The Other Side of the World (29 page)

Six weeks and two days after your first birthday, I received papers from a lawyer, informing me that your mother wanted nothing from me except my agreement to a divorce, and to be able to retrieve some personal possessions. In this, I suppose, her behavior was admirable. If I agreed not to contest the divorce, retained a lawyer of my own, and signed relevant papers, we could take legal and permanent leave of each other within ninety days, with no monies or properties exchanged or owed.

It was done, and the finality of documents and signatures, once processed and approved by a court, went a long way in helping to thicken the heavy, sooty fog in which I lived.

Holden Caulfield—a character I was somewhat alone at that time in not finding worthy of the loving attention he received (he seemed merely a somewhat confused
shlemiel
of a preppy to me, without, other than his sentimental love for his lost family, any significant redeeming qualities)—did come to mind whenever I thought I was ready to do the deed, for I kept thinking of what he said when he contemplated jumping from a window, and how he would have done it if not for the thought of all the strangers who would come around afterwards to gawk at his corpse.

I had similar inhibitions: not merely, What will people—strangers!—think?—but, What would
she
think?—and when the latter thought arrived, it served mainly to enhance my insecurity and immobility, sorry soul that I was, and to convince me she'd been right to ditch and humiliate me.

Still there was the blackness in which I lived, Charlie, and it was terribly real and dark, and no matter what words I or anyone put on it, let me tell you: there is nothing as awful as feeling so deeply sad that to leave the world seems not only, in prospect, a relief, but
just
! How much better life would be for everyone else were I gone! What a gift to the world my absence would be! But if I did it solo, I feared, she would get you, or, if she demurred re motherhood, the courts would get you, and such thoughts also held me back.

And there was also time—the passage of time, more exactly. At some point in the thirteenth month of my sorrows, the beast inside mind and body seemed to be tiring of me (out of boredom, I hypothesized), and I noticed, too, that I was taking occasional pleasure from simple things—eating, sleeping, holding your hand on walks, watching you eat, or sleep, or play with your toy cars and building blocks—and I began to have a distaste, not for bourbon—never, never, never—but for the foggy dizziness it induced. Then you fell.

I was, as usual, moderately sloshed, and it was your bedtime, and I had a stack of papers to grade, a few rolled and tucked snugly under my left arm, and I was very upset with you because you'd soiled yourself. Why? Why were you doing this to me? You'd been toilet-trained for six or seven weeks (precocious as ever, you had accomplished this feat a full four months before your second birthday), we'd both taken pride in the achievement, and you'd graduated from your crib to a bed—the top half of the old hi-riser that had served as
my
childhood bed in Brooklyn. Why
now
? Had I not been paying you enough attention? Were you angry with me? Were you missing your mother, or one of our babysitters (you'd taken an especial shine to a vixenish young woman named Robyn Hayes Henderson, who, by infiltrating your affections, was determined to have your father infiltrate her moist, secret places), or…

Who knew? What I do know is that when I smelled the
presence of the foul deed, and asked if you had done it, I was already too angry for anyone's good, and when you grinned with what seemed a fiendish look of feigned innocence, and said, ‘I don't
know
, Daddy,' I lost it.

So I did what I did sometimes: I let loose with words as if I were battering a punching bag with them—
How many times have I told you this or that
, and
What's the matter with you
,
you un grateful little schmuck
, and
When the fuck are you going to grow up
, and
I have no patience left for you
,
you bird-brained momzer
, and additional choice and self-pitying gabble about having to do everything, everything, everything by myself.
Give me a break
,
you little shit-head
,
you and your shit-filled pants!
I screamed.
Just give me a fucking break
,
you stupid lump of clumped
,
rotten turds!
In my fury, and without at first letting go of the student papers, I grabbed you—
snatched
you—and carried you in the crook of my right arm up the stairs and into your room, where I tried to hoist you up onto the changing table. But the flight of stairs had made the bourbon produce a major shimmer of nausea—
Hey
, I wanted to shout to the world:
Look at the noble
,
dead-drunk dumb daddy doing his goddamned dumb daddy thing!
—and as I lifted you with the intent of slamming you down on the table—smashing you!—you slipped out of my grasp, and for an instant, as in the memory of car crashes, all went into sickly slow motion: I saw you falling, and I saw that your head had turned upside down, and that the exposed and sharp iron corner of your bed was in perfect position to receive your skull—and yet you smiled at me with the most loving, trusting smile I had ever seen or ever expect to see again.

You showed no fear, Charlie. You seemed to believe that if I were taking care of you, no harm could come your way. How ever, ever forget your sublime calm—the loving trust in your eyes?

I dropped the student papers, scooped you up before you hit the bed's flanged corner (‘A fumble recovered, folks!' I heard an announcer proclaim), cleaned you up, and dressed you in
freshly laundered pajamas. ‘Sorry, Daddy,' you said and, when you noticed the glimmering film in my eyes, you asked if I'd hurt myself.

‘Not at all,' I said. ‘Not at all.'

I stopped drinking the next morning. The glooms retreated, defeated by your trust in me, which was, in that moment, certainly greater than
my
trust in me. Three weeks later, I received galleys for
Prizefighter
, and you and I celebrated by driving to Maine for lunch (clam rolls became your favorite food well into your teens). I waded into revisions with gusto, and within a year I married again—Inez Palenco, a sweet, bright woman four years younger than I (a social worker at an agency in Holyoke, a competent oboist, and a master gardener), whom you may remember only through photos, for within seventeen months of our marriage (we went to Glacier National Park, we three, for a ten-day honeymoon), she was done in by that cunning variety of breast cancer that can sneak in and take over between regular check-ups.

Somehow you grew up, went to school, graduated, and set off to seek your fortune, and what I have since thought of as ‘The Great Glooms' never returned with any marked force, though I feared their return, as now, every day when I woke and every night before I slept—and you turned into as fine a son as any man might be lucky enough to have.

Let me note something else that contributed to the fading away of my missing year, and I note it not to deprive you of credit for having helped me—us!—come to a better place, but to put what happened, and how it happened, into a somewhat larger context. I had, perhaps a year before the night on which you fell, come under the spell of Primo Levi, who, as man and writer, had become my hero. As you know (how proud I was when you chose several of his books, beginning with
If This Is A Man
, for book reports in high school), he wrote about his experiences in Auschwitz and journey home from Auschwitz,
but also about myriad other matters: his career as a chemist, his family, other people's vocations, his friendships, his beloved city of Turin.

It has occurred to me of late—when I have, happily, been able to give freer rein to my ruminative disposition—that the slight lessening of depressive pain I began to experience may have come from reading, not about Levi's life as victim, survivor, and witness, but about his views on suicide, along with what in him is so life-affirming (to use an apt if banal phrase): his fierce ability to see the differences in other people—their particularities and idiosyncrasies—in a time when they were put to death because they were judged, as Jews, to be
no
different, one from the other.

Though, of course, they were also exterminated because they were just that:
other
. We always fear, and despise, whatever we perceive as different from who we are, and in this, he has explained, we are not that different from animals, who are much more intolerant of members of their own species than they are of those of other species. Thus, anti-Semitism, he has suggested, is simply a horrific example of a more general phenomenon.

But suicide—what about suicide? There were, I was surprised to learn from Levi, few suicides in the camps—and generally, Levi notes, fewer suicides in wartime than in times of peace. His reasoning as to why this was so appears in a self-interview that I came across a few evenings before the night on which you fell, and long before—inexplicable, profoundly disturbing mystery!—
he
fell down a stairwell in a self-willed act I trust neither of us will emulate—one that ended his life in the place he loved: the house in which he'd been born and, before and after Auschwitz, had lived.

Yet some years before this, Levi wrote that he considered suicide a distinctively human act (we had never seen evidence that animals committed suicide), and that because, in the camps, human beings, both victims and oppressors, tended more
toward the level of animals—of
animality
—it was the business of the day—essentials—that ruled: what you were going to eat and if you were going to eat, how cold it would be, what you would wear against the cold, how heavy was the work and of what kind, et cetera. In short: you thought, if ‘thought' is the right word, of how you were going to make it through the day and into the evening and through the night. There was, simply, no time to think about killing yourself.

So I became busy. I began exercising regularly. I began preparing, in earnest, for the book I would write about Henry James as Irishman; I began making notes for new stories and novels; I began planting a garden, and learning carpentry; I began seeking out women who would make suitable helpmates for me, and loving (step-)mothers for you. I began cooking meals regularly, breakfast and dinner, and planning vacations, and asking my department chair if I could teach new courses that would require I put myself to school in the work of authors (Cather, Wharton, Howells, Dos Passos, Beckett) with whom I had, until then, only cursory acquaintance. I took tennis lessons, joined a co-ed softball team, took a course in auto repair, and searched out (in vain for the most part) lost cousins, aunts, and uncles. I painted rooms, repaired furniture, built bookcases, created file systems, learned to do my own taxes, and to play the piano.

Not all at once, of course, and after a while—when the demon of depression seemed to have increasing difficulty finding his way back into my daily life, I began to let some of the new activities fall away. But this happened over the course of several years, and I mark what has, until this moment, been its
definitive
departure (though daily wariness remains), from the third month of my third marriage—to Janice Fullerton, whom you will recall as perhaps the most animated and lively of my wives, though herself—the aphrodisiacal cue and clue to my infatuation and our romance?—a lifelong victim of depression, which, in the glory
days of falling in love, departed, only to return when a bit of the bloom, as was inevitable, began to wear off the rose of our bliss.

Janice never became suicidal—her condition was more like a ground bass, or low-grade hum—a Baroque ostinato I came to think I could actually
hear
, and some twenty-one months after our wedding, she left us, saying it was simply not
fair
—not fair!—can you
imagine
?—that it was not
fair
for anyone to have to live with someone so plagued with sadness, and with such labile changes of mood. (Why, she would write in a note a month or two later, should we have to live and ride on the nauseating sine-curve of
her
feelings?)

I tried to talk her out of leaving (I truly loved her, as, in fact, I loved
all
my wives, along with a good number of my girlfriends; my capacity for falling in love, and staying in love, being one of my more consistent capabilities), and with medications (not then as effective as they are said to be now), and some psychotherapy, she did return to her happier and more stable self for a while. Her will to be a miserable, unloved, unworthy, abandoned child, however, proved ultimately stronger than medications, therapy, or us. In the cartons of correspondence that Seana has acquired, you will, if interested, find some four to five dozen letters from Janice. She never married again, never had children, and always inquired about you, Charlie. I believe she missed you more than she missed me, the fact that you were and were not her (only) son creating complex, and somewhat anguished attachments, not to you—no guilt, Charlie, please, please!—but to parts of her earlier life that held a power over her against which all efforts, ours included—tolerant and loving though we both were—proved helpless.

But to the end of ending this meditation, let me return to what made the difference: to Primo Levi's life and to his thoughts about suicide, and thus to your life—to what I saw in your eyes, and believe I sensed of your happy prospects on the night of your fall.

I had, then as now, the highest hopes for you, Charlie, and I trust you won't confuse these hopes for expectations. Of the latter, I have none. Let me explain: When I first read
Triangle
, brilliant and wonderful as I found it, what was
most
wonderful (Mister James my guide yet again) was the mind of the writer writing it. For no matter its faults, and this goes for
Plain Jane
as well, what shone through was the presence of a unique, supremely intelligent mind—an idiosyncratic voice and shrewd sensibility informing a well(-enough) made tale.