In the Land of the Living (4 page)

“Yeah, I’m terrible!” Isidore shouted. “That’s right,
I’m
terrible! I’m the monster! This, from the troll who lives under the bridge!”

But at night he cried, thinking of his father without his glasses and with water stains on his pants—thinking even of the inimical stars over the cellar door in Jedwabne. He cried not because he loved his father, which he really didn’t, but because it could be, he thought, that he, too, was a monster. It could be that monstrosity was a family trait passed down from that old crocodile on the wall. He cried harder than he had since the day they arrived at the foster home in University Heights in the car with the bent antenna.

“What’s the matter?” Dennis said.

Burt just rolled over and said in a voice muddy with sleep, “I’ll break your knuckles, you consternummpin-fffffffff.”

Isidore couldn’t even answer. All he could say was “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry I woke you up. Go back to sleep, Denny. Go back to sleep. I’ll ruin your sleep.”

And the next day, Isidore was late to school. He guessed he was late so he would get a demerit and have to apologize to somebody who wasn’t his father.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Mr. Connelly, the homeroom teacher, who didn’t give him a demerit but looked him in the eye with priestly significance. He wished he hadn’t said he was sorry then and he sat down at his desk. It was a crude and bloody thing to be alive! But if he had to choose blood to be alive, then he chose blood. He watched Mr. Connelly, and said in a low voice, “Up yours, shit-for-brains.”

His father didn’t forgive people and neither did he. After his Harvard interview, he’d begun to believe he could really get in, because he’d told how he quit his job with the butcher, who’d thumbed his scale and sold bad meat, and the interviewer had seemed to like that story quite a bit. When he got the envelope, a gigantic thing like a letter from a king, he was surprised anyway and very proud, not only because it was Harvard but because he’d been rewarded for years of corned beef soup and emptying garbage cans when it was too early to smell anything like that, and for years of collecting Coke bottles from the gutters of Warrensville Center Road, years of looking after his brothers when he himself was so new and small he had to push a kitchen chair up to the counter and climb on it just to get himself or Dennis a cup to drink out of. He had no interest in telling his father, but there was also no hiding the big, fancy envelope with
VE-RI-TAS
spelled out on three little books on a crimson crest. “Harvard,” his father said. “A
groyser tzuleyger
now, I guess.” A big shot. And when Isidore came back to Cleveland in the summer, he didn’t call to tell his father he was back in town. He was free. He would let his hatred wrestle his father’s hatred in some realm of eternal hatred, some rank of the inferno cold and dark forever.

PHONY HARVARD HIPPIES
with their daddies’ money in their wallets and their prep school degrees. He saw them watching him from the table by the window. He saw them sneering and sniggering.
Yeah, I serve you lunch in the dining hall. Yeah, I do your dishes, and so what? You think you’re better than me? That makes me better than you, you shitheads.
He would rip their heads off and drink their blood. He’d crack their skulls and grease the skids of his own career with their spinal fluid. He’d—

“And you ordered a roasted chicken?” the waitress said.

“Yes, please,” Isidore said.

“I’ll be right back with that.”

“Thank you very much,” he said.

James’s girlfriend, Joyce, a girl from Smith, spilled a glass of water all over the table. James said they were living in the age when all the heroes had been destroyed. John F. Kennedy was dead. Joyce and James seemed to be having another fight.

“What do you know about heroes?” Joyce said. “Your hero is Burt Lancaster.”

“An imaginary hero is as good as any in this day and age,” James said. James was another Cleveland Jew without any money. They were dishwashers living in the basement of Dunster House. But five more years and they’d be golden, they’d be doctors.

Joyce had brought along a friend from Smith named Danielle. She’d been advertised as good-looking, and in fact she wasn’t bad. She liked to talk on and on about Bull Connor and the South. At least she cared, which was better than the last girl. But she was one of these girls who puckered her lips knowingly and nodded slowly like she was bringing everybody else the news, news that was by now old.

Isidore drank up two beers and felt he would fall asleep. He let his arms and legs fall where they would and wondered if he had mono.

“You’re really a great big teddy bear, aren’t you?” Danielle said.

“Oh, sorry,” Isidore said, and pulled his legs together under the table and crossed his arms.

“A great big teddy bear.”

“Uh,” he said.

When Joyce burst into tears and climbed over James and out of the booth, James clutched his head in both hands and, his black hair standing up in a sheaf, chased after her.

“That was awkward,” Danielle said.

“Uh, happens a lot with those two,” Isidore said.

“Hey,” she said. “You’re pre-med, aren’t you? Would you look at my hand? I was on vacation in Florida and I fell on it. That’s what I get for trying to play volleyball for the first time!”

“You know, they don’t teach much about volleyball injuries in organic chemistry.”

“That’s okay. Do you think it’s sprained?”

He took her hand. “Not really swollen. Does it hurt?”

“A little, when I move it like this.”

He saw very clearly what she was up to, but he tapped the back of her wrist. “Well, it’s not broken at least.”

“James told me about you,” she said. “He’s very impressed with you.”

She wore her brown hair in a bob swept across the top of her head and hairsprayed perfectly round and wore thick, dark eyeliner or eye shadow or whatever it was and dark mascara, which he liked. A pointy bra with fairly big breasts underneath and good thick thighs you could bounce a coin off.

“Darn that Florida sun,” she said, scratching at the neck of her sweater. “That darn volleyball game gave me a sunburn, too.”

“Well, I’ll have to make a thorough examination of that!” he said, because he guessed that was what she wanted to hear.

“Ah, ah, ah!” she said, and waved her finger no, but her eyes flashed yes like meteors, bridal white.

It would be nice to see her tan lines. But he was tired, and what he wanted more than sex was something else, maybe to be seen and felt as well as he could see and feel.

“I think you’ll be a good doctor,” Danielle said.

Isidore didn’t have a chance to answer because James came back in with his hair still standing up and his eyes a bit teary, which he made no effort to hide. He sat down next to Isidore and grabbed him around the neck with the cold rolling off him like he’d just come out of a meat locker.

“You all right, mate?” Isidore said.

“Ahoy. Bring me the hogshead,” James said, pulling Isidore close to him and kissing his hair. “This here Jack Tar, Danielle, he’s going all the way. Don’t you worry, I’m looking after him. He’s got a world-class arm and I won’t let him waste it on men in tights that carry around wet feathers.”

“What does that mean?” Danielle said, looking horrified.

“He thinks he’s a poet,” James said. “He goes around reading Romantic poetry and writing poems!”

“Don’t mind him,” Isidore said, “he has Osgood-Schlatter disease.”

James laughed.

“What is that?” Danielle said.

“Doesn’t that typically affect the knees?” James said.

“In rare cases it affects the brain. Apparently.”

“I mean,” James said, “he’s the hard-luck kid with the world-class fastball and I can’t wait to see the World Series, that’s all. Now bring me the hogshead!”

Joyce came back but would not speak to James. Isidore and James waited with the girls under the light of a dim and frozen lamppost to see what would happen, and if Joyce would soften up again, but she didn’t. She stared straight ahead until the bus came barreling in on tortured brakes, a hard and hardy machine lighting up the bleached asphalt from within, grinding salt under its wheels and boiling sulfur in its engine. It sat in gusts of white vapor from its own tailpipe, the lamplight shining on its black windshield.

“I’ll call you,” James said.

“Don’t bother,” Joyce said.

Isidore walked the girls to the door of the bus and kissed Danielle courteously. “I had fun with you girls,” he said. “Thanks for making the trip, Danielle, you’re sweet.”

“Never mind Joyce!” she said. “You call me! You make sure and call me!”

“Maybe next month,” he said. “There’s a dance.”

When the bus had roared off, they walked onto the bridge and James said, “Are you gonna call her?”

“No. But Joyce did well. She really tried this time.”

“Izzy?” James said seriously.

“Yes?”

“Do we have oranges in the room?”

“Oranges? No. There might be some peanut butter left on one of the mousetraps, though.”

“I think I have plague.”

“You want to buy some orange juice?” Isidore said, looking around for a store. “Jesus, what time is it? It’s been dark since lunch. It’s like the North Pole.”

The cold Charles River flowed under the bridge like the path of a nightmare down into darkness. Above the numb and dimly lit spires of Harvard, the moon was bright as a C sharp on a trumpet against the black sky. Harvard was a city upon a hill. Its ivy and polished windows and legion of janitors showed its power and its age. And he was a part of it. Of those to whom much is given, much is required, Kennedy had said. But the assholes at the other table could still fuck themselves, fucking cocksuckers, more was required of them than they would ever give.

“How much do you honor the dream,” he wrote to Dennis. “Sorry if I was incoherent when you called. I was half-asleep,” he wrote. “Remember that I believe in you, okay? And remember,” he wrote, “if you have an emergency, the parking lot of the grocery store is the best place for a last-minute bottle collection.” And he opened up the wine-red book to the dusty lines by Wordsworth. On onionskin paper, he typed up the lines of the poem that suited him.

And he could read, type no more. And he was blinded by his tears. And he thought of the lilac blouse, but didn’t get it out of his underwear drawer, just as he dared not allow the word “Mama” into his mind or the crow that had flown out of the tree and landed on her casket. If he did—

And he remembered the warmth and light of some home kind of place that had once shone on him, some home kind of person whom he would never see again. He remembered a warm place on a familiar chair, a leather chair, someone had been sitting there, sitting there, and he pressed his face where she had been until the leather went cold as rocks and was never warm again. And neither her warmth nor tucking in up under his chin, nor even her name returned again. He later discovered that the chair itself had not been theirs; his father had dragged it in off the street, Burt said, and banished a beetle from the hole in its leg.

HE ASSUMED, FOR
no particular reason, that he’d meet his future wife in Boston. Which is to say, he expected very little in the way of romance in the summer of 1966, because he was not living in Boston then. He was living in Cleveland—Cleveland, with its ring of beautiful suburbs and long burning avenues leading straight down to ruin. But, it had to be admitted, there was a man there named Dr. Neuwalder, a wonderful wizard of a man who made you believe the universe was not an accident and was after all rightly governed. And Isidore went to work in Neuwalder’s lab, which was no small thing, as Dr. Neuwalder had five years before become famous across the world; he’d shown for the first time that DNA from a healthy cell could cure a genetically diseased one.

Neuwalder looked to be about eight feet tall. (That is, he was six foot three.)

He said he always asked his short wife, “Are you standing in a ditch?”

He was busy, as people at that level tended to be. His time, if he gave it to you, was valuable in and of itself, like medicine.

Isidore asked him one day if he wanted the new test tube warmers on the first bench or the second.

“Either one,” he said.

Whoa.
Isidore told James, “That guy is amazing.”
Either one.

“What if he’s gonna help you?” James said.

“People have tried it before,” Isidore said. “I’d say I’m fucked regardless.”

Building Isidore up seemed to make James feel virtuous. Or maybe it just distracted him from himself. “Neuwalder makes things happen,” he said.

Neuwalder did have power. That was clear, because he had the sort of gentle humility about him that only the most powerful people can afford. His power and wisdom went almost beyond that, into indifference. Once, Isidore saw him looking out the window at the clouds with an expression that was hard to describe—the sort of docility you see in some fine race horses.

As Isidore drove east on Warrensville in Dr. Neuwalder’s much-abused truck, the new Beatles song “Got to Get You into My Life” played in his mind over the sick grinding of the gears. He guessed the song had come into his mind because he’d met Dr. Neuwalder’s daughter and she was good-looking. But as he pulled back up the drive to Neuwalder’s house, he purposely scuttled the Beatles refrain and sang out loud: “I am I, Don Quixote, the Lord of La Mancha!”

And there she was again—Laura, she’d said—sitting and writing something in the garden, sitting on a moss-grown patio of cracked red brick, amid the slow helicopter circles of the carpenter bees. A lock of dark hair with a blond streak in it hung down from her forehead as she looked over her papers with a warm, contemplative face. There was something deeply familiar about her, as though he’d seen her not one hour ago but ten years ago—a feeling of two places or moments separated by much time but linked by strong resemblance in the way that an adult’s face is linked to her baby picture or vice versa.

He tossed the gardening gloves onto a sack of birdseed and called out, “Hello there!” He felt like a dog must feel when he discovers a happy scent in the air—of a beef stew bubbling on the stove—or of another dog—or of wind—or of a person’s crotch! And just as he suspected, the letters aligned in pen across her notebook paper had been shaped with care. They were mature, they were steadfast, and beautiful.

“So what did your father do with his old water heaters before he had lab assistants?” Isidore said.

“Oh, we didn’t have any hot water,” she said. “You should have seen the place before we had lab assistants.”

Mr. Bonsdorf seemed to approve of them from behind the counter, and Isidore once again felt that Bonsdorf had only given out his ice cream to Jews by an unwitting mistake—but maybe that was paranoia.

Frigid air from the ice cream bins flowed over the glass and the long banquet tables loaded with Christmas-looking parcels, tinsel, chocolate, and canisters of Poppycock. It all looked like it hadn’t been touched since a Christmas many years past. But Isidore had brought the chief’s daughter there because it reminded him of something happy and long ago, something that was real but that he couldn’t quite hold in his mind, like the concept of pi.

“This place is frozen in time,” he said.

“He knows how to make a root beer float,” Laura said with a sunniness that meant she didn’t completely understand.

“You’d never know anything happened outside the door—that we went to space or that JFK was shot or there were race riots and a mother shot dead in a window in Hough,” he said. “I wonder if Bonsdorf would have let a colored man have a glass of water in here.”

They remembered together, and that was better: porcelain water fountains with drains patinaed like a grate in an old rainy garden. The smell of cut grass, of chalkboards, of antique pipes and pencil shavings. Stiff springs in bus seats that poked your sit bones through oily green plastic, and red rubber kickballs that pealed like bells. The smell of old library books with yellow pages soft as butterfly wings.

He didn’t want to see her again, because he sensed a trap, because he felt a very particular, dangerous old dream reanimating itself like the undead sailors in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” He used to imagine that his father wasn’t his real father, that his mother wasn’t dead, and that he’d be restored someday to his real family, and he felt tantalized by this dream again, by the chief of medicine and his beautiful daughter, even though he knew that dreams were dangerous. There was no escape in September, as she went to school in Boston too, at Brandeis.

So he drove his brother Dennis’s rusted Eldorado to the day care center where Laura worked. He knew just how to say it, gently and firmly, so she’d know it might be good-bye forever at the end of the summer—and after all, it really might be. He wouldn’t have to say more. She was too perceptive a girl not to get it.

When he opened the front doors to the white brick building at around three o’clock, she was right there in the dark front hall kneeling down before a boy of three or four whose face was splashed with tears. She had made a cartoon on a piece of notebook paper with a ballpoint pen, a little storybook of saying good-bye. The boy watched intently, as she explained it to him.

“See, this is your mommy in the coffee shop across the street, waiting for you,” she said. “And this is you seeing your mommy again!”

She said to the mother, “He actually did much better today. Sometimes the feelings come out when they see their moms.”

The mother looked at Laura with such relief on her face, she looked like she’d just received a verdict of “not guilty!”

“You see, this nice lady Miss Neuwalder is here to look after you!” the mother said. “She says you can do it! So you can do it!”

Isidore held the door open and the boy walked out with his mother.

“I’m never going back in there,” the boy said, but still he clutched the story in his small hand like a treasure map.

“Oh, yes you are!” the mother said as the glass door swung closed again.

Laura smiled at Isidore as if she knew what he was thinking, and what the mother was thinking and what the boy was thinking. He helped haul her up from her squatting position.

“It’s hard to get back on your feet in a skirt,” she said.

“You’re pretty valuable around here,” Isidore said. “How much are they paying you?”

“Come on, this is social work,” Laura said, and she tried to smooth the wrinkles in her skirt as another mother came out of the hallway, dragging a little girl behind her.

“Susan did not eat lunch,” the woman said hysterically. “Look at this!” She held up an open lunch box full of glassine papers.

It seemed there might be a confrontation, but again Laura stood there calmly in her wrinkled skirt, as though she had glassine papers waved in her face every day of her life—as though she didn’t even mind it, like a surgeon doesn’t mind a gall stone. He just removes it.

“Carol, Carol,” Laura said, “it doesn’t matter if she eats her lunch.” She said it so compassionately and authoritatively that the mother seemed to be soothed by it, even while she kept staring into the disaster of the lunch box, which indicated that day care and everything that had necessitated it would be the death of the child. “Susan is doing great,” Laura said.

The mother listened with a squished look on her face like she was trying to evacuate something from her colon.

“Her job is really just to get used to the place and to separate. And she’s doing that. Believe me, she won’t starve. The food is there when she decides she wants it.”

The mother went away not exactly with gratitude but without the squished look on her face. In fact, she looked as if she’d heard something that had improved her like gospel in church—because Laura seemed to know by intuition all the numberless, nameless idioms of worry in the souls of children and adults and it didn’t matter if the child cried and didn’t eat lunch. It didn’t matter if the moms were still
upset
that the child cried and didn’t eat lunch. There was someone to call, and someone to talk to, and that was all anybody ever wanted anyway.

What was wrong with these Neuwalder people? Why weren’t they a mess like everybody else?

When Isidore and Laura had sat down in the decaying sky-blue Eldorado, Isidore said, “I really like you.”

“Well, thanks. You’re so-so.”

“And I think it’s great we’ll both be in Boston this fall.”

“Yeah…?” Laura said with suspicion. It appeared she had already begun to figure this picture out, even before he’d finished shaping it for her, and to figure out its underlayers too. You couldn’t hide too much from this girl. “Yeah, you think it’s great?” she said.

He realized she’d put on more makeup than usual today. She looked pretty.

“I just don’t know what it will be like,” he said, carrying on to the bitter end. “I’m going to be busy, and I want to see you, but I don’t know, and we’ll have to wait and see.”

The frown disappeared. She laughed. Her laugh was as if to say,
I thought you had a better curveball.
“Of course we’ll have to wait and see. What else would we do?”

He eased the Eldorado into the street with all its exhausted, beaten parts straining and grinding uneasily against one another.

“How do you know so much about kids?” he asked.

“It’s just common sense really.”

She took a peek at herself in the mirror on the visor, thought about fussing with herself for a moment, and gave up and flipped the visor up again.

When they got back to his place, she asked him what he had been like as a child. He offered to show her some pictures.

“Don’t you have an album?” she said, when the pictures were emptied from the envelope.

“I should get one,” he said.

“Is this you?” she said. “Everybody’s smiling but you look so sad.”

“Yeah,” he said. “My mother had just died.”

“Oh no,” she said, and somehow the sympathy on her face did not mollify, whether because it was too uncomprehending about this particular thing or because nothing could mollify at all.

“That’s Ed. He’s not smiling either, see? That’s because I shoved a football into his face that day.”

“He probably deserved it.”

“We always had cheap, horrible clothes. He was making fun of my shirt, I think.” He had cried over that fight too. He showed her his watch and confessed: “It says Seamaster, but it’s a fake.”

“So?” Laura said. “There are probably more fake men with real watches than the other way around.”

He wanted to make a joke, but the pictures had sobered him.

“I’m sorry about earlier, in the car.”

“No need. You’re not the first man I’ve dated.”

“I have no doubt many men have tried,” Isidore said. “I guess, in the car before, I was just tensing up.”

“You? Tense?” She laughed. “My father always says about the house staff that the ones you have to worry about are the ones without a care in the world. They’re the ones who kill people. I mean, I wouldn’t really know myself, but I see the point.”

“What’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you a mess like everybody else?”

“Oh, isn’t everybody a mess, when it comes down to it?”

“I’m not sure. How many Harvard guys do you know? Some of those guys are like…printed at U.S. Steel. You wonder if they have adrenal glands.”

“That’s all a front,” she said. “They’re like anybody else and so am I. I have nightmares.” She told him how they’d operated on her eye when she was three. Her father had stood in the door and wouldn’t come and she’d breathed the ether and tumbled backward, falling and falling into space. And every night before sleep, when she was a child, she would think of a ballerina turning and turning around and around and slowing down, and as the ballerina made the last turn and came to a stop you saw that her face had changed to a skull.

They drank cheap wine and wondered whether it was any good and he laid his head on her big and pretty breasts, and she kept saying, Why not? Why not? So they climbed out the window and onto the roof with Vivaldi playing on the record player (because they were so young that Vivaldi was still fresh on their ears). He saw the scars high up on her legs. She pulled her skirt down over them and told him about the puppet show in front of the fire and her black pants and how she’d ignored the heat because, well, the show must go on! Then she’d had to peel off the dressings and the dead skin for weeks after and the fire had left a pattern of pale welts on her thighs as if it had touched her with evil fingers and left behind an anarchy of faint fingerprints like a Seurat.

Her healed injuries, the wine, and the major key of the Vivaldi made him believe with a total sincerity, without sentimentality, or romanticism, or self-delusion, or desperation, that things could be healed.

“Why not?” she said.