My Nine Lives (16 page)

The front rooms in the Hoch apartment were given over entirely to the Professor, one to his study and two to his library, which also acted as a buffer against any disturbance
from the rest of the household, or from the world in general. All domestic activity, including that of his growing sons, was confined to the other rooms leading off the long corridor. Here Hedda, with the help of her German maid, not only kept her house swept and polished but also acted as her husband's secretary. Like the rest of us, she too had been a student of philosophy,
his
student, when he was a young docent at Weimar, so she was able to deal with his notes, to type and arrange them. There was no room for another study, and she had to make use either of the kitchen or the dining table, quickly clearing them as needed. It was always Hedda who answered the telephone, or who opened the door for the Professor's visitors—of course none of us came without an appointment, arranged by herself, but nevertheless she scrutinized us before leading the way past the umbrella stand to the study door; and it was she who opened the door and then stood aside to let us pass—as stern, tall, and stiff as a Turkish dragoman, and as full of the pride of office.

I entered of course with a beating heart—I was the only graduate student of our year whose thesis he was personally supervising, for he had allowed me to research into some minor aspect of his own work. This was like being allowed to splash in the shallows of his oceanic thought. Oceans and mountains—those were the images I associated with him, the only concepts large enough to contain my impressions of him. He overwhelmed me, not only mentally but by his physical presence. He was a big, heavy man, with a square stubbled skull; he had fought in the First World War and still looked more like a Prussian officer than a philosophy professor. When I sat close beside him at his massive desk, I hardly dared glance into his face. I kept my eyes lowered to the papers before us, so that all I could see of him was his waistcoat. He always wore a three-piece suit, with an oldfashioned gold
watch-chain stretched across his stomach that rose and fell with his breathing. His breathing was heavy and became more so as his excitement mounted with his mounting thought; sometimes he seemed even to be panting like one who had climbed to a height never yet attained by man. I too felt my heartbeat increase with excitement as he spoke to me of his central idea (the reversal from the Western tradition of technology, or the excarnation of spirit into matter, to the Hindu concept of
Maya,
the incarnation of matter into spirit). And once, as if unable to sustain himself in those regions without some physical support—we are, after all, all of us here, still within the limits of our bodies—he put his hand on the back of my neck and said, “My little one.” He said it in German—“
Meine Kleine
”—which was always for him the language of his earthly desires. He shut his eyes when he kissed but I kept mine open. It was the only time I really dared to look into his face. He was in his fifties then, with heavy jowls that were always somewhat red and raw from the close shave he gave himself with a huge open razor. He was greatly attached to this razor and took it with him on all his travels; when I began to accompany him, I too became familiar with it, and with the leather strop on which he sharpened it and the shaving brush that looked like horsehair but was actually beaver.

After my marriage and Debbie's birth, my work with Hoch continued, for I had begun to act as his English translator and had become indispensable to him. I had nowhere to leave Debbie, so I always brought her with me, slung in a carrier on my back, along with my notebooks. The Hoch boys took charge of her and loved playing with her, all three of them fair-haired and rosy-cheeked. Hedda Hoch was also fond of Debbie and gave her cookies and milk in the kitchen and stroked her blonde curls, confiding that she had always
longed for a little daughter. I could never make out how much Hedda knew or suspected. She appeared in complete command of her thoughts and feelings, as she was, of course, of the whole situation. It was she who slept beside him in their double bed brought from Germany; and it was she who cooked and served his meals and cleaned his house (on Saturdays, her major cleaning day, I had to get to his study by stepping over rolled-up carpets and past Hedda and her maid wielding mops). In the summer the whole family left for their vacation in the Swiss Alps; they always stayed in the same hotel, where months before Hedda had reserved his favorite rooms.

Hedda lived on into her nineties and continued to work with me on the Hoch papers. Debbie often met her, but she remembered Hoch, who died when she was five, only as a threatening presence behind a forbidding closed door. The revelation that he was her father excited her perhaps more in its novel and scandalous aspect than the fact of her descent from one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers. She was also thrilled suddenly to acquire two half-brothers, and as a result sought out the two Hoch boys whom she hadn't seen for maybe forty years. One was an engineer in Pittsburgh, the other a partner in a Washington law firm, both settled with their families in households as orderly as the one they had grown up in. They did not welcome Debbie's revelation, nor I suspect Debbie herself, hung around with costume jewelry and trailing her aura of adulteries and divorces—anyway, she came back disgruntled and seldom mentioned these half-brothers again except to say that they had inherited not one jot of their father's genius, which had, she insisted, passed in a pure straight line through her to her own two wonderful children.

*

Although she has inherited nothing from Hoch except his height—she is much taller than anyone else in our family—there is something about my granddaughter Veronica that is reminiscent of him. This may be her complete absorption in what she is doing—that is, in her career, her stardom—and, with it, her absorption in herself. One has the feeling with her, as before with Hoch, that nothing can really touch her; that within herself, in her own sense of dedication, she is inviolate. The word ruthlessness attached itself naturally to Hoch, and so it does to Veronica. Yet her attitude to her own success is one of apparent indifference. She seems to regard it as her natural due, something she was both born for and works for, with all the strength of her ambition. And she has ambition—she is tense with it, always has been since childhood, even before she knew what she was going to do. Hoch's ambition was to reach the loftiest heights of thought; hers is to star in what she herself sometimes characterizes as “dumb little movies”: in both cases the result has been a complete and utter singlemindedness. Not that there is any resemblance between Hoch's personality and his granddaughter's. He was ponderous, and it is her business to enchant. I think of her returning to us from one of her trips—and she is often away, on location, or in Beverly Hills, where she has recently bought a house. She comes to us straight from the airport, either to my apartment or to Debbie's, wherever Andrew happens to be living at the time. Someone else has taken care of the luggage, so she arrives unencumbered—light as a butterfly in her simple frock and as if borne to us on a spring breeze (actually it was a chauffeur-driven limousine). Though protesting that she is dead tired from all that sitting on a horrible plane, she always has an amusing story to tell of something that happened to her en route, and from there other amusing stories—an encounter, maybe, with a stupid
journalist—which she tells with great skill and that make us laugh. She is full of news and excitement—
her
news,
her
excitement, she doesn't expect us to have any. Aroused by what she is telling us, she can't sit still but strides up and down our living room, tall, slender, and strong: and her presence among us is wonderful—it is like having a goddess, a Diana or Ceres, descend into the middle of one's little life, irradiating it for a moment with her splendor.

Ever since his last project—a semi-fictional documentary about a dancer who had died of Aids—failed to take off for lack of funds, Andrew has started nothing new. He has had projects fail before, in his various fields of interest, and usually, after a period of depression, has been ready to start on something new. It was always a pleasure to see Andrew with a new involvement, whether in work or love—and often the two coincided. Unlike Veronica, Andrew is short like the rest of us, and although he never played any sport, he used to have a firm, compact body like an athlete; for years he retained a boyish quality, as if he had only just started out and was unmarred by experience (this air of innocence remained even after his suicide attempt). But the other day I encountered him in the long corridor of my apartment when he was coming out of the toilet and zipping himself up. He wasn't wearing a belt and his stomach, which had once been so flat, drooped over his pants; he was in slippers and was shuffling a bit and was suddenly—this seemingly perennial boy—a middleaged man.

The reason he is staying with me is because of his mother. Debbie is the same with him now as when he wasn't doing well at school and she thought she could improve him. And he reacts now as he did then, by running away: this time not into the world at large with strangers but home to my apartment, where he stays all day in the library with the door shut.
When Debbie comes, and she comes all the time, he locks it while she stands outside and shouts at him through the door. He doesn't answer and there is a terrible silence.

I must have seen more than one production of
The Seagull
over the years, but I remember it chiefly from Andrew and Veronica's readings, when she played Nina and he Konstantin the young poet. In the last scene of the last act Konstantin locks himself up in a room, and the last line of the play is “Konstantin has shot himself.” Not that Andrew has a gun, or would know what to do with it if he had one. But living alone with him, I'm in constant anxiety, which I dare not share with Debbie. She has high blood pressure, and when she gets worked up, her face swells under her golden hair and a pulse beats dangerously inside her rosy rouged cheek. After shouting at Andrew through the closed door, she turns on me: “What's he doing in there?” she says, as though his locking himself away were my fault.

Andrew was the person most strongly affected by my revelation that not Gerd but Hoch was his grandfather. When I look back, I realize that it is from that time—which was also the time of his last project—that Andrew seems to have lost heart. It is as if the shadow that great men tend to cast on their descendants has caught up with Andrew at the age of forty. He has been trying to read Hoch's works; that is what he has been doing behind that closed library door. I have many editions of those works and in many languages; the English ones are mostly by myself, though I have not yet translated the last two volumes he published. They are impossibly difficult, for right till the end—even after his stroke—Hoch was penetrating into seemingly inaccessible areas of thought. Now a younger person than I will have to try and render them into English and so complete my life's work. Hoch's earlier phases have by now been absorbed
into philosophical tradition and are thus accessible to those with the right training and background. But Andrew's interests have always been in the arts, never—maybe in reaction to Gerd and myself—in philosophy; and without a thorough academic grounding in both Western and Eastern thought, Hoch cannot be understood. When Andrew and I are alone, he has sometimes asked me to explain, and this is not at all difficult because, like all truly universal thought, the gist of it is simple to formulate. But to follow the steps—the long ascent—by which this peak has been reached, is not possible without many years of study and discipline. I go into the library and I stand behind Andrew where he sits hunched over Hoch's tome, which must seem like a tomb of cognition to him; he is running his hands through his sparse hair, and when I touch his shoulder, he looks up at me and his intelligent green eyes are dimmed with reading and incomprehension.

When Debbie asks me what he is doing, I say, “He's reading.”

“What's he reading?” When I tell her, she snorts and says, “We've had enough of all that.” Secretly I agree with her. Although it has been my whole life, I don't want it for Andrew any more than Debbie does. At least once a day she comes around to my apartment; she knocks on the study door in vain and then stands there and looks at me. She has always been jealous that Andrew should so often prefer to be with me, his grandmother, instead of with her, his mother. But now, standing outside the locked library door, we are united in our anxiety for him. I don't tell her about
The Seagull,
but my fear is so great that I now confess to her a secret Andrew and I have shared for the last two years. Ever since my heart attack, I have been on strong medication; Andrew goes regularly to the pharmacy to have the prescription refilled and to
get whatever else Dr. Stein has ordered for me. When Andrew returns from the pharmacy and gives me the pills, I thank him and wait till he is out of the room. Then I open my chest of drawers and add the new phial to my little collection, hidden at the back of a drawer under some clothing I no longer wear. Sometimes I take out one little phial after the other to read the labels. Once it happened that Andrew came back to tell me something, and when I turned around, I saw him standing in the doorway and looking at me with a grave expression in his eyes. I shut the drawer and he went away without saying anything. Now, when he brings my prescription, he hands it to me with that same grave expression and walks away quickly, respecting my secret.

But now it is his secret too, and I have to tell Debbie about it. She does not reproach me—probably she will later, Debbie does not pass over one's mistakes in silence. She accompanies me to my bedroom and, opening the drawer, takes out the pills. Together she and I carry them to the bathroom and flush the contents down the toilet. While we are doing this, she talks constantly—not about what we are doing and why, but about one of her favorite dreams that has never yet been fulfilled: she would like to go on a trip with Andrew, just the two of them, mother and handsome son. It doesn't really matter where, although she would like it to be Italy, where she has already been twice with a party of her women friends. They had a good time, but none of them was very knowledgeable and the guides tended to rush them. But if she went with Andrew, he would explain everything so beautifully, the churches and the frescoes and the paintings, and they would live in a hotel in adjoining rooms, maybe with a shared balcony on which she would appear in the morning and call out to him.