A Private Sorcery (44 page)

“What will you do?”

“Try and get my license back. If I can, I'm going to leave the head business. Do a second residency in primary care or something like that. My father told me a story about this patient he treated when he was an attending, right before he met my mother. It made me think this shrink
thing is a family business gone bad.”

The guard raps on the window. The familiar two fingers.

“You're the one,” Saul says, “who's got to figure out what's next.” “That's exactly what he said. He thinks I should have a baby before I'm too old.”

“He's right, you've put it off all these years.”

“Actually, that's why I came here today.” She pushes her hair off her face. “I've been thinking,” she says slowly, “that you'd be pretty good genetic fodder.”

Saul stares at her.

“I'm not talking about getting back together. Just having a baby together.”

He places one hand on top of the other, his ringless fingers now half again their former size. “And how do you imagine this happening?”

“Nothing fancy. The old-fashioned way.”

Outside, keys are jangling. Rena stands.

“I asked Monk. You can request conjugal visits. As far as they're concerned,” she points at the guard now unlocking the door, “we're still husband and wife.”

17
Leonard

On the eve of your mother's sixtieth birthday, she announces that I am to take her to see you the next day. Russian caviar. A new handbag. Dinner at Dantelli's. These I would have expected. All evening, I watch her prepare. She bakes Toll House cookies and packs them in a Christmas tin even though it is only early November. She presses her Irish linen handkerchief blouse with a steam iron. She polishes her navy pumps and lays out her stockings and underwear.

In the car, she sits silently with her hands in her lap. Since she's abandoned her invalidism, her face has lost its puffiness and remnants of her former handsomeness have returned. I try to prepare her by describing the visitors' setup: the room with the reinforced window, the table where arms and possessions are to remain in full view. She listens politely, the way one might to the safety directions on an airplane.

Arriving at the prison, I sign in only her as the visitor. When they call her name, I rise but she motions for me to stay. Head erect, her girls' school posture, she walks toward the guard. I watch her from behind—a tall woman in a powder blue suit, broad in the back and the beam. She wobbles slightly on her pumps and then stands very still while the guard rummages through her pocketbook and the little shopping bag in which she has placed the cookie tin.

Fifty minutes later, your mother returns, escorted by a guard carrying a box of books you have asked us to take back. I see the blue covers of my Standard Edition, paperbacks by R.D. Laing, Searles, Lacan, Erikson. Your college philosophy texts. Dostoyevsky's
Crime and Punishment
. Driving home, your mother tells me how well you look. Fit and handsome with your new muscles and inch-long hair. How you told her that you have been in correspondence with the medical board and may be permitted to work as a physician's assistant in a rural area in upstate New York. About your hopes of doing a second residency in
primary care.

For a moment, I dread her saying something horrid like
who knows, maybe he'll become a surgeon
, but instead she smiles at me. Cars around us have begun to turn on their headlights, and in the refracted light her brow appears smooth and her eyes shine and I recall her snow-white skin one moonlit night, the sheer length of her, shoulders to toes, against creamy bedsheets, the chestnut triangle, those early years when our sexual life together was the one consolation we, mismatched souls, could offer each other. I swallow remembering her great appetite. Her violent orgasms.

Your mother rests her head on the window glass. She places a hand on the armrest between us, but I keep my fingers, all ten of them, on the wheel.

I think again about my dream in Todos Santos. Your mother with hair sleek as a ferret's. Always I've thought that we ceased relations after her father died, but now I wonder if it was before. For her thirtieth birthday, her parents had come to stay with the two of you while we had a weekend in the city. There were opera tickets,
La Traviata
, gifted by them, and a suite at the Waldorf. A negligee she'd bought for the occasion. Her preparations in the pink marble bathroom that night. Her muffled sobs when, climbing into bed, she discovered me in feigned sleep.

Why, I wonder now, this refusal? Retaliation for her having allowed her father to make her decisions? Anger that she would never grant me the adoration she'd given him?

Lulled by the movement of the car, your mother has fallen asleep. I touch her leg. It was a lavender gown, that night at the Waldorf. Lavender silk with a lace décolleté. Getting up in the middle of the night, I saw the candle she'd placed on the bedside table. She'd known. That with our bodies we could have made pockets of love in our lives. This was her choice. A brave choice for a woman with stretch marks on her belly from carrying two sons and a husband whom she'd been raised to view with contempt. I stood watching her, my fingers quivering inches from the lace, inches from awakening her, but instead, revenge
the last word, I crept alone into that pink marble sarcophagus to relieve myself.

I
WAKE AS
I
DID
the night after your arrest, thinking about the dream of the burning child in
The Interpretation of Dreams
. I go downstairs to the kitchen, where the box of books sits by the door. At the kitchen table, I search the index for the dream. My eye settles on the entry for the dream of smoked salmon. Flipping to the page, I laugh aloud, a weird laugh at three in the morning against the refrigerator hum, remembering my Uncle Jack with his creamed herring dreams. “All my dreams are of eating vats of creamed herrings and
shtupping
red-haired girls from behind,” he said when I first told him I was going to study psychiatry. “What would your Dr. Freud say about that?”

In the story about the dream of smoked salmon, a butcher's wife challenges Dr. Freud's theory that every dream is the fulfillment of a wish. Not the case, she argues, with her dream of being unable to have a dinner party due to having nothing in the cupboard save a single slice of smoked salmon. Tracing her associations, Freud easily trumps her: her wish had indeed been fulfilled in that her unconscious desire was to
not
have the dinner party since it would provide an opportunity to fatten up her skinny friend whom her husband, with his taste for stout women, would then only find more attractive than he already did.

In the margin, you have penciled
Lacan's Écrits
and a page number. I dig through the box and find the book and then the page with a circled asterisk next to Lacan's discussion of the same butcher's wife's dream. I struggle through the odd terminology, shocked by the easy, vulgar tone. The butcher's wife whom Lacan calls “our witty hysteric.” The butcher, a man, Lacan writes, whose wife, after he fucks her, does not have to masturbate.

You have drawn little arrows into the margins. From the butcher's wife, an arrow to the initial
K
. From the skinny friend of the butcher's wife whom her husband admires too well, to
R
. From the butcher, an arrow to a smudge mark where something has been erased.

I wait until the sky lightens. Then I climb the stairs. I listen to your
mother's
clu-hah
. Slowly, I pull back the covers. I place my hands on your mother's still lovely shoulders. I think of lavender silk. Of a lace décolleté. Of her girlhood hair. Because she is, after all, your mother, I say no more.

I
N THE MORNING
, she beams like a newlywed. She dresses in black slacks and a loose blouse that flatters her tall figure. She puts Vivaldi on the stereo. She makes pancakes with frozen blueberries. She sets the breakfast table in the dining room with her Wedgwood china.

Your mother pours me coffee in a long fragrant stream. A bowl of red apples gleams on the sideboard. “I would like to go to Italy, Leonard,” she says. “We have never traveled. The jewelry I inherited. The boys will never want that old stuff. We could sell my grandmother's pearls and go on a trip. I haven't been to Europe since I was nineteen and went with my mother and brother. I would like to go to Florence with you. To Venice. Siena. Rome.”

Your mother's eyes are shining. Had you asked me if she knew the names of four cities in Italy, I would have said no.

“I would like to learn Italian. We could rent a villa in Tuscany.”

My face is collapsing. Your mother rises. I bury my head in her stomach. I am weeping. She lowers herself to her knees and holds my face in her hands. Her horsewoman's hands.

“Forgive me, Klara,” I whisper.

Tears cascade over her cheekbones. “Forgive me, Klara,” I repeat.

“Forgive me, Leonard,” she whispers back.

A
FTER LUNCH, WE WALK TOGETHER
. Your mother remarks on the names of trees and the architectural styles of the neighborhood houses. It is so strange to be walking together, we might as well already be in a foreign country. Three girls, maybe thirteen, fourteen, pass arm in arm. They're dressed in the plaid skirts and saddle shoes of a parochial school, coats and book bags swinging loosely from their bodies,
hair arranged in the way that uniformed girls learn to signal their sexual knowingness.

“That was me. We had to stand in line, shortest to tallest, and the headmistress would measure from the bottom of our kneecaps down three inches to the required skirt length. Of course, I was always the tallest and therefore the last. I'd write limericks in my head, anything to kill time while the headmistress went from girl to girl. Once, I developed a terrible crush on a man I glimpsed through a doorway while I was waiting. I was composing a limerick about this girl in my class, Carol Jerginn, who kept straight pins and lipstick in her coat pocket so after school she could shorten her skirt and redden her lips. All I could see from my place in the line was his profile and his thick black hair. For weeks, everywhere I went, I looked for him. I described him to all my friends, and they would point at men and ask if that was him.”

“What was the limerick?”

Your mother laughs. A big-throated laugh. How could I have forgotten what a hearty girl she was? Blue ribbons for dressage. Gold ribbons for girls' basketball. How unexpected her taking to bed really was. “Let's see. ‘Carol Jerginn shows her knees. Always looking for the he's. Carries lipstick in her pocket. Got a boyfriend, cannot knock it.' ”

“I'm impressed.”

“Oh, I had a whole notebook of them. ‘Miss Flanner measures floor to hem. Worries, worries about the them. Thinks a girl who shows too much calf. Won't be able to learn her math.' Not the best. Calf and math.”

I always knew your mother had been bold and popular, but never have I thought of her as a wit.
Our witty hysteric
. “What happened?”

“With what?”

“With the man in the hallway?”

“Oh, nothing. Some other distraction came along. My friend Margaret Nunce started going out with a boy who worked in a gas station. That was very risqué. He might as well have been an ex-con.”

Your mother's hand flies to her mouth. I smile and take her arm.

“Margaret came into school one day all in a tizzy because this boy had told her he was going to get her name tattooed on his arm. Everyone said he wouldn't really do it. Then I had a dream that my father got a tattoo. I joked about it to everyone. In the afternoon, Margaret begged me to walk with her to the gas station. We must have walked two miles out of our way to see this boyfriend of hers. We get there and first thing we see is Margaret's name tattooed on his arm. I don't know which of us was more shocked.”

I steal a glance to see if your mother understands what she is revealing about her feelings toward her father, but if she does, she keeps a poker face. I hear my Uncle Jack when my Aunt Mindyl would go on and on about a slight from forty years before:
“
Goddamnit, my lawyer, he tells me there is in this country something they call a statute of limitations. After that, what do they say, let sleeping dogs lie. Let sleeping dogs lie in the sun and dream their farty dreams or whatever it is they dream.”

It's nearly dark by the time we get back to the house. Seeing the box of books by the kitchen door, I recall what had sent me downstairs last night: the burning child in
The Interpretation of Dreams
. I take the box up to my study and settle into my desk chair. Downstairs, your mother is listening to an old Beatles album of yours while she layers a lasagna. I find the dream and slowly read:

A father had been watching beside his child's sick-bed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so that he could see from his bedroom into the room in which his child's body was laid out, with tall candles standing round it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours' sleep, the father had a dream that
his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: ‘Father, don't you see I'm burning?'
He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next room, hurried into it and found that the old watchman had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings
and one of the arms of his beloved child's dead body had been burned by a lighted candle that had fallen on them.

Never have you reproached me. You never would.

I
WRITE YOU
the whole damn thing. The dream of the burning child copied verbatim. A diagram with my name on one side and yours on the other. Maria at the bottom of the page in my column. Mitch at the bottom of the page in your column. Me, asleep, while you went up in flames. The words
murderer
and
murdered
floating everywhere with colored lines in between. An echo chamber of accusations: Leonard murders Maria. Saul murders Mitch. Leonard murders Saul. Saul murders Saul.