A Private Sorcery (11 page)

I knew that it was a devil's pact. You boys got fried chicken and mashed potatoes and fresh vegetables every night and I got starched shirts and an immaculate porcelain tub and all the free time I needed and your mother got her retreat from us all. I taught two mornings a week, had office hours one afternoon. Other than that, I spent the days at home, behind the closed door of the study I set up in what had been our bedroom. I began my second book on the historical precursors of the psychoanalytic unconscious: a radical departure from my first book on the history of the asylum in nineteenth-century America, which had been about the history of a “thing,” involving what I thought of as “proper” research including, one summer, what your mother called the loony bin tour—the three of you splashing in Howard Johnson swimming pools while I rummaged through hospital storage rooms inspecting old hydrotherapy tubs and primitive electroshock machines.

Your mother's retreat suited me in another way, as well. It gave me the two of you. Not that she'd ever been possessive of you; rather, her focus had been on efficiency, and for that reason she'd left little room for my involvement. When you were babies, this had taken me by surprise because she was in other ways impulsive and disorganized. She'd prided herself on what she seemed to think of as the tricks of the trade: preserving her own sleep by leaving bottles hidden in the corners of your crib for you to grope for in the dark, toilet-training Marc before you were born so there'd be only one child in diapers, putting the two of you on the same schedule so she'd have her evenings free. You both seemed reasonably happy, so it was hard for me to put my finger on what bothered me. All I knew was that there were times when we'd be around other families and I would sense something different in the way
things worked, a back-and-forth flow between the children's needs and the parents' attempts to bring the children into the world, something like the way waters of different temperatures mix together.

Don't misunderstand me. It's not that you and your brother weren't attached to your mother. You'd run crying to her when something happened, when Marc's shove as you reached for the toy he had in his hand would result in your chin hitting the bookshelf, and she'd pick you up and put you on her hip. But it was always pat-pat and a brusque, or so it sounded to me,
come, come, forget about it, let's find a different toy for you
. It was not until after your mother took to her bed that I came to understand her approach—the very one I found myself using with her. Drawing you out to discuss how you felt must have seemed to her too dangerous.
If possible, do not operate on an impaired system
, I recalled learning during the first year of medical school.
Even a tooth extraction should be delayed if the patient has an infection
. That's how at first I rationalized my approach with your mother. I was waiting for the infection to pass.

Still, I could not overlook that your mother's retirement had a greater effect on you than on your brother. For a year already, he had begun to have a separate life centered on his sports teams and the friends he had through these teams. You would come home to the Saran-covered slice of applesauce cake Mrs. Smiley left on the kitchen table. Through the basement door, you'd hear the German radio station she listened to as she ironed or folded laundry. Upstairs would be silent.

The first time I saw you sitting by yourself at the kitchen table with your plate of cake, your skinny eight-year-old legs still silky and hairless, your head resting on one arm, I nearly wept. Unable to bear the image of your loneliness, I took to breaking from my work when I heard you at the back door. After a week, I ceased working altogether after three, saving my day's walk for your return from school. Together we'd walk the half-mile to the lake, where we'd circle the perimeter, watching out for our fowled friends: the family of magenta-headed ducks, the three white swans, the black male that appeared only on rainy days. Sometimes I'd bring along a blanket that we'd spread in autumn
over crackly brown leaves, in spring over damp green shoots, both of us stretching out to stare at the sky or read the books we'd carry in our backpacks. When the weather was inclement, we'd walk to the public library, each of us disappearing into the stacks to rejoin with armloads of books. Sometimes you'd come find me to show me something you'd discovered (a chart of the evolutionary path from tyrannosaurus to iguana, a book listing the largest one hundred rivers in order of length and volume), and sometimes I'd help you look up something that interested you that day in the adult encyclopedias.

Now, thinking back, I can't recall when we stopped those afternoons, probably by the time you reached junior high school and I could sense your embarrassment at being seen palling around with your dad, but I do know there were times before then, walking home with you, talking about the things we'd seen at the lake or discovered at the library, when it would seem that the planets had fallen strangely into order, your mother's neurasthenia having bequeathed us this time together.

M
ORTON TELEPHONES TO
say that the sentencing hearing took place and there'd been no surprises; it had all gone as expected, the forty-eight months with the fifty days a year off for good behavior. I call Rena to tell her.

“Morton said it's good news when it goes as expected. Sometimes it goes worse.”

“Yes, I can see that,” she says, like me, I suspect, not seeing it at all but somehow thinking it important that the sentencing be interpreted as having been in your favor.

“He'll be staying where he is. That makes it easier than being moved somewhere else.”

“Right. Of course.”

In the background, I hear what sounds like the tub running. She's told me that in the morning she'll fly to Denver, where she'll be for the rest of the week.

“Thanks for letting me know,” she says. “I'll go see him when I get back.”

“I can drive you. I'm going to try to go every Sunday.”

“The bus is fine. I actually like it.” She pauses, taken aback, I imagine, by the gracelessness of her own response. “That's very kind of you. Can we play it by ear?”

I hear the creak of the faucets turning, then the quiet of the water no longer running. I chastise myself for wondering if she's wrapped in a towel.

We say our careful good-byes, both of us knowing there's no way she'll let me drive her. She couldn't bear it, two hours in a car obliged to converse with me.

T
HERE ARE TIMES
when I no longer know if I am talking with you or talking with the you that lives in my head or writing to you in my mind or rehearsing what it is I will say when I next see you. This last week, what I keep going over is Mitch and how I could have acted like you'd moved on. Of course, we'd talked about it a lot at the beginning when it was in all the papers. Then you stopped bringing it up. I stopped asking. Behaved as if it was not on your mind while knowing all the while that it was. Did I think that by asking I would be encouraging you to remain bound up with the boy and that by not asking I was in some way spurring you to let go? Or did I make what you would call the physicalist assumption: assuming that mental life operates on the same principles as the body—that an emotional wound, like a cut to the skin, should be left after a point to heal on its own?

The day after your sentencing hearing, I attempt to resume my work. There's a pencil lodged in the album of newspaper clippings at the page where I was reading the morning Rena called to tell me about your arrest. I reread an article from a Mexico City paper that describes Carmelita as a seventeen-year-old girl from a pueblo outside Oaxaca who claimed to have conceived, like Our Blessed Virgin, without sexual relations. The article is dated February 21, 1955—a few days after the drowned baby was found by a group of women scrubbing their wash on the flat rocks at the edge of the stream. Carmelita, wakened in her hut, said the devil had killed her Jesus.

I flip forward to the account of the trial in the Oaxaca daily. A priest was called to testify on the religious validity of Carmelita's statements that God had spoken to her, telling her that the devil had murdered her baby. In the transcript of the trial, there'd been nothing short of a philosophical debate about the meaning of the concept of religious validity until the judge called a halt to the exchange, stating that in his courtroom all that was to be determined was whether other Catholics would believe that God might speak to a girl of seventeen about why her baby was dead—not whether there is a God or such a God speaks or whether there is a devil and such a devil could sink a baby to a bottom of a stream. A psychiatrist came from Veracruz to report on an outbreak of religious hallucinations among girls in rural areas. Asking for a blackboard, he drew a diagram of the brain to show the sector where hallucinations originate. What the jurors thought of all of this, it was impossible to say, since not a one of them was interviewed and they all disappeared within hours of the end of the trial back to their plots of rocky land, but we can conclude not much since Carmelita was convicted of infanticide. Twelve days later she was found dead. A suicide, the authorities stated, despite the absence of rope burns on her neck and her sisters having declared it impossible,
Carmelita loved life too dearly.

I review my introduction in which I outline three frames through which the case can be viewed: the psychopathological—the girl as psychotic, perhaps even a postpartum psychosis on top of an already existing delusion about the conception; the cultural-relativist—why would we accept the story of Mary's virginal pregnancy but not a modern-day story of miracles?; the sociological—the disruption of traditional family life by the opening of an American-owned copper mine outside the town. Reading over what I've written, I see that I've given extra weight to the third explanation, the shift from families working side by side to the creation of public and private spheres, the separation of fathers from children, the unspoken humiliations of the male workers, having to ask permission to use the toilet, the men responding with a denigration of their wives, the wives retaliating by an assertion of their own power via the virgin birth fantasy.

I have no idea if this materialist lens is right or any more right than the other interpretations. As a child, I didn't know it was a lens; it seemed natural that everything would be seen as a piece of politics, as part of the inexorable struggle between workers and owners. Now it seems uncomfortably close to my own father's situation, to Merckin's harping from his throne behind the couch about the triumph I'd felt watching my father crushed by the capitalist machine.

Usually, I determine the truth value of my ideas by visceral conviction—are they tepid or insistently, heart-poundingly “right”?—but today everything seems flat and two-dimensional, my inner sense turned tin. Asked today, I could not say if a painting is banal or luminous, if a piece of music is clichéd or haunting, if Morton is leveling with me or sugarcoating the facts.

If you are a soul turned evil or a person traumatized by life's tragedies.

If my ministrations toward your wife are for my benefit or yours.

6
Rena

On the plane to Denver, Rena sits next to a plump woman in a yellow jogging suit and white sneakers who is headed out to help her third daughter after the birth of her second child.

“She had an awful time of it, upchucking everything, and I mean everything, those first twelve weeks. She was so tiny to start with and she lost so much weight, they thought they'd have to put her in the hospital. But the baby was nine pounds! So the Lord has his miracles. And you, dear? Are you married?”

“Yes.”

“What does your husband do?”

For a split second, Rena imagines saying,
He's an inmate at a federal prison.
“He's a doctor.”

“Well, isn't that nice. Lucky you.” She pokes Rena in the ribs. “You probably have a real nice house with a pool. My oldest boy, Joey, we always thought he'd be a doctor, but those chemistry courses killed him. Do you have children? Don't tell me, I know, not yet, but you want them, right?”

“I suppose.”

“See, I can tell. You have that look. Just don't wait too long. My middle daughter waited till thirty-eight and she had a dickens of a time.”

“If you'll excuse me.” Rena takes her tote bag and heads toward the back of the half-empty plane. Spotting an open pair of seats, she sits in the one next to the window. She leans against the glass, staring out at the spidery haze.

After her visit in March, Saul had written that she could visit as often as she wished but he wouldn't harangue her to come. That was the word he had used:
harangue
. She spent a long time on the word, first because it was impossible to imagine Saul haranguing anyone, but also because it has always fascinated her the way he slides up and down within the language, adjusting his vocabulary to the listener, not in a way that seems condescending, but rather a kind of transposition, more like moving from A minor back to C major. On the surface, his letter suggested self-possession; he would allow her to work out her own feelings and visit or not visit as she wished. Beneath (though there was nothing she could point to in the sentences, not even after many readings), there was panic, his awareness that in the realm of the emotions, repairs are few and far between.

Not until the pilot announces their approach to Denver and she returns to her own seat does she realize that it's not the busybody she's angry with, but Saul. Saul for ruining everything. Saul for making her hide again.

H
ER FIRST NIGHT
in Denver, she cannot sleep. At three in the morning, she gives up and runs a tub: the soak she'd abandoned yesterday after Leonard's call. Watching the water rise, she wonders if Leonard's tone, the implication that the sentencing was a victory, that there was nothing for them to discuss about it, had been affected for her benefit—she who couldn't even manage a car trip with him. It occurs to her that her remark about taking the bus had been not only hurtful but also unfair. Certainly, Saul never expected idle chitchat. He was the one who'd taught her the many moods of silence: the enraged homicidal mood that afternoon driving back from Sylvia's but, more often, the companionable possibilities, reading together in bed, walking with their feet in the surf. It had been a revelation after Ascher, who'd
never left room for silence, who, having seen her at Alil's serving drinks in the front room while Sammy and the other girls danced in the back, the men's lips flattened like fish mugs against the glass, had left her with no self to protect.