Wonderland (39 page)

Carla chattered about the movie, but Jesse remembered only looming men, expressionless men, vast colored skies and horizons, the promise of eternal desert, mountains that looked like perfunctory limitations of the earth, the earth as it is imagined, needing an end. He remembered the disturbing thud of horses’ hoofs and the monumental thud of stampeding cattle. Forces pounding in one direction and then back in the other. Back and forth. A tornado of the mind. A spiral dipping out of the sky. It was the Old Testament, all that activity! And he was absurdly, abruptly grateful for the movies, which he saw so rarely,
for their progress in patches and spurts, not as a coherent story but as the jagged bits of a story that never quite added itself up to anything believable. Years ago, his freshman English instructor at the university had told him there was something odd about his understanding of literature—he was unable to follow a plot. He was unable to see the careful evolution of a story. The necessary pattern, the rhythm that demanded completion, the internal heat, the gravity that forced everything to a suitable conclusion … what did all these things mean? He had not understood, though he had tried. But in the end he did not know what a “story” was. He had the idea that what people thought were stories were fragments from shattered wholes, the patterns, the brain waves, of a certain man at a certain time in his life, the record of his controlled and uncontrolled inner life: therefore all writing was autobiography, wasn’t it? His instructor, an earnest young New Yorker, had tried to explain what was wrong with Jesse’s ideas. Or his temperament, maybe; he didn’t have a “literary temperament.” But Jesse still believed that all writing was factual and true, as part of a shattered whole that could not be put back together again but must be experienced only in parts, and yet was not “believable” in the way his medical texts were believable. You lived it but you could not believe it.

He was struck by a sense of shyness as he entered the Cadys’ apartment building. It was fairly small, four stories high, made of stone that was weathered and stained, covered partly with ivy, with the appearance of an old church. Shadows everywhere in the foyer—a still, moist air that had the quality of secrecy, sternness; an elevator with an elaborate iron grillwork that put Jesse dizzily in mind of a fortress. There was a stern, secretive spirit here and a variety of styles—the curlicues of the grillwork, brass knobs, small heraldic beasts at the molding, nearly lost in shadow and dust, an aged but very respectable wallpaper that showed silvery leaflike designs, absolutely flat, motionless, unlike the turbulent screen of the movie house Jesse had just been in. Carla tugged at his arm and whined about going home—wasn’t it time to go home? What were they doing here?

The Cadys’ apartment was on the first floor, so he did not have to take the elevator. Carla would probably have refused to get into it. He found the door without any trouble, bent to spruce up Carla, hid his own nervousness. He rang the doorbell and Cady’s daughter answered
the door almost immediately. It happened so quickly that Jesse was not prepared to speak.

“Is Dr. Cady—?”

“He isn’t home right now.”

“Oh … he isn’t home?”

She did not reply, looking from him to Carla and back again.

“When do you think he’ll be home?”

“I don’t know.”

Jesse smiled nervously. “I wanted to say good-by before he left.… I wanted … this is a little friend of mine, Carla Spewak. You probably don’t remember me … my name is Jesse Vogel.…”

She nodded, but so quickly and vaguely that Jesse could not tell if she had remembered. His face went hot with disappointment.

“Yes, I’ll tell Father you stopped by.”

“I’m sorry to disturb you.”

“It’s all right.”

“Was I disturbing you …? Are you busy? I wonder if I could talk to you for a minute,” Jesse said.

She hesitated.

Now Jesse knew why he had brought Carla along.

“I don’t want to take up your time, but I’d like to talk to you for a minute,” Jesse said.

Cady’s daughter did not quite meet his eye. The skin of her forehead seemed to tighten, as if with dread or expectation; Jesse found himself staring at the dead-white part in the center of her head. Her black hair had been brushed back on either side of this part, starkly and smoothly, but in front of her ears there were filmy tendrils of hair, not thick enough to be curls. Her face was pale and clear—no makeup, no lipstick. A face denuded of guile, no tricks there, no bright false surges of enthusiasm of the kind he got from other girls and that had disturbed him so in Anne-Marie. He wanted only the truth from women. He wanted their true faces. He did not care about beauty, Jesse told himself as he stared at this young woman, who was not beautiful but who seemed to him stronger and more valuable because she was not beautiful and possessed instead that stern, doubtful face.…

She smiled suddenly. A courteous smile, exactly like her father’s. “Yes, please come in. Father will probably be home soon.” She led
them inside and Jesse was pleased with the sparseness, cleanness—furniture that was well-worn, an oval table with a scalloped tablecloth draped over it, a gleaming white bowl that was empty of fruit or decoration, lamps that looked squat and old-fashioned and hunched, shades that were a little yellowed. His eye jumped at once to a photograph in a dark metal frame, set on a table—he saw Cady in a group of men, standing in what appeared to be a garden. He bent to look at it.
Stockholm, 1947
.

“Your father—Dr. Cady—that was when he won the Nobel Prize?” Jesse stammered.

He felt giddy with the fact of being here, standing here.

Helene Cady seemed about to say something, then hesitated. Perhaps she sensed Jesse’s agitation. She met his gaze a little from the side, so that he saw her dark, still eyes across the slender side of her cheek, and something moved in him: he would love this woman.

Later, he would recall Carla Spewak as if she had been their first daughter. Their most basic and helpless child, a complaining, sickly, precociously troubled little girl, whose eyes had begun to water in the first five minutes of their visit—set off by a frayed black fur thrown across one of the sofas. So much would come of this visit that it was necessary to believe a great deal had gone into it—more than his straying desires, ripened by the late, warm spring, or his vexing recollection of Anne-Marie, Anne-Marie’s body, or the odd half-recalled tale of Trick’s about a woman in a riding outfit who carried a small velvet-handled whip, searching for lovers along a Minnesota highway. What could he bring to Helene, directly to her, unflinching and unashamed, except the keenness of his respect for her, his envy of her still, intelligent, listening body?

A clear, sun-splotched day. The mist of early morning had burned off, the sky was enormous, they were driving along a country road that dipped and seemed to bounce around curves, as if any surprise might be waiting for them. The road was empty all the way. Jesse sat between
Trick and Helene, his hand clasped around Helene’s, and beyond their casual conversation—Trick was talking about his plans for next year, his internship at Massachusetts General, where he would study with Francis Ehrlich in psychiatric medicine—Jesse felt the pull of the distance, the cultivated Michigan hills. Running right up to the road was a field of new corn, hardly a foot high. Air swam through it, silent ripples; it looked as if it were being stroked by an invisible hand. Jesse felt caressed by that same wind, able to pay only slight attention to Trick’s voice.

His fingers moved restlessly over the ring on Helene’s finger.

He had borrowed money from Trick in order to buy Helene an engagement ring—a ring with a small diamond, a plain band and setting. He was proud of it. He was proud of Helene’s obvious happiness in wearing it. His eye involuntarily always sought out this ring on her finger, anxious to see if she was still promised to him, if he had not been mistaken. At times he lay awake, sleepless, and it seemed incredible to him that they would really be married—he would really marry Helene Cady? He would become a married man, she would become his wife?… In her shyness she was eager to please him, already wifely and observant. She had learned quickly from him the affectionate camaraderie of this kind of heady, intimate friendship; Jesse had found in himself an ability to guide both himself and her, refusing to be self-conscious or embarrassed, refusing to give in to his perpetual sense of unworthiness. He must hide that from her. He had never been friendly with Anne-Marie, not really. They had been lovers and nothing more. If they had seemed to talk of other things, it was really love they were talking about—Jesse eager, keyed up, jealous of her attention and her beauty, untrusting—though they had never been frank enough to use the vocabulary of love. With Helene, Jesse kept thinking of the rightness of their marriage. He kept thinking of Anne-Marie’s limitations. She had been able to respond to him only as a pretty woman, always conscious of her prettiness, conscious of Jesse as a young man who desired her, the two of them walking parallel in these roles as if on railroad tracks that would never meet … and so he had never felt any friendship for her, he had never trusted her the way he trusted Helene. He had never been friendly with any girl before Helene.
Not even Hilda Pedersen
. His “sister.” No, he had never been friendly with any girl, and he had to invent the casualness with which he greeted Helene each
time they met, as if he felt no apprehension of losing her or of somehow violating the affection she felt for him. It was all so precarious, this business of trading in emotions—exactly what was love, what was it? Could it be depended upon?

He loved Helene.

He loved her, yes. He wanted to talk to her, to bring to her bizarre and random questions about life; he wanted to talk to her about oddities, promises, incidents, newspaper items, the gossip of his rooming house, the weather, anything. He wanted to confer with her about the handling of each day. This must have meant, Jesse believed, that he was now truly in love; he did not feel combative or anxious in her presence. He was not driven by a desperate lust to bury himself in her body.

They planned to marry when Jesse completed his intern year, the following July.

On this day Trick had invited them for a drive in the country. He was very surprised and pleased about the engagement, he told them repeatedly—he had never guessed the two of them were even seeing each other. How strange, how surprising.… Trick had looked stunned when Jesse told him, but in the next instant he had smiled a quick, courteous, rather paternal smile, congratulating Jesse. He had met Helene a few times. After Jesse told him about the engagement, as the weeks passed, Trick began to allude familiarly to it, smilingly, enthusiastically, as if he had really meant to bring the two of them together all along. “I had it in mind, I really did. She’s a remarkable young woman—very intelligent—just right for you. A very intelligent woman,” Trick told Jesse repeatedly. Jesse searched his face for a flash of cynicism, but Trick was sincere. He spoke rapidly, in a flat, earnest voice.
She is just right for you. Just right
.

In front of Helene, Trick praised Jesse in the same earnest voice. It ran on and on, flattened, a little dead, the voice of a clown who is forced to be serious. “Jesse works harder than anyone I know. He’s totally dedicated. Almost possessed. It’s a gift of his, being able to work so hard. Your father told me he thinks Jesse has a brilliant career ahead of him in anything, anything he wants to do … he has to be careful not to waste himself.…” They were pushing him toward research, pure research. Jesse was uneasily flattered by Cady’s suggestions: he could get a postdoctoral grant at Harvard and work with Cady himself. Or he could get a similar grant somewhere else and work with a friend of
Cady’s, another prominent man. Jesse tried to explain that he was interested in clinical work. He wanted to work with people. He talked over his plans with Trick, with Helene, and one long evening with Cady himself, when Helene had made dinner for the three of them. The food on Jesse’s plate had cooled, turned unappetizing, as they talked. Jesse’s forehead crinkled with the flood of advice, suggestions, his own need to decide while everyone told him kindly not to make any decision now, to take his time. Cady was generous. He said gently to Jesse, “I see in you a genuine liking for people, maybe even a need for people. You want to feel your way along by gauging other people’s opinions of you, their satisfaction with you, and this seems easiest in terms of patients. The sick are always hopeful and always grateful. They are always immediate. They are very real. I can understand your interest in that kind of medicine.… But research is also a matter of other people. These people are not physically available to you but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. They exist in great numbers, a multiplication of the people you would ever actually help in medical practice. After all, Jesse, a man doesn’t exist simply in his skin, so that we must go around touching everyone!… And then you will have a certain relationship with your colleagues, even those who are in other parts of the world. You will be communicating with them constantly. And this is ultimately what is most satisfying about research. What you achieve—the progress you make—will enable thousands of other doctors to treat the sick, it will multiply you by thousands, you yourself multiplied by thousands, even millions.… You must think of that, Jesse; always keep that in mind!”