Twice Told Tales Read online

  “Well!” I said. “How the hell can a funeral oration, a eulogy, be something you can do well? Okay, okay,” I muttered. “If you’re a clergyman, a Rabbi Priest Minister maybe. They’re pros. You smoothly get from Part A—the loving family left behind to Part B—the living legacy of love left by the—here comes Part C—the extraordinary benevolent character of the deceased—But a friend, a lover, ex or not, how can you sing a song of personal feeling about someone you’ve cared about, in such a way that it can be for Christ and Moses’ sake—graded: good, as opposed to poor or perhaps first-rate or mediocre.”

  “Bullshit,” Jackson said. I’d stung him out of the Man of Letters pose. “You can do anything well or badly.”

  “Ah,” I said. “The famous New York Ethic of Skill—goes hand-in-hand with the Ethic of Success. Everything grist for the mill. I can see the special issue of New York Magazine now: The Year’s Top Ten Eulogies From The Seven Lively Arts.”

  “Exactly wrong,” he said, stung so badly that he told me a tale of a different Katherine; not steadfast, but on the verge of crack-up for years. Not the Saint of Art I’d thought she was. She had raged at her rejections—bit at her blocks like an infuriated animal; denigrated her contemporaries not for their values but for their success. A picture of the classic middle-aged woman writer—come on the scene too late for the modernist voice, too early for the feminist, with no true voice of her own. The collapse had been total. Last year she’d gone to the bathroom without realizing her clothes were still on. The psychiatrist she’d consulted would be at the funeral.

  She’d had lunch at the Russian Tea Room with her agent, taking her baby along because the sitter had not shown up—and had forgotten the baby in the coat room; had not remembered, in the aftermath of the disappointments of the lunch table, for two-and-a-half hours that she had come with a child and left only with her sense of failure. When she got back to the restaurant the waiters were feeding the baby sour cream and no one had called the police. They knew she’d come back. Nobody understood why she wept so, inconsolable. Everyone knew she would do it again.

  It was not a story I wanted to hear, not a picture I wanted to see. To block it out, to deflect it, I said, “Stop this crap and tell me why you want me to speak, you lying son-of-a-bitch, me instead of any of the people she’d spent her life with. I knew her for a few weeks, years ago.” He looked at me blurred, teary, defenses and poses gone.

  “Because I never understood her. You’re not married. You don’t know about being with someone for year after year and having the feeling that there’s one thing you’re missing; one key that would explain everything. Of course, in between you’re convinced that both of you have exhausted all surprise for each other. But with Katherine there was always that mysterious edge: she knew it confused me. I used to call it her shadow-Jew that she carried with her, everywhere. And you”—he swayed next to me as if he were going to fall on me and crush me. Jackson is quite large. I realized that he’d not been to sleep much since Katherine had died. And that had been three days before. Gentiles don’t rush their dead into the ground the way Jews do. He was on the edge of collapse. “You—” he said. “I always thought you knew something about what had happened to her when she first came to town. You knew something or were something which happened to her. And now is the last chance I’ll get to find out. It sounds crazy—okay, but I wanted to find out at the last possible moment what that shadow-Jew was she carried with her.”

  There was no reason to stay any more. I started to leave.

  “You know,” he called after me, desperately, “it was suicide.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “But I’ll do it. I’ll call you for the time and place.”

  And this is the time and the place and now we must end this Ending. Since I am Rabbi, Minister, Priest, all rolled up into none—I have written a few words of exhortation: the way I would end Katherine’s eulogy if I were to deliver it.

  I’ve seen a generation, your generation, give up its one and only chance. I wonder if it’s inevitable. Does every generation make the same movements? I’ve seen you go from hating injustice to feeling badly treated; from cosmic rage to irritability; from the tragic view of life to merely feeling depressed; from the struggle for truth to the skirmish of advantage. Your Long March towards The Promised Land and Self-Knowledge has brought you to nothing but the psychiatrist and the podiatrist.

  As I look around this chapel I feel glad that I have not been included in your text. Life is cleaner in the margins.

  I’ve told the story of the blindfold, of the desecration, and since only saints pray for others while the rest of us pray for ourselves, please rise and join me in the following prayer:

  Come back Katherine Eudemie, come back beautiful and sturdy wheat-shaded girl of my one and only chance. Come back and let’s leave the party together again. Let’s walk once more down Morningside Heights, past the dark and oily river, along the tranquil streets still safeguarded by the Liberal Imagination, walk all the way down to the haven of the Village. Come back and undress again in the half-darkness and make love and be made love to in the glow of excited, unsatisfied ambition, turning, turning, in the low, low bed next to the trembling table bearing the Royal Portable, you trembling under me, me trembling under you; come back and let me, this time, lie next to you all night—what’s left of it—blindfolded only by darkness and sleep till morning wakes us both with all the wonderful and awful obligations of love and light.

  The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud

  a story

  “ALWAYS A THREESOME,” SHE said. “Two men and a woman. Except that one man, the one with previous rights in the matter, is always dead.”

  “I hate this nickel analysis,” he said.

  “I can’t help it. When it gets neat is when it feels true. You don’t have to do anything about it. It’s just that it’s like a murder mystery with a series of imaginary murders. If you marry two widows there are two dead men in the background.”

  This is how it went after his second wife was bitten on the finger by a squirrel, Dickstein had a feeling things would change, and not for the better. It was a three-month situation: meeting, wooing, marrying, and up to New York for a new life. She was fourteen years younger than he and nothing besides falling in love and marriage had been decided. Would she work at her music, at a job, have a baby, have two babies? In the meantime it was a muggy August and against his wishes—though he hadn’t examined them or actually expressed them—she had been marking time taking a course at the N.Y.U. Summer School: “Dream, Myth and Metaphor.”

  The day had been warm and after class she’d lingered in a small rainbow of sunlight and offered one of the peanuts she was shucking and munching to a begging squirrel. She was a Georgia girl and the peanut habit died hard.

  Fortunately, after the animal nipped her and drew blood a sharp park attendant netted the squirrel. The rabies test was negative but they put the little bastard to sleep anyway. Leaving Sharon in bed for a few days with shock and a bandaged hand.

  “You’re mad at me,” she said to Dickstein.

  “Surprised,” he said. “What happened to your country girl smarts? You don’t feed New York squirrels from your hand.”

  “Well, how would I learn that in Chapel Hill?”

  He snapped a portable dinner tray in place and tried a laugh. “I always thought that course was dangerous.”

  “How so?”

  He shut up fast. There was no decent way he could tell her how he’d felt the day she came back from the class with a paperback copy of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Tell her what? That if he’d wanted to marry somebody who could rattle off about latent and manifest content, who could play peek-a-boo with symbols and wish-fulfillment and repression he wouldn’t have waited until he was thirty-nine to remarry. He could have tied up with any of the smart-ass, overeducated, underserious women he’d spent most of his life with.

  Sharon was wonderfully articulate without being glib
. She had the southern gift for language flow without the little chunks of undigested information—okay, call it knowledge—that was the conversation he’d grown up with and hated. He couldn’t tell her any of this because it would come out upside down. The truth of it was in intangibles: the intelligence of her smile, the quick wit that sparkled questions the night he’d lectured to a dozen students who’d swallowed a snowstorm just to hear him compare Shubert and Keats.

  “They both go from major to minor keys and back again very quickly,” she’d said. Not a question or academic comment: a fragment of song. Just what he was in need of: idea-tossed, song-hungry. “I mean,” he said, “that I expected you to start poking at yourself with the new tools of psychology.”

  “Instead,” she said. “I’m poking at you.”

  “Can you have wine?” he asked. “I forgot what the doctor said.”

  Sharon shivered against her pillows. “He didn’t say. I’ll have a glass, thank you. Listen, you knew I was a widow, right off.”

  “You told me instantly. With all the appropriately southern Gothic details.”

  “Gothic! It was a hunting accident. Everybody in our part of Georgia hunts. But you didn’t tell me your first wife—Alma—was a widow until, for God’s sake, last week!”

  “It didn’t seem important. It’s all of three months, not our golden wedding anniversary. Both men died natural deaths—one, sickness, one a shooting accident—both men were considerably older than the women. Now you know what I know.”

  Dickstein filled the bowls with linguine and shared the wine.

  “Two widows,” she sighed.

  “I’m damned if I know why I didn’t tell you sooner. But you didn’t notice anything odd until New York University and Sigmund Freud told you it was worthy of thinking about.”

  He set down an amazement of utensils any which way on the trays. It was not like him and he noted it.

  “It gave me the shivers,” she began …

  “What did?”

  “Reading the dream book. I think you have to read things at the right moment for them to get to you. I must have read Freud at school. I took all the right courses. I graduated. I took a year of graduate school.”

  “You were doing music, not psychology.”

  “But reading this now in class it gave me the eerie feeling that everything is connected.”

  “Overdetermined …”

  “Please don’t be just clever,” she said. “I’m wounded and I’m trying to track something down. I got shaky in class and that’s why I wasn’t careful in the park … It wasn’t a change in the way I think—I wasn’t born yesterday. It was a weird change in the way I feel about the way I think.”

  “Let me see; is that oozing?”

  “Looks the same. I’ve been bitten before.”

  “Not in Washington Square Park. City animals are more dangerous.”

  She ate carefully with her left hand.

  “I’m talking about the sensation of strangeness—just thinking that causes and connections run through everything like the bloodstream through the body.”

  “Did you think everything was random, till yesterday?”

  She laughed. “I felt that way till yesterday. Then, sitting on the bench with the bag of peanuts I got distracted, the wet heat, I’m used to more hot and dry in August, and I began to think about you and Alma and me and Joshua and widows and husbands and fathers and wives and mothers, and it was more like a dream than thinking and I fed this squirrel and I must have done it in a funny way because I’ve fed them a million times before and nothing ever happened and he bit me.”

  Dickstein didn’t know why the memory appeared for delivery at that moment. It was not a buried one, was right at hand. Rather, it showed up at that instant to help deal with Sharon, who sounded shakier every minute.

  “To give you a dose of strange,” he told her, “you’re not my second widow. You’re my fourth. You’re living with a regular Bluebeard in reverse.”

  And he told her of being puppy-young, meeting the war widow with the long legs at a fundraising chamber music evening, and about his family’s terror.

  His father, Dr. Dickstein, the gynecologist/philosopher and his Big Moment in Paternal Wisdom! “A woman whose husband has died and who marries a younger man puts too much of a burden on the boy. And don’t forget: she’ll always be comparing you to him.”

  So he was shipped out to Stanford instead of finishing at Columbia and fell in love, for a time, with a California aerospace widow. Nothing glamorous like a test-pilot crash; just an equipment explosion.

  “It’s not funny,” Sharon said; she was purplish from trying not to laugh. His intent was distraction and seemed to be succeeding. She was slipping into her country accent as she did when she felt easier. She wasn’t a modern West-Side-of-New-York Sharon; her full name was Rose-a-Sharon. “I grieved so much,” she said, “when Joshua died. I was mad, too, ’cause I hated hunting.”

  “We’re not talking about how it feels when your husband dies. We’re talking about how much more connective tissue there is here than even you thought of.”

  She wasn’t laughing anymore. “Four,” she murmured. “A daytime dream of the dream. The older man who possesses your woman first dies, but you didn’t kill him. You just get to have her. Over and over again. My God. Doesn’t that count as murder and possession of the spoils?”

  What he couldn’t bring himself to bring up was what would seem to be the underlying strategy. He saw all these men as brutal, himself as tender; they were heedless of their women, he was concerned; they took what they wanted, he asked or waited for the moment to ripen.

  When Dickstein envisioned those hunting trips of Sharon’s husband, Joshua, he imagined some kind of secret, violent sex mixed in with the country satisfactions of blood sport. He’d never asked her about such things and she’d not offered much beyond a black mustache, six-foot-three height and a paper mill business. Questions of fidelity were not included in the data. But when he recalled his father’s caution, he welcomed the comparison. Not only were they dead and he alive: he was molded to offer precisely what they lacked. That was his enterprise!

  But he wasn’t going to bring up all that and reinforce this dream-book talk. Instead, he poured the wine more freely than usual and the astonishment turned festive. Sharon was pretty in what she called her sick-time-of-the-month robe, though only her finger bled. They laughed again at her fears of the “uncanny” connections in the mind. (Freud, he told her, had written a famous letter in which he claimed an absence of any such “uncanny” feelings; more about religion than psychology, though.) And she promised never to feed squirrels in the city, again—and she grew coy and sensual, drinking more and eating less, holding her injured hand out into the air as she caressed him with the other and it seemed like a nice idea to eat dinner in the bedroom at times and afterwards she asked him if she were the more precious of the prizes he’d won from the dream-murder of all those father/lovers; and he kissed her mouth as answer and evasion and she grew most southern and promised to at least consider dropping the class since something about it bothered him, if he would take her to Turkey at Christmas-time. (He had absolutely no interest in things Turkish.)

  She wondered aloud if they’d made a baby; and he wondered, silently, thinking he could be a husband and a father and could die, like all the others, leaving his lovely Rose-a-Sharon for … who?

  Late that night he woke, his head frantic from too much wine. In the bathroom he stared at the mirror and thought of his father’s face for the first time in many months: square-immigrant-tough where Dickstein’s was second-generation soft-nurtured; perfunctory and commanding with his sullen, witty wife, where Dickstein was the one who provided attentions and the occasions for laughter. He remembered the early childhood Saturday visits to Dr. Dickstein’s office, the women waiting patiently, obediently, and the chrome and the stirrups … and remembered, too, years later, how amazed he was that the old man should be at the mercy of th
e pain and fears which came with final illness. He’d never seen his father at the mercy of anything before.

  Dickstein’s eyes blazed in the bathroom mirror with the awful knowledge that there were no more of these imposing older men to die and leave him their women to take for his own. He would be forty in three months, he thought, and listened to Sharon’s regular hiss of breath. Now he was at the top of the ladder: an uncomfortable, precarious position.

  There she lay, the next widow, unsuspecting; in spite of her squirrel-wisdom, in spite of N.Y.U. and Freud. Because she was young and easy in her skin and had been bereaved only by a rifle, not by time and entropy.

  “Peasant pleasures,” his father would have said, with irony, about people who died in hunting accidents. He’d sent himself through college and sold insurance to help pay for medical school. These successes entitled him to a loftiness towards those less educated and less successful. Including, on occasion, his wife and son. But now Dickstein, staring into the mirror, saw mirror-images hard to ignore. He, too, had become a Dr. Dickstein, though only a Ph.D. shadow of the real thing: no chrome, no stirrups, not even a white coat.

  Like his father, he always had at least three major activities. (The old man lectured, did the first television medical education series along with his regular practice.) Dickstein taught English, lectured when asked, and edited a journal. The income and prestige were not comparable but the restless multiple activities had similar outlines.

  He searched in the mirror for some of the older man’s features he could recognize and endow with the qualities he admired. What he thought of as Hungarian; a mouth he saw as eloquent, romantic.

  “The better for talking out of both sides at the same time,” Dr. Dickstein had said, laughing his runaway laugh. Dickstein, too, laughed nonstop, large and loud. For years he’d felt his father’s heavy laughter aimed at him. The truth was, he suspected, that it was aimed at everyone, the good doctor included.