They sat next to each other with only the coffee table and the large speckled ceramic ashtray that rested on the wedge-shaped table separating them. He, the patient, was six foot three, some six inches taller than his doctor. That difference was a sensitive figure—the size of a manikin. The doctor never stood when the patient was in the room. He was seated when the patient arrived and he nodded goodbye from his chair after their session.
The patient had long soft hair, not as long as his son’s, but thinner, hence softer, and he had long, graying sideburns. The doctor had begun their treatment sessions with a crew cut, of all things! He had a good-boy look: apple-cheeked, a non-dandruffed pink scalp, starched white shirts, thin ties. After ten months the patient opened the door of the treatment room to find his doctor in a turtleneck. The patient felt vaguely betrayed, as if they had traded places, but it was a mock-turtleneck, not meant to be bulky. This comforted the patient. In another four months the doctor had begun wearing soft shoes. Today the doctor returned after a ten-day vacation.
“In Mexico,” his doctor had answered after a moment’s hesitation. One cannot tell the patient everything. The patient had insisted. Disappearance was all right if the doctor turned up someplace else. The patient had learned all about disappearance from his son, from his turtlenecked, head-in-shell son. Reappearance had therefore become important to the patient. He had even begun to read literature on reincarnation. Continuum he intended; Passover this year was not to be passed over. His doctor was not the only one who had returned; his son was back.
“The more one tells of the departure from Egypt, the more is he to be praised,” he told his son, asking him to stay for the Seders. He reminded the son, “I personally came out of Egypt,” but the patient was nearer to Exodus than the son. The patient’s parents had not sailed on the Good Ship Exodus, but into New York harbor and he, first generation, had raised his hand with all the others in his classroom when asked by the third-generation American teacher if their parents had been born in Europe. He, unlike his son, was raised on radio and on the Lone Ranger. Although he was tall, his parents lovingly thought of him as Andy Hardy, like the short, manic Mickey Rooney. He went through childhood hating the Dionne Quintuplets and Shirley Temple and Shirley’s Good Ship Lollipop when his mother tried to Americanize him into tap-dancing lessons with the fat girls above the Eastern Market, on the second floor, next to his dentist’s office. He could feel the vibrations from those fat tappers even under the dentist’s drill.
The patient opened the door. The humidifier was on, buzzing noisily. The blinds were down, slits of light webbing the twin chairs. Stains from snow and slush had been washed, during the doctor’s absence, from the carpeting. All this at a glance. Second glance from matching chair—the doctor’s long sideburns, not gray as the patient’s, but curved up from the jaw line toward the lips, as if anticipating a long moustache. The turtle-neck was worn with a Mexican silver chain hanging from the mock neck. The doctor’s hair was collar length and itching him. He did not scratch but rubbed with his knuckles where it was growing in.
The patient felt fatherly and moved. He decided to share more than appearance. Upon entering he mentioned the name of R. D. Laing. The doctor had not heard of him but was open and modest and wrote down the name. He asked the patient to write down the title of the book. The Divided Self, wrote the patient, underlining the title as in the MLA style sheet. The world was being influenced by him. He had caused his doctor to become less starchy and had introduced him to a radical existential psychoanalyst. His influence would pass on to other patients. A good morning’s work.
After the appointment the patient parked his car near the Woodward Avenue bus line. He read the ecology literature his son had sent home. He neither used—nor allowed to be used—detergents or enzyme breakers; he bought non-return bottles; he neither procreated nor took his car downtown. He stopped smoking. In a few months the tobacco stain left his second and third fingers, and teeth, and, hopefully, his lungs. His son had told him what to do and he, obedient father, had done it, paraphrasing the Haggadah: “and thou shalt tell thy father on that day.” Only it was his son who was his Egyptian and caused his affliction.
At the bus stop in the ghetto neighborhood he wavered between pessimism and optimism. He was a waverer—he would tentatively gesture out to the world, then withdraw that wave of recognition. He hunched at his bus stop against the spring wind and the surrounding riot area. Stores were still boarded from three years before, rubble not cleaned away, or an area was razed clean and left that way, frozen in winter, muddy in spring.
Waiting the twenty minutes for the bus, he studied this area near the Expressway, for it was also the dumping ground for towed cars that had been in accidents. All accidental autos found their way to the side streets of the ghetto—all unrepairables, with smashed windshields, hoods crumpled and petaled like flowers, fenders not fending off.
Our waste. We must campaign against our refuse. He had started several campaigns in his suburb. One, the most lasting, had been the PAP party, People Are Precious. Through the mimeographed newsletter he fought battles. (1) Write to a Friend battle. He was against the phone since his son had written him about the telephone tax going solely for the war. He did not want to encourage excessive use of that means of communication. Return to Correspondence. (2) Curb the Use of Water. At the first leak in his faucet he called in his plumber the past weekend. (3) Recirculate, Re-Use. PAP was against the shiny new. The used was handled and therefore more valuable. Re-use envelopes, containers, the backs of letters. It makes for continuum.
He took his editorial policy seriously. He was an example. As, for instance, with the plumber. The man came, short, muscular, cigar, and Jewish.
“Why should my son fight?” asked the plumber. “I fought in World War II. I should fight. To be a soldier means to protect yourself. He’s nineteen, and he’s a dummy. It takes until you’re twenty-two to know how to protect yourself.”
The plumber refused coffee. The patient wondered if he, the host, had learned to protect himself before or after twenty-two.
“I’ll fight for my son,” said the plumber. “I know how to fight.” The plumber refused eggs and toast. “But I keep out of it. I remove. I’ll fix pipes and let the nation’s plumbing leak. I don’t care; I won’t repair. You voted for Nixon, I tell my friends when they complain about the cost of living, the cost of building, the cost of buying. You wanted him. I didn’t want him. Now everything is in disrepair.”
The patient was in despair. The effects of the appointment usually lasted a couple of days, until the next visit, except on the weekend when he had to get through Sunday. But now, ten minutes later and already in despair. An old woman approached him. People are precious. Lipstick smeared on the left corner of her mouth. Rouge on the white, white flesh, the pores darkened at the spots of rouge. Sunken eyes. Old coat, matted fur collar. Some people are precious.
“How are you?” she grinned at him, for he was another white (only not so pale as she) in that neighborhood.
“Do you get robbed here, too?” she asked.
“Never,” he told her indignantly. She was merely another prejudiced person.
“Ahhh,” she said. “Everything is stolen. Once the lobby of our building had grillwork, mahogany table, lovely lamps, fringed shades, a huge planter next to the fireplace, candlesticks with imitation candles, and light bulbs shaped like flames. It was all stolen, even the grillwork on the doors. Now we have a kitchen table in the lobby.”
He could see she was not proud to walk across that lobby. He was attentive. Detail, he always told his high-school classes. In your themes, put detail. The bus came. He sat next to her. He wanted more detail.
“I’m eighty,” she told him, “and I can’t move away. My doctor won’t travel far to me. He can’t get around like he used to, now that he’s an elderly gentleman of seventy. I used to be a nurse. I worked for doctors—all the big Jewish doctors when they had clinics here, before they moved—Green, Glassgold, Kirschbaum, Meyers, Soloveichik, Bernstein—he died of a bleeding ulcer-Rich. Do you know,” she said, “I can do everything. Cook, sew. I cook home-made noodles and matzoh balls that are like clouds on my soup. I’m not Jewish but I like matzoh balls.”
_____________
The patient was beginning to feel superfluous to the world. Where was his influence? Not on his son, not on his plumber, not on the old woman—they all flowed over him, drowning him in word and deed—ah, yes, on the sideburns of his doctor.
“What do you do?” she asked him. She had to ask it twice. Usually he answered right away.
“English?” she said, her eyes turning away, but then, even staring straight at him she seemed to be looking past him. “I’m German.”
She had no accent.
“My father’s nephew knew Herbert Hoover when he came over after World War I. My father’s nephew was an engineer, too, like Hoover. We gave a ball—I danced with Herbert Hoover.”
She giggled. Was she senile? Should she be dismissed?
“Detail is harder to dismiss than abstractions and generalities,” he had told the tenth-graders.
“I need a new coat,” she told him suddenly (had the ball and the floor-length gowns reminded her?). “The social worker came. I told her about the coat. ‘Have you any money?’ she asked me. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Where?’ she asked. I went to my jar, the kind I keep my noodles in in the refrigerator. I had saved a little money there by traveling all the way out to Hamtramck to get my groceries. I took the cold jar out of the refrigerator and showed her. She took my money. She left the jar. That wasn’t nice. That wasn’t very nice.” She was whining. It was his stop. He had stopped listening to her.
“The world cries out with its innumerable trials and horrors—the betrayal of human life, made cheap and stripped of its dignity, in every nation. The very nature of the human mind forces us to limit our interests and compassion, or else we drown in their diffusion and our own extreme pain.” This was Robert Coles in Children of Crisis. He had given a mimeographed copy of the quotation to his doctor and to his mailing list in his People Are Precious party.
“But what does this mean to you}” the doctor had asked, as expected. He couldn’t take anything as having its own intrinsic value.
The bus stopped in front of crowds at his school. The whole school, out on the pavements. Fire bells were ringing, air-raid sirens wailing, squad cars honking. The German woman looked out of the window, smiling with interest. A bomb threat. He pushed inside. The metal mail boxes of the faculty were being systematically opened and slammed. He looked in his. A notice from a catering service nearby.
“It was an anonymous phone call,” the plain-clothesman told him. “Better evacuate.”
The halls had already been made into a vacuum. He exited. He exodused. (Although it was a noun, not a verb.)
Back on the same bus line, without the German lady, going to his car and the suburb from whence precious people emanated.
His son was asleep. His wife was moving dishes to the basement, taking the Passover dishes upstairs. He heard the dishwasher. She was doing her silverware in the machine with a stone to purify it. He laughed. A stone purified. And what purified the German woman, an enemy in World War I—dancing with Herbert Hoover and working for Jewish doctors? It was Hoover who became the enemy.
“A chicken in every pot,” he had once quoted to his son.
“Pot in every chicken,” his son now quoted to him.
The upstairs bedroom door opened. Out came the odor of incense, and his son.
“Coffee?” asked the father, as he had offered the plumber. The son refused.
“Familia,” said the son, “Organic cereal. We use it at the commune.”
The son lectured a long time to the patient/ father on organic foods.
“That’s very educational,” said the father.
The slippery son. He had gone through all the stages when he had asked the Questions. He passed through them in reverse, first not knowing how to ask, then asking simply with much prodding from his parents and his grandparents.
(“Immigrants,” the grandson’s social-studies book was to tell him, “came to this land for freedom and brought with them certain crafts, such as leather-making.” He was shocked and ashamed to learn that he was the grandchild of immigrants. “But they don’t work with leather,” he said. He became alien in that household, so far removed from exodus that he had to make his own.)
After the simple-dimpled son came Hebrew school and the wise son, gesturing dramatically at the Seder plate. It was high drama and comedy, with the stealing of the matzoh and the selling of it back. His grandparents had come already with the presents, none of which he would have demanded—like new Medium Hard toothbrushes, real-bristle hairbrushes, stretch socks. The wise son became wiser, after his Bar Mitzvah, expanding on the meaning of the Seder, comparing the translations of several Haggadahs while parents and grandparents let him speak uninterruptedly. He was, thus, not used to being interrupted, explained his father to the son’s junior-high teachers, and that probably accounted for the talking which was marked on his Conduct/Citizenship record.
This had gone on uninterruptedly, like a peace that lulls the land, until the son became the wicked son and excluded himself, denying the group principle. Passover came and there was no youngest to ask, for the youngest was in exile, and the father would ask hurriedly while the grandmother wiped her eyes and his wife clattered suddenly the plates she was preparing in the kitchen.
_____________
The grandparents rang the bell. They had come over to visit the visitor. The son spoke uninterruptedly about I Ching. He told them of another commandment, “Do not ye judge, for judgment causes fear.” He told them that they were all part of the same Godhead (at which the son’s grandfather did not know whether to nod or shake his own head), and how, in reincarnating, the son had discovered that he was as much Chinese as Jewish.
“How so?” the grandfather had asked.
The father had learned his own patience from his scholarly father, although he had never acquired the perception and depth of his own father. And was his son more or less perceptive than he? Deeper or shallower?
“I was in the court of Genghis Khan,” said the son.
The grandfather looked mildly startled. The grandmother and mother clutched their hearts.
“Why that court?” the grandfather asked gently. “It was such an oppressive court, so barbaric.”
The grandson was annoyed.
“Tell me,” the grandfather asked. “Don’t you belong to a family, a nation of people, a country, a world?”
The son tilted back the dining-room chair. His mother wanted to stop him because the chairs were old and loosening, but her husband gestured her not to interrupt.
“No,” said the son. “I am of the family of man. I am not Jewish. You are not my parents. You are not my grandparents.”
“Then why did you visit?” the father asked. “Why did you come home to us?”
“Just to see some old people,” said the son. “Just to try this trip again. Before I left.”
“Where to?” grandmother/mother.
“Another trip. How can I tell before I make it?”
“Tell me,” said the father or grandfather. It was hard in recalling to decide who the questioner was, for they were suddenly themselves sons who were too simple to ask questions, who did not know the questions to ask before this traveler and his own telling.
“Tell me, what do you mean we are not your relatives? You are always your father’s son and your mother’s son.”
It was the grandfather, then, who asked the question.
“Wherever your travels will take you, you’ll find no other parents. . . . What are you searching for?”
“My real self,” said the son.
“But you’ve had that all along,” said the grandfather. He leaned on the dining-room table that would soon be the Seder table. The sunlight was of earliest spring. One day snow. One day not. Even an eclipse this year. At a former eclipse, several years ago, the young son and his father had charted the path of a lima-bean rim of light which narrowed as the moon moved across the sun.
“Remember the eclipse in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court}” the grandfather asked his son. “Remember Will Rogers in the movie?”
This new eclipse was not charted. No one cared about moons obscuring suns or the darkness that descended upon the earth.
“That’s right,” said the grandmother. “You take your real self with you wherever you go.”
The grandson laughed. “If that’s your trip—”
“Like Shirley Temple,” said the grandmother, “in The Blue Bird. She was a big girl already when she made that movie, maybe too big—and how she went looking all over for the blue bird of happiness only to find it in her own back yard. Look at your nice back yard—”
“The city says the elm tree is blighted,” the father said to the grandfather. “They’re charging me three hundred and forty dollars to cut it down.”
“You can’t win,” said the mother.
“I belong equally to all things,” said the son. “I talk to willow trees.”
“What do they say back?” the grandfather giggled. The grandmother jabbed him. The grandson was talking.
“I have talked to the great men of all times. This will interest you. I spoke to Einstein.”
“What did he say?” asked the irrepressible grandfather, “E=MC2?”
“He showed it to me,” said the grandson. “In one reincarnation, when I dropped acid, I spoke Sanskrit. In another I talked in my sleep. My girl took it down.”
“His girl?” the grandmother asked the mother. The mother sighed upward, like blowing smoke from a cigarette.
“My girl showed it to a friend who is a linguist. ‘Why that’s ancient Hebrew,’ said the friend.”
The father couldn’t help it. “So all those nights of United Hebrew School amounted to something.”
The son slammed the chair back on its four weakening legs and left the table.
The women chastised the men. “You shouldn’t have offended him. How can we have an influence if you do?”
_____________
The son was in the living room. He had put on Abbey Road. He had set up a little metal-pagoda incense burner to change the sweet smell of his cigarette. The Beatles sang: “Because the world is round, it turns me on/Because the wind is high, it blows my mind.”
The family followed the son.
“Don’t talk,” said the son. “Your words are meaningless.”
So they sat until the women returned to the kitchen, whispering.
“There was a bomb scare in the school today,” the father told the grandfather.
“Honestly?” Shock.
“Shh!!” said the son. He turned up the Beatles. Full force. Stereo. Both cars attacked. Both men attacked. But the men were stubborn. He had left them so many times, they would not leave him.
“Probably one of my students who didn’t have his theme ready,” said the father, making light of the bomb scare, so his own father’s years would be long in the land. “They were supposed to write on the eclipse—‘What in Your Life Has Been Eclipsed?’”
“Very good topic,” said the grandfather.
“School,” said the son, “turning out Remco plastic toys.”
“If we don’t learn,” said the father, “then we are animals.”
“There’s nothing wrong with animals,” said the grandson. “Animals are together. People are apart.”
Ninety dollars a week to be together, the father paid and took a Saturday job selling shoes at Wonderland suburban mall. He also made an income-tax partnership with a friend in the math department at the high school where they’d make themselves a couple of thousand for the season.
“It reduces us when we belong,” said the son. “Belonging is an old hang-up. The thing is to exchange and to be free. In our commune all the nursing mothers exchange babies.”
“Nisht gutkeit,” said the grandmother.
“You heard of wet nurses,” the grandfather chastised her. “It’s the same thing.”
“I like dry nurses better,” said the grandmother.
The son speaks, the only son, the only grandson, the one for whom there should be a sign upon the frontlets in the morning, upon the post of the house.
“We are objects to each other,” said the grandson, “like trees and the sky. My father is an ‘it.’ It woke me up this morning. It tells me to eat my breakfast. It tells me to change my ways. When it speaks I hear the branches swish on the willow tree in our commune, only the willow is more accepting and says things that really blow my mind. But it hurts my head.”
The father left the room. He was crying. Onto his knuckles tears fell. He ran the faucet to wash the knuckles and to cool the face. He turned Cold onto his wrists.
His son now had to depersonalize, he who had been such a personality, Little Mozart at the piano, a learned scholar at the Torah, the heir to the expectations. He had even inherited a bachelor flutist uncle’s flute library and took lessons from the first flutist of the symphony. The grandson had eclipsed the father and the father’s own father had, with scholarship and sweetness, eclipsed his offspring. Somewhere sun and moon and earth had combined and he was overshadowed.
The father sat on the toilet lid. His son could be a case in Dr. Laing’s The Divided Self, someone needing to depersonalize the world, to make an object of those who objected to him, with mysticism and magic until the real world became unreal and the unreal world had talking willows. His son was sick, maybe a schizophrenic. He would ask his doctor. They would restore order to the garden, illumination to the world.
The father came out of the bathroom. His parents had waited to tell him good-bye. They were going home.
“Take me, take me along,” he wanted to say. “I’ll sit quietly in your kitchen. I won’t bother you. I’ll drink tea and wash my cup out afterwards. And I’ll grind the lemon slice down the garbage disposal.”
“Thank you for coming,” he said.
The grandson said nothing.
His wife whispered to him from the kitchen. He sat with her and put sugar into his coffee—he didn’t even bother reaching for the saccharine on the counter. He had stopped jogging in the morning since his son’s visit. Their voices rose, and his wife began to wail.
“Don’t talk!” called the son from the living room.
But the father had to talk to prove his existence.
Onto the father’s head fell all the pain of the world: the cat that ate the kid, the dog that bit the cat, the stick that beat the dog, came fire, the chill of water, came slaughter, came the final butcher. And all because he had one kid, one only kid.
His son turned blank eyes on him. They were those of the eighty-year-old woman. His son was a German; his son was an Egyptian.
_____________
The last issue of PAP was on the kitchen table. He had quoted Robert Coles again: “Sorrow may be fated, but to survive it and grow is an achievement all its own.”
He and his wife held hands. They would do the Passover together and invite his parents. He had a couple of students at school who wanted to come. Even though they were not hungry, even though they were not needy, he would let them celebrate with him. He would be continuous and historical.
“If we do not reach our sons, we reach the sons of others,” he whispered.
“It is not the same,” whispered his wife.
Everything would be the same again, after the visitation. The metal pagoda would be gone. The stereo would be classical again. He would lift that arm on the record of his memory and play the old ways, his son bringing joy. Today, gifting them with sorrow, his son was still his son. Only sometimes he must be interrupted.
“It does not take an optimist to be hopeful,” the father wrote, quoting Gunnar Myrdal who had come through town on a lecture tour. That would be the slogan for the next PAP newsletter. He and his sighing wife would be pessimists, seeing their son crouching inside of himself, making a smaller and smaller ball of his place in the world, a harder lump in their hearts. From that pejoration would come amelioration.
It was not very late in the day. The weather changed. Snow fell where the morning had been in the upper 40’s. Last year’s dried leaves were still falling from his blighted elm.
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