The Liar's Wife (24 page)

The courage I was just then learning about as I learned about Thomas Mann.

What I came to understand was: Thomas Mann was great. Thomas Mann had greatness. And my mother did not.

I was tormented by the idea of greatness, and that so much of everything that made up my life could not ever be thought of as great.

Certainly, the daily life of my high school was not great. But at least I knew it, and I was proud that Mrs. Hauptmann knew that.

I realized that Mrs. Hauptmann had singled me out, saw me as different from the others, an outstanding teen. I had come upon her impatiently shuffling papers and saying, “This is not what I did my thesis on the dream plays of Strindberg for.” Had she not noticed I was in the room? When she finally did, she laughed and said, “Oh, Bill, it's this damned dance. Mr. Hauptmann and I are meant to be the chaperones; we're supposed to stand on the balcony like some minor Greek gods looking down at the kids and making sure they're not having a good time. Of course I loathe these dances and everything that they imply. I'm awfully glad that you're not one of the crowd that devotes themselves to all this ballyhoo.”

How proud I was to be able to tell her that I had stopped going to the dances because I thought they were “for snobs.” That I didn't like the way some of the students who thought themselves so important,
the leaders of the Latin Club and the newspaper, made others feel left out … and that was why I didn't go with them to Walgreens after school, to the soda fountain. What I didn't tell her was that I went with my friends Jimmy Riley and Ted Pezinkowski to a tavern. To drink beer. To talk about real things. Like about Roosevelt, whom they taught me to admire to the point of idolatry, whereas even the mention of his name in our house caused my father to slam his fist on the table in outrage.

“It isn't just the ordinary kind of high school exclusion. Think about the class implications,” she said.

I wondered if Mrs. Hauptmann was what my father would call a pink.

“In order to go to the dances you have to have the right kind of clothes. Am I right, Bill? You have to have black pants and a white dinner jacket, the girls have to have the right kind of dress, you have to know the right kind of dances, you have to have at least access to a car. That lets all the working-class kids out—they can't even think of going to the dances. They're only for the Four Hundred. God, what a hateful concept.”

“The Four Hundred?” I asked.

She showed me an article in the local paper, complaining about the discrimination at Horace Mann in favor of the wealthier students, calling this select group “the Four Hundred.” The article said there was a favoritism nurtured by the parents, and in which the teachers were complicit. I wondered who had written the article. I wondered if it was my friend Mike Costelloe, who wanted to be a newspaperman. He did become one. I often wonder how many of us actually became what we wanted to become.

“I'm against all of that, Mrs. Hauptmann. I really am,” I said. I was full of myself, of my own importance.

“I'm so glad, Bill,” she said and put her hand on my shoulder. I felt that hand on my shoulder as a young knight would have felt the touch of the king's sword. I was anointed, chosen.

But quite soon, I would learn that my anointing was only partial, and that Mr. Hauptmann had not quite shared in it. I was standing outside Mrs. Hauptmann's classroom after school, unwilling to interrupt
what I knew to be a private conversation. They were, after all, husband and wife.

“Bill Morton. He's no genius, but he's our best bet. And he has the looks of a young blond god, and let's face it, that will probably engage Herr Mann more than a great mind. Oh, yes, I'd be willing to bet on that.”

“He is a beauty, and, yes, you're right. No, he's no genius, but he's a pure soul, a sensitive soul. And he has it in him to be greatly responsive.”

“And you, my dear, should know.” I saw Mr. Hauptmann stroke his wife's cheek with his knuckles.

I felt a fool. I had imagined that the Hauptmanns thought about me in a new way, a way that would open all sorts of doors for me, in that it would allow me to think I had the right to walk through those doors. I thought I had kept my mediocrity hidden from them, the middlebrow side of myself I was trying so hard to be rid of, my taste for the sentimental, the merely pleasing. But I believed then that they had seen through me.

Mr. Hauptmann had stroked his wife's cheek with his knuckles. And she had given him a play slap again. And I found the gestures not only arousing but the sign of something I wanted one day for myself. That kind of talk. That kind of marriage. Stroking a woman's cheek with the rough knuckles, knuckles that were meant for fighting, knuckles that could draw blood rather than the gentle fingertips that were of no possible danger. Not in the least. And then a slap; not a kiss but a slap.

And then it happened again. A hard-on. At the sight of Mr. Hauptmann stroking his wife's cheek with his knuckles rather than his fingertips, and her pretending to slap his face. A double shame: a shame at the foolish tyranny of my body, shame that the Hauptmanns believed I was not great, but only the best of the mediocrities available to them.

In order for Mr. Hauptmann to get me ready for Thomas Mann, he had not only to give me a cram course in Mann's fiction but also to shove the whole of the Great Books down my throat. That's why I'm thinking about it all now, why I'm reliving it all after all these years.
My brother, Sam, just died, older than I: the Morton boys seemed to be blessed or cursed with extraordinary health and access to the best medical care in the world. So I am, at ninety, free of all major afflictions and I still have all my marbles. But my brother's death … a quick death from an embolism … made me understand in a new way that I myself will die. Apparently, he was in a department store and he turned to a perfect stranger in an elevator and said, “Something quite unusual is about to happen,” and he fell to the floor, almost immediately dead. My wife, my second wife, is much younger than I, and today it occurred to me that the least I can do for her and my children and grandchildren is not to leave them with the burden of a lot of useless junk. So I'm going through things, getting ready to get rid of almost everything. It's terrible to take old photographs of people I have loved and put them in large black plastic bags, kind of like the body bags they use for corpses. But I will do this. However, I'm going to keep the books that Thomas Mann signed for me, and the copy of the speech he gave the day I introduced him.

I make a pile of them, putting them on the table in the order that I read them. The novellas and short novels:
Death in Venice, Buddenbrooks. The Magic Mountain. Joseph and His Brothers, Tonio Kröger.

I think I realized even then that Mr. Hauptmann wasn't helping me read Thomas Mann for me, that what I was required to learn had nothing to do with me, it was like cramming for any other exam: no one really cared if I forgot everything the day after Thomas Mann's appearance. But maybe I'm not being fair to Mr. Hauptmann, certainly not to Mrs. Hauptmann. They cared deeply about literature; for all their snooty remarks about the students and their families, it was important to them that what they loved not be lost, that the torch be passed on, the flame kept alive. I suppose Mr. Hauptmann would jump all over me if he heard me using that kind of cliché. So would Mrs. Hauptmann. But of course they're long dead. I never saw them after I'd left for Europe; he'd enlisted in the army—I didn't know the details. I don't even know if he survived the War. Somehow I got the idea that after he was in the army she moved away to be with her family. New York, maybe. Or it might have been Los Angeles.

The first thing of Thomas Mann that Mr. Hauptmann gave me
to read was
Death in Venice.
I don't think it was the very best choice, but maybe he did it because it was short and he thought the subject would grab my attention. But you see, at that time, the only way I knew how to read was to identify with one of the characters in whatever I was reading. The minute I got to Chicago, I was taught to be ashamed of that, that it was something I had to give up, a mortifying sign of an almost pathological immaturity, like sucking your thumb or wetting the bed. Mr. Hauptmann didn't have time to instruct me on the breaking of that childish habit; he had to make sure I'd read things, so that if Thomas Mann asked me something, or some reporter from the local paper, I wouldn't look like a fool. By which they meant that they wouldn't.

No, there was no way I could identify with Aschenbach. I was much closer to Tadzio's age, but I couldn't identify with the spoiled rich boy who did nothing all day but be looked at—except for one fight almost at the end of the story. Mr. Hauptmann had told me that it was about the impossibility of having a body and a mind and a spirit, and that, as I've said before, was a help … but I couldn't help thinking of Aschenbach as a queer.

I'd known that there were men who were interested in men. There was the librarian who was the head of the little theatre who took an interest in me, and my friend Jack Scully said, “Just make sure you're never alone in a room with him. He's been known to make passes at guys like you.” And I was shocked, but I was careful to keep my distance from him. Of course when we were younger, just starting Boy Scouts, we played at jerking each other off. But we told ourselves that had nothing to do with being queer. It was just “horsing around.” And it all stopped when we started being interested in girls. We would never have imagined that we had anything to do with Aschenbach, with the kinds of feelings he had for Tadzio.

So I listened to Mr. Hauptmann when he said
Death in Venice
was not really about sex, not in the ordinary way, that it was about eros, rather than sex, that I had to understand everything in Platonic terms. Which meant I had to read Plato. Which meant he had to take me through the
Phaedrus
, and I had to consider the problem: Is beauty a distraction? If we can only get to the spirit through the flesh, are we
prisoners? Hopeless? Trapped? It didn't seem to have much to do with me, but I was proud to walk around with
The Dialogues of Plato
under my arm. I even thought it might impress Laurel, but it
was
hopeless. If she wasn't impressed by my being chosen to introduce Thomas Mann, she wouldn't be impressed by my reading Plato. It only occurred to me just now, after all these years, that maybe she was jealous or resentful that I was chosen instead of her. She was a much better student than I: she'd read much more, and with much more sophistication. But she was going to Purdue to study home economics and I was going to the University of Chicago. To study whatever I liked. And she was a girl. Or perhaps it's better to say: she wasn't a boy.

I had a much easier time with
Buddenbrooks
, even though it was much longer. I remember telling Mr. Hauptmann that it was a very sad story of a family that didn't seem to be able to make each other happy.

How contemptuous Mr. Hauptmann was when I said that, how he spat the word “happiness” out, as if it were a piece of spoiled meat. “Happiness! An American invention like Coca-Cola. Life, Liberty, the pursuit of Happiness … Happiness”—he spat the word again—“what a comedown from the other two, life and liberty. The paltriness of it: it cries out to heaven.”

I nodded, and acted chastened. But I didn't give up my sadness for the Buddenbrookses, and I thought of my own family, particularly my mother, how we were a family that people wanted to be around, maybe because we liked being around each other. We were a family that many people wished was theirs.

Like Old Ladislaw.

Old Ladislaw—did we ever know his last name? If we did we never used it. He worked for my father as a painter. My mother saved rags for him … he seemed to always be in need of rags for his painting. Of course my mother was always kind to Ladislaw, and sometimes they would chat a bit as he came to collect the rags. He never took his hat off in the house, and I knew that was wrong, something a gentleman didn't do, but I was proud of my mother because it didn't bother her. It probably bothered my father. Although he never said anything either. Maybe he knew it would make Ladislaw feel bad, and then he might not have come back. But maybe he wouldn't have felt bad, would have
been grateful that my father was teaching him something about America. How would you ever know?

One night the doorbell rang as we were all at dinner. My father answered the door. It was Old Ladislaw. He was there to collect rags. My father started to say we were eating dinner, but my mother rushed up—she knew that the way my father was talking would make Old Ladislaw feel bad—and said, “Please join us, Ladislaw, you're very welcome to join us.”

“No,” Old Ladislaw said. “But is it all right if I just sit and watch?”

There was no way that they could say no to him, and after a few tries at insisting that he join us, met with resolute refusals, they agreed to let him sit and watch us eat.

And from time to time, with no regularity, so that it was nothing we could plan for or expect, Old Ladislaw came and asked if he could sit and watch us. I could see that it filled some large emptiness in him, just to watch us, and after a while we stopped offering him food. It was just something that happened: Old Ladislaw rang the bell, he was shown into the dining room, he took his chair at the side of the room. And watched us. Watched us eating an ordinary dinner, an ordinary happy family.

And then one day he said that he was going home. Going home to Lithuania, to his family. He was going to leave us a car, to thank us for having been kind to him. “A jalopy,” he said, pleased at his use of the American. My brother and I were thrilled.

We never heard of him again. From time to time during the War, and afterwards, in the Cold War, I wondered if his family were safe, if they were alive … if they were Jewish. It's another thing that I will never know.