the boy when he was four
years old, in a park, shyly, with puckered forehead, looking away from an eager
squirrel, as he would have from any other stranger. Here was Aunt Rosa, a
fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad
news, bankruptcies, train accidents, and cancerous growths until the Germans
put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about. The boy,
aged six—that was when he drew wonderful birds with human hands and feet, and
suffered from insomnia like a grown-up man. His cousin, now a famous chess player.
The boy again, aged about eight, already hard to understand, afraid of the
wallpaper in the passage, afraid of a certain picture in a book, which merely
showed an idyllic landscape with rocks on a hillside and an old cart wheel
hanging from the one branch of a leafless tree. Here he was at ten—the year
they left Europe. She remembered the shame, the pity, the humiliating
difficulties of the journey, and the ugly, vicious, backward children he was
with in the special school where he had been placed after they arrived in
America. And then came a time in his life, coinciding with a long convalescence
after pneumonia, when those little phobias of his, which his parents had
stubbornly regarded as the eccentricities of a prodigiously gifted child,
hardened, as it were, into a dense tangle of logically interacting illusions,
making them totally inaccessible to normal minds.
All
this, and much more, she had accepted, for, after all, living does mean
accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case, mere
possibilities of improvement. She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that
for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the in
visible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the
incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this
tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of
neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds
that cannot hide from the farmer.
It was
nearly midnight when, from the living room, she heard her husband moan, and
presently he staggered in, wearing over his nightgown the old overcoat with the
astrakhan collar that he much preferred to his nice blue bathrobe.
“I
can’t sleep!” he cried.
“Why
can’t you sleep?” she asked. “You were so tired.”
“I
can’t sleep because I am dying,” he said, and lay down on the couch.
“Is it
your stomach? Do you want me to call Dr. Solov?”
“No
doctors, no doctors,” he moaned. “To the devil with doctors! We must get him
out of there quick. Otherwise, we’ll be responsible.... Responsible!” He hurled
himself into a sitting position, both feet on the floor, thumping his forehead
with his clenched fist.
“All
right,” she said quietly. “We will bring him home tomorrow morning.”
“I
would like some tea,” said her husband and went out to the bathroom.
Bending
with difficulty, she retrieved some playing cards and a photograph or two that
had slipped to the floor—the knave of hearts, the nine of spades, the ace of
spades, the maid Elsa and her bestial beau. He returned in high spirits, saying
in a loud voice, “I have it all figured out. We will give him the bedroom. Each
of us will spend part of the night near him and the other part on this couch.
We will have the doctor see him at least twice a week. It does not matter what
the Prince says. He won’t have much to say anyway, because it will come out
cheaper.”
”Can I
speak to Charlie?” a girl’s dull little voice said to her now.
“What
number do you want? . . . No. You have the wrong number.”
She put
the receiver down gently and her hand went to her heart. “It frightened me,”
she said.
He
smiled a quick smile and immediately resumed his excited monologue. They would
fetch him as soon as it was day. For his own protection, they would keep all the
knives in a locked drawer. Even at his worst, he presented no danger to other
people.
The
telephone rang a second time.
The
same toneless, anxious young voice asked for Charlie.
“You
have the incorrect number. I will tell you what you are doing. You are turning
the letter ‘o’ instead of the zero.” She hung up again.
They
sat down to their unexpected, festive midnight tea. He sipped noisily; his face
was flushed; every now and then he raised his glass with a circular motion, so
as to make the sugar dissolve more thoroughly. The vein on the side of his bald
head stood out conspicuously, and silvery bristles showed on his chin. The
birthday present stood on the table. While she poured him another glass of tea,
he put on his spectacles and reëxamined with pleasure the luminous yellow,
green, and red little jars. His clumsy, moist lips spelled out their eloquent
labels—apricot, grape, beach plum, quince. He had got to crab apple when the
telephone rang again. ♦