The Liar's Wife (22 page)

She was using the clothes brush that had belonged to her father. It was small and fit easily in her hand, those hands which were, even for a woman as small as she was, unusually small. “Delicate,” she would say when she would hold her hands up so the light fell behind them, fell through them, illumining them, turning them a reddish color like the sun going down. “My hands were the envy of all the girls I knew,” she would say. “Who would have believed I'd end up with the hands of an old washerwoman.”

What she didn't say: it was because my father had lost all his money in the Depression, and she resented it, resented him, because her own father had been prosperous. A banker. A pillar of the small Illinois town where both my parents were born and reared.

I loved my mother's hands, I thought they were lovely, not the hands of an old washerwoman at all. They were always wonderfully cool, the flesh was creamy, and her wedding ring sank into the softness of her fourth finger in a way that when I was a child seemed magical. Then we would sit on the couch sometimes holding hands, listening to the radio. It had made us both very happy.

But I had put a stop to it. I had to. It wasn't “manly.” I knew that, after a while, with a clarity as clear as All Men Are Created Equal or A Penny Saved Is a Penny Earned. And that day I told her to stop fussing over me, although I really enjoyed her running the bristles of the silver brush over the shoulders of the jacket of my new suit. I'd always been very fond of that brush, I liked the design on its silver back, a border of raised Xs that when I was very little I'd mistaken for birds' wings. I'd liked the plain cool feeling of the matte silver against my dry palm,
and the rougher, raised texture of the Xs or wings that I would run my fingertips along. When I was little, I'd ask my mother if I could hold it sometimes, after she had used it to brush her own coat and hat, and I would hold it sometimes to keep myself from feeling sad that she was going out into the world without me and to distract myself so that I could forget that I was lonely.

“Billy, you are a caution,” she'd say when I asked to hold the brush. She would never tell my father because it wasn't something my father would have liked. He would have thought it wasn't quite manly, though he probably wouldn't have said anything. My father spoke very little. My father was quite manly. He built houses. The letterhead which he used to send out his bills had the heading, “Build as if you knew that it would last forever.”

My father was a silent man, and I was both soothed and frightened by his silence. His silences. My brother, Sam, was much more silent than I; he was always on at me for talking too much. But my mother encouraged me to talk, to use words not just for information, but for pleasure. “Remember, you're named for William Shakespeare,” she would tell me although my father insisted I'd been named for a great-uncle who'd died working in the mines.

When I was six, she signed me up for something called Expression Lessons, taught by Mrs. Alma Ferguson. I've given up trying to explain what Expression Lessons were. They were a product, a sign of a vanished America. What I can never decide is whether it's a good thing that it vanished, or bad.

Certainly there were good things about the lessons Mrs. Ferguson gave. They taught me to speak clearly and, as the name suggests, expressively. We began with breathing exercises and exercises to strengthen what she called “my midriff.” Then she would have me read aloud … passages from Shakespeare or Byron, for example, and then she'd correct my readings by reading them herself.

Who was she? She was distinctly, deliberately unmodern looking; her skirts were long and full, and her hair was piled on the top of her head. She was rather operatic in her presentation of herself. She was a large woman, not fat, but tall and broad. When I see Margaret Dumont in the Marx Brothers movies, I think of Mrs. Ferguson. Mrs. Ferguson
was not ridiculous, though. She had great dignity. She stood for something that was not foolish, that ought not be laughed away.

What was her training? What gave her the right to give lessons to other people? To children. I don't think she'd ever been on a stage, except perhaps the Little Theatre, where I remember her being very good playing Mrs. Alving in Ibsen's
Ghosts.
I think my mother sent me to her for reasons that had everything to do with who my mother was. Certainly Mrs. Ferguson was one of my mother's lame ducks. She'd been a widow for quite some time when I began studying with her. I can hardly believe that now, that my mother sent me for Expression Lessons when I was six. But she always wanted me to be an actor. She said that before I could talk, when she read me nursery rhymes, I would stand in my crib and act them out. It makes people laugh when I tell them that my mother is the only woman in America who was disappointed when her son gave up acting to become a doctor. But her disappointment was no laughing matter; it was deep, very deep. I hated causing her pain. I loved my mother.

My father harbored a lot of anger towards the late Mr. Ferguson. “He died without a penny of insurance,” my father would say, pounding his fist on the table every time, in a tone of disgust that suggested that dying without insurance was equal to dying in a whorehouse or on the Bowery or running away with the underage maid. So Mrs. Ferguson was poor. Poor but middle class. Poor but genteel, and somehow she was able to support herself and her mother and her daughter by teaching Expression Lessons.

Her daughter's name was Celestine Lavonne. Mrs. Ferguson insisted that the accent be placed on the second syllable, Ce-LES-tine. I thought the name very romantic. I imagined it was French. But Celestine was anything but romantic. She was a stocky, good-natured redhead, and it was to Mrs. Ferguson's credit that she accepted her daughter's lack of dramatic talent, entire lack of romance, with a generous grace. Celestine went to business school. She became a bookkeeper. I don't know what happened to her. I assume she married someone. I assume she had a happy life. There's no reason to assume otherwise. Or maybe there is; maybe it's true that most people don't have happy lives. But it's not the way I like to think about people like Celestine.

The apartment they lived in was very small and very dark. I took my lessons in the living room, two thirds of which was taken up by the piano, so there was no room for a couch, only two berry-colored overstuffed chairs. There was a statue of the Venus de Milo on the top of the piano; its whiteness shone out like a small moon in the room that was always dark. The curtains were heavy, plum-colored; velvet. They were lined with a satiny material the color of rich cream.

When I say that my Expression Lessons with Mrs. Ferguson were a product of a vanished America, I mean it in more ways than one. That kind of emphasis on being “a good speaker,” the very word “elocution,” is something that was disappearing even as I came of age. But there was another way in which what happened in the Ferguson apartment was a vanishing America. Mrs. Ferguson's mother, whom we called Grandmother Geer, was in her nineties when I was taking my lessons. She spent most of her time in bed, lying on a cot in the back room. But she liked seeing people, and I was a nice boy, old ladies tended to love me, and Mrs. Ferguson would bring me in to say hello when our lesson was done. She loved telling stories, and her favorite one was to say that her father had shaken George Washington's hand and had put her up on his shoulders to hear the Lincoln-Douglas debates. She made the point that her father was very old when she was born—in his sixties, she said, with a shy pride in his late virility, I now understand. I've calculated the dates, and they work: if she was born in the 1840s and her father was in his sixties when she was born, then he was born in the 1780s, and Washington didn't die till 1799. So there I was, with the history of America embodied in an ancient old lady, with a face that looked like a walnut shell, but a pleasant one, lying on a cot in the back room of an apartment that was paid for by Expression Lessons, taken by people like me, because of mothers with some half-baked idea of a higher culture.

But when I think of what Mrs. Ferguson gave me as the poem that was meant to be my pièce de résistance, that I performed for the women's clubs and the Rotary Club and the Lions, I am appalled and ashamed for all of us. Was there any excuse for the kind of ignorance we all lived in? Could you call it innocence? If you did it then, you can't now. This is nothing I've talked to my children about.

The poem was called “The Glory Road.” I wish the words weren't in my brain, but that's the curse of early memorization: it's cut in the grooves of the mind forever. “The Glory Road” is about a black man being visited on his bed by God himself.

Mrs. Ferguson made a point of my emphasizing the difference in tone and emphasis as the “hooees” are repeated. This was a way of using my vocal exercises, showing my vocal range. Up to this point, except for the insult implied by the imposition of uneducated dialect by a person of a different culture and a different diction—there's not so much to object to. But the objectionable enters quite soon.

I now understand that it fell under the category of white people's appropriation of black folk material. I suppose they thought it was a kind of homage, a kind of sympathetic attention. But now it's impossible to see it as anything but grotesquely insulting.

Can we be excused for this, pardoned on the grounds that we meant no harm? I sometimes think that we cannot be pardoned. It's why I'm
not patient with people my age who bathe in the warm stream of nostalgia. That stream had horrible breeding creatures on the bottom, and if we happened not to be attacked and destroyed by them—well, that was luck, or privilege. But there is no sense pretending that the killing creatures weren't there.

So do I have to say that the people whom I loved and lived among were poisoners and if not killers then implicated in the killing that went on? Do I have to say that about my mother, whom I adored?

My poor mother. It must have been confusing for her, trying to understand me in those years. Trying to figure out the right way to deal with me. God knows I was confused. I loved my mother; I loved her till her death at ninety-six, and all through my childhood I loved her unequivocally. I knew I was the favorite of her sons, and that it was a secret we both felt bound to keep, so that we were only entirely free when we were alone and could express our delight in the other's company. But then I became a teenager and feared that my love for my mother was not quite manly. That I had to create a distance between us, a distance I wanted only half or perhaps less than half the time, to escape a closeness that I loved and feared … so I was often saying things to her I didn't mean and acting in ways I didn't want to.

Like the day I was going to introduce Thomas Mann when she was brushing off my shoulders. I was enjoying it very much but felt I had to say, “Cut it out, Mom, it's no big deal.”

Did I say that so she would have to say, “No big deal? No big deal. Why, Billy Morton for land sakes, what's a big deal if not interviewing onstage the most famous writer alive in the world today? A winner of the Nobel Prize. Shoot, Billy, you were the one chosen to interview Thomas Mann. It's a very great honor. It shows how highly everyone thinks of you. Your teachers. The principal even told me he couldn't think of anyone who would be more of a credit to the school.”

And as she said that, as she was running the bristles of the brush over my shoulders, I was thinking, If they only knew what I was really like. If they only knew I am really a monster.

And then came the thought of Laurel Jansen, who had not chosen me, the girl of my dreams, the thought that maybe I was the choice of Mr. and Mrs. Hauptmann and all the teachers and even the principal,
maybe even the whole student body would have chosen me, but Laurel did not. And I thought of Laurel and the smell of her hair, and, even as my mother was running the bristles of the silver brush over my shoulders, I got a hard-on. And I knew myself to be a monster. But then the thought of Dolph Johnson, whom Laurel had chosen over me, Dolph who was playing halfback for Purdue and wouldn't have known Thomas Mann from Tom Mix, and my hard-on went down. I hated Dolph Johnson with a ferocity that made me suspect I was another kind of monster, and I hated myself because I thought that maybe Laurel, who was the smartest girl in our class, had chosen that chucklehead over me because she thought I was not quite manly. And then I thought, If that's what being manly is, I want no part of it. I will have to think of another way of being a man. But what I really believed was that I would have been willing to be any kind of man at all if Laurel would have chosen me. Would have loved me. And sometimes I hated her because she could make me feel these things, and I had fantasies about doing terrible things to her, tying her up, hitting her, and sometimes that would arouse me and then I knew I was truly a monster and it was only a matter of time before everyone would know.

It was enormously helpful to me when Mr. Hauptmann said, “The most important thing to remember about
Death in Venice
is that it's about the impossible paradox of having both a mind and a body.” But that was much later, and it didn't seem to help for long.

A mind and a body. Because of my mind, my body was more and more a source of anguish to me now. There would be times when my body was the pleasure to me it had always been. But more and more it was unruly, shameful. I almost thought I should talk to the doctor about it, but I would never have made a special appointment to do that. I was glad to have to have a tetanus shot when I stepped on a rusty nail, glad that it was he who brought it up. “Old Man Sex getting you down?” he asked, after I'd put my shirt back on. I didn't know what to answer. He was a good man, Dr. Larkin, and he said, “Just remember a lot of things that seem troubling are entirely normal. Entirely normal.”