The Ghost Writer (15 page)

On the ride back to the Berkshires, while Amy told him what it had been like for her during the years when she was being read in twenty different languages by twenty million people, he made plans to consult Dr. Boyce. Boyce was at Riggs, the Stock-bridge psychiatric hospital. Whenever a new book appeared, Dr. Boyce would send a charming note asking the author if he would kindly sign the doctor’s copy, and once a year the Lonoffs were invited to the Boyces’ big barbecue. At Dr. Boyce’s request, Lonoff once reluctantly consented to meet with a staff study group from the hospital to discuss “the creative personality.” He didn’t want to offend the psychiatrist, and it might for a while pacify his wife, who liked to believe that if he got out and mixed more with people things would be better at home.

The study group turned out to have ideas about writing that were too imaginative for his taste, but he made no effort to tell them they were wrong. Nor did he think that he was necessarily right. They saw it their way, he saw it like Lonoff. Period. He had no desire to change anyone’s mind. Fiction made people say all kinds of strange things—so be it.

The meeting with the psychiatrists had been underway for only an hour when Lonoff said it had been an enjoyable evening but he had to be getting home. “I have the evening’s reading still ahead of me. Without my reading I’m not myself. However, you must feel free to talk about my personality when I’m gone.” Boyce, smiling warmly, replied, “I hope we’ve amused you at least a little with our naive speculations.”

“I would have liked to amuse you. I apologize for being boring.”

“No, no,” said Boyce, “passivity in a man of stature has a charm and mystery all its own.”

“Yes?” said Lonoff. “I must tell my wife.”

But an hour wasted some five years ago was hardly to the point. He trusted Boyce and knew that the psychiatrist would not betray his confidence when he went the next day to talk with him about his former student and quasi-daughter, a young woman of twenty-six, who had disclosed to him that of ail the Jewish writers, from Franz Kafka to E. I. Lonoff, she was the most famous. As for his own betrayal of the quasi-daughter’s confidence, it did not count for much as Amy elaborated further upon her consuming delusion.

“Do you know why I took this sweet name? It wasn’t to protect me. from my memories. I wasn’t hiding the past from myself or myself from the past. I was hiding from hatred, from hating people the way people hate spiders and rats. Manny, I felt flayed. I felt as though the skin had been peeled away from half my body. Half my face had been peeled away, and everybody would stare in horror for the rest of my life. Or they would stare at the other half, at the half still intact; I could see them smiling, pretending that the flayed half wasn’t there, and talking to the half that was. And I could hear myself screaming at them, I could see myself thrusting my hideous side right up into their unmarred faces to make them properly horrified. ‘I was pretty! I was whole! I was a sunny, lively little girl! Look, look at what they did to me!’ But whatever side they looked at, I would always be screaming, ‘Look at the other! Why don’t you look at the other!’ That’s what I thought about in the hospital at night. However they look at me, however they talk to me, however they try to comfort me, I will always be this half-flayed thing. I will never be young, I will never be kind or at peace or in love, and 1 will hate them all my life.

“So I took the sweet name—to impersonate everything that I wasn’t. And a very good pretender I was, too. After a while I could imagine that I wasn’t pretending at all, that I had become what I would have been anyway. Until the book. The package came from Amsterdam, I opened it, and there it was: my past, myself, my name,
my
face intact
—and all I wanted was revenge. It wasn’t for the dead—it had nothing to do with bringing back |the dead or scourging the living. It wasn’t corpses I was avenging—it was the motherless, fatherless, sisterless, venge-filled, hate-filled, shame-filled, half-flayed, seething thing. It myself. I wanted tears, I wanted their Christian tears to run like Jewish blood, for me. I wanted their pity—and in the most pitiless way. And I wanted love, to be loved mercilessly and endlessly, just the way I’d been debased. I wanted my fresh life and my fresh body, cleansed and unpolluted. And it needed twenty million people for that. Twenty million ten times over.

“Oh, Manny, I want to live with you! That’s what I need! The millions won’t do it—it’s you! I want to go home to Europe with you. Listen to me, don’t say no, not yet. This summer I saw a small house for rent, a stone villa up on a hillside. It was outside Florence. It had a pink tile roof and a garden. I got the phone number and I wrote it down. I still have it. Oh, everything beautiful that I saw in Italy made me mink of how happy you could be there—now happy I would be there, looking after you. I thought of the trips we’d take. I thought of the afternoons in the museums and haying coffee later by the river. I thought of listening to music together at night. I thought of making your meals. I thought of wearing lovely nightgowns to bed. Oh, Manny, their Anne Frank is theirs; I want to be your Anne Frank. I’d like at last to be my own. Child Martyr and Holy Saint isn’t a position I’m really qualified for any more. They wouldn’t even have me, not as I am, longing for somebody else’s husband, begging him to leave his loyal wife to run off with a girl half his age. Manny, does it matter that I’m your daughter’s age and you’re my father’s? Of course I love the Dad-da in you, how could I not? And if you love the child in me, why shouldn’t you? There’s nothing strange in that—so does half the world. Love has to start somewhere, and that’s where it starts in us. And as for who I am—well,” said Amy, in a voice as sweet and winning as any he’d ever heard, “you’ve got to be somebody, don’t you? There’s no way around that.”

At home they put her to bed. In the kitchen Lonoff sat with his wife drinking the coffee she’d made him. Every time he pictured Amy at the dentist’s office reading about Otto Frank in
Time
magazine, or in the library stacks searching for her “real” name, every time he imagined her on Boston Common addressing to her writing teacher an intimate disquisition on “her” book, he wanted to let go and cry. He had never suffered so over the suffering of another human being.

Of course he told Hope nothing about who Amy thought she was. But he didn’t have to, he could guess what she would say if he did: it was for him, the great writer, that Amy had chosen to become Anne Frank; that explained it all, no psychiatrist required. For him, as a consequence of her infatuation: to enchant him, to bewitch him, to break through the scrupulosity and the wisdom and the virtue into his imagination, and there, as Anne Frank, to become E. I. Lonoff’s
femme
fatale
.

IV.   MARRIED TO TOLSTOY

The next morning we all ate breakfast together like a happy family of four. The woman whom Lonoff could not throw out after thirty years just because he might prefer to see a new face over his fruit juice proudly told us—over our fruit juice—of the accomplishments of the children whose chairs Amy and I occupied. She showed us recent photographs of them, all with their own children. Lonoff had not mentioned to me the night before that he was a grandfather several times over. But why would he?

Hope seemed overnight to have been transformed from his aging, aggrieved, lonely wife into somebody rather more like the happy author of the sweet nature poems framed on the kitchen wall, the tender of the geraniums, the woman of whom Lonoff had said over the broken saucer, “She can glue it.” Nor did Lonoff seem quite the same man; whether deliberately or not, he was humming “My Blue Heaven” when he came to the breakfast table. And almost immediately began the mordant clowning, also designed to make Hope all the happier.

And why the change? Because Amy would return to Cam bridge after breakfast.

But I could not really think of her as Amy any longer. Instead I was continually drawn back into the fiction I had evolved about her and the Lonoffs while I lay in the dark study, transported by his praise and throbbing with resentment of my disapproving father—and, of course overcome by what had passed between my idol and the marvelous young woman before he had manfully gone back to bed with his wife.

Throughout breakfast, my father, my mother, the judge and Mrs. Wapter were never out of my thoughts. I’d gone the whole night without sleep, and now I couldn’t mink straight about them or myself, or about Amy, as she was called. I kept seeing myself coming back to New Jersey and saying to my family, “I met a marvelous young woman while I was up in New England. I love her and she loves me. We are going to be married.”

“Married? But so fast? Nathan, is she Jewish?”

“Yes, she is.”

“But who is she?”

“Anne Frank.”

“I eat too much,” said Lonoff, as Hope poured the water for his tea.

“It’s exercise you need,” Hope said. “It’s more walking. You gave up your afternoon walk and so you began to gain weight. You actually eat almost nothing. Certainly nothing that’s fatten ing. It’s sitting at the desk that does it. And staying in the house.”

“I can’t face another walk. I can’t face those trees again.”

Then walk in the other direction.”

“For ten years I walked in the other direction. That’s why I started walking in this direction. Besides, I’m not even walking when I’m walking; The truth is, I don’t even see the trees.”

“That’s not so,” Hope said. “He loves nature,” she informed me. “He knows the name of everything that grows.”

“I’m cutting down on my food,” said Lonoff. “Who wants to split an egg with me?” Hope said, happily, “You can treat yourself to a whole egg this morning.”

“Amy, you want to split an egg with me?”

His invitation for her to speak gave me my first opportunity to turn her way without embarrassment. It was so. It could be. The same look of unarmored and unimpaired intelligence, the same musing look of serene anticipation… The forehead wasn’t Shakespeare’s—it was
hers
.

She was smiling, as though she too were in the best of spirits and his refusal to kiss her breasts the night before had never happened. “Couldn’t do it,” she said to him.

“Not even half?” asked Lonoff.

“Not even a sixteenth.”

This is my Aunt Tessie, this is Frieda and Dave, this is Birdie, this is Murray …as you see, we are an enormous family. This is my wife, everyone. She is all I have ever wanted. If
you doubt me. just look at her smile, listen to her laugh. Remember the shadowed eyes innocently uplifted in the clever little face? Remember the dark hair clipped back with a barrette? Well, this is she…. Anne, says my father—the Anne? Oh, how I have misunderstood my son. How mistaken we have been!

“Scramble an egg, Hope,” said Lonoff. “I’ll eat half if you’ll eat half.”

“You can eat the whole thing,” she replied. “Just start taking your walks again.” He looked at me, imploringly. “Nathan, eat half.”

“No, no,” said his wife and, turning to the stove, announced triumphantly, “You’ll eat the whole egg!” Beaten, Lonoff said, “And to top things off, I threw out my razor blade this morning.”

“And why,” said Amy, pretending still to be in her blue heaven too, “did you do a thing like that?”

“I thought it through. My children are finished with college. My house is paid for. I have Blue Cross and Major Medical protection. I have a ‘56 Ford. Yesterday I got a check for forty-five dollars in royalties from Brazil—money out of the blue. Throw it out, I told myself, and have a fresh shave with a new blade. Then I thought: No, there’s at least one shave left in this blade, maybe even two. Why be wasteful? But then I thought it through further: I have seven books on the paperback racks, I have publishers in twenty countries, there’s a new shingle roof on the house, there’s a quiet new furnace in the basement, there’s brand-new plumbing in Hope’s little bathroom. The bills are all paid, and what is more, there is money left over in the bank that is earning three percent interest for our old age. The hell with it, I thought, enough thinking—and I put in a new blade. And look how I butchered myself. I almost took my ear off.”

Amy: “Proves you shouldn’t be impulsive.”

“I only wanted to see what it was like living like everybody else.”

“And?” asked Hope, back at the table now, frying pan in hand. “I told you. I almost took my ear off.”

“Here’s your egg.”

“I only want half.”

“Darling, feast for once,” said Hope, kissing his head.
Dear Mom and Dad: We have been with Anne’s father for three days now. They have both been in the most moving state of exaltation since our arrival…

“And here’s your mail,” said Hope.

“I never used to look at this stuff until the end of the day,” he explained to me.

“He wouldn’t even look at the newspaper headlines,” said Hope. “He wouldn’t even eat breakfast with us until a few years ago. But when the children were all gone, I refused to sit here “by myself.”

“But I wouldn’t let you talk to me, would I? That’s new.”

“Let me make you another egg,” she said.

He pushed aside his empty plate. “No, darling, no. I’m full.”

Dear Folks: Anne is pregnant, and happier, she says, than she ever thought possible again…

He was sorting now through the half dozen letters in his hand.

He said to me, “This is what gets forwarded from a publisher. One in a hundred is worth opening. In five hundred.”

“What about a secretary to open them?” I asked.

“He’s too conscientious,” Hope exclaimed. “He can’t do it mat way. Besides, a secretary is another person. We can’t turn the house into Grand Central Station.”

“A secretary is six other people,” he informed her.

“What is it this time?” she asked Lonoff as he turned over the penciled sheets in his hand. “Read it, Manny.”

“You read it.” He handed the letter across to his wife. “Let Nathan see what it is to be lifted from obscurity. Let him not come hammering at our door to tell us that he wasn’t warned.”