The Liar's Wife (27 page)

I still have my old copy of
Tonio Kröger
, and I see the passages I underlined. To say that I was self-dramatizing would not be the half of it, but then Tonio is a master of self-dramatization.

“To feel stirring within you the wonderful and melancholy play of strange forces and to be aware that those others you yearn for are blithely inaccessible to all that moves you—what a pain is this!… But yet he was happy. For he lived. His heart was full; hotly and sadly it beat.”

So I turned my sense of shame into “the wonderful and melancholy play of strange forces,” and I took a deep, unkind pleasure in Tonio's description of the people who were more successful in the world than he, though he knew himself to be superior. Of the despised dancing master, Tonio says, “To be able to walk like that, one must be stupid; then one was loved, then one was lovable.”

So I lay in the bright moonlight in my thin pajamas (it was only ten o'clock but I'd taken off my clothes in despair) and thought: Laurel doesn't love me because I am not stupid enough, and to be loved one needs to be stupid, like Dolph.

But soon
Tonio Kröger
failed in its work of consolation. I was not Tonio Kröger. Laurel was not Ingeborg. For one thing, Ingeborg was stupid, as stupid as Hans; her phrases were “commonplace,” her thoughts “indifferent.” And I knew Laurel wasn't; she was the smartest person in our class. It upset me terribly that she planned on studying home economics in college because that was the only thing her father would pay for, the only thing he said it made sense for a girl to study. I had dreams of marrying her the day after graduation, running away and putting both of us through college, waiting tables, working in a factory, anything so she could study whatever she wanted: literature, philosophy. I dreamed of us sitting at our kitchen table, reading the tragedies
of Aeschylus, Shakespeare's sonnets. No, Laurel wasn't Ingeborg. If Laurel didn't want me, there must be some good reason.

It must be because she knew I wasn't Tonio. Tonio despised the dancing master because he loathed dancing, loathed everything about it. And I loved dancing, everything about it. Holding the lovely girls in my arms, the light silkiness of their dresses, the fresh smell of their hair and their skin, moving to the music, singing the words in some girl's ear, or silently, in my own heart. The most wonderful night of my life had been the freshman dance, walking with Laurel through the trellis of artificial roses, dancing under the synthetic moon.

It was true that I had given up going to the dances, but it was also true that what I considered the most wonderful night of my life had happened at a dance, the freshman dance that Laurel and I had been in charge of, the first time we'd danced together, the beginning of what was for me (but not for her) what I believed to be the great love story of my life.

There were four of us on the dance committee, Laurel and I, and Rose Blaine and Tom Nelson. We'd decided what the theme of the dance would be: spring. God, weren't we original! Spring. We planned on setting up trellises in the girls' gym and covering them with paper flowers. We decided to take a look in the school attic to see if anything like trellises might be up there. But what we found was much more wonderful than trellises that could be covered by paper flowers: a sky painted on scrim, clouds and stars on a background of what could only be sky blue. We brought it down to the gym. It stretched from one end of the balcony to the other. Rose Blaine's father was the electrician who was in charge of the lights of the Christmas tree and also the lighting of the little theatre; she talked him into getting involved. He set up two lights behind the scrim. One would revolve and change the shade of the scrim as it revolved so that the sky seemed to be turning from dark to light, and he would get his pal to train a spotlight on a particular couple and follow their progress across the dance floor. And on the night of the dance, Laurel Jansen and I walked through the trellis together.

I knew what the Hauptmanns would say about it, that it was the kind of thing that one had to have risen above, that only the unimaginative
members of the Four Hundred would have fallen for it. But I had fallen for it, would always fall for it; even now I remember it as one of the magic nights of my life. The sky turning, as if we'd captured our own moon, from light gray to pure blue to midnight, and the two beams, one revolving behind the thin cloth, one focusing on the dancers, rendering all the girls magic, beautiful, suggesting that what was between the beautiful girls and the gallant boys was wonderful, and magic, and could only be true love.

And even though I'd given up the dances because I didn't approve of them on ethical grounds, it was a sacrifice. But if I'm really honest, I'd have to say that there was a pleasure in the sacrifice: I knew that Laurel would not go to the dances with me, and going with anyone else was a falling-off from the ideal. My sense of myself as ethically heroic was something of a compensation. But it had been a sacrifice; it had been a loss. The truth was, I loved the dances. I loved to dance.

Tonio Kröger
couldn't help me. Tonio was great, Tonio was an artist. At first, he suggested that he didn't know what he wanted to become. Asked what in the world he meant to become, he gave various answers. He was used to saying—and had even already written the words—that he bore within himself the possibility of a thousand ways of life, together with the private conviction that they were all sheer impossibilities. But really he had always known that he meant to be a writer, an artist. He was perfectly ready to give up everything for art. He loathed the spring because it disentranced him from writing.

I knew I had no idea what I really meant to become. When you were a child, people were always asking, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” But they didn't really want to know, whatever you said was fine with them. A fireman. A policeman. President of the United States. Mostly adults found whatever answer you gave funny. But Tonio Kröger knew he was meant to be a writer: he said he felt it as a curse, but even then I knew that wasn't real. And I knew I had never felt anything like a calling. And I was face-to-face with my own meagerness. I knew that there was nothing in me that was great, and there would never be. I was better at some things than most of the people
around me. A better actor, with a good comic timing and a good voice. But I knew I wasn't a great actor: I knew what a great actor was. Laurence Olivier. I'd seen
Wuthering Heights
six times, because I had a job as an usher in the movie theatre. I'd seen him as romantic Orlando in
As You Like It
and as a cold-blooded spy in
Clouds over Europe.
That was greatness. Thomas Mann had greatness. But all I could say about myself was I was better than some people at some things.

I wondered if I could never be great because I wanted to be happy.

I was sure Thomas Mann didn't want to be happy. Certainly, Tonio didn't. He didn't require to be loved; he was happy to love hopelessly. Happiness is not in being loved—which is a satisfaction of the vanity and mingled with disgust. Happiness is in loving, and perhaps in snatching fugitive little approaches to the beloved object. I wasn't satisfied with fugitive little approaches to the beloved object. I wanted to make love to Laurel Jansen, then to marry her, to have children with her, to live with her forever, to grow old beside her, to die at an advanced age in her arms.

Tonio Kröger didn't even seem to want friends. He called his friends “impious monsters.” I thought of my best friends, Larry Held and Ernie Townsend. We could talk about anything. I could trust them with everything. I could trust them with my life.

And I knew that there were times in my life I had been happy. And that I wanted that as much as possible. I lay in my bed holding
Tonio Kröger
wishing I could think of something better to wish for than happiness. But I could not. And I wondered whether I could never be great because I wanted to be happy or whether I wanted to be happy because I knew I could never be great.

And so a new layer of self-loathing covered the original one, the one whose source was Laurel's rejection. For a moment I could imagine she had rejected me because she knew I was better than Dolph and she preferred stupidity to tenderness. But then I came to believe that she was right to reject me, because I was nothing, not one thing, not the other, not Hans, which was to say not Dolph. Not Tonio. Certainly not Thomas Mann.

Looking at my copy of
Tonio Kröger
, seventy-three years later, I remember the boy lying in his bed in the moonlight, thinking these
young man's thoughts. But more strongly, I remember waking up at midnight and hearing my father and my brother, Sam, in the kitchen. I heard chairs scraping across the wood floor. Then I heard my brother's voice and my father's. It's a strange thing, but you know right away when something terrible has happened. The air changes: it becomes electric, like just before a storm, and both heavier and lighter. But charged with something. Overfull.

I went downstairs to the kitchen. Sam and my father were sitting at the kitchen table. Sam was sitting with his head in his hands. It was hardly credible. My brother was crying. I'd never seen my brother cry. Even as a child, he had refused it.

“You mustn't blame yourself, Son,” my father said. “It was an accident. Nobody could have seen it coming … Nobody would have imagined.”

“But the light, Dad,” I heard my brother say. “The light.”

My father saw me standing in the doorway. I hung back: I thought it was not my business. It was not my world. It was the world of men like Sam and my father, who always knew what to do. I knew something terrible had happened and I knew that they would know what to do. And I would not.

“You've done everything you could,” my father said. Then he pulled up a chair for me. “Have a seat, Bill,” he said. “There's been an accident.”

I had never heard my father's voice like that. Tender, like a woman's. Like my mother's. As if, to tell the terrible story he knew he had to tell, he had taken on my mother's voice. Where was my mother? Away at her sister's for a week of playing bridge. We all knew we needed her; we needed our mother, he needed his wife. But she wasn't here. She couldn't help us.

He told me the story in my mother's voice.

They had planned to do all the driving along the soft berm at the side of the road; it was more than wide enough for the wagon. But there was just one place where the berm wouldn't take them because there was an old store on the side of the road, so the farmer, Mr. Thompson,
drove the tractor pulling the wagon into the road itself. Just to avoid the store. It all happened in a minute, Sam kept saying … less than a minute. A truck came up behind them. It mistook the white lights of the wagon for the lights of the store and so it didn't stop until too late. The driver jammed on his brakes. The truck rammed into the back of the wagon and the people in the front of the wagon couldn't see it coming. The ones on the back of the wagon saw the truck and jumped off in time—“I was one of them,” Sam kept saying. “Dad, it easily could have been me.” But the people in the front couldn't see anything; they didn't have time to jump. Mr. Thompson was killed.

“Betsy Laird died, too,” my father said, and he put his head in his hands so that he and Sam looked like matching statues, facing each other, as if they were at the entrance to something, as if they guarded the space between them, which was nothing but night air and the white deal table.

Nothing of what was happening seemed possible. My brother weeping. My brother and my father sitting with their heads in their hands like each other's reflections. Everyone awake, long after midnight now, the air cool, silky, but heavy with this new wrongness that hung over the white deal table. Betsy Laird dead. The smartest girl I'd known, even smarter than Laurel. A student at Northwestern, not home ec, but literature. Modern poetry. She wanted to be a professor.

One night after a beach picnic, we were all lying around the dunes and she said, “I don't think I'll get married, Billy. Who would have me once they knew what I was really like? And besides I don't see myself doing dishes and changing diapers.”

She'd always talked like that to me, seriously, although most of Sam's friends thought of me as Sam's kid brother. We lay looking at the stars and talked about poetry. About life. She had long tan legs and her hair was a cap of crisp dark curls.

She'd been thrown from the wagon and broken her neck. A broken neck didn't seem like the kind of thing you needed to die from, I thought. “I broke my neck.” It was a statement people used when they were exaggerating something: some difficulty that had nothing to do with death. When you heard the words you didn't think of blood or a
stopped heart. I thought it sounded like something you could get over, if you lay very still, perhaps for a long time. But eventually you'd get over it. Eventually you'd get up again.

But Betsy Laird would not. Betsy Laird was dead. She would not be getting up; she would not be all right. I saw her body, flat, sprawled on the white road in the clear moonlight. I saw that Betsy Laird was dead. She was twenty years old.

I tried to think what was the right thing to be doing now. Should I sit with my father and my brother or should I let them alone? When I was trying to decide, a terrible thought came to me, a thought that I believed was the worst thing I could possibly be thinking. What I was thinking was this: Betsy Laird is dead and I am alive. I am glad to be alive. If I had to choose which of us was to be alive and which was to be dead, I would choose what happened: that Betsy Laird had died and I had lived.

I excused myself and stepped outside into the darkness. I was glad to feel myself shivering. My impulse was to strip off my pajamas and run into the lake, which would be freezing at this hour, at this moment in June. But I knew my father and my brother would think that was ridiculous, embarrassing: it would reinforce everything they thought about me. That I was not the man they were. That I was not quite a man.