The Journal I Did Not Keep Page 31

  The two women listened with horror to what came bubbling inexplicably out of their brother’s one-sided mouth.

  Sam said, “They go down for the day, big towel, umbrella, medicine ball, sandwiches. Sun lotion! I felt myself getting burned and I thought of asking the mom if I could borrow the lotion but, I mean, I didn’t even know their name and I kept thinking that I was going to turn over onto my stomach…”

  “Is his speech going to come back?” Deborah asked the woman in—a hijab—that’s what they call the thing over their heads.

  “We’re surprised at the degree of language he has recovered,” said the young doctor. “Understanding what he’s saying is a sort of trick, like finding the angle from which you can make out the figures in a holograph.”

  “When we were kids,” Sam was saying, “did everybody always squeal when they hit the water? The kids, Joe and Stacey, dripped on Charley and made him cry and when they went up the beach for ice cream, they wouldn’t wait for Charley and he ran after them. I wanted to watch Charley running, only my head didn’t turn.”

  The doctor had gone to stand at the foot of Sammy’s gurney and was writing on his chart. She said, “His vitals are good. We’re finding Mr. Gorewitz a bed in our Senior Center for his rehab two blocks up the road. Visiting starts at eleven a.m.” To the patient she said, “I’ll be looking in on you.”

  * * *

  —

  On the beach, in the later afternoon, the sun was not a factor, no longer burning straight down. Later still, the air cooled unpleasantly on Sam’s heated flesh.

  The family collected their stuff. Joe and Stacey, who were supposed to fold the big towel, yanked its corners out of each other’s hands and laughed and laughed and laughed.

  “Kids, kids! Come on!” the mom said.

  They collapsed the umbrella. Who was going to carry it?

  “I’m not carrying the umbrella!”

  “I will carry the umbrella.” The dad’s voice.

  Who said, “I didn’t bring the ball so no way am I going to carry it.”

  “Who brought the ball?”

  “You said to bring the ball. You carry the ball.”

  They were moving away. Stacey was back for whatever it was that Charley had been supposed to carry. Charley was crying.

  They were gone.

  Samson, flat on his back, could tell that people behind him were passing left to right. The rolled-up shirt under his neck barely tilted his head so that his view was empty sky.

  “Dad?” Stewy had asked him. “How far does the blue come down?” The little boy had drawn a seascape: ocean with waves, boat with sail, sun with rays. He had crayoned the yellow sun in the white paper gap between the blue ocean at the bottom and the two inches of blue sky along the top edge of the paper, and Stewy knew this was never how it was. “Where does the sky stop?” “Why sweet boy, it comes all the way down,” Sam had said a little at random. “Heaven is all around you.” “Only it’s not,” said Stewy. The child held out his hand. It met no blue.

  On the evening beach, Samson lay on his back in the sand, looked upward into the gold-stained air, and still pondered little Stewy’s problem.

  * * *

  —

  A boy jumped over Samson’s legs. His navy swim trunks had tiny white whales all over. The boy ran back and did it again. The father and mother stopped to look back and told the child to quit and to say sorry to the gentleman. “I can’t move,” Sam said to the child who saw the white stuff come out of the grown man’s mouth, and ran after his parents and pulled on their hands to make them keep walking.

  * * *

  —

  Now there was a star to look at. Sam looked at it. There was a second star. There were numbers of stars.

  * * *

  —

  “I can’t move,” he couldn’t shout up two bare legs like two, tall, slim young trees that multiplied into a running forest passing by his right side. All night Samson was going to feel the ghost of the spray of sand he couldn’t lift his hand to brush from the corner near his eye. The girl had looked down, hesitated, and might have stopped if the man’s hand, interlocked with her hand, hadn’t drawn her into the waves which, suddenly, were right here. Samson thought, I’m going to drown. It was the first but not the only time that long night on the desolate beach that his upturned face crumpled and the tears, having nowhere to flow off, collected in his eye and fractured his vision like rain on a windshield.

  He resented being cold, and having nothing to cover him.

  * * *

  —

  This was how he was going to cheat the worst of it—the boredom: Samson was going to chart the air’s incremental darkening, going to watch change happen, only he kept forgetting, kept finding that he had forgotten to watch and the blue had darkened, had already grayed. It was almost black; nor did Samson, lying alone, on his back on the great, empty beach ever, not once, catch change in the act.

  His piece of heaven was peppered with the stars. He had never cared to know them by name, and now they did nothing to entertain him. The first wave licked his foot to the ankles and retired. He waited for the next assault, waited, waited, waited. The shock of the wet cold on his sunbaked flesh had been unpleasant. For the second time he wept. The next wave shocked him by lapping his knee, retreated and immediately returned. Help me! The young girl with the long, running legs and the man—which direction had they disappeared? Was he alone on the dark expanse to his right and left, that he could not turn his head to see?

  Help me!

  The heaven never got so black that the small clouds did not show a deeper black. The cold wet slapped and kept slapping his groin. You can not, it turns out, panic for hours on end. Later he thought nothing and must have slept because he woke drowning, swallowing, coughing water. He opened his mouth to shout and swallowed more water and again, and more water and drowned again and drowned.

  * * *

  —

  Samson Gorewitz was alone in exquisite discomfort, wet and radically chilled, exhausted, without expectations and no hope. Off and on he wept and did not care to know how the black heavens lightened incrementally to gray to silver.

  * * *

  —

  The jogger ran way down the beach along wavelets that looked to have been drawn by a lovingly sharpened pencil. Limpid and serene, they magnified a string of seaweed and the convolutions of a shell whose inhabitant had moved on. The horizon was beginning to spray needles of light into the chilly air, which was a funny time for the fat old codger with a shirt rolled under his neck, and the wide-legged old-codger swim trunks, to be napping where he looked like something the tide had deposited. The jogger kept running. He wondered, as he did every morning with no intention of researching the explanation, why the morning’s first light is so purely white and what chemistry introduces the golden adulteration of the later hours. He ran but he kept turning to look where the fat man lay on his back with a stillness not of inanimate objects, nor of sleep. The jogger reversed direction.

  But the old man’s eyes were wide with intelligent terror. The right side of his mouth bubbled saliva. “I can’t move!” is what Samson Gorewitz thought he said to one leaning down to him out of the blare of white light.

  * * *

  —

  He was lifted up, and, one two three, shifted onto a bed that moved him smoothly, swiftly. White figures, male and female, surrounded and bent to tend him. Samson felt, was helpless not able, to contain the rictus of bliss of being warm, being dry.

  * * *

  —

  Glen Shore Hospital stabilized the patient. From the information found in the wet wallet in the breast pocket of his wet shirt, they notified a sister living in the city. They transferred the patient to the better facilities of Cedars of Lebanon.

  * * *

  —

  Deb and Shirley have come to sit with Sammy in rehab. They each hold one of Sammy’s hands. Deb leans down and slowly and very distinctly tells him, “Sa
mmy, sweetheart, you’re going to be just fine! They’re going to keep you here for a bit, okay? I’m going to put a bed in the den for you, sweetheart, okay, nice and private.”

  “The grave’s a fine and private place,” says Sam.

  “What does he want?” says Deborah.

  “Search me,” says Shirley.

  Shirley tells Deb, “I called Stewart in Paris, and he’s flying in.”

  Samson wishes they hadn’t done that. You die and the first thing is you upset somebody’s day.

  * * *

  —

  Dr. Miriam Haddad has walked over from Emergency, and enters the room where Samson Gorewitz lies alone, on his back. His eyes are raised to the ceiling and his hands are folded over his chest.

  The doctor cranks up the bed. “We need you to be sitting up, Mr. Gorewitz. We want you to sit in a chair. You have to start moving if you’re going to get well.”

  “That’s past praying for.”

  “Mr. Gorewitz, do you know where you are?”

  “‘In heaven,’ where Hamlet told them to look for Polonius. ‘And if you find him not look in the other place.’”

  “Mr. Gorewitz, what makes you think you are dead? Your medical report says you are alive; we’re surprised, as a matter of fact, how well you are doing.”

  “Drowned dead,” says Samson, “dead or live, is all the same. Who knew when you were dead there would be the ceiling and the floor, windows, a bed, a TV.” He indicates the one that is mounted on the wall of his room in rehab and makes the sound that might be a laugh.

  “So, Mr. Gorewitz, if everything is the same, why do you think that you are dead?”

  “See, that old trick won’t work,” says Samson. “You pinch yourself and if you don’t feel anything, you’re dead, but if it hurts it proves you are alive? What if you pinch yourself and you’re dead and it hurts exactly the same as when you were alive? Then,” says Samson in a tone of ultimate clarity, a final disillusion, “you know that this is a gyp.”

  “What, Mr. Gorewitz, is the gyp?”

  “Being dead,” says Samson.

  PART III

  NONFICTION

  MEMOIR

  MY GRANDFATHER’S WALKING STICK,

  OR THE PINK LIE

  When Pandora upended her box of calamities over the earth, there fell out, so says the story, a last straggler: hope.

  Hope pities us and lies. It pities our terrors and invites us to tell ourselves that the things we fear happen only to other people. We are a special case. When it comes to us, says hope, calamity will turn aside.

  Hope pities our dowdiness. It promises that we will find the treasure, marry the prince, and inherit the kingdom. Hope says that it is our birthright to win the lottery and write a classic novel. If we are American it will be a bestseller. We will make the NBA, be a rock star, become president.

  And hope pities our disappointment with the world. It tells us to look forward to the time of the messiah to come, or backward to the paradise that must surely have been. The heart rebels at the truth that what is is it.

  Friends to whom I argue that hoping contains an inherent lie disagree violently. The Oxford English Dictionary explains their reaction: it defines a lie as “a false statement made with the intent to deceive; a criminal falsehood,” and goes on to say, “In mod. use, the word is normally a violent expression of moral disapprobation, which in polite conversation tends to be avoided, the synonym falsehood or un-truth being often substituted as relatively euphemistic.”

  The OED lists only one other category, our old friend the white lie, and defines it as “a consciously untrue statement which is not considered criminal; a falsehood rendered venial or praiseworthy by its motive.”

  I wish to advance the pink or rose-colored lie and define it as an unconsciously untrue statement never considered blameworthy because it is not considered a falsehood. I want to look at the pink lie in terms of the three aspects of the OED’s definition of the lie and the white lie: intentionality, function, and moral reputation.

  To take the last first, hope gets a universally favorable press. One Corinthians 13:13 ranks it with faith and charity, which is to say, with love.

  To address the second, it is true that hope’s gentle falsehoods are essential to our progress. It is the dream of an improbably prosperous outcome that initiates, and lets us persevere in, our best and worst ambitions. We need hope to power any action that is not instinctive. What personal, civic, or criminal act would we undertake—who would marry, run for office, plan a heist or an essay, start a polar expedition or a war—without the hope of better success than we have reason and experience to believe plausible?

  Doctors tell us that hope assists the process of healing. Perhaps our very instincts abandon us when we stop hoping: I remember the evening, at supper, when my grandmother stopped lifting her fork up to her mouth.

  Hope’s necessary falsehoods are the tools in our survival kit. They blessedly preserve us from intellectual despair, the sin accounted as the seventh and deadliest because it demonstrates an absence of faith. Hope’s rose-colored falsehoods allow us to deceive ourselves and to participate in the deceptions practiced by our community. Hope ignores the evidence of history and experience; it lies in order to con us out of knowing what we know and into thinking what we wish.

  My late husband used to tell the story of a Martian chief who summons his head astronaut and orders an expedition to Earth. The chief is puzzled by an anomaly he has been observing over the aeons: earthlings appear to be born to live for a period of time, after which they die. Now a race, he argues, that knows it is going to die would be incapable of doing what earthlings do day in and day out—get out of bed, dress, go to their jobs, come home, eat their suppers, drink, laugh.

  Had the expedition in that story actually taken place, the head astronaut would have brought this explanation home: the human race knows it is mortal but does not believe it. It believes what the serpent told Eve: “You are not going to die.”

  Curious, the difference in our feelings when the doctor has numbered the years we will live; the difference is not the limited number; the number was always limited. It is the number made actual that disables the lie and forces us to believe what we already know: we will die.

  Community systematizes the private lie, and our language backs it. We say “a life has been saved” when we mean a death has been postponed. Usage promises that we merely pass away or, more hopefully, on.

  I have a friend who believes in the transmigration of his soul for another round of life that must, surely, make up to him for the unfairness meted out to his industry and talent in this one. And, he argues, life would not punish babies with illness, abuse, or the sufferings of the Holocaust unless they deserved it for what they must have perpetrated in some previous existence. His proof is his heart’s certainty that life could not, in both these instances, be as unfair as he knows, from his own observation, that it is. The trick is to locate hope’s proof in that place from which no traveler returns to explode the story.

  * * *

  —

  We must, finally, settle the question of intentionality: how, if we believe our lie, can we be said to intend to deceive? Is a statement false when the liar is persuaded of its truth as a matter of faith, for instance, or is it the result of a successful act of self-deception? Or can we ask ourselves the extent to which we choose—to which we give ourselves permission—not to know what we know?

  I have a friend who advocates denial as a serviceable method for dealing with truths she would not know how to handle or how to bear. When I offered to join her in grieving over a piece of mortal news affecting a mutual friend, she proposed instead that we disbelieve it together. This is the honest lie: It is more common not to acknowledge up front what it is that we are up to.

  In a late essay entitled “The Memory of the Offense,” Primo Levi discusses the revision of a too painful past by both victim and perpetrator of that monumental offense we call the Holocau
st. “A person who has been wounded tends to block out the memory so as not to renew the pain; the person who has inflicted the wound pushes the memory deep down to be rid of it, to alleviate the feeling of guilt.”

  It troubles us, as it troubled Levi, that the perpetrator and his victim belong to the same species and operate according to instincts common to both. And our justice judges the identical psychological operations differently: the criminal, wanting to lessen the pain of guilt, revises—resees—the past and restores himself in his own eyes to the condition of innocence, of not knowing he has committed a crime. It is not the lie told to others that is his second crime but the lie he has given himself permission to tell himself.

  When the sufferers revise their past or present of undeserved pain, they grab on to falsehoods that are venial, that is to say “easily excused or forgiven; pardonable.” We wish them Godspeed.

  * * *

  —

  Here, finally, are two rose-colored memories in which the liar is my mother; it is she who caught herself at it, she who tells the story on herself.

  The story requires reiteration of the history I keep hoping to have finished telling: Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938. In December my father got me included in a transport of five hundred Jewish children leaving for safety in England. My mother and father were lucky to obtain the visas to follow in March 1939.

  After her arrival in England my mother used to embarrass me by asking every single English person she met to help her obtain a visa to get her parents out of Hitler’s Vienna. In her refugee English she would explain how Vienna’s shops were off-limits to Jews. Since her brother, Paul, and his bride, Edith, had also immigrated to England, my mother’s parents would starve, she said, were it not for Frau Resi. Frau Resi was my mother’s cleaning woman. She had taken my grandmother’s gold jewelry, broken it up, sold it piecemeal, and, at great risk to herself, was bringing my grandparents food to eat.