The House of Pain
David Ghitelman
After I showed my story to Mrs. Miller, my English teacher, everything got real weird. She showed it to Dr. Horowitz, the school psychologist, who showed it to Mrs. Bernstein, my guidance counselor, and she called my parents.
Dr. Horowitz called me into his office. Jonah, he asked me, do you ever think about committing suicide?
I know now that I should have lied. I should have said, No, not ever. I should have said, Dr. Horowitz, it was just a short story that I had to write for English class, and I just wanted to make it interesting.
Because I was still an idiot back then, I answered with a question of my own: Doesn’t everybody?
I wasn’t trying to be funny. I don’t know. Maybe I was trying to be funny. What I know now was it was the wrong thing to say. Dr. Horowitz, a sort of Groucho Marx kind of guy, bald on top with a thick mustache, just sat there. He looked straight at me with no expression on his face. For a moment, I thought that maybe I should slash my wrists in front of him, just to get a reaction, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. It isn’t like I carried safety razors around with me in school. Actually, I would never slash my wrists in front of anybody. Actually, I would never slash my wrists even though everybody was afraid that I wanted to.
The only person who had slashed his wrists wasn’t really a person. That is, a real person. He was just the kid in my story. Okay, he was a kid who looked like me and talked like me and liked the books and music that I liked, but he wasn’t me. Hadn’t anyone read J.D. Salinger or William Faulkner? I know Mrs. Miller had read Nine Stories. We’d talked about it. How none of them were even half as good as The Catcher in the Rye. I hadn’t invented the idea of writing a story about a guy who commits suicide. It’s a literary trope, if that’s the correct word. It’s virtually a cliché.
The title of the story didn’t help. I had called it “The House of Pain.” Again, it wasn’t because I thought I lived in a house of pain. Even the character in my story didn’t necessarily think he lived in a house of pain. It was an allusion to my favorite novel by H.G. Wells. Nobody got it.
All of a sudden, all these people – Mrs. Miller, Dr. Horowitz, Mrs. Bernstein, my parents – got extremely concerned about me and decided I should start seeing Dr. Mendelsohn. Dr. Mendelsohn had an office in his house, and his house was over on the other side of Golden Grove, which meant it wasn’t that far away, maybe a mile or two, so I could bike there every Thursday after school if it wasn’t snowing or raining or anything. It was early spring, so I lucked out. I was able to bike there.
I’d never been to a shrink before, unless you count the five minutes I spent in Dr. Horowitz’s office when I got the old stone face treatment by saying that I thought everyone thinks about killing themselves. (Don’t they?) From Dr. Mendelsohn I expected something out of the movies or television, where this kindly old doctor with a carefully trimmed beard and a European accent gives his patient this word association test. The doctor says, “Cat,” and the patient says, “Dog,” and then the doctor says, “Black,” and the patient says, “White,” and finally the doctor says, ”Despair,” and the patient says, “The winter my mother walked out on us,” and the patient is cured. In real life, this isn’t how it works. At least, it was not how things worked with Dr. Mendelsohn.
For one thing, Dr. Mendelsohn wasn’t old and he wasn’t European. He was youngish. I mean, he was younger than my father. And clean-shaven, with thin, kinky hair like Bob Dylan, although I’m pretty sure he was older than Bob Dylan. He must have been somewhere between my father ‘s age and Bob Dylan’s.
His office was a room on the ground floor of his split-level house. It was a house just like the one I lived in, probably. I never saw any part of it except the office and the small waiting room just outside the office. The office was a wood-paneled room with three comfortable black-leather chairs, a black-leather couch, and a large desk the same dark brown as the walls with a desk chair that Dr. Mendelsohn never used. Instead, he sat in one of the black-leather chairs. The only thing he ever used the desk for was to hold a large mug of tea. I knew it was tea because I could see the string of the tea bag sticking out of the mug. A dark brown bookshelf lined one of the walls. On another wall hung a pair of framed botanical prints, one of an onion, the other of an acorn squash. The only light came from a black floor lamp.
The room was dim as a cave but cozy, the sort of place you might want to hibernate in if you were so disposed. At my first session, I sat in one of the comfortable chairs across from Dr. Mendelsohn. Perhaps the chair was too comfortable. After a minute or two of staring at Dr. Mendelsohn, I fell asleep, and he had to wake me up when it was time for me to leave.
At the second session, he suggested I lie down on the couch. It didn’t sound like a good idea to me. I told him I might just fall asleep again. He said I should give it a try, so I did. I stared at the ceiling, which needed a paint job. It was dotted with water spots like small islands in a vast ocean, but Dr. Mendelsohn was right. It was easier to talk when I wasn’t looking at him. I could just look at the ceiling without worrying if the water spot islands were pleased or not with what I was saying. I began to speak about something that happened about two years ago.
In the days after my mother left, my father would come home from work and sit on the living room couch with his head in his hands, I told Dr. Mendelsohn. I would stop at the King Kullen on my way home from junior high and pick up food, and my sister Eleanor – a fifth grader at the time – would prepare our evening meal. Mostly we ate frozen dinners. Probably all we ate were frozen dinners. Eleanor liked the turkey while I preferred sirloin steak because it was really hamburger in thick, salty gravy. The little kids – Guinevere, Joel and Roxanne – just ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that Eleanor made for them while our frozen dinners were heating in the oven.
I always made sure to have a loaf of Wonder Bread and jars of Skippy Creamy and Welch’s Grape in the house. I also had to keep us stocked with Frosted Flakes and milk for the little kids’ breakfast as well as English muffins and Nescafe for my breakfast along with margarine for the English muffins. I don’t know what Eleanor ate for breakfast because I had to leave for school a good half-hour before anyone else got out of bed. My father was always gone before I came into the kitchen. I know he didn’t eat breakfast at home because there were never any dirty dishes in the kitchen when I got there. I also know that he didn’t sit on the couch with his head in his hands all night. At some point, he would get up and go to bed, according to Eleanor. She told me she sometimes heard him snoring in his room after midnight. My father was a fat man and a loud snorer. I don’t know why Eleanor was awake after midnight. Maybe she couldn’t sleep. I slept well. Carrying those groceries home from the supermarket was hard work.
Every morning I made my bed before leaving for school. I don’t know if Eleanor and the little kids made theirs. I slept downstairs in the room that used to be my father’s study. My father’s study, I told Dr. Mendelsohn, is a lot like this room, except not as dark. It has a large window that overlooks the front lawn. Everyone else slept upstairs. Since the study had become my bedroom – maybe two or three years before the stuff I’m talking about happened – I’d had little reason to ever go upstairs. Now that my mother was gone I made a point of never going there. Why should I?
After dinner Eleanor would take the few dishes we used during the day and load them into the dishwasher and then run it. Every night before I went to bed I would walk into the kitchen and wipe down the table. Then I would say goodnight to my father who was sitting on the couch with his head in his hands. I would walk up to him, kiss him on the cheek, and say, Goodnight. It was a ritual that went way back. Of course, before my mother left I would go up to both of them, kiss each one on the cheek and say, Goodnight.
It was lucky that my mother waited to leave us until Roxanne had started first grade. That way she could walk home with Eleanor, Guinevere, and Joel. If she had still been in kindergarten, which ended two or three hours before regular elementary school, I don’t know what we would have done. She could have walked home from school by herself without any problem, but she would have been alone in the house for hours, and she was just a kindergarten kid. That couldn’t have been a good idea.
Actually, things weren’t that bad. The little kids behaved themselves. Guinevere and Joel didn’t fight, and the three of them went straight to bed after Eleanor read them a story. Every morning I found some money – a ten or twenty-dollar bill, more than enough – that my father left for me to buy food. I left the change from the previous day’s shopping on the counter for Eleanor and the little kids to use for lunch money. If my father had simply gone to bed when he got home each night instead of sitting on the couch with his head in his hands, it would have been easy to pretend that we were a normal family. Or at least easier.
There’s a pop song from a few years ago, maybe more than just a few years ago, that begins, Why do the birds go on singing? Why do the stars shine above? Don’t they know it’s the end of the world? It ended when I lost your love. Maybe you know it? I asked Dr. Mendelsohn. He didn’t respond, so I continued. That’s what I thought about when I saw my father sitting on the couch. Like he was waiting for the end of the world, or the world had already ended. For him. It’s not the sort of song my father would know. His taste runs more to Broadway show tunes. Even back then I preferred folk music. You know, Peter, Paul and Mary, Simon and Garfunkel, that kind of stuff. Now it’s all Bob Dylan, all the time. I can listen to one of his songs every day, and every time I listen to it it’s different. I don’t know what that’s about.
One night when I went into the kitchen to wipe down the table, I discovered Roxanne there in her pajamas. She was standing by the refrigerator and eating Yodels straight from the box. Normally, that is, normally since my mother had left, I gave everyone one Yodel for dessert after dinner. Now Roxanne was standing in the middle of the kitchen eating I don’t know how many of them.
What in hell do you think you’re doing? I asked. I spoke loudly but not loudly enough to wake anybody up. My father was on the couch with his head in his hands. I couldn’t tell if he was awake or asleep. Roxanne hadn’t even bothered to throw out the Yodels’ foil wrappers. Four or five of them lay crumpled up on the counter.
I was hungry, she said. She looked like she was about to cry, which didn’t worry me. I wanted her to cry. That’s why I used the word hell. When my mother was around, we weren’t allowed to curse. Hell was considered a curse. We had to say heck. Now I could say anything I wanted. Hell, shit, fuck. Now I could say anything, and no one would stop me.
I could swear like a sailor, whatever the hell that meant. Popeye never swore. I could let loose a string of goddamns or for chrissakes like Holden Caulfield, although I wouldn’t read that book for at least another year.
I lowered my voice. If you’re hungry, I’ll make you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I said.
She just stood there, looking even more like she was about to cry. I didn’t know what to do. I no longer wanted to make her cry.
Do you want a sandwich? I asked again.
Slowly she walked upstairs to the bathroom, ran some water in the sink and went back to the bedroom she shared with Joel. I had overheard my parents talking a few months ago about how Roxanne and Joel were becoming too old to share a bedroom. Because she was a girl and he was a boy, I suppose. I’d never heard anyone say Eleanor and Guinevere were too old to share a bedroom although they were older. I didn’t like this talk. Where would Joel move, into my bedroom? That didn’t sound like a good idea at all. After Roxanne closed her bedroom door, I wiped down the kitchen table, kissed my father goodnight, and went back to my room.
I was too angry with Roxanne to fall asleep so I read for a while: H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau. It’s a weird book. Mrs. von Kleist, this woman who lives down the street, had seen me reading a copy of The Time Machine I’d borrowed from the library and had given me an old hard-backed edition of Dr. Moreau that she’d read when she was a girl. Dr. Moreau is a lot weirder than The Time Machine. It’s hard to imagine Mrs. von Kleist, who is older than my mother, ever having been a girl, and it’s even harder to imagine Mrs. von Kleist liking Dr. Moreau. It’s just so weird.
The next afternoon I told Eleanor about finding Roxanne in the kitchen eating Yodels. I told her I didn’t think I should keep buying them.
The little kids need them, she said. I mean: they need something.
So I said I would keep buying them. I liked them, too. I needed something, too. My French teacher, Madame Meursault, said that at Christmas in France they eat something like Yodels. They call them Bûche de Noel. We don’t celebrate Christmas, of course. We’re Jews.
My mother had been sick for a while many years ago, just after Roxanne was born, and then she got better and started taking college courses and she seemed totally better. Of course, she was busy so we had frozen dinners a lot or went out to the Golden Grove Diner to break the monotony. I didn’t mind at all. This is how I discovered sirloin steak. The sirloin steak was better at the diner than the frozen Swanson’s stuff, but there was no way we could have all walked that far and back on a school night. My father, of course, could have driven us there, but he didn’t seem to hear anything anyone said to him while he was sitting on the couch with his head in his hands. Maybe his hands blocked his ears. I’m not sure he really knew what was going on when we said goodnight to him and kissed him on the cheek. He never looked up. He never smiled at us.
I was beginning to think that this could go on forever, I told Dr. Mendelsohn. I don’t know what Eleanor thought. I almost never talked to Eleanor or the little kids about our situation. I believed the less we talked about it the less real it was and the sooner we might return to normal, although I didn’t think that things would ever be normal again. I thought that this – eating frozen dinners while my father sat on the couch – was our destiny, our fate. It was what we deserved.
The night my mother left she was going to a poetry reading at Athena College. That’s where she was taking classes. She had dropped out of City College in her sophomore year, the year I was born. City College was where she met my father. The poet she was going to hear was Horace Canterbury. He’d been her professor at City College. She’d shown me a photograph of him on the back of a thin book of his poems. Night Waltzes, it was called. He had white hair, a bushy white beard and thick, black-rimmed glasses. He looked so old. The book had one poem on each page, and I read the first. It made even less sense than the e. e. cummings poem about Buffalo Bill we’d had to read in English class. When I told my mother that, she grabbed the book out of my hands.
Have you ever read The Island of Dr. Moreau? I asked Dr. Mendelsohn. By now I knew that he wasn’t going to respond to my questions, so I just kept talking. It’s about this guy who’s traveling from England to Australia or someplace like that to study plants, but he gets into a shipwreck and washes up ashore on this island where this mad doctor – yeah, I know, what a cliché, but maybe it wasn’t a cliché yet, in Wells’ time – anyhow, this island where this mad doctor, Dr. Moreau, of course, is experimenting on these animals, trying to force them to evolve into people. Like I said, crazy, scary crazy. And that’s what I felt like at the time, sometimes like the guy who gets shipwrecked, sometimes like one of the animals Dr. Moreau is experimenting on. Dr. Moreau, the mad scientist, was my father. I wonder what Mrs. von Kleist thought about all this stuff. Maybe she didn’t think about it at all.
It wasn’t too cold the first few days after my mother left, but then one day it started to snow as I was walking from school to the supermarket. We were out of almost everything – milk, bread, peanut butter, jelly, Yodels. Big wet flakes of snow fell. At the beginning they melted as soon as they hit the sidewalk, but by the time I arrived at King Kullen they were sticking to the ground and building into a slippery mess. I was walking through the parking lot on my way home with the groceries when one of my paper bags began to rip. I held on to big, heavy, glass gallon-bottle of milk, but everything else tumbled onto the pavement. The jelly jar would have shattered if it hadn’t fallen into a pile of slush. Wet and getting wetter, I just stood there watching my stuff lying around on the ground.
Jonah, said Mrs. von Kleist. Jonah, what’s happening?
The engine of her large, green station wagon was chugging away, and the wipers screeched across the windshield, so she had to shout to be heard. Her two sons, Billy and Jimmy, sat jammed together in the front seat with her. I barely know them. Younger than me, they go to Catholic school. All the von Kleists – Mr. and Mrs. von Kleist and Billy and Jimmy – have reddish blond hair and abundant freckles. They are one of those families where everybody looks the same. In our family everyone looks different – the girls short and fat like my father, the boys tall and lean like my mother. Eleanor and Roxanne even have red hair, but a darker, redder, curlier red hair than that of the von Kleists. Because neither of my parents has red hair, people – complete strangers – sometimes ask where Eleanor and Roxanne got their red hair from. What a stupid question.
My mother, I began to say to Mrs. von Kleist and then stopped. I didn’t want to talk to her about my mother even though I liked Mrs. von Kleist. She was the only adult I knew other than my parents who read books, I told Dr. Mendelsohn. Or at least she had read books like The Island of Dr. Moreau when she was a girl. I don’t know what she reads now.
Where is she? Where is your mother? Jonah, what is happening?
The snow, I began again. This time I decided I’d stick to what was happening at the moment, but I was cold and it was hard to speak.
Jonah, get in the car, and tell me what is going on.
The food, I said and pointed at the bread and the peanut butter and the jelly and the Yodels, which the snow and slush were rapidly covering. All my food.
Billy, please get out of the car and pick up Jonah’s stuff, Mrs. von Kleist said. And Jonah, get in the car. Hurry up. You’re freezing.
Billy looked as his mother as if she’d just asked him to kill a giant with his bare hands, but he got out of the car and picked up the bread and the jars and the box of Yodels. I got into the back seat. Mrs. von Kleist was the sort of woman you listened to, I told Dr. Mendelsohn. You obeyed her whether you wanted to or not. I was shivering.
Jonah, where is your mother?
She sounded alarmed, as if she was as frightened as I was.
I don’t know, I sobbed. I don’t know.
After my mother got sick, but before she started taking college classes, she would leave us every Friday afternoon for a few hours. I was in charge of the kids – all the kids, including Eleanor – until my mother returned. I was in charge but mostly I would lie on my bed in the room that used to be my father’s study and read. Mostly I read H. G. Welles: The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, even The Outline of History. Eleanor and the kids would watch television. Our television was downstairs in the basement. Our basement was finished, with plywood boards covering the gray cinderblock walls. They weren’t stained that dark mahogany varnish like these walls or the walls in the room that used to be my father’s study, I told Dr. Mendelsohn. The wood was light. The whole basement was well-lighted. It was a nice space, but I preferred to be alone in my room.
The kids would watch the afternoon television shows for kids. A lot of the kids in my class also watched these shows, and they sounded good and funny when my classmates talked about them, but I didn’t watch them. I just stayed in my room and read H. G. Wells. No one told me, but I eventually figured out where my mother was going those Friday afternoons. She was going to see a psychologist. This was scary. That’s why no one told me about it. What if my mother was crazy?
I was ashamed to be sitting there in Mrs. von Kleist’s car and crying. Not so much because of Mrs. von Kleist. She was a mother and must’ve seen kids cry before. But I felt humiliated to be sobbing in front of Jimmy and Billy, particularly because they were so much younger than me. At least, I thought, they go to Catholic school. They won’t be able to tell any kids in my class about this. But I was embarrassed and ashamed to be talking about my mother, the same way I was embarrassed and ashamed when I realized my mother was going to a psychologist. What if she was crazy? Would she have to leave us? Had she left us because she was crazy?
Mrs. von Kleist drove us to her house and made us cups of cocoa, the best cocoa I’d ever tasted. Then she sent Billy and Jimmy upstairs to their rooms to do their homework. It seems Catholic schools give you a lot of homework even if you’re just a little kid. The smell of chocolate filled the kitchen and was as soothing as a hot bath. I told Mrs. von Kleist everything, how my mother had left, how my father would sit on the couch all evening with his head in his hands. I said that was why I had to go to King Kullen every day on my way home from school.
How long has your mother been gone? Mrs. von Kleist asked me. When did she leave?
She was questioning me like a police detective on television. A good one. One who helps people solve their problems. But it was hard for me to talk, because whenever I began to speak I felt like crying, and I didn’t want to cry, even though Jimmy and Billy were upstairs and couldn’t hear me.
Monday, I managed to choke out between sobs.
Monday? Monday, this week, Monday?
Glad that I could answer her question without speaking, I nodded.
Do you know what day today is?
I hadn’t expected this question. Surely, Mrs. von Kleist knew what day it was. Why was she asking me?
I had to close my eyes and concentrate to come up with an answer.
Friday? It was really just a guess.
Yes, Jonah, you’re right. It’s Friday. She sounded proud of me, as if I had just recited all the states in the order of their admission to the Union or something. Then we all – Mrs. von Kleist, Jimmy, Billy and me – walked across the street to my house. The snow had stopped falling, but several inches of slush covered the streets and sidewalks. Mrs. von Kleist and Jimmy and Billy had put back on their black galoshes to make the trip, but I was just in my school shoes. Mrs. von Kleist looked unhappy about this, but what could she do?
I suppose my father was surprised to see Mrs. von Kleist sitting in our kitchen with me when he came home from work, I told Dr. Mendelsohn.
Emily? my father said. It sounded like he had trouble remembering Mrs. von Kleist’s first name.
Solomon, we have to talk, she said and then turned to me. Jonah, why don’t you see how the kids are doing downstairs?
Huh? I said. I had assumed I would be part of the conversation between Mrs. von Kleist and my father.
Jonah, my father said. It was the first time I’d heard him say my name since my mother had left. It was the first time I’d heard him say anything to me since my mother left.
I didn’t want to go downstairs. I went to my room, which was near the kitchen, but they spoke quietly, so I couldn’t hear them. I went back to reading The Island of Dr. Moreau. I might have already read through the book once by then, so I just studied these lines the animals that the crazy doctor is trying to turn into people recite, a sort of Ten Commandments for the beast-people: Not to go on all fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men? Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not men?
After Mrs. von Kleist and Billy and Jimmy left, my father called us all together in the living room. He sat on the couch, but his hands were not covering his face. His eyes were red. It looked like he had been crying. I’m sorry, he said. I’m very sorry. Then we all went out to Golden Grove Diner to eat. I had sirloin steak. It was even better than I had remembered.
As we were finishing our main course at the diner, my father said Harriet would be coming back every day to cook and clean for a while.
How long a while? Roxanne asked.
My father had been in pretty good shape during dinner, eating his sirloin steak and baked potato with obvious enjoyment, but now his eyes filled with tears.
I don’t know, he said. We’ll see. We’ll just have to see. His voice was shaky, and he was trying hard not to cry.
Eleanor shot Roxanne an angry look, and we managed to get through dessert without any more questions. I had an ice cream soda, a black-and-white.
When my mother had been sick a few years ago, Harriet had come two or three times a week to do laundry and clean the house. Harriet was a large Negro woman who lived just across the county line in a town that was mostly Negro. My mother said it had been settled more than a hundred years ago by a mixture of free Negroes, escaped slaves and Indians. My mother knew a lot about this town, but she never took me there. I don’t even know if she had ever gone there herself. Before this, I hadn’t known that there were places in the suburbs where Negroes lived. I had thought that the Negro ladies I saw walking through the streets of Golden Grove in the morning on their way to clean people’s houses had come all the way from Brooklyn or Queens. Harriet herself was not a descendant of the free Negroes, escaped slaves or Indians who had settled the town in the last century. As a teenager she had come north with her family from North Carolina. Eleanor had asked her and then told me. I was disappointed. I had wanted Harriet to be a descendant of escaped slaves.
Now that I didn’t have to stop at the supermarket on my way home from school, I spent even more time in my room. I’d put something on my record player, some Bob Dylan or Peter, Paul and Mary or Joan Baez, and close the door. Sometimes I’d read, other times I’d sleep. Sometimes I’d just reread the prayer of the beast-people: His is the House of Pain. His is the Hand that wounds. The His, of course, refers to crazy Dr. Moreau. Often I’d wake up when the record ended and the needle was just making staticky noises in the groove between the last song and the label. I could hear the television downstairs or Harriet listening to her music on the radio in the kitchen.
One afternoon I woke up hungry and walked into the kitchen to get something to eat. With my father doing the shopping, there were usually cookies in the pantry, Chips Ahoy or Oreos, probably. Well, good afternoon, Jonah, I see you were able to tear yourself away from your homework to visit with us for a few minutes, Harriet said. She spoke in a deep raspy voice, sounding the way Louis Armstrong would talk if he’d been a woman.
She was at the stove stirring cubes of beef in a large frying pan. It certainly smelled much better than any frozen dinner or anything my mother had ever cooked for us. It even smelled better than the food at the Golden Grove Diner.
Eleanor was standing at the kitchen counter chopping carrots. I could see that she had just finished peeling and chopping some potatoes. I had never seen Eleanor help our mother cook. I recognized the song that was playing on Harriet’s top-forty radio station. It was called “Stop in the Name of Love.” I had seen the women who sang it on television, on Ed Sullivan or something. They were three tall, thin, pretty Negro ladies in very tight dresses. When they sang the title line, they held out their right hands as if they were cops halting traffic. Stop.
If I had known that both Eleanor and Harriet had been in the kitchen, I would have stayed in my room and starved.
He isn’t doing his homework. He’s just reading, Eleanor said to Harriet. Then Eleanor turned to me. Why are you always reading those weirdo books of science fiction, anyway? she asked.
Huh? I said. That was all I could come up with. I should have said that H.G. Wells wasn’t weirdo science fiction. These books were filled with history and philosophy and sociology and who knew what other ologies. But I wasn’t used to talking with anybody about my reading habits. The only person, other than Eleanor, who had ever expressed any interest in what I was reading had been Mrs. von Kleist.
Some time in this period, after Harriet started cooking and cleaning for us but before my mother came home, my father bought a small television for his bedroom. After dinner he would go upstairs to his room and watch television for the rest of the night. Eleanor could hear the television from her bedroom. She said he mostly watched cop shows. It wasn’t great, but it was better than when he sat on the couch with his head in his hands.
I have to admit I’m not sure what came next, I told Dr. Mendelsohn. I rolled on the couch so I could look at him. He was sipping tea from his mug although it must have been cold by then, room temperature at best. On his lap lay a legal pad and a pen, and on the pad was some writing. I had liked Dr. Mendelsohn from the start, even that first session when I fell asleep in the chair. I had wanted to talk but it was just too hard. He put down the mug and smiled at me, as if to say, Go on, keep talking.
If I try to ask Eleanor about what happened that spring around the time my mother returned, she looks at me like I’m crazy, like I imagined this whole story about my mother, I told Dr. Mendelsohn. I’m not sure about the exact order of things, but I did not imagine the whole story about my mother.
This is what I know. Sometime in March or April my mother came home. Nobody spoke about where she’d been. She started going back to her college courses as if nothing had happened. Every Friday afternoon she would disappear for a few hours. Nobody spoke about where she was going although I knew.
One night soon after my mother returned, Eleanor was in my bedroom looking at my records. You think things are going to stay normal now? I asked her.
My sister continued thumbing through my LPs without looking up. Which is the one where she sings “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue”? When Eleanor said she, she meant Joan Baez.
It’s the new one, I said and handed it to her. I preferred Dylan’s version of the song and not just because he’d written it. Baez’s version sounded sad and beautiful, a lament, while Dylan’s version was a long, raspy snarl, like he’s mad at the world. That’s how I felt then, and it’s how I feel now, I told Dr. Mendelsohn. All the time. Mad at the world. I don’t know why. After all, my mom came back. My mom came back two years ago.
The Baez album had a black-and-white photo of her in a leather jacket on the cover. Somehow she looked sad and tough and beautiful and sexy at the same time.
Yeah, I do, Jonah. I really do, Eleanor said to me. She shot me the same sort of look she’d given Roxanne that night in the diner. Yeah. Well, thanks. She took the record and left.
Yeah, well, you’re welcome, I said to no one.
Harriet continued to come in the afternoons to clean the house and do laundry. My mother returned to preparing dinner for us. The second time she served us chicken that was raw at the bone – red and pink, as if the bird were still alive – Eleanor declared she was a vegetarian. A week later Guinevere said she was going to stop eating meat as well. Joel, Roxanne, and I kept on eating everything my mother served us. We just stopped eating the chicken all the way down to the bone.
At about this time, either just before or just after my mother came back, I got into the habit of going outside to fetch The New York Times from the end of our driveway first thing in the morning, sometimes even before I’d put on my socks and shoes. You know what Long Island can be like in March or even early April, I told Dr. Mendelsohn. Of course he knew. He lived in the same town as I did, just a mile or so away.
Anyway, I told Dr. Mendelsohn, it may be spring, or almost spring, but it still feels like winter. If there were frost or snow or ice on the driveway, I’d imagine myself as young Abe Lincoln walking barefoot to his one-room schoolhouse. I’d read the paper while I scarfed down my Nescafe and English muffin. The only part I really had time for was the obituary page. I loved the way the obits could sum up a long, important life in a few minutes worth of reading. Generals, senators, movie directors. When a really important person died, The Times might give him a whole page or two. I usually skipped those.
One morning I came across this headline: HORACE CANTERBURY, PRIZE-WINNING CONFESSIONAL POET, 54, COMMITS SUICIDE. Under the headline was the same picture of Canterbury that was on my mother’s book, the same glasses, the same beard. Canterbury had taught at a lot of universities, including the University of California at Berkeley. Then a day or so ago he walked out of the northern California sun and into his garage, picked up a shotgun he kept there, and blew his head off. Like Hemingway, I thought, although I couldn’t figure out why the hell a poet would need to keep a shotgun in his garage. With Hemingway, who thought of himself as some sort of big game hunter, the gun made sense. The obituary also said poor old Horace had won a lot of prizes I had never heard of and one that I had, the Pulitzer. He won it for that book my mother showed me, Night Waltzes. The poems must have made some sense to somebody. Many somebodies were quoted in the obituary talking about what a great poet and fine teacher he’d been. Again, I’d only heard of one of them, Edmund Wilson, whose stuff I had seen in the New Yorker. Wilson called Night Waltzes “the most impressive book of American poetry since T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland.” I’d heard of T.S. Eliot. I’d read his obituary.
Outside, it was a cold, clear morning. I walked quickly to school. Perhaps I ran. I was out of breath by the time I got there. My face was red, my legs sore. I was sweating from every pore of my body.
Janet Manischewitz, a classmate who perhaps would have been my girlfriend if I’d told her how much I liked her, was the first person I saw when I got to school, I told Dr. Mendelsohn. Jonah, what’s wrong? What’s happening? Janet Manischewitz asked me.
Huh, I said and caught my breath. Nothing, Nothing’s wrong. I just felt like running. Like running to school.
Thinking of going out for track? she asked. Janet Manischewitz was on the track, tennis and swimming teams. I wasn’t on any teams. She was also smart, smarter than me, or, at least, she got much better grades.
Huh. I dunno. Maybe, I said.
She walked to her homeroom, and I walked to mine. I wonder, I told Dr. Mendelsohn, I wonder if she had a black leather jacket like the one Joan Baez wore on the album cover, would Janet Manischewitz also look sad and tough and beautiful and sexy? I don’t know. I’m not sure if she could have brought off the tough part.
While I was walking to my homeroom that morning, after I had just told Janet Manischewitz nothing, nothing about how I was feeling and nothing about how I felt about her, the Dylan snarl started going through my head. You must leave, take what you need, what you think will last. But whatever you want to take you’d better grab it fast.
I wanted to leave. But what should I take? What did I have? And what was I supposed to tell Janet Manischewitz? (When I thought about her, I always said her full name to myself: Janet Manischewitz, Janet Manischewitz.)
What was I supposed to say? I asked Dr. Mendelsohn. That some stupid old poet shot himself in the head and ruined my mother’s life?
And now it’s two years later, and I still don’t know anything. Did he blow his brains out before or after my mother came home? Did he ruin my mother’s life? Or my life? Does it matter? I asked Dr. Mendelsohn.
I asked him, but I already thought I had my own answer. I thought it didn’t matter. I did not tell him this.
And where did your mother go? Dr. Mendelsohn asked. That time you’re talking about, two years ago. Where was she?
I don’t know. I just don’t know. And no one will tell me, I told Dr. Mendelsohn.
Have you asked her? Dr. Mendelsohn asked me.
I’m pretty sure he knew that I hadn’t.
Why don’t you ask her? Dr. Mendelsohn suggested.
Then he said the session was over. We both stood up, and I reached out to hug him, but he stepped back, so we just shook hands, which was probably a better idea. I don’t really like hugging people that much.
As I pedaled home on my black Raleigh racer, the sun was low in the western sky behind me and in front of me the sky was a deep, cloudless blue. In the flower beds in front of the houses I passed small purple flowers were just beginning to break through the soil, and next to them, on thin, woody branches, hung tiny bright yellow flowers, the bright yellow kids use when they draw the sun. I had lived in the stupid town of Golden Grove since I was four years old. Was it really possible I had never before noticed how beautiful it was?
David Ghitelman
After I showed my story to Mrs. Miller, my English teacher, everything got real weird. She showed it to Dr. Horowitz, the school psychologist, who showed it to Mrs. Bernstein, my guidance counselor, and she called my parents.
Dr. Horowitz called me into his office. Jonah, he asked me, do you ever think about committing suicide?
I know now that I should have lied. I should have said, No, not ever. I should have said, Dr. Horowitz, it was just a short story that I had to write for English class, and I just wanted to make it interesting.
Because I was still an idiot back then, I answered with a question of my own: Doesn’t everybody?
I wasn’t trying to be funny. I don’t know. Maybe I was trying to be funny. What I know now was it was the wrong thing to say. Dr. Horowitz, a sort of Groucho Marx kind of guy, bald on top with a thick mustache, just sat there. He looked straight at me with no expression on his face. For a moment, I thought that maybe I should slash my wrists in front of him, just to get a reaction, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. It isn’t like I carried safety razors around with me in school. Actually, I would never slash my wrists in front of anybody. Actually, I would never slash my wrists even though everybody was afraid that I wanted to.
The only person who had slashed his wrists wasn’t really a person. That is, a real person. He was just the kid in my story. Okay, he was a kid who looked like me and talked like me and liked the books and music that I liked, but he wasn’t me. Hadn’t anyone read J.D. Salinger or William Faulkner? I know Mrs. Miller had read Nine Stories. We’d talked about it. How none of them were even half as good as The Catcher in the Rye. I hadn’t invented the idea of writing a story about a guy who commits suicide. It’s a literary trope, if that’s the correct word. It’s virtually a cliché.
The title of the story didn’t help. I had called it “The House of Pain.” Again, it wasn’t because I thought I lived in a house of pain. Even the character in my story didn’t necessarily think he lived in a house of pain. It was an allusion to my favorite novel by H.G. Wells. Nobody got it.
All of a sudden, all these people – Mrs. Miller, Dr. Horowitz, Mrs. Bernstein, my parents – got extremely concerned about me and decided I should start seeing Dr. Mendelsohn. Dr. Mendelsohn had an office in his house, and his house was over on the other side of Golden Grove, which meant it wasn’t that far away, maybe a mile or two, so I could bike there every Thursday after school if it wasn’t snowing or raining or anything. It was early spring, so I lucked out. I was able to bike there.
I’d never been to a shrink before, unless you count the five minutes I spent in Dr. Horowitz’s office when I got the old stone face treatment by saying that I thought everyone thinks about killing themselves. (Don’t they?) From Dr. Mendelsohn I expected something out of the movies or television, where this kindly old doctor with a carefully trimmed beard and a European accent gives his patient this word association test. The doctor says, “Cat,” and the patient says, “Dog,” and then the doctor says, “Black,” and the patient says, “White,” and finally the doctor says, ”Despair,” and the patient says, “The winter my mother walked out on us,” and the patient is cured. In real life, this isn’t how it works. At least, it was not how things worked with Dr. Mendelsohn.
For one thing, Dr. Mendelsohn wasn’t old and he wasn’t European. He was youngish. I mean, he was younger than my father. And clean-shaven, with thin, kinky hair like Bob Dylan, although I’m pretty sure he was older than Bob Dylan. He must have been somewhere between my father ‘s age and Bob Dylan’s.
His office was a room on the ground floor of his split-level house. It was a house just like the one I lived in, probably. I never saw any part of it except the office and the small waiting room just outside the office. The office was a wood-paneled room with three comfortable black-leather chairs, a black-leather couch, and a large desk the same dark brown as the walls with a desk chair that Dr. Mendelsohn never used. Instead, he sat in one of the black-leather chairs. The only thing he ever used the desk for was to hold a large mug of tea. I knew it was tea because I could see the string of the tea bag sticking out of the mug. A dark brown bookshelf lined one of the walls. On another wall hung a pair of framed botanical prints, one of an onion, the other of an acorn squash. The only light came from a black floor lamp.
The room was dim as a cave but cozy, the sort of place you might want to hibernate in if you were so disposed. At my first session, I sat in one of the comfortable chairs across from Dr. Mendelsohn. Perhaps the chair was too comfortable. After a minute or two of staring at Dr. Mendelsohn, I fell asleep, and he had to wake me up when it was time for me to leave.
At the second session, he suggested I lie down on the couch. It didn’t sound like a good idea to me. I told him I might just fall asleep again. He said I should give it a try, so I did. I stared at the ceiling, which needed a paint job. It was dotted with water spots like small islands in a vast ocean, but Dr. Mendelsohn was right. It was easier to talk when I wasn’t looking at him. I could just look at the ceiling without worrying if the water spot islands were pleased or not with what I was saying. I began to speak about something that happened about two years ago.
In the days after my mother left, my father would come home from work and sit on the living room couch with his head in his hands, I told Dr. Mendelsohn. I would stop at the King Kullen on my way home from junior high and pick up food, and my sister Eleanor – a fifth grader at the time – would prepare our evening meal. Mostly we ate frozen dinners. Probably all we ate were frozen dinners. Eleanor liked the turkey while I preferred sirloin steak because it was really hamburger in thick, salty gravy. The little kids – Guinevere, Joel and Roxanne – just ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that Eleanor made for them while our frozen dinners were heating in the oven.
I always made sure to have a loaf of Wonder Bread and jars of Skippy Creamy and Welch’s Grape in the house. I also had to keep us stocked with Frosted Flakes and milk for the little kids’ breakfast as well as English muffins and Nescafe for my breakfast along with margarine for the English muffins. I don’t know what Eleanor ate for breakfast because I had to leave for school a good half-hour before anyone else got out of bed. My father was always gone before I came into the kitchen. I know he didn’t eat breakfast at home because there were never any dirty dishes in the kitchen when I got there. I also know that he didn’t sit on the couch with his head in his hands all night. At some point, he would get up and go to bed, according to Eleanor. She told me she sometimes heard him snoring in his room after midnight. My father was a fat man and a loud snorer. I don’t know why Eleanor was awake after midnight. Maybe she couldn’t sleep. I slept well. Carrying those groceries home from the supermarket was hard work.
Every morning I made my bed before leaving for school. I don’t know if Eleanor and the little kids made theirs. I slept downstairs in the room that used to be my father’s study. My father’s study, I told Dr. Mendelsohn, is a lot like this room, except not as dark. It has a large window that overlooks the front lawn. Everyone else slept upstairs. Since the study had become my bedroom – maybe two or three years before the stuff I’m talking about happened – I’d had little reason to ever go upstairs. Now that my mother was gone I made a point of never going there. Why should I?
After dinner Eleanor would take the few dishes we used during the day and load them into the dishwasher and then run it. Every night before I went to bed I would walk into the kitchen and wipe down the table. Then I would say goodnight to my father who was sitting on the couch with his head in his hands. I would walk up to him, kiss him on the cheek, and say, Goodnight. It was a ritual that went way back. Of course, before my mother left I would go up to both of them, kiss each one on the cheek and say, Goodnight.
It was lucky that my mother waited to leave us until Roxanne had started first grade. That way she could walk home with Eleanor, Guinevere, and Joel. If she had still been in kindergarten, which ended two or three hours before regular elementary school, I don’t know what we would have done. She could have walked home from school by herself without any problem, but she would have been alone in the house for hours, and she was just a kindergarten kid. That couldn’t have been a good idea.
Actually, things weren’t that bad. The little kids behaved themselves. Guinevere and Joel didn’t fight, and the three of them went straight to bed after Eleanor read them a story. Every morning I found some money – a ten or twenty-dollar bill, more than enough – that my father left for me to buy food. I left the change from the previous day’s shopping on the counter for Eleanor and the little kids to use for lunch money. If my father had simply gone to bed when he got home each night instead of sitting on the couch with his head in his hands, it would have been easy to pretend that we were a normal family. Or at least easier.
There’s a pop song from a few years ago, maybe more than just a few years ago, that begins, Why do the birds go on singing? Why do the stars shine above? Don’t they know it’s the end of the world? It ended when I lost your love. Maybe you know it? I asked Dr. Mendelsohn. He didn’t respond, so I continued. That’s what I thought about when I saw my father sitting on the couch. Like he was waiting for the end of the world, or the world had already ended. For him. It’s not the sort of song my father would know. His taste runs more to Broadway show tunes. Even back then I preferred folk music. You know, Peter, Paul and Mary, Simon and Garfunkel, that kind of stuff. Now it’s all Bob Dylan, all the time. I can listen to one of his songs every day, and every time I listen to it it’s different. I don’t know what that’s about.
One night when I went into the kitchen to wipe down the table, I discovered Roxanne there in her pajamas. She was standing by the refrigerator and eating Yodels straight from the box. Normally, that is, normally since my mother had left, I gave everyone one Yodel for dessert after dinner. Now Roxanne was standing in the middle of the kitchen eating I don’t know how many of them.
What in hell do you think you’re doing? I asked. I spoke loudly but not loudly enough to wake anybody up. My father was on the couch with his head in his hands. I couldn’t tell if he was awake or asleep. Roxanne hadn’t even bothered to throw out the Yodels’ foil wrappers. Four or five of them lay crumpled up on the counter.
I was hungry, she said. She looked like she was about to cry, which didn’t worry me. I wanted her to cry. That’s why I used the word hell. When my mother was around, we weren’t allowed to curse. Hell was considered a curse. We had to say heck. Now I could say anything I wanted. Hell, shit, fuck. Now I could say anything, and no one would stop me.
I could swear like a sailor, whatever the hell that meant. Popeye never swore. I could let loose a string of goddamns or for chrissakes like Holden Caulfield, although I wouldn’t read that book for at least another year.
I lowered my voice. If you’re hungry, I’ll make you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I said.
She just stood there, looking even more like she was about to cry. I didn’t know what to do. I no longer wanted to make her cry.
Do you want a sandwich? I asked again.
Slowly she walked upstairs to the bathroom, ran some water in the sink and went back to the bedroom she shared with Joel. I had overheard my parents talking a few months ago about how Roxanne and Joel were becoming too old to share a bedroom. Because she was a girl and he was a boy, I suppose. I’d never heard anyone say Eleanor and Guinevere were too old to share a bedroom although they were older. I didn’t like this talk. Where would Joel move, into my bedroom? That didn’t sound like a good idea at all. After Roxanne closed her bedroom door, I wiped down the kitchen table, kissed my father goodnight, and went back to my room.
I was too angry with Roxanne to fall asleep so I read for a while: H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau. It’s a weird book. Mrs. von Kleist, this woman who lives down the street, had seen me reading a copy of The Time Machine I’d borrowed from the library and had given me an old hard-backed edition of Dr. Moreau that she’d read when she was a girl. Dr. Moreau is a lot weirder than The Time Machine. It’s hard to imagine Mrs. von Kleist, who is older than my mother, ever having been a girl, and it’s even harder to imagine Mrs. von Kleist liking Dr. Moreau. It’s just so weird.
The next afternoon I told Eleanor about finding Roxanne in the kitchen eating Yodels. I told her I didn’t think I should keep buying them.
The little kids need them, she said. I mean: they need something.
So I said I would keep buying them. I liked them, too. I needed something, too. My French teacher, Madame Meursault, said that at Christmas in France they eat something like Yodels. They call them Bûche de Noel. We don’t celebrate Christmas, of course. We’re Jews.
My mother had been sick for a while many years ago, just after Roxanne was born, and then she got better and started taking college courses and she seemed totally better. Of course, she was busy so we had frozen dinners a lot or went out to the Golden Grove Diner to break the monotony. I didn’t mind at all. This is how I discovered sirloin steak. The sirloin steak was better at the diner than the frozen Swanson’s stuff, but there was no way we could have all walked that far and back on a school night. My father, of course, could have driven us there, but he didn’t seem to hear anything anyone said to him while he was sitting on the couch with his head in his hands. Maybe his hands blocked his ears. I’m not sure he really knew what was going on when we said goodnight to him and kissed him on the cheek. He never looked up. He never smiled at us.
I was beginning to think that this could go on forever, I told Dr. Mendelsohn. I don’t know what Eleanor thought. I almost never talked to Eleanor or the little kids about our situation. I believed the less we talked about it the less real it was and the sooner we might return to normal, although I didn’t think that things would ever be normal again. I thought that this – eating frozen dinners while my father sat on the couch – was our destiny, our fate. It was what we deserved.
The night my mother left she was going to a poetry reading at Athena College. That’s where she was taking classes. She had dropped out of City College in her sophomore year, the year I was born. City College was where she met my father. The poet she was going to hear was Horace Canterbury. He’d been her professor at City College. She’d shown me a photograph of him on the back of a thin book of his poems. Night Waltzes, it was called. He had white hair, a bushy white beard and thick, black-rimmed glasses. He looked so old. The book had one poem on each page, and I read the first. It made even less sense than the e. e. cummings poem about Buffalo Bill we’d had to read in English class. When I told my mother that, she grabbed the book out of my hands.
Have you ever read The Island of Dr. Moreau? I asked Dr. Mendelsohn. By now I knew that he wasn’t going to respond to my questions, so I just kept talking. It’s about this guy who’s traveling from England to Australia or someplace like that to study plants, but he gets into a shipwreck and washes up ashore on this island where this mad doctor – yeah, I know, what a cliché, but maybe it wasn’t a cliché yet, in Wells’ time – anyhow, this island where this mad doctor, Dr. Moreau, of course, is experimenting on these animals, trying to force them to evolve into people. Like I said, crazy, scary crazy. And that’s what I felt like at the time, sometimes like the guy who gets shipwrecked, sometimes like one of the animals Dr. Moreau is experimenting on. Dr. Moreau, the mad scientist, was my father. I wonder what Mrs. von Kleist thought about all this stuff. Maybe she didn’t think about it at all.
It wasn’t too cold the first few days after my mother left, but then one day it started to snow as I was walking from school to the supermarket. We were out of almost everything – milk, bread, peanut butter, jelly, Yodels. Big wet flakes of snow fell. At the beginning they melted as soon as they hit the sidewalk, but by the time I arrived at King Kullen they were sticking to the ground and building into a slippery mess. I was walking through the parking lot on my way home with the groceries when one of my paper bags began to rip. I held on to big, heavy, glass gallon-bottle of milk, but everything else tumbled onto the pavement. The jelly jar would have shattered if it hadn’t fallen into a pile of slush. Wet and getting wetter, I just stood there watching my stuff lying around on the ground.
Jonah, said Mrs. von Kleist. Jonah, what’s happening?
The engine of her large, green station wagon was chugging away, and the wipers screeched across the windshield, so she had to shout to be heard. Her two sons, Billy and Jimmy, sat jammed together in the front seat with her. I barely know them. Younger than me, they go to Catholic school. All the von Kleists – Mr. and Mrs. von Kleist and Billy and Jimmy – have reddish blond hair and abundant freckles. They are one of those families where everybody looks the same. In our family everyone looks different – the girls short and fat like my father, the boys tall and lean like my mother. Eleanor and Roxanne even have red hair, but a darker, redder, curlier red hair than that of the von Kleists. Because neither of my parents has red hair, people – complete strangers – sometimes ask where Eleanor and Roxanne got their red hair from. What a stupid question.
My mother, I began to say to Mrs. von Kleist and then stopped. I didn’t want to talk to her about my mother even though I liked Mrs. von Kleist. She was the only adult I knew other than my parents who read books, I told Dr. Mendelsohn. Or at least she had read books like The Island of Dr. Moreau when she was a girl. I don’t know what she reads now.
Where is she? Where is your mother? Jonah, what is happening?
The snow, I began again. This time I decided I’d stick to what was happening at the moment, but I was cold and it was hard to speak.
Jonah, get in the car, and tell me what is going on.
The food, I said and pointed at the bread and the peanut butter and the jelly and the Yodels, which the snow and slush were rapidly covering. All my food.
Billy, please get out of the car and pick up Jonah’s stuff, Mrs. von Kleist said. And Jonah, get in the car. Hurry up. You’re freezing.
Billy looked as his mother as if she’d just asked him to kill a giant with his bare hands, but he got out of the car and picked up the bread and the jars and the box of Yodels. I got into the back seat. Mrs. von Kleist was the sort of woman you listened to, I told Dr. Mendelsohn. You obeyed her whether you wanted to or not. I was shivering.
Jonah, where is your mother?
She sounded alarmed, as if she was as frightened as I was.
I don’t know, I sobbed. I don’t know.
After my mother got sick, but before she started taking college classes, she would leave us every Friday afternoon for a few hours. I was in charge of the kids – all the kids, including Eleanor – until my mother returned. I was in charge but mostly I would lie on my bed in the room that used to be my father’s study and read. Mostly I read H. G. Welles: The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, even The Outline of History. Eleanor and the kids would watch television. Our television was downstairs in the basement. Our basement was finished, with plywood boards covering the gray cinderblock walls. They weren’t stained that dark mahogany varnish like these walls or the walls in the room that used to be my father’s study, I told Dr. Mendelsohn. The wood was light. The whole basement was well-lighted. It was a nice space, but I preferred to be alone in my room.
The kids would watch the afternoon television shows for kids. A lot of the kids in my class also watched these shows, and they sounded good and funny when my classmates talked about them, but I didn’t watch them. I just stayed in my room and read H. G. Wells. No one told me, but I eventually figured out where my mother was going those Friday afternoons. She was going to see a psychologist. This was scary. That’s why no one told me about it. What if my mother was crazy?
I was ashamed to be sitting there in Mrs. von Kleist’s car and crying. Not so much because of Mrs. von Kleist. She was a mother and must’ve seen kids cry before. But I felt humiliated to be sobbing in front of Jimmy and Billy, particularly because they were so much younger than me. At least, I thought, they go to Catholic school. They won’t be able to tell any kids in my class about this. But I was embarrassed and ashamed to be talking about my mother, the same way I was embarrassed and ashamed when I realized my mother was going to a psychologist. What if she was crazy? Would she have to leave us? Had she left us because she was crazy?
Mrs. von Kleist drove us to her house and made us cups of cocoa, the best cocoa I’d ever tasted. Then she sent Billy and Jimmy upstairs to their rooms to do their homework. It seems Catholic schools give you a lot of homework even if you’re just a little kid. The smell of chocolate filled the kitchen and was as soothing as a hot bath. I told Mrs. von Kleist everything, how my mother had left, how my father would sit on the couch all evening with his head in his hands. I said that was why I had to go to King Kullen every day on my way home from school.
How long has your mother been gone? Mrs. von Kleist asked me. When did she leave?
She was questioning me like a police detective on television. A good one. One who helps people solve their problems. But it was hard for me to talk, because whenever I began to speak I felt like crying, and I didn’t want to cry, even though Jimmy and Billy were upstairs and couldn’t hear me.
Monday, I managed to choke out between sobs.
Monday? Monday, this week, Monday?
Glad that I could answer her question without speaking, I nodded.
Do you know what day today is?
I hadn’t expected this question. Surely, Mrs. von Kleist knew what day it was. Why was she asking me?
I had to close my eyes and concentrate to come up with an answer.
Friday? It was really just a guess.
Yes, Jonah, you’re right. It’s Friday. She sounded proud of me, as if I had just recited all the states in the order of their admission to the Union or something. Then we all – Mrs. von Kleist, Jimmy, Billy and me – walked across the street to my house. The snow had stopped falling, but several inches of slush covered the streets and sidewalks. Mrs. von Kleist and Jimmy and Billy had put back on their black galoshes to make the trip, but I was just in my school shoes. Mrs. von Kleist looked unhappy about this, but what could she do?
I suppose my father was surprised to see Mrs. von Kleist sitting in our kitchen with me when he came home from work, I told Dr. Mendelsohn.
Emily? my father said. It sounded like he had trouble remembering Mrs. von Kleist’s first name.
Solomon, we have to talk, she said and then turned to me. Jonah, why don’t you see how the kids are doing downstairs?
Huh? I said. I had assumed I would be part of the conversation between Mrs. von Kleist and my father.
Jonah, my father said. It was the first time I’d heard him say my name since my mother had left. It was the first time I’d heard him say anything to me since my mother left.
I didn’t want to go downstairs. I went to my room, which was near the kitchen, but they spoke quietly, so I couldn’t hear them. I went back to reading The Island of Dr. Moreau. I might have already read through the book once by then, so I just studied these lines the animals that the crazy doctor is trying to turn into people recite, a sort of Ten Commandments for the beast-people: Not to go on all fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men? Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not men?
After Mrs. von Kleist and Billy and Jimmy left, my father called us all together in the living room. He sat on the couch, but his hands were not covering his face. His eyes were red. It looked like he had been crying. I’m sorry, he said. I’m very sorry. Then we all went out to Golden Grove Diner to eat. I had sirloin steak. It was even better than I had remembered.
As we were finishing our main course at the diner, my father said Harriet would be coming back every day to cook and clean for a while.
How long a while? Roxanne asked.
My father had been in pretty good shape during dinner, eating his sirloin steak and baked potato with obvious enjoyment, but now his eyes filled with tears.
I don’t know, he said. We’ll see. We’ll just have to see. His voice was shaky, and he was trying hard not to cry.
Eleanor shot Roxanne an angry look, and we managed to get through dessert without any more questions. I had an ice cream soda, a black-and-white.
When my mother had been sick a few years ago, Harriet had come two or three times a week to do laundry and clean the house. Harriet was a large Negro woman who lived just across the county line in a town that was mostly Negro. My mother said it had been settled more than a hundred years ago by a mixture of free Negroes, escaped slaves and Indians. My mother knew a lot about this town, but she never took me there. I don’t even know if she had ever gone there herself. Before this, I hadn’t known that there were places in the suburbs where Negroes lived. I had thought that the Negro ladies I saw walking through the streets of Golden Grove in the morning on their way to clean people’s houses had come all the way from Brooklyn or Queens. Harriet herself was not a descendant of the free Negroes, escaped slaves or Indians who had settled the town in the last century. As a teenager she had come north with her family from North Carolina. Eleanor had asked her and then told me. I was disappointed. I had wanted Harriet to be a descendant of escaped slaves.
Now that I didn’t have to stop at the supermarket on my way home from school, I spent even more time in my room. I’d put something on my record player, some Bob Dylan or Peter, Paul and Mary or Joan Baez, and close the door. Sometimes I’d read, other times I’d sleep. Sometimes I’d just reread the prayer of the beast-people: His is the House of Pain. His is the Hand that wounds. The His, of course, refers to crazy Dr. Moreau. Often I’d wake up when the record ended and the needle was just making staticky noises in the groove between the last song and the label. I could hear the television downstairs or Harriet listening to her music on the radio in the kitchen.
One afternoon I woke up hungry and walked into the kitchen to get something to eat. With my father doing the shopping, there were usually cookies in the pantry, Chips Ahoy or Oreos, probably. Well, good afternoon, Jonah, I see you were able to tear yourself away from your homework to visit with us for a few minutes, Harriet said. She spoke in a deep raspy voice, sounding the way Louis Armstrong would talk if he’d been a woman.
She was at the stove stirring cubes of beef in a large frying pan. It certainly smelled much better than any frozen dinner or anything my mother had ever cooked for us. It even smelled better than the food at the Golden Grove Diner.
Eleanor was standing at the kitchen counter chopping carrots. I could see that she had just finished peeling and chopping some potatoes. I had never seen Eleanor help our mother cook. I recognized the song that was playing on Harriet’s top-forty radio station. It was called “Stop in the Name of Love.” I had seen the women who sang it on television, on Ed Sullivan or something. They were three tall, thin, pretty Negro ladies in very tight dresses. When they sang the title line, they held out their right hands as if they were cops halting traffic. Stop.
If I had known that both Eleanor and Harriet had been in the kitchen, I would have stayed in my room and starved.
He isn’t doing his homework. He’s just reading, Eleanor said to Harriet. Then Eleanor turned to me. Why are you always reading those weirdo books of science fiction, anyway? she asked.
Huh? I said. That was all I could come up with. I should have said that H.G. Wells wasn’t weirdo science fiction. These books were filled with history and philosophy and sociology and who knew what other ologies. But I wasn’t used to talking with anybody about my reading habits. The only person, other than Eleanor, who had ever expressed any interest in what I was reading had been Mrs. von Kleist.
Some time in this period, after Harriet started cooking and cleaning for us but before my mother came home, my father bought a small television for his bedroom. After dinner he would go upstairs to his room and watch television for the rest of the night. Eleanor could hear the television from her bedroom. She said he mostly watched cop shows. It wasn’t great, but it was better than when he sat on the couch with his head in his hands.
I have to admit I’m not sure what came next, I told Dr. Mendelsohn. I rolled on the couch so I could look at him. He was sipping tea from his mug although it must have been cold by then, room temperature at best. On his lap lay a legal pad and a pen, and on the pad was some writing. I had liked Dr. Mendelsohn from the start, even that first session when I fell asleep in the chair. I had wanted to talk but it was just too hard. He put down the mug and smiled at me, as if to say, Go on, keep talking.
If I try to ask Eleanor about what happened that spring around the time my mother returned, she looks at me like I’m crazy, like I imagined this whole story about my mother, I told Dr. Mendelsohn. I’m not sure about the exact order of things, but I did not imagine the whole story about my mother.
This is what I know. Sometime in March or April my mother came home. Nobody spoke about where she’d been. She started going back to her college courses as if nothing had happened. Every Friday afternoon she would disappear for a few hours. Nobody spoke about where she was going although I knew.
One night soon after my mother returned, Eleanor was in my bedroom looking at my records. You think things are going to stay normal now? I asked her.
My sister continued thumbing through my LPs without looking up. Which is the one where she sings “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue”? When Eleanor said she, she meant Joan Baez.
It’s the new one, I said and handed it to her. I preferred Dylan’s version of the song and not just because he’d written it. Baez’s version sounded sad and beautiful, a lament, while Dylan’s version was a long, raspy snarl, like he’s mad at the world. That’s how I felt then, and it’s how I feel now, I told Dr. Mendelsohn. All the time. Mad at the world. I don’t know why. After all, my mom came back. My mom came back two years ago.
The Baez album had a black-and-white photo of her in a leather jacket on the cover. Somehow she looked sad and tough and beautiful and sexy at the same time.
Yeah, I do, Jonah. I really do, Eleanor said to me. She shot me the same sort of look she’d given Roxanne that night in the diner. Yeah. Well, thanks. She took the record and left.
Yeah, well, you’re welcome, I said to no one.
Harriet continued to come in the afternoons to clean the house and do laundry. My mother returned to preparing dinner for us. The second time she served us chicken that was raw at the bone – red and pink, as if the bird were still alive – Eleanor declared she was a vegetarian. A week later Guinevere said she was going to stop eating meat as well. Joel, Roxanne, and I kept on eating everything my mother served us. We just stopped eating the chicken all the way down to the bone.
At about this time, either just before or just after my mother came back, I got into the habit of going outside to fetch The New York Times from the end of our driveway first thing in the morning, sometimes even before I’d put on my socks and shoes. You know what Long Island can be like in March or even early April, I told Dr. Mendelsohn. Of course he knew. He lived in the same town as I did, just a mile or so away.
Anyway, I told Dr. Mendelsohn, it may be spring, or almost spring, but it still feels like winter. If there were frost or snow or ice on the driveway, I’d imagine myself as young Abe Lincoln walking barefoot to his one-room schoolhouse. I’d read the paper while I scarfed down my Nescafe and English muffin. The only part I really had time for was the obituary page. I loved the way the obits could sum up a long, important life in a few minutes worth of reading. Generals, senators, movie directors. When a really important person died, The Times might give him a whole page or two. I usually skipped those.
One morning I came across this headline: HORACE CANTERBURY, PRIZE-WINNING CONFESSIONAL POET, 54, COMMITS SUICIDE. Under the headline was the same picture of Canterbury that was on my mother’s book, the same glasses, the same beard. Canterbury had taught at a lot of universities, including the University of California at Berkeley. Then a day or so ago he walked out of the northern California sun and into his garage, picked up a shotgun he kept there, and blew his head off. Like Hemingway, I thought, although I couldn’t figure out why the hell a poet would need to keep a shotgun in his garage. With Hemingway, who thought of himself as some sort of big game hunter, the gun made sense. The obituary also said poor old Horace had won a lot of prizes I had never heard of and one that I had, the Pulitzer. He won it for that book my mother showed me, Night Waltzes. The poems must have made some sense to somebody. Many somebodies were quoted in the obituary talking about what a great poet and fine teacher he’d been. Again, I’d only heard of one of them, Edmund Wilson, whose stuff I had seen in the New Yorker. Wilson called Night Waltzes “the most impressive book of American poetry since T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland.” I’d heard of T.S. Eliot. I’d read his obituary.
Outside, it was a cold, clear morning. I walked quickly to school. Perhaps I ran. I was out of breath by the time I got there. My face was red, my legs sore. I was sweating from every pore of my body.
Janet Manischewitz, a classmate who perhaps would have been my girlfriend if I’d told her how much I liked her, was the first person I saw when I got to school, I told Dr. Mendelsohn. Jonah, what’s wrong? What’s happening? Janet Manischewitz asked me.
Huh, I said and caught my breath. Nothing, Nothing’s wrong. I just felt like running. Like running to school.
Thinking of going out for track? she asked. Janet Manischewitz was on the track, tennis and swimming teams. I wasn’t on any teams. She was also smart, smarter than me, or, at least, she got much better grades.
Huh. I dunno. Maybe, I said.
She walked to her homeroom, and I walked to mine. I wonder, I told Dr. Mendelsohn, I wonder if she had a black leather jacket like the one Joan Baez wore on the album cover, would Janet Manischewitz also look sad and tough and beautiful and sexy? I don’t know. I’m not sure if she could have brought off the tough part.
While I was walking to my homeroom that morning, after I had just told Janet Manischewitz nothing, nothing about how I was feeling and nothing about how I felt about her, the Dylan snarl started going through my head. You must leave, take what you need, what you think will last. But whatever you want to take you’d better grab it fast.
I wanted to leave. But what should I take? What did I have? And what was I supposed to tell Janet Manischewitz? (When I thought about her, I always said her full name to myself: Janet Manischewitz, Janet Manischewitz.)
What was I supposed to say? I asked Dr. Mendelsohn. That some stupid old poet shot himself in the head and ruined my mother’s life?
And now it’s two years later, and I still don’t know anything. Did he blow his brains out before or after my mother came home? Did he ruin my mother’s life? Or my life? Does it matter? I asked Dr. Mendelsohn.
I asked him, but I already thought I had my own answer. I thought it didn’t matter. I did not tell him this.
And where did your mother go? Dr. Mendelsohn asked. That time you’re talking about, two years ago. Where was she?
I don’t know. I just don’t know. And no one will tell me, I told Dr. Mendelsohn.
Have you asked her? Dr. Mendelsohn asked me.
I’m pretty sure he knew that I hadn’t.
Why don’t you ask her? Dr. Mendelsohn suggested.
Then he said the session was over. We both stood up, and I reached out to hug him, but he stepped back, so we just shook hands, which was probably a better idea. I don’t really like hugging people that much.
As I pedaled home on my black Raleigh racer, the sun was low in the western sky behind me and in front of me the sky was a deep, cloudless blue. In the flower beds in front of the houses I passed small purple flowers were just beginning to break through the soil, and next to them, on thin, woody branches, hung tiny bright yellow flowers, the bright yellow kids use when they draw the sun. I had lived in the stupid town of Golden Grove since I was four years old. Was it really possible I had never before noticed how beautiful it was?
