The Invention of Solitude (17 page)

During this family conference A. could see the fear on his grandfather’s face. At one point the old man caught his eye and gestured up to the wall beside the doctor’s desk, which was covered with laminated plaques, framed certificates, awards, degrees, and testimonials, and gave a knowing nod, as if to say, “Pretty impressive, eh? This guy will take good care of me.” The old man had always been taken in by pomp of this sort. “I’ve just received a letter from the president of the Chase Manhattan Bank,” he would say, when in fact it was nothing more than a form letter. That day in the doctor’s office, however, it was painful for A. to see it: the old man’s refusal to recognize the thing that was looking him straight in the eyes. “I feel good about all this, doctor,” his grandfather said. “I know you’re going to get me better again.” And yet, almost against his will, A. found himself admiring this capacity for blindness. Later that day, he helped his grandfather pack a small satchel of things to take to the hospital. The old man tossed three or four of his magic tricks into the bag. “Why are you bothering with those?” A. asked. “So I can entertain the nurses,” his grandfather replied, “in case things get dull.”
A. decided to stay in his grandfather’s apartment for as long as the old man was in the hospital. The place could not remain empty (someone had to pay the bills, collect the mail, water the plants), and it was bound to be more comfortable than the room on Varick Street. Above all, the illusion had to be maintained that the old man was coming back. Until there was death, there was always the possibility there would not be death, and this chance, slight though it was, had to be credited.

A. remained in that apartment for the next six or seven weeks. It was the same place he had been visiting since earliest childhood: that tall, squat, oddly shaped building that stands on the corner of Central Park South and Columbus Circle. He wondered how many hours he had spent as a boy looking out at the traffic as it wove around the statue of Christopher Columbus. Through those same sixth floor windows he had watched the Thanksgiving Day parades, seen the construction of the Colosseum, spent entire afternoons counting the people as they walked by on the streets below. Now he was surrounded by this place again, with the Chinese telephone table, his grandmother’s glass menagerie, and the old humidor. He had walked straight back into his childhood.

A. continued to hope for a reconciliation with his wife. When she agreed to come to the city with their son to stay at the apartment, he felt that perhaps a real change would be possible. Cut off from the objects and cares of their own life, they seemed to settle in nicely to these neutral surroundings. But neither one of them was ready at that point to admit that this was not an illusion, an act of memory coupled with an act of groundless hope.

Every afternoon A. would travel to the hospital by boarding two buses, spend an hour or two with his grandfather, and then return by the same route he had come. This arrangement worked for about ten days. Then the weather changed. An excruciating heat fell on New York, and the city became a nightmare of sweat, exhaustion, and noise. None of this did the little boy any good (cooped up in the apartment with a sputtering air conditioner, or else traipsing through the steamy streets with his mother), and when the weather refused to break (record humidity for several
weeks running), A. and his wife decided that she and the boy should return to the country.

He stayed on in his grandfather’s apartment alone. Each day became a repetition of the day before. Conversations with the doctor, the trip to the hospital, hiring and firing private nurses, listening to his grandfather’s complaints, straightening the pillows under his head. There was a horror that went through him each time he glimpsed the old man’s flesh. The emaciated limbs, the shriveled testicles, the body that had shrunk to less than a hundred pounds. This was a once corpulent man, whose proud, well-stuffed belly had preceded his every step through the world, and now he was hardly there. If A. had experienced one kind of death earlier in the year, a death so sudden that even as it gave him over to death it deprived him of the knowledge of that death, now he was experiencing death of another kind, and it was this slow, mortal exhaustion, this letting go of life in the heart of life, that finally taught him the thing he had known all along.

Nearly every day there was a phone call from his grandfather’s former secretary, a woman who had worked in the office for more than twenty years. After his grandmother’s death, she had become the steadiest of his grandfather’s lady companions, the respectable woman he trotted out for public view on formal occasions: family gatherings, weddings, funerals. Each time she called, she would make copious inquiries about his grandfather’s health, and then ask A. to arrange for her to visit the hospital. The problem was her own bad health. Although not old (late sixties at most), she suffered from Parkinson’s disease, and for some time had been living in a nursing home in the Bronx. After numerous conversations (her voice so faint over the telephone that it took all of A.’s powers of concentration to hear even half of what she said), he finally agreed to meet her in front of the Metropolitan Museum, where a special bus from the nursing home deposited ambulatory patients once a week for an afternoon in Manhattan. On that particular day, for the first time in nearly a month, it rained. A. arrived in advance of the appointed time, and then, for more than an hour, stood
on the museum steps, keeping his head dry with a newspaper, on the lookout for the woman. At last, deciding to give up, he made one final tour of the area. It was then that he found her: a block or two up Fifth Avenue, standing under a pathetic sapling, as if to protect herself from the rain, a clear plastic bonnet on her head, leaning on her walking stick, body bent forward, all of her rigid, afraid to take a step, staring down at the wet sidewalk. Again that feeble voice, and A. almost pressing his ear against her mouth to hear her—only to glean some paltry and insipid remark: the bus driver had forgotten to shave, the newspaper had not been delivered. A. had always been bored by this woman, and even when she had been well he had cringed at having to spend more than five minutes in her company. Now he found himself almost angry at her, resenting the way in which she seemed to expect him to pity her. He lashed out at her in his mind for being such an abject creature of self-absorption.

More than twenty minutes went by before he could get a cab. And then the endless ordeal of walking her to the curb and putting her into the taxi. Her shoes scraping on the pavement: one inch and then pause; another inch and then pause; another inch and then another inch. He held her arm and did his best to encourage her along. When they reached the hospital and he finally managed to disentangle her from the back seat of the cab, they began the slow journey toward the entrance. Just in front of the door, at the very instant A. thought they were going to make it, she froze. She had suddenly been gripped by the fear that she could not move, and therefore she could not move. No matter what A. said to her, no matter how gently he tried to coax her forward, she would not budge. People were going in and out—doctors, nurses, visitors—and there they stood, A. and the helpless woman, locked in the middle of that human traffic. A. told her to wait where she was (as if she could have done anything else), and went into the lobby, where he found an empty wheelchair, which he snatched out from under the eyes of a suspicious woman administrator. Then he eased his helpless companion into the chair and bustled her through the lobby toward the elevator, fending off the shouts of the
administrator: “Is she a patient? Is that woman a patient? Wheelchairs are for patients only.”

When he wheeled her into his grandfather’s room, the old man was drowsing, neither asleep nor awake, lolling in a torpor at the edge of consciousness. He revived enough at the sound of their entering to perceive their presence, and then, at last understanding what had happened, smiled for the first time in weeks. Tears suddenly filled his eyes. He took hold of the woman’s hand and said to A., as if addressing the entire world (but feebly, ever so feebly): “Shirley is my sweetheart. Shirley is the one I love.”

In late July, A. decided to spend a weekend out of the city. He wanted to see his son, and he needed a break from the heat and the hospital. His wife came into New York, leaving the boy with her parents. What they did in the city that day he cannot remember, but by late afternoon they had made it out to the beach in Connecticut where the boy had spent the day with his grandparents. A. found his son sitting on a swing, and the first words out of the boy’s mouth (having been coached all afternoon by his grandmother) were surprising in their lucidity. “I’m very happy to see you, daddy,” he said.

At the same time, the voice sounded strange to A. The boy seemed to be short of breath, and he spoke each word in a staccato of separate syllables. A. had no doubt that something was wrong. He insisted that they all leave the beach at once and go back to the house. Although the boy was in good spirits, this curious, almost mechanical voice continued to speak through him, as though he were a ventriloquist’s dummy. His breathing was extremely rapid: heaving torso, in and out, in and out, like the breathing of a little bird. Within an hour, A. and his wife were looking down a list of local pediatricians, trying to reach one who was in (it was dinner hour on Friday night). On the fifth or sixth try they got hold of a young woman doctor who had recently taken over a practice in town. By some fluke, she happened to be in her office at that hour, and she told them to come right over. Either because she was new at her work, or because she had an excitable nature, her examination of the little
boy threw A. and his wife into a panic. She sat the boy up on the table, listened to his chest, counted his breaths per minute, observed his flared nostrils, the slightly bluish tint to the skin of his face. Then a mad rush about the office, trying to rig up a complicated breathing device: a vapor machine with a hood, reminiscent of a nineteenth century camera. But the boy would not keep his head under the hood, and the hissing of the cold steam frightened him. The doctor then tried a shot of adrenalin. “We’ll try this one,” she said, “and if it doesn’t work we’ll give him another.” She waited a few minutes, went through the breath-rate calculations again, and then gave him the second shot. Still no effect. “That’s it,” she said. “We’ll have to take him to the hospital.” She made the necessary phone call, and with a furious energy that seemed to gather up everything into her small body, told A. and his wife how to follow her to the hospital, where to go, what to do, and then led them outside, where they left in separate cars. Her diagnosis was pneumonia with asthmatic complications—which, after X-rays and more sophisticated tests at the hospital, turned out to be the case.

The boy was put in a special room in the children’s ward, pricked and poked by nurses, held down screaming as liquid medicine was poured into his throat, hooked up to an I.V. line, and placed in a crib that was then covered by a clear plastic tent—into which a mist of cold oxygen was pumped from a valve in the wall. The boy remained in this tent for three days and three nights. His parents were allowed to be with him continuously, and they took turns sitting beside the boy’s crib, head and arms under the tent, reading him books, telling him stories, playing games, while the other sat in a small reading room reserved for adults, watching the faces of the other parents whose children were in the hospital: none of these strangers daring to talk to each other, since they were all thinking of only one thing, and to speak of it would only have made it worse.

It was exhausting for the boy’s parents, since the medicine dripping into his veins was composed essentially of adrenalin. This charged him with extra doses of energy—above and beyond the normal energy of a two-year old—and much of their time was spent in trying to calm him down, restraining him
from breaking out of the tent. For A. this was of little consequence. The fact of the boy’s illness, the fact that had they not taken him to the doctor in time he might actually have died, (and the horror that washed over him when he thought: what if he and his wife had decided to spend the night in the city, entrusting the boy to his grandparents—who, in their old age, had ceased to be observant of details, and who, in fact, had not noticed the boy’s strange breathing at the beach and had scoffed at A. when he first mentioned it), the fact of all these things made the struggle to keep the boy calm as nothing to A. Merely to have contemplated the possibility of the boy’s death, to have had the thought of his death thrown in his face at the doctor’s office, was enough for him to treat the boy’s recovery as a sort of resurrection, a miracle dealt to him by the cards of chance.

His wife, however, began to show the strain. At one point she walked out to A., who was in the adult sitting room, and said: “I give up, I can’t handle him anymore”—and there was such resentment in her voice against the boy, such an anger of exasperation, that something inside A. fell to pieces. Stupidly, cruelly, he wanted to punish his wife for such selfishness, and in that one instant all the newly won harmony that had been growing between them for the past month vanished: for the first time in all their years together, he had turned against her. He stormed out of the room and went to his son’s bedside.

The modern nothingness. Interlude on the force of parallel lives.

In Paris that fall he attended a small dinner party given by a friend of his, J., a well-known French writer. There was another American among the guests, a scholar who specialized in modern French poetry, and she spoke to A. of a book she was in the process of editing: the selected writings of Mallarmé. Had A., she wondered, ever translated any Mallarmé?

The fact was that he had. More than five years earlier, shortly after moving into the apartment on Riverside Drive, he had translated a number of the fragments Mallarmé wrote at the bedside of his dying son, Anatole, in 1879. These were short
works of the greatest obscurity: notes for a poem that never came to be written. They were not even discovered until the late 1950s. In 1974, A. had done rough translation drafts of thirty or forty of them and then had put the manuscript away. When he returned from Paris to his room on Varick Street (December 1979, exactly one hundred years after Mallarmé had scribbled those death notes to his son), he dug out the folder that contained the handwritten drafts and began to work up final versions of his translations. These were later published in the
Paris Review
, along with a photograph of Anatole in a sailor suit. From his prefatory note: “On October 6, 1879, Mallarmé’s only son, Anatole, died at the age of eight after a long illness. The disease, diagnosed as child’s rheumatism, had slowly spread from limb to limb and eventually overtaken the boy’s entire body. For several months Mallarmé and his wife had sat helplessly at Anatole’s bedside as doctors tried various remedies and administered unsuccessful treatments. The boy was shuttled from the city to the country and back to the city again. On August 2.2 Mallarmé wrote to his friend Henry Ronjon ‘of the struggle between life and death our poor little darling is going through … But the real pain is that this little being might vanish. I confess that it is too much for me; I cannot bring myself to face this idea.”’