When We Argued All Night (19 page)

—Well, of course not! said Myra.

He went back inside. Without inviting either boy to come along, he drove into Schroon Lake for the paper, his hands trembling on the wheel. They were still trembling when he paid for the
Times
, and he stood in a hot parking lot, greedily taking in the news, forcing himself until he was thinking of nothing but the news and what it implied. The story that interested him most these days was the Eichmann trial in Israel, and the paper that day reported that the evidence phase was done and the court would pause for a couple of weeks. Harold had read everything, watched the highlights on television, listened to the radio.

He got back into his car with the newspaper, thinking of Jews in Henry James and Jews in the life of Eichmann—anything but thinking about Myra—and drove some miles out of his way before returning to the cabin.

And even when he'd had time to think about what she said, even then he couldn't think about Myra. She drove him mad—she was selfish, unpredictable, critical, then suddenly charming and talkative, friendly. They rarely made love, but when they did, it remained a thrill. He knew there was something wrong with Myra. She was almost never seen to eat, though she cooked. She'd smoke and watch him and the boys eat, then she'd leave the room, and later he couldn't say when that had happened. He didn't know why she had said she was in love with someone, whether it was true. He found he was terrified that if he asked a question, she'd leave him. Months passed and speaking became less possible.

A
ren't there Jewish writers for you guys to think about? Harold's closest friend at Columbia asked, one evening that fall, speaking thoughts Harold had entertained as well. He was a Negro named Austin Granger, with whom Harold sometimes shared supper in a neighborhood place before they both taught late composition classes. Austin was writing about Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. You make yourselves miserable, he said. Henry James or T. S. Eliot, one or the other! That's all you Jews look at! Your literary gods are a couple of anti-Semites. You're trying to join the aristocracy.

—I never was accused of that before, Harold said, though he had been. I lost my job in the public schools for being a Red. He didn't miss his high school job more than occasionally. It was almost worth it, bragging about being a victim of oppression.

—You're no Red, Austin said. You're an aristocrat. He had said much the same when they picketed Woolworth's together a couple of years earlier, eagerly joining student sympathy picket lines that supported the lunch counter sit-ins in the South. The two of them marched for an hour or two.

—You and I, we don't belong in the streets, we belong in libraries, Austin had said then, including himself that time. Now, when he asked about Jewish writers, they were making their way back from supper, in the early dark, to their seven o'clock classes. They began talking about Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow, why Harold admired them and why he wanted to write about Henry James anyway. It was October and raining lightly, and Austin was wrapped in a big rain cape that made him seem mysterious. He tapped Harold's shoulder in farewell, on his way to his own class, and Harold made his way through the corridors to his classroom. The heat had been turned on, and there was a pleasantly indoor smell. The weather and the season promised time for reading and writing, reasoning silently and aloud, and though Harold's freshmen weren't true intellectual companions, they were bright and interesting. He loved his joking yet serious suppers with Austin; they both loved their work too much to say so aloud, but their passion for what they did was in the space between them at the table.

A folded note was Scotch-taped to the door of the classroom with his name on it: Call your wife, it said. Harold's throat tightened. The note was from the department secretary. He excused himself to the three students already present and hurried to the office. From a phone on someone's desk, standing, he dialed his house and heard Paul's hello.

—Mommy called? Harold said.

—She's not here, said Paul. His voice was squeaky with anxiety, and Harold became frightened. What's going on?

—Nelson did something, Paul said. I don't want to say . . .

—He's in trouble? Nelson was in high school, and there had been conferences with concerned teachers. He wasn't disruptive, they were assured, but inattentive. Harold and Myra had nodded in rare unanimity. Nelson was inattentive.

—He's in the hospital, Paul said. Then, in tears, Daddy, he tried to get killed.

—Oh my God, Harold said. His own voice rose in pitch, and as he experienced the sensation of being separate from his body, he also sensed two people behind him in the office stand up and turn in his direction as if to catch him when he fell.

—He's not dead, Paul said, and sobbed again. He'd never been home alone before and explained through sobs that he'd volunteered to stay and wait for Harold's call.

Harold said, He'll be all right, sweetie, I promise. Don't worry.

But how could he know? After their conversation was over, Harold realized he should have told Paul to go to a neighbor's. He should also have asked what exactly Nelson had done, but he didn't call back. He sent the secretary to dismiss his class, raced to the street, and as he searched for a taxi, he found himself, irrationally, worrying primarily about Paul, alone where criminals might break in, where he might take it into his head to imitate his brother, whatever his brother had done. Jostled from side to side on the wide seat of the taxi—fancy but shabby—he settled into his real trouble: his boy Nelson, his first boy, his darling son whom he'd never known how to love.

When Harold finally saw Myra in a hospital waiting room on the floor where he'd been told he could find Nelson, she was smoking and crying, a closed magazine in her lap. What if Nelson was now dead? As he went to her, he suddenly thought of her lakeside confession—or boast or point of information—from three months before. It was absurd that he had been unable to speak of it. He looked right and left as if he expected to see another man hurrying to comfort Myra, a man in a well-fitting suit who'd lean over her solicitously, the smoke from their cigarettes mingling over their heads. She was alone, and Harold dropped his briefcase on the floor—the same briefcase in which Nelson had carried his toys when Paul was born—sat beside her, and put his wide hand on her knee.

—What happened? he said, and was surprised at his voice, which sounded old and almost foreign, almost his father's voice.

She wasn't startled, and she turned and fell against his chest, sobbing. He'll be all right, she said, he's going to be all right.

—What did he do?

—Oh, Harold, she said. He jumped in front of a train.

Nelson had tried to get himself killed by the IRT at Union Square, jumping off a platform after an afternoon spent somewhere in the East Village. He'd been seen, alarms raised, the power turned off. The train stopped. Irate transit workers had rushed to him and yanked him back to the platform. He had a broken leg and bruises from the jump. After a short stay in a medical ward, he'd be sent to a locked psychiatric unit.

Harold, as the hours and days passed, could not stop thinking about what might have happened—what Nelson had planned—and could not bear to think about what might have happened.
Why
was almost beside the point.

Jumping from a subway platform was such an easy, obvious way for New Yorkers to die that it was unthinkable and unspeakable, and for the first days and weeks the primary effort of them all—parents, relatives, doctors, and nurses—was to look past Nelson's act and only at the bruises, the broken leg, as if he'd fallen when out for a walk. Harold could not ask why, ask himself or Nelson or anyone, because the answer had the coming train in it: it was what Nelson had chosen to accept, the train reaching his body. Or had he been so sure he'd be rescued? How could he have been sure?

Harold abruptly led a new life, rushing back to the university only when he had no choice. Nelson, in lank hospital gowns that bared his thin chest and tremulous neck, wouldn't answer his father's questions or agree or disagree with his speculations. Unlike everyone else, Harold couldn't stop beginning sentences that would include the coming train, but even he couldn't bring himself to finish them. When he was with Nelson, he did most of the talking. He had something to say to Nelson, something to say at last. The choice for suicide, Harold believed, was dignified and honorable—a choice, but a wrong choice. To choose death was to decide that life—the bargain offered human beings—was not worth it. Suicide wasn't Harold's choice, or the choice of the writers he loved best and believed in. Harold felt that if he explained to Nelson that suicide was an honorable choice, he could then persuade him that it was a choice he should not make, that the arguments of those who rejected suicide were better than of those who believed in it.
Live, it's a mistake not to,
James's Lambert Strether had said, with touching awkwardness.

—James doesn't mean
Live as opposed to die,
Harold explained, in Nelson's hospital room, but live
fully
, don't deny oneself intense experience. But the other view, he repeated, the defense of suicide, was a view. Eventually, he hoped Nelson would read some of the authors who had espoused and others who had denied this view. (Would it be dangerous for Nelson to read authors who espoused it, and who
were
they, anyway?) As father and son, perhaps they could soberly make the decision to reject this view.

Nelson didn't reply. Myra smoked and looked angry—or sometimes scared. Paul stood and stared out windows, his back to whatever room they were in. He seemed older than he was. Paul was the one who'd say, as the three of them walked from the train station to their apartment, Is there anything in the house for supper? Should we pick something up?

Nelson's psychiatrist was a thoughtful Jewish man who looked as if he might have enjoyed talking about literature, but he was not interested in discussing suicide as a philosophical position. From Harold and Myra he wanted to know details about Nelson's childhood: toilet training, schoolwork. Harold said, Nelson's different from everyone, hoping for some ordinary back-and-forth discussion.

—How do you find Nelson different, Mr. Abrams? asked the doctor.

—That's not true, said Myra, and the doctor swiveled in his chair to face her. He's not different from everyone, she said. He's like me.

—In what way?

Harold chided himself for expecting a psychiatrist to talk like a dinner guest, then realized that the dinner guests he was imagining were no more real than the psychiatrist of his fantasies, the man who would exonerate Harold and Myra while restoring Nelson to something he had never been. The dinner guests were in books, and so were the psychiatrists.

—I'm of no use to my sons, he said to Austin Granger.

—Oh, look here, Austin said, looking uncomfortable. He was younger, unmarried, the son of a bus driver who was as baffled about him as Harold's father had been about Harold's desires and choices. Sometimes Harold and Austin seemed a generation apart, and their racial difference made Harold awkward as well; he wondered if Austin blamed him for discrimination and Negro poverty. Would a Negro boy be thrown in jail, not sent to a hospital, for jumping off a platform and disrupting the trains?

It was a relief that Nelson was in a locked ward, but someday he'd be released, and Harold didn't know how he'd stand it, not knowing where his son was at any moment. Nelson was friendlier once he was in the psychiatric hospital. He didn't mind confinement as much as Harold had expected. Maybe he felt safer. Harold dreaded the visits, but going alone, he'd sit on the edge of Nelson's neatly made bed while his son, dressed, sprawled at the other end of it, and as 1962 began, progressed, and ended, they talked about what they saw on the news—the hanging of Eichmann, the death of Marilyn Monroe, the Cuban Missile Crisis.

—I might go into politics, Nelson said once. It seemed an absurd ambition for this silent, brooding boy who couldn't make friends, but Harold was uplifted because Nelson had spoken of a future. He was on medication and grew heavier, which made him seem likelier to live, as if the hospital had proposed to save Nelson by enlarging him, so there would be more to grasp and hold on to.

Harold had been pleased to let Brenda Saltzman use the cabin, but he was surprised to hear from her. He was sorry he hadn't seen a way to ask her about herself and her father. He was sure that at heart, Artie still blamed him for the loss of his teaching job. And Harold was embarrassed at the difference between them. Even if Artie had been exaggerating the one time he said it, it was probably true that he thought Harold was a snob.

Yet after Nelson was admitted to the Psychiatric Institute at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, Harold wanted Artie to know all about it, if only so that he'd stop resenting Harold's good fortune. Or because it was important: he couldn't live through something important without Artie. Harold's life now included many more trips on the subway, where he was unable to keep from thinking of Nelson walking closer and closer to the edge of the platform. He was in agony, though also not in agony. He liked the upper Broadway neighborhood where Nelson was, which had vigorous street life, huge fruit and vegetable markets, and cheap discount places. Combining a visit to Nelson with his classes or trips to the library, Harold had more private life. He didn't visit Naomi for months, and then he did again.

Now it was easier for Harold to stop by Artie's shoe store, also on Broadway but closer to midtown, and propose that they go out to lunch. It had been embarrassing—for both of them—to see Artie at work in his tie but no jacket, kneeling to measure women's feet. The first time Artie said he had no time, but Harold tried again and they went to a Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood, where Harold studied Artie's face, bisected by sunlight. Artie danced his fingers playfully in the light, which didn't seem to bother him. He seemed younger than Harold.