A Private Sorcery Read online

  A Private Sorcery

  A NOVEL BY Lisa Gornick

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2002

  For

  Ken, Zack and Damon

  As for the symptoms, they are a private sorcery.

  They transform one thing into another.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One Burning Child

  1 Leonard

  2 Rena

  3 Leonard

  4 Rena

  5 Leonard

  6 Rena

  7 Leonard

  Part Two Potions

  8 Rena

  9 Leonard

  10 Rena

  11 Leonard

  Part Three El Hoyo

  12 Rena

  13 Leonard

  14 Rena

  Part Four A Body Rising

  15 Leonard

  16 Rena

  17 Leonard

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  They come in the middle of the night. There’s a ruckus on the stairs, then the bell ringing. Once, twice, quickly three more times. Saul, naked, sits up in the bed as Rena, lost in his pajamas, moves forward. She clutches the neck above the buttons, swipes the tangle from her eyes. Through the peephole, she sees men’s faces: a pale, a dark. Behind them, more.

  Chain in place, she opens the door a crack. The pale one, brillo hair, a faded strawberry mark on his cheek, stuffs a paper through the space. “Warrant. For Dr. Saul Dubinsky.”

  “My robe.” She turns. There’s a rush in her chest. From the rear, she hears the grates to the fire escape opening. A bullhorn blasts. A voice, loud, staccato: “At the window. He’s at the window.”

  Trash cans clatter. “Don’t move, Dubinsky. Stay where you are.”

  From the front: “Open the door. Now, missy.”

  She swings around. Above the chain, the snout of a gun. The old guns explode inside her. The pistol Nick waved while her mother scrambled to gather her panties from the parking lot. The one Sammy kept loaded under the bed. Joe’s rifle mounted in the room where she slept.

  “I said now.”

  She unlatches the chain. Men run past her toward the bedroom. The doughy rookie grabs her around the waist, an arm yanked sharply behind her, the other caught at the wrist.

  “Let go of me.” Her voice—a trickle of sound.

  He tightens his grip. His boot touches her bare foot. “Don’t struggle, ma’am. It’ll only make it worse.”

  The reverb from the bullhorn surrounds them. “Dubinsky, we’re counting to ten. You better be off that fire escape by then.”

  The rookie’s heartbeat is on her back. He’s scared, too.

  “I’d recommend you get your naked butt inside.”

  The grates bang closed.

  “Okay, Doc. We’re going to take this a step at a time.”

  A few seconds later, Saul is pushed into the living room ringed by three of the men, his long neck spindly among their thick ones, his dark hair frizzed like a clown’s. She can see the hollow where his breastbone is concave, just large enough for two robin’s eggs, she’d once told him, her finger tracing the spot. His hands are cuffed behind him.

  “Oh my God.”

  “It’s okay,” the rookie whispers. He pulls her closer as though she’s his date, the two of them swaying together, and then she remembers that today is her birthday.

  Saul’s eyes are circles of panic.

  Rena looks at the one with the brillo hair. “You can let him put some pants on, at least.”

  Her left eyelid is twitching, the pajama top twisted under her arms. She can see Brillo taking her in—calculating something.

  “Bring her in to get Doc here some clothes.”

  In the bedroom, she opens Saul’s dresser drawers: the mismatched balls of socks, the Tshirts and jeans thrown willy-nilly. She searches for underwear without holes. From Saul’s closet, she takes khaki pants, a button-down shirt, a tweed jacket worn at the elbows.

  They undo the cuffs. Saul moves slowly, his fine fingers fumbling with the buttons. Brillo takes out a handkerchief and blows his nose. “All right, Pretty Boy. You’ll get the fashion award down at MCC.”

  The rookie takes the rear. At the door, he turns and tips his cap.

  “Night, ma’am. Lock up tight.”

  Part One

  BURNING CHILD

  1 Leonard

  A regimented man, I rise as always at five, lowering my big white feet onto the cold wood floor. I am thinking of you, Saul, my second-born son. You would laugh to hear me call you my second-born. So biblical, you would say. Begat, begat, begat. Your mother—a flowered bonnet over her beauty parlor hair, her chin slack, the inhaled clu-hah with the slight gasp in the middle, the exhale through the Grecian nose that turned somewhere in the past thirty-seven years from regal to beak—still has a morning’s sleep before her and then her daily litany: not a wink all night, such a torture to lie there just watching the clock.

  Downstairs, I make coffee and struggle to peel an orange. I toy with the night’s dream fragment, partly a compulsion like a dog worrying a bone, partly an exercise from my old psychiatry days when residents still spent six months studying Chapter Seven of The Interpretation of Dreams. So different from your training three decades later when, you bitterly complained, no one read books, reading relegated to four-page articles in the green journal, terse pieces correlating drug dosages and symptom checklists. In the dream fragment, I’m with my sisters: Rose, Eunice and Lillian. We’re in a room with pocket doors and a clawfoot dining table, so it must be when the six of us lived in the back of my Aunt Mindyl and Uncle Jack’s apartment—the dining room, the maid’s room and the miniature maid’s bath our delegated quarters. Then the scene changes and Carmelita Erendira Gomez, the subject of the accursed biography I’ve been trying to write these past twelve years, is sitting with my sisters, showing them something I either can’t see or can’t now recall.

  I eat standing at the kitchen sink. It’s a habit your mother has always hated. “Only laborers eat on their feet,” she would hiss in the years when I still existed enough in her consciousness to merit criticism, willfully dumb to the knowledge that my father had spent twenty-nine of his forty-two years breaking his back, the last six leaning over a pressing machine in my Uncle Jack’s factory—the job, a gift in Depression years, bestowed only after my father had promised not to utter on the premises so much as a word of what Jack had called your Commie union filth.

  I stare out the window, trying to lift the thick cheesy covering from my mind. A soapy light washes across the lawns, filtering through the two Japanese maples and the Canadian spruce we planted thirty-two years ago when the development was still new. I think, as I have every morning since, about how dissatisfied I feel with the view before me: the colors, muted and tasteful as befit a neighborhood where property values have consistently risen and the homes have gracefully aged, the uniformity of the colonials and ranches and split-levels hidden behind varying additions. How every person needs to live in a place imbued with substance, with personal meaning, how these surrounds have for me never ceased feeling weak, dilute, perfectly pleasant, with nothing discordant to the eye, but with nothing, either, upon which the eye would linger.

  At six, I enter my study. Unable to face a blank page or yesterday’s scrawl, I take out the red leather album where I keep the Mexican newspaper clippings about Carmelita. They’re in chronological order, the first from a local paper when Carmelita started having visions, the last from a Oaxacan paper after her death in prison. I am midway through the album, feeling as always daunted about how to convey the many ways the events surrounding Carmelita were experienced—her family and the village priest saw her as a virgin saint with the baby miraculously
conceived, the local police pointed to vindictive villagers jealous that her father had prospered in the new copper mine, the doctors suggested command hallucinations that had driven her to drown her own child—when the phone rings.

  I pick up immediately.

  “Leonard.”

  Hearing your wife’s soft, chilly voice at this hour, my stomach clutches. Rena is not the sort of daughter-in-law who calls simply to see how we are doing, perhaps because any call would involve listening to your mother’s catalog of symptoms, each preceded by the phrase I’m doing better, better than last week, a reminder to callers that they’d failed her when she was really down.

  “Leonard,” she repeats. I am envisioning the bluish skin under her gold-flecked eyes, so large they bulge slightly and make one wonder about thyroid levels, her willowy form, the almost-perfect posture broken every now and then by a slight slouch, pentimento, I’ve always imagined, of some earlier, awkward self.

  “Are you sitting down? You should sit down.”

  “I’m sitting.”

  She sucks in air. “Saul’s been arrested. Last night, in the middle of the night.”

  “What?” I stammer, not because I haven’t heard but rather because I can’t connect this to anything I know about you: your blue lips at the neighborhood pool, your wobbly ankles and eyeglasses the butt of so many pranks.

  Saul’s been arrested. The words sit outside my mind like three steamer trunks that cannot fit into an already packed car.

  “Why?” I whisper. I hold the receiver in my hand, paralyzed, staring at the Japanese maples, their limbs knotted with baby buds.

  “Something to do with drugs, a burglary of the pharmacy at his hospital. He tried to escape through the back window, but they had police in the garden.”

  I’m gripping the phone, having the oddest sensation, as if I can’t quite make out what is being said. This uncomfortable thought I’ve had on occasion about your wife returns: that there’d been some other life before she came east, before you met her, things you hinted at when you married three years ago, black holes between the few facts you told us—that she’d grown up over an Italian restaurant in San Francisco where her mother was a waitress, was helped to go to Yale by a community organizer who’d then died of breast cancer, had her half brother living with her for several years.

  Did she say drugs?

  “I need a lawyer. I thought maybe Marc would know someone. I …” For the first time, her voice falters, a tiny fissure between the words. “I don’t have his number.”

  A surge of protectiveness wells up in me. It’s a relief to feel something recognizable, to discern the outlines of something to grasp onto. “Wait,” I say. “I’ll take the next train.”

  I SHOWER QUICKLY. In reaction to your mother’s hypochon-driasis, I have refused to purchase the blood pressure cuffs so many men my age keep in their bathroom cabinets but find myself now anxiously worrying about my diastolic reading. I soap my flabby chest, forcing myself to concentrate on the circles of suds I make over the gray hairs, duck under a showerhead not installed for men my height, remembering the years of taking you and Marc into the shower with me, when you were little little, still in diapers, being sure to clean all the creases, the indent where we once had tails.

  My hands shake as I write a note to your mother: “Gone to the city to use the library. I’ll call later to let you know when I’ll be home.” I prop it next to the coffeemaker and lock the kitchen door behind me.

  It takes twenty minutes to walk to the train station, the streets empty this early on a Sunday morning. I ride on the platform between the cars, staring out at the cruddy landscape grown around the tracks—the junked cars, the aluminum-sided houses with their clotheslines and swing sets, at one spot something that looks like a dead dog. I’m feeling sorry for myself, that I can’t tell your mother what with her hysterical response to everything: the fainting or feigning of fainting, the need to call Dr. Stone for tranquilizers, the way anyone else’s problems are immediately co-opted as her property, her tragedy. Guilty because I’m saved from another morning facing a blank page, as though Rena’s call announced a snow day. We’re in the tunnel coming into New York before I can focus on you and then I feel so awful, so sick in my soul, the air acrid with fumes, I have to move inside and take a seat.

  Of course, I’d sensed you were having trouble this past year; for the first time, we’d hardly seen you. But I’d assumed it had to do with your job, with what had happened to that boy in the subway. I count back the weeks to mid-December, when you asked to borrow my credit card. You said you wanted to buy holiday presents for Rena, didn’t want her to see the bill. I didn’t question you, didn’t let myself entertain any concerns about why you’d been so insistent, taking the train out to New Jersey on a Tuesday evening to get the card. Even your mother was suspicious. “Maybe he’s having an affair,” she said smugly, unable to disguise the touch of glee the idea gave her, revenge on Rena for not having provided any family of note for a Times wedding announcement, for keeping a distance from the dear-dear cluckers who listen to her complaints.

  Your mother’s bemusement disappeared when the bill (the only thing about the household to which she still attends being bills and bank statements) arrived and there were twenty-six hundred dollars of charges: a gold chain, a man’s leather coat, a television set. “You call him, Leonard,” she commanded. “Right this minute.” When I’d not reached you, your brother, usually dutiful but brief in his phone calls with your mother, was, for once, happy to be her sounding board. He threw out his own theory, gambling, does he go to Atlantic City, you know what a gullible person he is, but it was easy to brush this aside as his old antagonism to you, the usurper whom he’d pronounced on your arrival home from the hospital to be an icky-wicky, his opinion of you having gone only downhill from there when he’d felt burdened with the job of protecting you from the very neighborhood bullies whose friendships he sought.

  At Penn Station, I buy a bag of bagels and a tub of cream cheese, and then feel idiotic for having done so, for having blindly followed my mother’s rule never to arrive at anyone’s door empty-handed. I consider handing the bag to one of the homeless women splayed near the Eighth Avenue exit but, superstitiously, I clutch it to me.

  Outside, it’s cold and drizzling. The rain hits the bald spot on the top of my head. I hail a cab. Coptic crosses jangle against the rearview mirror and I recognize the radio station as the listener-funded one you support, the shows put together with Scotch tape and chewing gum, the topic today the environmental racism behind a Harlem incinerator. It’s a little after nine when I climb the brownstone steps and ring your bell.

  She’s wearing what must be your pajamas. Her tawny hair is wild and uncombed, and my first thought is how alike the two of you look: two long-limbed ectomorphs, she the pale-complected reflection of your darker hues. A thread of blood has formed in a crack in her lower lip. I resist drawing her toward me. I know that she could not stand it.

  I follow her to your galley kitchen, a chopped-off corner of what had once been the parlor of an elegant house. She puts the bagels on a platter, turns on the kettle. “Tea or coffee?” she asks.

  “Whatever you’re having.”

  She scoops green leaves into two mesh balls. Although her white couch and sleigh bed replaced your ratty corduroy couch and mattress on the floor when she’d moved in with you, it still feels like your apartment: the brick-and-board shelves overflowing with books and old records, the crates of unfiled papers, your cheaply framed political prints. Rather than overhauling the place, she has, it seems, carved out areas as her domain—your previously swampy bathroom now meticulously clean with sea-green hand towels and a glass shelf holding an aloe plant, the blue mugs into which she now pours hot water having ousted your drug company and radio station handouts.

  She carries the mugs of tea. I follow her into the living room with the platter of bagels. She sits with her legs folded under her on the couch, cradling her cup, and I
take the chair across. She rubs her shoulder as she talks. It takes quite a while for me to piece together even the most basic things. I can’t tell if the ellipses are because she is editing what she knows or because she, too, is bewildered, but I find myself thinking the way I did when patients would tell me their stories and I learned to let the first version have some breathing room before pushing at the contradictions, before insisting on details.

  IT STARTED, SHE TELLS ME, when that boy jumped in front of the train. She calls him Mitch as though he is a frequent subject of discussion between the two of you, this boy dumped on your caseload New Year’s Day, over a year ago, when the clinic’s other psychiatrist quit and suddenly you were responsible for twice as many patients. From the perfunctory note left about him, you had no clue that he was rapidly decompensating and should not be grouped among the less urgent cases to be seen the following week. No one blamed you. The head of the service said it was fully his responsibility for giving you an unmanageable task. The lawyers skipped right over you to the doctor who’d left the inadequate sign-off note. You’d never even met the boy until his first night in intensive care, by then a double amputee.

  “Saul couldn’t sleep. His eyes wouldn’t even shut. He’d pace in the hallway. I was the one who suggested he take a sleeping pill.” She tells me this with the steadiness of someone confessing. I refrain from reassuring her that it was an innocent thing to do, remembering all too well how the reassurances I tried to give you those first weeks after Mitch’s jump made you feel worse, lonelier, as if you were the only one who could see your failure—how the nurses’ reassurances on the ward that my patient Maria’s actions were independent of me (when I knew they were entirely about me) left me unable to work as a psychiatrist anymore.

  Every night, she tells me, you took your Nembutals: first one, then two, then four. Convinced that you could not sleep without them, you would wake groggy and then panic that the grogginess would cause another mistake. She doesn’t know when you began prescribing for yourself, maybe March, maybe April, only that she discovered it Memorial Day weekend when the two of you went to visit your old supervisor, Sylvia Jacobs, at her house in Montauk.