A Private Sorcery Read online

  Your mother idolized her father: the head of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. “You can quote me,” she said the night we met at her brother’s birthday party. “Daddy will be dean of the medical school one day.” She was twenty-two and about to graduate from Wellesley with a C average maintained with the help of tutors who’d written her term papers. The C average, to be fair, was due not to a lack of smarts but rather to a basic laziness. Besides, she was too busy with parties every weekend at Harvard and Tufts and trips home for cousins’ baby showers and bridesmaid dress fittings to go to a library. And, I knew from her brother, there were the occasional weekends when she and her girlfriends went to New York, weekends hidden from parents when three or four of them would pool allowances and take a room at the Gramercy Park Hotel. They’d paint black moons over their eyes, curling the line up at the corners, and tease their usually silky hair into poufs and wear their tightest cashmere sweaters and slimmest pencil skirts and go to the bars in the Village, giggling when men would approach. None of them, I’m certain, ever went home with any of these men, but it was a release and a titillation for them to pretend they were free girls, even for just a night, after which they’d return to Wellesley, content to don again their cardigans and saddle shoes.

  The night I met your mother (a parent-sponsored weekend with a room at the Sherry Netherland, where her mother would join her the following afternoon for consolation shopping), she was at her brother’s party drinking herself blotto because she’d just been dumped by her fiancé after he’d fallen in love with a scrub nurse. The ex-fiancé was a tennis player who’d grown up in her set. His sister had kept her horse at the same stable where your mother kept hers. He’d attended Princeton and then, with the help of your grandfather, medical school at Hopkins. Your mother sized me up: a garment worker’s son who’d become a psychiatrist and had just quit his job. “I like surgeons,” she informed me, her eyes sweeping the room for men after her brother, a fifth-year surgical resident, introduced us. And, although she was too well bred to say it, it was clear that she wasn’t too crazy about Jews, either. Certain she would have no interest in me, her brother entrusted me to walk her, by then three hours more inebriated, back to her hotel.

  It was your grandfather who gave me the news. He took the train to New York and invited me to lunch at the University Club. It never occurred to me that the invitation had to do with your mother, to whom I’d not spoken since the unfortunate incident. Naïvely, I assumed he was taking an interest in me, that her brother had told him that my career was foundering, how, after being chief resident and, everyone thought, a shoo-in at the psychoanalytic institutes where I’d applied, I’d quit my hospital job and tabled my applications. How I’d been working nights and weekends as a sub in emergency rooms. Not that sleeping with drunken girls (you’ll have to forgive my speaking this way about your mother, I’m just trying to convey my state of mind at the time) was such a common occurrence for me that I’d forgotten it; rather, I’d so immediately known it was a stupid and caddish thing to do, a desperate attempt to exorcise Maria, that I’d put it aside as a mistake I’d not repeat. That next morning, waking on the enormous hotel bed, both of us embarrassed and eager to part, was perhaps the only time your mother and I have had a true meeting of minds.

  Her father came armed with a plan. We would have a civil marriage at the end of the week. This was the first mention that your mother had accompanied him to New York. He would stay to witness it. The civil marriage was because she was Episcopal and I was Jewish. I could see he was using all his willpower to put aside the Jewish issue. His only mention of it was to say—and here, he gave me a searing look—he had to insist the child be christened by the minister at their church.

  “Klara is not religious, either,” he informed me. “The two of you will have to work out the religious issues as you see fit. But her mother will not be able to rest if the child is not baptized. I’m sure you understand,” he said, signaling the close of that topic.

  He’d heard that I was unemployed. That was the word he used, unemployed, and it left me feeling ashamed, dirty. I tried to defend myself, that I was working, just not at a regular job.

  “Given the current situation, you must have regular employment.” His former mentor was a dean at the newly opened New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry. He’d spoken yesterday with him. They could use me to teach the history of psychiatry. “That would suit you,” he announced, “with your interest in Freudian analysis.” After the baby was born, he would discuss with me starting a private practice.

  I must have looked stunned. He offered me a cigarette, and even though I didn’t smoke, I took it.

  “I’m sorry for both of you, that things happened this way. Klara’s mother and I are not people who hold grudges. Once you’re married, we will put all this behind us.” He lit my cigarette and then his own. “Klara is a complicated girl,” he said confidentially. “Perhaps, being in your profession, you will understand her better than her mother or I have been able to.”

  Your mother assumed that I would proceed exactly as her father had outlined. She had terrible morning sickness that left her eyes ringed with broken capillaries, and on the way to City Hall she had to ask the cabdriver to pull over. Your grandfather and I stood by her at the curb, each holding an elbow. I’d not noticed before how tall she was, how substantial were her wrists and hips. She got a spot on her linen suit and spent the rest of the ride dabbing at it with her father’s handkerchief. And I did proceed as her father had outlined, up until the part that had to do with returning to practicing psychiatry. I’m not sure if my break from the designated program at that point was due to its being far enough down the line that I was able by then to reassert something of my own will, or if this—more than the marriage or the christening or the move to New Jersey—was something I simply could not bring myself to do. What I do know, though, is that she hated me for not practicing. Psychiatry was in her mind low enough, for those too squeamish or weak to do real medicine. But to not even practice was to move off the map.

  Writing books struck your mother as shabby. Not to mention, not very lucrative. Her incantations about her father and the number of operations he did in a week and the kinds of tools he used to saw open a skull and the eminent people—a Kuwaiti prince, the wife of the former Italian president—who traveled to be operated on by him became her way of expressing her bitterness, which it took me years to see was, at heart, not about what I did for a living but rather about how our coitus that night at the Sherry Netherland had ruined everything for her. Everything being a life like her parents’ with the opening of the season in October at the Hunt Dance, and six weeks of holiday parties and debutante balls between Thanksgiving and New Year’s when all the houses in Roland Park would be adorned with fresh wreaths on the doors and candles in the windows, their living room rearranged to fit the ten-foot fir her father would cut himself from the back of their property. The cruise wear—tennis whites, striped boating sweaters, lemon evening dresses—purchased each January for the two weeks in the Bahamas, the night of love arias performed for the opera donors’ inner circle on Valentine’s Day, the Easter baskets her mother made every year for the hospital’s children’s wing, each with green tinsel and hand-painted eggs and a chocolate bunny and a terry-cloth duck that squeaked and two daffodils from their garden laid on top. The languid summers that began with the Memorial Day barbecue at the country club three miles from their home: a club, mind you, at which members telephoned in the full names of their guests two days in advance so as to make certain that never again would a Jewish guest be discovered in the steam room wrapped in one of the club’s monogrammed towels, the offending member having sworn he’d thought that his accountant, Mr. Schulman, was of pure German descent.

  YOUR MOTHER LIFTS the remote control and aims it at the television set. There’s a sound like air being sucked through a pneumatic tube and then it’s silent. “You weren’t even wat
ching, were you,” she says.

  “No.” For a fleeting moment, the directness of her tone leads me to imagine that I’m going to be able to talk with her about what has happened, that we will be able to face together what needs to be done.

  “Klara,” I say. Her face contorts and a hand moves to her mouth. “Klara,” I repeat.

  “No,” she whimpers. “Don’t tell me.” She starts to cry. “Don’t tell me. Don’t you tell me.”

  It’s hard to hear her with her hand covering her mouth. It sounds like she’s saying her head hurts too much. Or is it her heart? She clamps her palms over her ears.

  I move to the edge of the bed and pry her fingers from her hair. “Stop it,” I say. “Stop.” I consider slapping her, which sometimes stems the tide of hysteria but other times only escalates it. I hold her hands between my two. “Listen to me. You have to listen.”

  She’s sobbing. She flails on the bed and twists so her face is buried in the pillow.

  “Jesus Christ.” I throw the other pillow against the wall and walk down to the second floor. Opening the medicine cabinet, I take out a bottle of Valium. I put two pills in my shirt pocket and go down to the kitchen, where I pour myself a scotch. I get a glass of water for your mother and sit waiting at the kitchen table.

  Twenty minutes later, she arrives. She’s put on the slippers that match her peach bed jacket. I hand her the two Valium, which she downs with the glass of water. She sits opposite me and closes her eyes. Five minutes pass and then, calmly, she says, “All right, Leonard, I’m ready to listen.”

  I WAKE IN THE middle of the night thinking about the dream of the burning child in The Interpretation of Dreams. A father has spent the past week nursing his dying child. When the child finally dies, the exhausted father goes to rest in an adjacent room, leaving the boy’s body under the care of an old man who will pray by candlelight over the corpse. He keeps the door ajar so he can see into the room where the body lies. He dreams that the boy comes to him and says, “Father, don’t you see I’m burning?” Awakened by a glare of light, he discovers that the old man has fallen asleep and that the shroud and the arm of his child have been singed by a toppled candle.

  When I first read the dream, I railed that such a tragic story had interested Freud mostly in its technical sense: as an exemplar for his theory of dreams as wish fulfillments. By dreaming that the child has come to the father’s bedside to report that he is burning, Freud argues, the father fulfills both the wish that his child were still alive and the wish to remain asleep. Now, lying next to your snoring mother, I begin to cry. Where are the father’s crimes addressed? A father who left his dead child in the care of a dotty old man. A father who slept while his child’s corpse caught fire.

  Unable to sleep, I pray. I am a nonbeliever, but still I pray that you are sleeping soundly, that you are not huddling cold and frightened in your cell.

  • • •

  AT FIVE, I GO downstairs. I make the coffee, eat my toast over the sink, gaze through the mist at the outlines of trees. With the Valium, your mother remained calm while I told her about your arrest. She asked only two questions: Would your name be in the newspapers? Had Rena been arrested, too? Then she said she wanted to talk with Marc. It was nearly ten when I dialed the number for her. She seemed reassured by his anger at you. Perhaps it made it all seem more like a childhood incident. After a while, Marc asked to speak with me, and although he hadn’t changed his mind about helping you, he did inquire if we’d found a lawyer and then volunteered to take your mother. “I guess you’ll be out a lot,” he said. “Maybe she’d do better being here.” Your mother immediately agreed. Before swallowing two more pills and going back upstairs, she dictated a list of what to pack for her. She was already asleep when Susan called to tell me she’d booked a morning flight.

  At quarter to seven, I place the two suitcases I’ve packed for your mother by the front door and go to make her breakfast tray. Between the Valium and the fact that she hasn’t been up this early in years, it’s hard to rouse her. I peel back the covers and shake vigorously. She looks at me with confused distress, and for a moment I think she is going to burst into tears the way you would as a baby if you were wakened before you were ready. Next to her orange juice I’ve placed one more Valium, which she takes after eating her eggs and jam.

  She dozes in the car on the way to the airport. Guiltily, I wonder if she’ll be able to manage alone on the plane. As we pull into short-term parking, she asks if I remembered to pack the belt to her orange dress and I tell her I did.

  “The belt that goes with it, not the sash I sometimes wear with it?” “The belt.”

  I tell the stewardess that she’s not feeling well, and they let me take her to her seat and promise to escort her off the plane in Atlanta and deliver her to Marc. She closes her eyes as soon as she sits down. I lean over to peck her cheek.

  Her lids rise and I see a look of terror. “Marc will meet me, won’t he?”

  I pet her shoulder. “Yes, dear.”

  IT’S TEN-THIRTY WHEN I enter the city through the Holland Tunnel. I park the car at Astor Place and walk south, debating what to do with the next three and a half hours until we’re supposed to meet Morton. What I’m debating is whether to go, despite Morton’s advice to the contrary, to your preliminary hearing.

  I raise my hand and a cab veers toward me. Decided.

  At the courthouse entrance, I ask a guard where the courtrooms are. “Information booth end of lobby,” he says without moving a muscle.

  I point to the long queue. “I just need to know the floor.” “Information booth end of lobby.”

  It takes twenty minutes to reach the head of the line, after which I wait another five while a huge girl with crimson lips and hoop earrings moves papers from one pile to another. She hoists herself from her stool to get her purse, and I watch while she unwraps a hard candy.

  “Spell that again,” she says when I give your name.

  Slowly, she runs a finger down a column of names, stopping at yours. At ours. She writes a number on a paper and hands it to me. “Second floor.”

  I take the elevator to the second floor, push open a heavy door to a cavernous room with wooden pews. I sit in back and slouch so my face is obstructed by the man in front of me. I spot you immediately, your black hair curling over the collar of a tweed jacket. Last year, I’d noticed a few wiry white strands over your ears. They were coiled tightly like cartoon character hair and I’d had the urge to yank them out, as if with their disappearance I could arrest time, wrest you from the mechanism that rotates beneath both our lives, leading you to walk at precisely the same fifteen months I did, marching you forward to a head of gray at the same forty-two that both my father and I lost the black color of ours.

  You’re in the front row with a dozen or so other people, all seated in pairs. The lawyers are showered and freshly shaved; like you, the defendants are in clothes they appear to have slept in overnight. Everyone’s whispering, the voices gathering into a drone that seems to be gaining velocity. There’s an ominous feel in the overheated room: a mixture of deceit and despair and cynicism and, underneath it all, fear.

  Two lawyers are arguing about the parole status of a kid with a shaved head. He’s dressed in a camouflage outfit and enormous black boots. An armed policeman stands beside him. When the kid lowers his head, I can see something that looks like a swastika but with an extra leg or two tattooed on his albumen scalp. My mouth tastes like copper pennies, and I am suddenly very scared for you.

  They’ve moved on to another case, something about the fraudulent sale of public telephones to restaurants. The defendant is a man my age. He’s sweating profusely. His collar is too tight and the judge keeps glancing at him, afraid, it seems, that he’ll have a coronary right here in her courtroom. “Does your client need a recess?” she asks his lawyer. The lawyer confers with the sweating man. My mind drifts—an afternoon some sixty years ago, sitting at my Uncle Jack’s dining room table, doing my homework
. I could see across West End Avenue to the opposite building. An animal was crawling on one of the window ledges. At first I thought it was a pigeon. Then I thought it was a kitten that had climbed outside. Suddenly, the animal dropped from the ledge. It passed through the square of sky I could see from my chair. I rushed to the window to look below, but there were people on the sidewalk and cars going north and south and I’d been unable to detect anything.

  I hear your name being called. You sit in the same chair as the boy with the swastika on his scalp and the guy who looked like he was having a heart attack. The same armed police officer stands beside you. Morton is dressed in a brown suit, hair slicked back from his face. That confidence we invest in strangers on whom we need to depend dissolves and I stare at this simian-shaped man, jumping now from place to place with a yellow pad in hand. You look paler and thinner than the last time I saw you. I count back eight weeks to the day I handed you my credit card. Your eyes and nose appear to be running, and I think I can see the tremor in your hands. Despite Morton’s reassurances that the jail doctors will stay on top of detoxing you from the barbiturates, I’m afraid that your fine brain is going to seize.

  The other lawyer, the federal prosecutor, has the appearance of someone who has resigned himself to being fat. When he stands, his sport coat hikes over the waistband of his pants, elasticized in back. He reads the charges in a singsong voice: conspiracy to commit burglary, conspiracy to distribute controlled substances. He clears his throat. “In addition, we have been advised by representatives of the State of New York that they will be independently pursuing their own investigation through the Manhattan district attorney’s office and will be presenting a case to a state’s grand jury to secure an indictment of Mr. Dubinsky on manslaughter charges.”