The Storm at the Door (22 page)

I know
, Canon says.
I know. But I don’t see why it necessarily has to change anything. I mean this, thing, we have
.

Not that
, Rita says.
Something else
.

As she explains what has happened, Canon sees Rita through a strange lens, the way certain moments, such as Marvin Foulds’s face the other night, can appear as if photographed, as if Canon is a small boy glimpsing a picture book depicting his potential future. She is beautiful, in this heightened moment.
They need you
, she says.

It’s only been two days
, she continues,
and look what’s happened
.

This loss, this fading, can be overcome. But first he must identify the source of the bleeding, before he can stanch the loss of passion. Being discovered by Frederick is only an obstacle; the
true loss comes from some other place. A place that remains maddeningly obscure.

And I need you
, Canon says.

Rita herself cannot name her reasons. For the hospital? For Canon’s sake? For love? She surprises, sickens, enlivens herself as she takes Canon’s hand and gives it a quick pump with her fingers.

From his pocket, he removes a crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes. In his abject state, he bought it just this morning and there are only two left now. His wife despises his smoking. Canon lights up and the warm vapors rattle his lungs; his tongue tastes the slow exhalation.

All right, all right
, he whispers.
Tomorrow. I’ll be back tomorrow
.

Already, in his mind, Canon anxiously revises his protocols.

When occasionally Schultz does sleep, his dreams are still in a postlapsarian tongue, the Yiddish of his youth. His dreamworld is never a purgatory. Either his dreams are heaven or they are hell.

Schultz and Irit had escaped the war, just barely. They had escaped the horrors of which others had told them, horrors that seemed impossible to believe, until all reports continued to confirm them. On the first day in that comfy Cambridge apartment bestowed by Harvard, Schultz woke in bright sunlight, his wife sleeping beside him. Her belly had just begun to convex with
their son. Since the start of her pregnancy, she had lost control of her gases. And that first Cambridge morning, she awoke with a fart. He laughed to himself as she darted upright at the rupture.
It’s nothing
, he told her in Yiddish,
just bad dreams
. She scrutinized the new foreign apartment, and then reclined into the sunlight. She smiled, kissed his hand, and said,
The light comes in nicely here
. Schultz pressed himself to her, and, over the next hour, they made love.

Presently, in his fit of sleep in the starched sheets of his bed at the Mayflower Home, Schultz is making love to his wife in the safe, sunny room, the war distant and impossible, the future, their family, growing between the friction of their bodies. This is heaven.

And then there is hell, but it does not at first present itself that way. In the radiant postcoital glow, Schultz and Irit go out into the day. Outside the sunny cocoon, however, is not the new strange city of Boston, but the town that Harvard paid for them to flee, their childhood town of Bolbirosok in the time before the war. They pass the familiar faces: Kogen, the Mohel. The grocer, Shmuel Block. Menachem Mendelsohn, Irit’s father. Irit and Schultz wave to each, on their way to Hadassah’s Cafe for a breakfast. They are contented and oblivious; there is so much beauty to receive this morning that they do not need to make conversation. But. Schultz looks more closely at those familiar faces and bodies, and discovers each is wounded.

At first they appear as only small red risings, bug bites, pimples at the worst: on Kogen’s hands, on Block’s cheeks. A pinprick of blood on the shirt of Reb Mendelsohn. As Schultz and Irit continue toward the diner, Schultz watches their wounds expand and multiply, like a slow-motion film of the people of Bolbirosok riddled with invisible bullets. All those faces, the
faces of his childhood, each looking to Schultz for help. But Schultz is distracted by his wife’s hand, tugging at his with her own urgency, and he turns away from the people of Bolbirosok just as they succumb to their wounds, falling one by one.

This is a dream version of how Schultz has imagined it, how he has tried to stop himself from imagining it, every day, ever since. All those bodies, all those faces, opened with death.

On the strength of his scholarship, the linguistics department of Harvard had arranged an exit permit for Schultz and his wife through the University of Vilnius just as such papers had become nearly impossible to obtain, even with money. There had been a great debate; at first Schultz and Irit had refused, but the people of Bolbirosok—Irit’s parents most stridently—had argued that their refusal of the offer would not only be stupid but be a great disrespect to the others, who could only dream of such an escape.

If you stay
, Irit’s father told the couple,
you will no longer be a part of this family
.

And so they left. They left, but always planned to return. They always planned to return when things got better, but they only got worse, and then worse still. Soon, their letters seemed no longer to reach Bolbirosok.

A small community of Jewish exiles in Cambridge shared hopeful stories of buying family members’ passage to America, but there was no way now to send money. The only way, the others agreed, was to go there with tremendous sums and determination, and hope for the best. And so this was what Schultz resolved to do, returning to Bolbirosok to rescue one generation of Irit’s family, as Irit remained in America, to birth another.

Maybe it was the tension, or maybe it was pure chance. One morning, just two weeks before Schultz was to leave, Irit found
her husband in the alleyway behind the house, carrying on a conversation with the dumpster rats. Under advice from the Harvard counselors, Irit drove her husband to Mayflower. And then, during the week of observation his doctor recommended, she left. Irit simply took her husband’s place in his plans. Without a word to Schultz, Irit left, knowing that her husband needed the help of these doctors, and that he would never allow her to go on her own. She left for Bolbirosok, her suitcase heavy with a loaned fortune in German currency, the kind that still had value.

When Schultz eventually, briefly emerged from Mayflower, it was all over. There was no credible news, no correspondence for months and then for years, until it was clear what had happened.

As before, as with the death of his parents, all objects again began to speak more loudly with their compensatory words. A sonic landscape that Schultz could no longer pretend to ignore. Schultz’s colleagues at Harvard soon returned him to Mayflower. He hasn’t left since.

There is something wrong with my head
, Irit says in Yiddish, in Schultz’s dream.
I don’t feel so good
.

Now Schultz sees the lesion rising, right in the center of his wife’s brow. It opens rapidly, already revealing skull and brain, but Irit doesn’t seem yet to understand the severity.

Maybe I should see a doctor
.

No, no
, Schultz says, and still the hole expands, cleaving her brain.

She is trying to speak Yiddish still, but as the lobes of her brain separate, she slurs, producing other sounds that are perhaps related to the language that has obsessed Schultz. But Schultz cannot focus on what she is saying, cannot pause to consider her words. The hole grows still, burrowing straight through her
brain, and now he can see to her skull’s far wall. Irit has begun to convulse; her face is fearful, and soon she will collapse. Schultz reaches out to his wife, as if his hands pressed to her can slow the spread of her wounds, but she is just beyond his reach. He tries to get closer to her, to run to her, but his distance increases with his effort to reach her. He lunges, but now she is so far away, her face barely legible, the hole now tunneled straight through, allowing a gap of light in the center of her forehead, like a literal version of what a Hindu’s red dot signifies.

I’m scared
, she says, just before Schultz wakes with a start in the starchy friction of his hospital sheets. Schultz vows again to stay awake as long as he possibly can.

You and the girls are all that ever could keep me in some semblance of a normal state
, my grandfather writes in another faltering attempt at a letter to his wife.
Without you now, I either harden into ice, or else I turn to vapors
.

Vapors
, Frederick thinks. It is like that now, his awareness diffuse. Or maybe more like radiation, some charge thrown off by solar flares. He knows he has felt this way before, many times, but its familiarity never comforts him. Charge after charge: he cannot quite discern if he is excited or terrified. He thinks of hoboes wandering Boston Common, raving with Jerusalem syndrome. He rises from his bed, leaves the room, and paces the hall, but his bodily motion only adds to the energy, each step another
push to the swinging of his mind, which seems about to vault the top bar. He puts one hand to his heart, to measure its pace.
Katharine
. He wants only to hold himself to her. He wants to clutch on to her, as he has before, to keep from floating away into that peripheral place. That place of near visions and half-whispers that he sometimes receives.

The silence of the hall seems somehow louder now, as if the walls were thrumming with an obscure power. Frederick wonders about the private sounds that obsess his roommate.

Dinner comes and goes, and then more pills. Now that he is in bed again, the Miltown has begun to obscure his thoughts, and Frederick writes a simple memory:

Citing his unceasing restlessness, Frederick asks for a second dose of Miltown, which the Crew Crew boy grants him. He lies in bed for an hour or two, trying to will the tranquilizer, a blackness gathering at the base of his stifling atmosphere, to accumulate
into the pure darkness of medicated sleep. But another half hour passes, and still Frederick is restless, still there is that dreadful imminence. Frederick interrupts Schultz from his notations and asks for a couple pills from the desk leg stash.

Be my guest
, Schultz replies.
But you know how these things muddy the brain
.

Frederick gratefully swallows three, then four, and finally he finds himself on the other side of brief sleep—or, more accurately,
unconsciousness
—waking in his bed in the late evening, the sky outside the same blue-black as the crows that maunder there. He sits up in his bed as a boy opens the door,
checks
, and closes it again.

Frederick waits for that foreboding to reassemble with his wakefulness. But minutes pass, and there is nothing. The luminous sheen of things has dulled away. Now there is only the starched sheets, the scratching of his roommate’s pencil, a boy making his inspections, the cinder-block walls housing the meaningless fact of Frederick. When it switches, it can switch this quickly.

Frederick—so often contemptuous of the doctors and their vague diagnoses—allows himself some comfort in the term they have given to his condition.
Manic depression
, he thinks,
this is what it means
. The chemicals in his brain go one way, and then they shift and go the other. Only, just now, it does not feel like science. It feels, in this moment, like a dark revelation. Frederick knows he has deluded himself, just as people everywhere allow themselves their fantasies. Frederick’s enthusiasms, his notions, his writings have all been only noise to cover this. But now he will be strong enough to see things clearly, as they are. My grandfather will look straight into the darkness, even if it only continues to expand, even if it blots away everything else.

There is no more money, Katharine
.

In the silence that follows this proclamation, Katharine pictures her father as he is now: in his house by the ocean, watching the fog roll in over his cabana down on the beach at the base of the hill. His biggest problem, his daughter’s mad husband aside, is where to acquire the evening’s lobster. And there she is, a woman alone in a clapboard house, on the far side of Mount Washington, winter beginning to make itself known, ice-glazed pinecones strafing the windows. She has carried the phone to the kitchen table, the veneer of which is balding from her work, the central office of the enterprise of trying to hold her family together. My mother and her sisters have left for school, and so my grandmother has resumed the business she still tries, as best she can, to make invisible to her daughters.