My Life as a Man (7 page)

I have no nostalgia for that childhood of illness, none at all. In early adolescence, I underwent daily schoolyard humiliation (at the time, it seemed to me there could be none worse) because of my physical timidity and hopelessness at all sports. Also, I was continually enraged by the attention my parents insisted upon paying to my health, even after I had emerged, at the age of sixteen, into a beefy, broad-shouldered boy who, to compensate for his uncoordinated, ludicrous performances in right field or on the foul line, took to shooting craps in the fetid washroom of the corner candy store and rode out on Saturday nights in a car full of
“
smoking wise guys
”
—my father
’
s phrase—to search in vain for that whorehouse that was rumored to be located somewhere in the state of New Jersey. The dread
I
felt was of course even greater than my parents
’
: surely I would awaken one morning with a murmuring heart, or gasping for air, or with one of my fevers of a hundred and four
…
These fears caused my assault upon them to be particularly heartless, even for a teenager, and left them dazed and frightened of me for years thereafter. Had my worst enemy said,
“
I hope you
the
, Zuckerman,
”
I could not have been any more provoked than I was when my well-meaning father asked if I had remembered to take my vitamin capsule, or when my
Mother
, to see if a cold had made me feverish, did so under the guise of giving my forehead a lingering kiss at the dinner table. How all that tenderness enraged me! I remember that it was
actually a relief to me when my
sister
’
s first husband got caught with his fist in the till of his uncle
’
s heating-oil firm, and Sonia became the focus of their concern. And of my concern. She would sometimes come back to the house to cry on my seventeen-year-old shoulder, after having been to visit Billy in jail where he was serving a year and a day; and how good it felt, how uplifting it was, not to be on the receiving end of the solicitude, as was the case when Sonia and I were children and she would entertain the little shut-in by the hour, and without complaint.

A few years later, when I was away at Rutgers, Billy did my parents the favor of hanging himself by a cord from the drapery rod in their bedroom. I doubt that he expected it would hold him; knowing Billy, I guess he wanted the rod to give under his weight so that he might be found, still breathing, in a heap on the floor when my parents came back from their shopping. The sight of a son-in-law with a sprained ankle and a rope around his neck was supposed to move my father to volunteer to pay Billy
’
s five-thousand-dollar debt to his bookie. But
the
rod turned out to be stronger than Billy had thought, and he was strangled to death. Good riddance, one would think. But no; the next year Sunny married (in my father
’
s phrase)
“
another one.
”
Same wavy black hair, same
“
manly
”
cleft in his chin, same repellent background. Johnny
’
s weakness was not horses but hookers. The marriage has flourished, nonetheless. Each time my brother-in-law gets caught, he falls to his knees and begs Sunny
’
s forgiveness; this gesture seems to go a long way with my sister—not so
with
our father:
“
Kisses her shoes,
”
he would say, closing his eyes in disgust;
“
actually kisses
shoes,
as though that were a sign of love, of respect—of anything!
”
There are four handsome wavy-haired children, or were when last I saw them all in 1962: Donna, Louis, John Jr., and Marie (that name the unkindest cut of all). John Sr. builds swimming pools and brings in enough each week to be able to spend a hundred dollars on a New York call girl without feeling a thing, financially speaking. When last I saw it, their summer house in
the Italian Catskills had
even more pink
“
harem
”
pillows in the living room than the one in Scotch Plains, and an even grander pepper mill; in both
“
homes,
”
the silver, the linens, and the towels are monogrammed SZR, my sister
’
s initials.

How come?
I used to be plagued by that question. How could it be that the sister of mine who had rehearsed for hours on end in our living room, over and over again singing to me the songs from
Song of Norway
and
The Student Prince
until I wished I were Norwegian or nobility; the sister who took
“
voice
”
from Dr. Bresslenstein in his studio in North Philadelphia and at fifteen was already singing
“
Because
”
for money at weddings; a sister who had the voluptuous, haughty airs of a prima donna when the other little girls were still fretting over boys and acne —how could
she
wind up in a house with a harem
“
motif,
”
mothering children taught by nuns, and playing
“
Jerry Vale Sings Italian Hits
”
on the stereo to entertain our silent parents when they come for a Sunday visit?
How? Why?

I used to wonder, when Sonia married for the second time, if perhaps she were involved in a secret and mysterious religious rite: if she had not deliberately set out to mortify herself, so as to sound to the depths her spiritual being. I would imagine her in bed at night (yes, in bed), her pretty-boy slob of a husband asleep beside her, and Sonia exultant in
the
dark with the knowledge that unbeknownst to everyone—everyone being the bewildered parents and incredulous college-boy brother—she continued to be the very same person who used to enchant us from the stage of the Y with what Bresslenstein (a poor refugee from Palestine, but according to himself formerly the famous impresario of Munich) described to my mother as
“
a beautiful beautiful coloratura quality—the beginnings of another Lily Pons.
”
I could imagine her one evening at dinnertime knocking on the back door to our apartment, her black hair to her shoulders again, and wearing the same long embroidered dress in which she had appeared in
The Student Prince—my
graceful and vivacious sister, whose ap
pearance on a stage would cause
tears of pride to spring to my eyes, our Lily Pons, our Galli-Curci, returning to us, as bewitching as ever
and uncorrupted:
“
1
had to do it,
”
she explains, when we three rush as one to embrace her,
“
otherwise it meant nothing.
”

In brief: I could not easily make peace with the fact that I had a sister in the suburbs, whose pastimes and adornments—vulgar to a snobbish college sophomore, an elitist already reading Allen Tate on the sublime and Dr. Leavis on Matthew Arnold with his breakfast cereal—more or less resembled those of millions upon millions of American families. Instead I imagined Sonia Zuckerman Ruggieri in Purgatorio.

Lydia Jorgenson Ketterer I imagined in Hell. But who wouldn
’
t have, to hear those stories out of her lurid past? Beside hers, my own childhood, frailty, fevers, and all, seemed a version of paradise; for where I had been the child served, she had been the child servant, the child slave, round-the-clock nurse to a hypochondriacal mother and fair game to a benighted father.

The story of incest, as Lydia told it, was simple enough, so simple that it staggered me. It was simply inconceivable to me at the time that an act I associated wholly with a great work of classical drama could actually have taken place, without messengers and choruses and oracles, between a Chicago milkman in his Bloomfield Farms coveralls and his sleepy little blue-eyed daughter before she went off to school. Yet it had.
“
Once upon a time,
”
as Lydia liked to begin the story, early on a winter morning, as he was about to set off to fetch his delivery truck, her father came into her room and lay down beside her in the bed, dressed for work. He was trembling and in tears.
“
You
’
re all I have, Lydia, you
’
re all Daddy has. I
’
m married to a corpse.
”
Then he lowered his coveralls to his ankles, all because he was married to a corpse.
“
Simple as that,
”
said Lydia. Lydia the child, like Lydia the adult, did not scream out, nor did she reach up and sink her teeth into his
neck once he was over her. The
thought of biting into his Adam
’
s apple occurred to her, but she was afraid that his screams would awaken her mother, who needed her sleep.
She was afraid that his screams would awaken her mother.
And, moreover, she did not want to hurt him: he was her father. Mr. Jorgenson showed up for work that morning, but his truck was found abandoned later in the day in the Forest Preserve.
“
And where he went,
”
said Lydia, in mild storybook fashion,
“
nobody knew,
”
neither
the invalid wife whom he had left penniless nor their horrified little child. Something at first made Lydia believe that he had run away
“
to the North Pole,
”
though simultaneously she was convinced that he was lurking in the neighborhood, ready to crush her skull with a rock if she should tell any of her little friends the dring he had done to her before disappearing. For years afterward—even as a grown woman, even after her breakdown—whenever she went to the Loop at Christmastime, she would wonder if he might not be one of the Santa Clauses standing outside the department stores ringing a little bell at the shoppers. In fact, having decided in the December of her eighteenth year to run away from Skokie with Ketterer, she had approached the Santa Claus outside Goldblatt
’
s and said to him,
“
I
’
m getting married. I don
’
t care about you any more. I
’
m marrying a man who stands six feet two inches tall and weighs two hundred and twenty-five pounds and if you ever so much as follow me again he
’
ll break every bone in your body.
”

“
I still don
’
t know which was more deranged,
”
said Lydia,
“
pretending that that poor bewildered Santa Claus was my father, or imagining that the oaf I was about to marry was a man.
”

Incest, the violent marriage, then what she called her
“
flirtation
”
with madness. A month after Lydia had divorced Ketterer on grounds of physical cruelty, her mother finally managed to have the stroke she had been readying herself for all her life. During the week the woman lay under the oxygen tent in the hospital, Lydia refused to visit her.
“
I told my aunts that I had put in all the hours I owed t
o the cause. If she were dying,
what help could I be in preventing it? And if she were faking again, I refused to participate.
”
And when the mother did expire at long last, Lydia
’
s grief, or relief, or delight, or guilt, took the form of torpor. Nothing seemed worth bothering to do. She fed and clothed Monica, her six-year-old daughter, but that was as far as she went. She did not change her own clothes, make the bed, or wash the dishes; when she opened a can to eat something she invariably discovered that she was eating the cat
’
s tinned food. Then she began to write on the walls with her lipstick. The Sunday after the funeral, when Ketterer came to take Monica away for the day, he found the child in a chair, all dressed and ready to go, and the walls of the apartment covered with questions, printed in big block letters with a lipstick:
WHY NOT? YOU TOO? WHY SHOULD THEY? SAYS WHO? WE WILL?
Lydia was still at her breakfast, which consisted that morning of a bowl full of kitty litter, covered with urine and a sliced candle.

“
Oh, how he loved that,
”
Lydia told me.
“
You could just see his mind, or whatever you
’
d call what he
’
s got in there, turning over. He couldn
’
t bear, you see, that I had divorced him, he couldn
’
t bear that a judge in a courtroom had heard what a brute he was. He couldn
’
t bear losing his little punching bag.
‘
You think you
’
re so smart, you go to art museums and you think that gives you a right to boss your husband around—
’
and then he
’
d pick me up and throw me at the wall. He was always telling me how I ought to be down on my knees for saving me from the houseful of old biddies, how I ought to
worship
him for taking somebody who was practically an orphan and giving her a nice home and a baby and money to spend going to art museums. Once, you see, during the seven years, I had gone off to the Art Institute with my cousin Bob, the bachelor high-school teacher. He took me to the art museum and when we were all alone in one of the empty rooms, he exposed himself to me. He said he just wanted me to look at him, that was all. He said he didn
’
t want me to touch it. So I didn
’
t; I didn
’
t do
anything. Just like with my
father
—I felt sorry for
him.
There I was, married to an ape, and here was Cousin Bob, the one my father used to call
‘
the
little grind.
’
Quite a distinguished family I come from.
Anyway:
Ketterer broke down the door, saw the handwriting on the wall was mine, and couldn
’
t have been happier. Especially when he noticed what I was pretending to be eating for my breakfast. Because it was all pretense, you see. I knew exac
tly
what I was doing. I had no intention of drinking my own urine, or eating a candle and kitty litter. I knew he was coming to call, that was the reason I did it. You should have heard how solicitous he was:
‘
You need a doctor, Lydia, you need a doctor real bad.
’
But what he called was a city ambulance. I had to smile when two men came into my apartment actually wearing white coats. I didn
’
t have to smile, that is, but I did. I said:
‘
Won
’
t you gentlemen have some kitty litter?
’
I knew that was the kind of thing you were supposed to say if you were mad. Or at least
that’s
what everybody else drought. What I really say when I
’
m insane are things like
‘
Today is Tuesday,
’
or
‘
I
’
ll have a pound of chopped meat, please.
’
Oh, that
’
s just cleverness. Strike that. I don
’
t know
what
I say if I
’
m mad, or if I
’
ve even
b
een
mad. Truly, it was just a mild flirtation.
”

But that was the end of motherhood, nonetheless. Upon her release from the hospital five weeks later, Ketterer announced that he was remarrying. He hadn
’
t planned on
“
popping the question
”
so soon, but now that Lydia had proved herself in public to be the nut he had had to endure in private for seven miserable years, he felt duty bound to provide the child with a proper home and a proper mother. And if she wanted to contest his decision in court, well, just let her try. It seemed he had taken photographs of the walls she had defaced and had lined up neighbors who would testify to what she had looked like and
smelted
like in the week before
“
you flipped your Lydia, kid,
”
as it pleased Ketterer to describe what had happened to her. He did not care how much it would cost him in legal fees; he would spend every dime he
had to save Monica from a crazy
woman who ate her own filth.
“
And also,
”
said Lydia,
“
to get out of paying support money in the bargain.
”

“
I ran around frantically for days, begging the neighbors not to testify against me. They knew how much Monica loved me, they knew that I loved her—they knew it was only because my mother had died, because I was exhausted, and so on and so forth. I
’
m sure I terrified them, telling them all they
‘
knew
’
that they didn
’
t begin to know about my life. I
’
m sure I
wanted
to terrify them. I even hired a lawyer. I sat in his office and wept, and he assured me that I was within my rights to demand the child back, and that it was going to be a little harder for Mr. Ketterer than he thought, and so on and so forth, very encouraging, very sympathetic, very optimistic. So I left his office and walked to the bus station and took a bus to Canada. I went to Winnipeg to look for an employment agency—I wanted to be a cook in a logging camp. The farther north the better. I wanted to be a cook for a hundred strong, hungry men. All
the
way to Winnipeg in the bus I had visions of myself in
the
kitchen of a big mess hall up in the freezing wilds, cooking bacon and eggs and biscuits and pots and pots of coffee for the morning meal, cooking their breakfast while it was still dark—the only one awake in the logging camp, me. And then the long sunny mornings, cleaning up and beginning preparations for the evening meal, when they
’
d all come in tired from the heavy work in the forest. It was the simplest and most girlish little daydream you can imagine.
I
could imagine. I would be a servant to a hundred strong men, and they in return would protect me from harm. I would be the only woman in the entire camp, and because there was only one of me, no one would ever dare to take advantage of my situation. I stayed in Winnipeg three days. Going to movies. I was afraid to go to a logging camp and say I wanted work there—I was sure they would think I was a prostitute. Oh, how banal to be crazy. Or maybe just banal being me. What could be more banal than having been seduced by your own father and then going around being
‘
scarred
’
by it for
ever? You see, I kept thinking all the while,
‘
There
’
s no need for me to be behaving in this way. There is no need to be acting crazy—and there never was. There is no need to be running away to the North Pole. I
’
m just pretending. All I have to do to stop is
to stop.
’
I would remember my aunts telling me, if I so much as uttered a whimper in objection to anything:
‘
Pull yourself together, Lydia, mind over matter.
’
Well, it couldn
’
t be that I was going to waste my life defying
those
two, could it? Because making myself their victim was sillier even than continuing to allow myself to be my father
’
s. There I sat in the movies in Canada, with all these expressions I used to hate so, going through my head,
hut making perfect sense.
Pull yourself together, Lydia. Mind over matter, Lydia. You can
’
t cry over spilled milk, Lydia. If you don
’
t succeed, Lydia—and you don
’
t—try, try again. Nothing could have been clearer to me than that sitting in the movies in Winnipeg was as senseless as anything I could do if I ever hoped to save Monica from her father. I could only conclude that I didn
’
t want t
o save her from him. Dr. Ru
the
r
ford now tells me that that was exactly the case. Not
that
it requires a trained therapist to see through somebody like me. How did I get back to Chicago? According to Dr. Rutherford, by accomplishing what I set out to do. I was staying in a two-dollar-a-night hotel on what turned out to be Winnipeg
’
s skid row. As if Lydia didn
’
t know, says Dr. Rutherford. The third morning that I came down to pay for the room, the desk clerk asked me if I wanted to pick up some easy cash. I could make a lot of money posing for pictures, especially if I was blonde all over. I began to howl. He called a policeman, and the policeman called a doctor, and eventually somehow they got me home. And that
’
s how I managed to rid myself of my daughter. You would have thought it would have been simpler to drown her in
the
bathtub.
”

To say that I was drawn to her story because it was so lurid is only the half of it: there was the way the tale was told. Lydia
’
s easy, familiar, even cozy manner with misery, her droll acceptance of her own madness, grea
tly
increased the story
’
s appeal—
or, to put it another way, did much to calm whatever fears one might expect an inexperienced young man of a conventional background to have about a woman bearing such a ravaged past. Who would call
“
crazy
”
a woman who spoke with such detachment of her history of craziness? Who could find evidence of impulses toward suicide and homicide in a rhetorical style so untainted by rage or vengeful wrath? No, no, this was someone who had
experienced
her experience, who had been
deepened
by all that misery. A decidedly ordinary looking person, a pretty
little
American blonde with a face like a million others, she had, without benefit of books or teachers, mobilized every ounce of her intelligence to produce a kind of
wisdom
about herself. For surely it required wisdom to recite, calmly and with a mild, even forgiving irony, such a ghastly narrative of ill luck and injustice. You had to be as cruelly simpleminded as Ketterer himself, I thought, not to appreciate the moral triumph this represented—or else you just had to be someone other than me.