The Liar's Wife (23 page)

Do you mean that I am not a monster? I wanted to ask. But I said nothing and finished buttoning up my shirt.

Then when I got home I worried that there was something about me, some telltale sign that had given me away: that sex was giving me trouble. I'd heard it called self-abuse. I knew some of the things I'd heard couldn't be true: that it could make you blind. But I also knew that when I'd spent whole days in my room doing nothing but masturbating I could see a kind of pasty look when I looked in the mirror, and I was pretty sure there were dark circles under my eyes even though I'd got plenty of sleep. I wanted to ask Dr. Larkin if it was a sign of mental illness that I masturbated so much. That I woke up every morning in a pool of my own semen no matter how many times I'd jerked off the day, or even the night before. Was I afflicted with some sort of excess fluid that could lead to a future of invalidism, perhaps an early death?

This is another story I told my children, that I've even told my grandchildren (they're old enough for it now) that makes them understand the kind of foolish boy I was. I'd been very worried that my mother would know about what I considered my obsessional masturbation because she'd discover the caked handkerchiefs in the laundry. That she couldn't possibly ignore the stained sheets. But of course nothing was ever said.

There was a laundry chute that led from the second floor, where the bedrooms were, to the basement, where the washing machine sat. You simply threw your dirty laundry down the chute and it landed in the basement, right into a basket that my mother could carry to the washing machine. Sometimes, for some reason, some of the laundry would miss its mark and would land on the concrete floor and my mother would have to bend to pick it up and I could hear her—if I happened to be in the kitchen—saying “Oh shoot” and something about old bones.

One night at supper, she said to my father, “Dan, the strangest thing. You know how sometimes the laundry misses the basket and falls onto the floor? Well today I bent to pick it up from the floor and every single thing I picked up was full of little holes, little holes with brown rings around them as if something had eaten into the clothing some way. Luckily it was just a pile of handkerchiefs and so it's no big loss.”

My children, my grandchildren now get almost sick with laughter as I reenact the panic that I felt when I heard my mother say those
words. I was terrified; what I'd feared was true. There was something inside me, some toxic substance that was dangerous and poisonous and destructive to anything it touched. Here was the proof.

My mother was surprised when I excused myself before dessert and said I had to study for a math test. But of course I couldn't concentrate on math or anything, I was so appalled at myself, at what had been discovered or revealed. Then I heard my parents laughing downstairs, laughing in that way that reminded me that they had a life outside me, that had nothing to do with me or my brother, that had begun before we were born, that would go on after we'd all left the house. Too often now they argued. It was always about money. The Depression. My mother was tired and disappointed. My father was tired and ashamed. But now they were joyous, light. They were laughing. My mother was laughing louder than my father. My mother was famous for her laugh. People who liked her loved her laugh, they said it was infectious, but they employed the metaphor of infection in a positive sense, as if she were without their will infusing joy into their bloodstreams. But people who didn't like her—some of the women in the church—said she was loud. She'd been terribly hurt when she'd overheard the minister's wife saying: “Why is it that wherever Mae Morton is, there is always a noise?”

I went downstairs to see what they were laughing about; I needed the relief from my own misery and self-loathing and terror at being exposed.

“Your father's solved the mystery. The mystery of the small holes in the laundry.”

I was terrified again. Why were they laughing at what so clearly was not a laughing matter?

My father explained that he'd left an old car battery in the basement, absentmindedly putting it in a place where it shouldn't have been (that wasn't like him. A place for everything and everything in its place was one of his favorite sentences). The clothes had fallen on top of the battery and the battery had been leaking acid. The little holes in the handkerchiefs came from the leaky acid. “End of mystery,” he said.

I heard a sound come out of my mouth, the same mouth that had, only minutes before, tasted of ashes, the ashes of shame, and now was
sluiced with a wonderful, cool relief. I think the sound I made could only be called a hoot.

“It is pretty darn funny,” my father said.

It had been a long time since I had loved my parents so much.

But I was still worried about what I felt was excessive masturbation, and since Dr. Larkin had raised the topic, I asked him if he thought there was such a thing.

“Not a tall, not a tall,” he said. “You're perfectly normal. You're perfectly healthy. In time, it will sort itself out. The important thing is not to worry. You have a fine healthy body. The least you can do is to enjoy it.”

And when Dr. Larkin said that, I remembered that there were things I loved, things I loved about being Bill Morton, about being alive and seventeen years old. Things I loved on the surface of my skin and in the depths of my muscles and in the speed and strength and lightness of my limbs. That I loved all kinds of weather, the cold, blue-white snow, the slow light summer breezes, carrying the wonderful smells, my mother crushing some herbs in her fingers and saying, This is thyme, this is the mountain thyme, Billy, and even thunder and lightning, and the feel of the cool sand under my bare feet. And swimming, how I loved swimming—jumping into the cold lake, knowing my body would forget the shock soon and the cold would be exhilaration only. Making my way so easily, simply through the water, effortless, and putting my head under the water and seeing the colors changing as the light fell differently, and made shadows and patterns on the sand below, and the sun's rays striking straight down through the bottom like gold spokes and the reflection of the trees when the lake was still, like a sheet of lime-colored spun sugar, so you were surprised when you tasted it that it wasn't sweet at all, only the complicated lake taste that reminded you that somewhere you couldn't see some rich life was going on and now you were part of it and it of you. And the light on the water, wonderful, at any time, in any weather.

That was what I talked to Mrs. Hauptmann about—the light on the water—when she gave me that passage from
The Hairy Ape
to read.
I had no idea that this would be the beginning of a conversation that would blast a hole right through my easy life, my easy happiness.

In her copy of
The Hairy Ape
, Mrs. Hauptmann had underlined one of Paddy's speeches for me to deliver. Paddy the old Irish sailor, a foil for Yank with his dreams of force.

“The Irish are the true poets of the English tongue.”

I'd never thought of the Irish in that way. Jimmy Riley and Mike Costelloe were Irish. I thought they were great guys, imaginative, interesting, with good senses of humor. But poets … No, I would never have connected the word with them. Their fathers worked in the steel mills and they didn't seem to have a whiff of romance about them. They were always kidding me for being too much of a dreamer. “Billy has his head in the clouds so he falls on his ass. I have my nose to the sidewalk, and someday I might find a diamond.” That was what Jimmy Riley said to me one day. I didn't think of that as poetry.

I've never seen a production of
The Hairy Ape
and I can only imagine that some people would find the language overwrought, but I thought it was wonderful; it was thrilling to me that what I felt about the water—although it was only Lake Michigan and I had never been on a boat that could hold more than four people—had been written about by someone acknowledged to be a great writer. I can call the words up in a second, three quarters of a century later.

“Oh, to be scudding south again wid the power of the Trade Wind driving her on steady through the nights and the days! Full sail on her! Nights and days! Nights when the foam of the wake would be flaming wid fire, when the sky'd be blazing and winking wid stars. Or the full of the moon maybe. Then you'd see her driving through the gray night, her sails stretching aloft all silver and white, not a sound on the deck, the lot of us dreaming dreams.… And there was the days, too.… Sun warming the blood of you and wind over the miles of shiny green ocean like strong drink to your lungs.”

I guess I must have made a good job of it—maybe Mrs. Ferguson's lessons counted for something to someone like Mrs. Hauptmann—for I could see she was pleased with me, and the pleasure she took, the
extravagance of her praise, freed me to talk about my happiness on the water. And she allowed as how she was happiest by the water, how the light on the water, the smell of the salt air, the clarity of the sunlight, the sound of the waves—always made her feel renewed. She told me about a summer she'd spent on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, in Provincetown, where Eugene O'Neill had lived.

“One day I'd love to have a house by the water,” she said.

And that was where my enthusiasm got the best of me.

“You could, Mrs. Hauptmann, you really could. You could have a house in Ogden Dunes, where we live. My father builds houses for people, and he does them very reasonably. I'd be happy to introduce you to him. I'm sure he'd be able to help you out.”

And then she said the thing that made it impossible for me ever to love my parents in the same way again.

“But you see, Bill, that would be impossible. We're Jews and Jews aren't allowed to live in Ogden Dunes. It's the first thing you see when you drive into the town: a sign saying ‘Restricted Home Sites on Lake Michigan.' Didn't you ever think of what that means?”

I don't think I'd ever felt so ashamed. The fact was, I'd never thought of what the sign meant. And I'd seen it every day. I was ashamed for myself, but I was ashamed for everyone I'd ever known, a shame that spread like the blood I felt spreading from my neck and heating my face straight to the roots of my hair. I knew I should say something, but there was nothing that seemed right to say. And so I said something I knew to be ridiculous.

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Hauptmann. I just didn't know.”

“No, Bill,” she said. “Of course you didn't. That's part of the problem, isn't it? That's why Thomas Mann is so insistent upon traveling around America. That's why it's so important that ordinary people hear what he has to say.”

I couldn't imagine that she'd want anything to do with me again. But she ruffled my hair, as if I were a child, and said, “You're a nice boy, Billy. You'd never do anything to hurt anyone. I know that.”

A nice boy. That was what everyone thought of me. That was what everyone said about me when they signed my yearbook: “Dear Bill: To think that the sweetest, most considerate guy in the senior class is
also the handsomest.” “Dear Bill, Thanks for your kindness … Horace Mann is losing its Gary Cooper.” And at that moment, I was disgusted with myself for being the boy people thought nice when I wasn't nice, because of sex, and now because I had allowed myself to be blind to prejudice.

How can I explain to people that in 1939 I didn't know about anti-Semitism? That what was going on in Germany—that fellow Hitler—didn't seem to have anything to do with me, that I knew that the First World War had been over only four years before I was born, that it was a terrible thing, and it seemed right that everyone I heard speaking said that above all we shouldn't allow ourselves to be involved in another war. That the term “isolationist” didn't seem like a bad thing to me. That everything I learned from Thomas Mann was a shock and a surprise.

But how can it be, that I had never heard of Kristallnacht, or the defeat of Poland, to say nothing of the deportation of Jews? I can only say it's the truth: before I met the Hauptmanns, before they prepared me to meet Thomas Mann, none of it had penetrated my mind.

What had penetrated my mind? That was what I had to ask myself, diving up from the swamp of self-loathing that Mrs. Hauptmann's words had plunged me into. What had I been thinking about all day? Decorating the gym for dances? Preparing for the state finals in this or that? Being in love with Laurel Jansen, earning money for college with after-school jobs, keeping my masturbation secret so my mother might believe she had a decent son.

I had to ask my mother if she knew that Ogden Dunes was a restricted town. I could tell she didn't want to talk about it. Didn't want to listen to the words that I was using. She was peeling vegetables for dinner: carrots, potatoes, onions, celery; she would boil them with pieces of chicken for a stew. She would dip a mix of flour and water into the broth for the dumplings she knew I loved.

“I never really thought about it, Bill,” she said.

“But now, Mom, now that we know, we have to do something.”

“I don't know about that,” she said, wiping her hands on her flower-printed apron.

“But you know it's wrong. You know it's wrong to keep people out because of their religion. Because of who they were born.”

“Of course it's wrong. Of course I know it's wrong. But maybe it's for the best. Maybe they just wouldn't feel comfortable. Maybe in time they will. I tend to think that things work themselves out in time and it's better not to go stirring up a hornet's nest.”

And for the first time, I wondered if I loved my mother.

But I couldn't even hold on to that thought for a minute. I knew my mother was the kindest, the most loving person in the world. She'd taken a job for almost no pay teaching English to foreigners, and, at the end of every class, she invited her students to our house for a party. Many of them went on to be her friends. She was the most loving person I knew. But was it possible that she lacked courage?