The Anatomy Lesson (5 page)

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Zuckerman
had lost his subject. His health, his hair, and his subject. Just as well he couldn
’
t find a posture for writing. What he
’
d made his fiction from was gone—his birthplace the burnt-out landscape of a racial war and the people who
’
d been giants to him dead. The great Jewish struggle was with the Arab states; here it was over, the Jersey side of the Hudson, his West Bank, occupied now by an alien tribe. No new Newark was going to spring up again for Zuckerman, not like the first one: no fathers like those pioneering Jewish fathers bursting with taboos, no sons like their sons boiling with temptations, no loyalties, no ambitions, no rebellions, no capitulations, no clashes quite so convulsive again. Never again to feel such tender emotion and such a desire to escape. Without a father and a mother and a homeland, he was no longer a novelist. No longer a son. no longer a writer. Everything that galvanized him had been extinguished, leaving nothing unmistakably his and nobody else
’
s to claim, exploit, enlarge, and reconstruct.

These were his distressing thoughts, reclining on the playmat unemployed.

His brother
’
s charge—that
Carnovsky
had precipitated their father
’
s fatal coronary—hadn
’
t been easy to forget. Memories of his father
’
s 4ast years, of the strain between them, the bitterness, the bewildering estrangement, gnawed away at him along with Henry
’
s dubious accusation; so did the curse his father had fastened upon him with his dying
breath; so did the idea that he
had written what he had, as he had, simply to be odious, that his work embodied little more than stubborn defiance toward a respectable chiropodist. Having completed not a page worth keeping since that deathbed rebuke, he had half begun to believe that if it hadn
’
t been for his father
’
s frazzled nerves and rigid principles and narrow understanding he
’
d never have been a writer at all. A first-generation American father possessed by the Jewish demons, a second-generation American son possessed by their exorcism: that was his whole story.

Zuckerman
’
s mother, a quiet, simple woman, dutiful and inoffensive though she was, always seemed to him a slightly more carefree and emancipated spirit. Redressing historical grievances, righting intolerable wrongs, changing the tragic course of Jewish history—all this she gladly left for her husband to accomplish during dinner. He made the noise and had the opinions, she contented herself with preparing their meal and feeding the children and enjoying, while it lasted, the harmonious family life. A year after his death she developed a brain tumor. For months she
’
d been complaining of episodes of dizziness, a headache, of little memory lapses. Her first time in the hospital, the doctors diagnosed a minor stroke, nothing to leave her seriously impaired; four months later, when they admitted her again, she was able to recognize her neurologist when he came by the room, but when he asked if she would write her name for him on a piece of paper, she took the pen from his hand and instead of
“
Selma
”
wrote the word
“
Holocaust,
”
perfectly spelled. This was in Miami Beach in 1970, inscribed by a woman whose writings otherwise consisted of recipes on index cards, several thousand thank-you notes, and a voluminous file of knitting instructions. Zuckerman was pretty sure that before that morning she
’
d never even spoken the word aloud. Her responsibility wasn
’
t brooding on horrors but sitting at night getting the knitting done and planning the next day
’
s chores. But she had a tumor in her head the size of a lemon, and it seemed to have forced out everything except the one word. That it couldn
’
t dislodge. It must have been there all the time without their even knowing.

Three years this month. December 21. In 1970 it had been a Monday. The neurologist told him on the phone that the brain tumor could take anywhere from two to four weeks to kill her, but when Zuckerman reached her room from the airport the bed was already empty. His brother, who
’
d arrived separately by plane an hour before, was in a
chair by the window, jaw fixed,
face a blank, looking, for all his size and strength, as though he were made of plaster. One good whack and he
’
d just be pieces on the floor.
“
Mother
’
s gone.
”
he said.

Of all the words that Zuckerman had read, written, spoken, or heard, there were none he could think of whose rhetorical effectiveness could ever measure up to those two. Not she
’
s going, not she will go, but
she
’
s gone.

Zuckerman hadn
’
t seen the inside of a synagogue since the early sixties, when he used to ride forth each month to defend
Higher Education
on the temple lecture trail. The nonbeliever wondered nonetheless if his mother oughtn
’
t to be buried in the Orthodox manner—washed with water, wrapped in a shroud, and laid in a plain wood box. Even before she
’
d begun to be troubled by the first disabling signs of her fatal illness, four years of tending to an invalid husband had already reduced her to a replica of her own late mother in advanced old age, and it was in the hospital morgue, blankly staring at the prominent ancestral nose set in the small, childlike family skull, that curving sickle from which the sloping wedge of the careworn face sharply dropped away, that he thought of an Orthodox burial. But Henry wanted her wearing the soft gray crepe dress she
’
d looked so pretty in the night he and Carol had taken her over to Lincoln Center to hear Theodore Bikel, and Zuckerman saw no reason to argue. He was trying really to
place
this corpse, to connect what had happened to his mother with what had happened to her mother, whose funeral he
’
d witnessed as a child. He was trying to figure out where, in life, they were. As for the attire in which she should molder away, let Henry have what he wished. All that mattered was to get this last job done as unbruisingly as possible: then he and Henry needn
’
t agree on anything or speak to each other ever again. Her welfare was all that had kept them in touch anyway; over her empty hospital bed they
’
d met for the first time since their father
’
s Florida funeral the year before.

Yes. she was all Henry
’
s now. The angry edge to his organizational efficiency made it unmistakable to everyone that inquiries relating to her burial were to be addressed to the younger son. When the rabbi came around to their mother
’
s apartment to plan the chapel service—the same softly bearded young rabbi who
’
d officiated at their father
’
s graveside—Nathan sat off by himself saying nothing, while Henry, who
’
d just gotten back from the mortician
’
s, questioned the rabbi about the arrangements.
“
I
thought I
’
d read a little poetry,
”
the rabbi told him,
“
something about growing things. I know how she loved her plants.
”
They all looked over at the plants as though they were Mrs. Zuckerman
’
s orphaned babies. It was far too soon to see anything straight—not the plants on the windowsill, or the noodle casserole in the refrigerator, or the dry-cleaning ticket in her purse.
“
Then I
’
ll read some psalms,
”
the rabbi said.
“
I
’
d like to conclude, if you wouldn
’
t mind, with some personal observations of my own. I knew your parents from the Temple. I knew them well. I know how much they enjoyed together as a husband and wife. I know how they loved their family.
”
“
Good,
”
said Henry.
“
And you, Mr. Zuckerman?
”
the rabbi asked Nathan.
“
Any memories you
’
d like to share? I
’
ll be glad to include them in my remarks.
”
He took a pad and pencil from his jacket to note down whatever the writer had to tell him, but Nathan merely shook his head.
“
The memories,
”
said Zuckerman,
“
come in their own time.
”
“
Rabbi,
”
said Henry,
“
I’ll
deliver the eulogy.
”
Earlier he
’
d said that he didn
’
t think he
’
d have the emotional wherewithal to get through it.
“
If you could,
”
said the rabbi,
“
despite your grief, that would be wonderful.
”
“
And if I cry,
”
replied Henry,
“
that won
’
t hurt either. She was the best mother in the world.
”

So: the historical record was to be set straight at last. Henry would cleanse from the minds of her Florida friends the libelous portrait in
Carnovsky.
Life and art are distinct, thought Zuckerman; what could be clearer? Yet the distinction is wholly elusive. That writing is an act of imagination seems to perplex and infuriate everyone.

Carol arrived on an evening plane with their two oldest kids and Henry put them up with him at a hotel over on Collins Avenue. Zuckerman slept at his mother
’
s alone. He didn
’
t bother making the bed up anew but, between the sheets that had covered her only two nights before, planted his face in her pillow.
“
Mama, where are you?
”
He knew where she was, at the mortician
’
s wearing her gray crepe dress; nonetheless, he couldn
’
t stop asking. His little mother, five feet two, had disappeared into the enormity of death. Probably the biggest thing she
’
d ever entered before was L. Bamberger
’
s department store on Market Street in Newark.

Till that night Zuckerman hadn
’
t known who the dead were or just how far away. She murmured into his dreams, but no matter how hard he strained to hear, he could not understand. An inch separated them, nothi
ng separated them, they were in
divisible—yet no message could make it through. He seemed to be dreaming that he was deaf. In the dream he thought,
“
Not gone; beyond gone,
”
and awoke in the dark, bubbling saliva, her pillow soaked with his spittle.
“
Poor child,
”
he said, feeling for her as though
she
were the child, his child, as
t
hough she
’
d died at ten instead of sixty-six. He felt a pain in his head the size of a lemon. It was her brain tumor.

Coming out of sleep that
morning
, struggling to be freed from a final dream of a nearby object at a dreadful distance, he began readying himself to find her beside him. Mustn
’
t be frightened. The last thing she
’
d ever do would be to come back to frighten Nathan. But when he opened his eyes to the daylight and rolled over on his side there was no dead woman on the other half of the bed. There was no way to see her beside him again.

He got up to brush his teeth, then came back into the bedroom and. still in his pajamas, stepped into the closet among her clothes. He put his hand in the pocket of a poplin raincoat that looked hardly ever to have been
worn
, and found a freshly opened packet of Kleenex. One of the tissues lay folded in the pocket
’
s seam. He touched it to his nose, but it smelled only of itself.

From a square plastic case down in the pocket he extracted a transparent rain bonnet. It was no bigger than a Band-Aid, folded up to about a quarter-inch thickness, but that it was tucked away so neatly didn
’
t necessarily mean that she had never used it. The case was pale blue, stamped
“
Compliments of Sylvia
’
s, Distinctive Fashions, Boca Raton
.
”
The
“
S
”
in Sylvia
’
s was entwined in a rose, something she would have appreciated. Little flowers always bordered her thank-you notes. Sometimes his wives had got the flowered thank-you notes for as little as a thoughtful long-distance call.