Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

After he left, my mother and brother and I had a chance to talk.

"He loved you boys, you know," my mother said. "Do you know that?"

"Yes," I said. My brother said yes too.

"And in his own way he loved me. These last few years, he didn't really show it. He was so bitter. But you should have seen the cards he wrote me, for birthdays, and anniversary. Wonderful, wonderful cards."

"Why was he so bitter, Mom?" I asked. "He'd always dreamed of golf in Florida."

"I think it was money," she said.

"He had plenty," my brother said. "His own, and what we gave him."

"Not plenty compared to some of the others down there. And especially some of the less educated men, the building contractors, the businessmen. He felt superior to them, being a professional man, and yet they had more money. Some had millions, so he said. He said it wasn't fair. I think he felt that he wasn't a great success."

We talked on, numbly, into the night.

The next day the funeral was held in what used to be a childhood friend's home that had become a funeral home. It was a freezing cold day and we were all still in shock. There was some question whether they could break ground at the cemetery.

I cried twice. Once, when my grandfather arrived from his

nursing home in a wheelchair, his eyes filled with grief and rage at God for taking his only son first. Then, as I was being offered condolences by my father's dental assistants and by Bill Starbuck, the aged town doctor, and by an old high school buddy who'd just lost his own father, and I saw in their eyes the pain they felt and thought I was feeling, the pain of the loss of a father-rather than my feelings for my particular father- then I really sobbed, recalling the good golf games, swept by guilt that I had been cool to him the last tune, with Jill, and that I'd missed the diagnosis: the hiatus hernia pain was not his stomach but his heart-one clue in hindsight being the astonishing fact of his quitting golf before the eighteenth hole-and maybe I could have saved him if I had been a better real doctor.

As I sat in what used to be my childhood friend's romper room and listened to the rabbi's excellent eulogy, which made it sound like my father had been not only his trusted dentist and devoted congregant but also a dear friend, I thought: Is this split-between the idea of losing a father and the actual loss of my own father-the seed of a killer ambivalence? I was dry-eyed through all the Hebrew at the grave and the lowering of the coffin and the dance of the pebbles on the coffin lid, which completed the journey from strong potent man to dirt, and then, back at home, dry-eyed at the buffet. My mother and brother were just as dry-eyed; all of us seemed to be taking it as neurotically as possible.

"Are you sick?" my grandfather asked, bending me to his wheelchair.

"Yes," I said, thinking of myself as neurotic.

"Yen, me too. Sick at heart. And God must be sick too, to do dis-the Big Fella needs a psychiatrist-nul I should be foist. Den him. Den you. Here-take dis." He handed me a fifty. "Where's dat nice goil, Berry?"

"We broke up."

"Nah, don't be stupid. Get a gun, like I did wid mine vife. Show her who's d'boss."

I hugged him. We both wept. Was this the last time I would ever see him?

At sundown the rabbi returned. He did a quick riff of Hebrew, blessing the bread and wine, and then buttonholed me again:

"And cheapl To get a raise here is like pulling teeth. If you hear of any openings where you are located, Doctor, think of me, will you?"

"It's not that much different there. The reality of 'location' is less important than the fantasy."

"No, no. No. You remember your anatomy, Doctor? One pupik, and this is it. Shalom."

I said my own sad shaloms to all and drove the three hours back, alone, free-associating, fantasizing, analyzing it all out.

The next morning, preparing for my cases, some unconscious motivation made me pick up Freud's classic, "Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious."

A wife's like an umbrella: sometimes one takes a cab.

I made a note to try this one out on Cherokee Putnam later that day.

SOLINI APPEARED at my office that evening. He seemed more worried than ever, and now sported a tic. His right eye twitched like crazy, as if trying to mate with his right ear.

"How are you, Henry?"

"Depressed?"

"Good."

"You?"

"Me too."

"Good? I'm worried about Hannah?"

"What's wrong?"

"She didn't show up today for our meeting? We debrief our sessions with the Slapper every Tuesday? And she's never missed, not once? I asked around? Win said she didn't show up at the drug unit-didn't show up at Misery today at all? So I called her condo and there's no answer?"

I felt a chill. "Let's go."

We drove together in his red Geo, which churned through the flat iced-up planes of the night, laboring badly, as if the planes were being stacked before its beak in ever-more-foreboding succession. Solini hunched over the wheel as he had that first day driving out to Ike White's. Now, instead of Bob Marley, there was Silence, one of Jesus I Hope She's Okay.

At the concrete bunker that served as the outer walls of her

condo, we got out and, either from cold or fear, started running across the parking lot, our breaths hanging in the air behind us like cartoons of choo-choo trains. We knocked on her door. No answer. We stared at each other wondering what to do. Henry had a key. Gingerly we entered, walking as if on foam, though the floor was uncarpeted. I'd never been inside, and now realized why she hadn't wanted me to see her place: it looked unlived-in, boxes still unpacked, nothing on the walls except an announcement of a conference in Kuala Lumpur entitled "Borderlines of the Singapore Boom" with Heiler's name highlighted in yellow Magic Marker, hi a corner, in its case, was her neglected cello.

We called, softly, then louder, "Hannah? Hannah-babe? Hannah?"

No answer. The first thought that came to mind was that she'd hanged herself in her closet. We rushed into her bedroom and I threw open the closet door. Nothing. We rushed into the bathroom. Yes.

She lay naked hi the half-filled tub, a plastic Wonder bread bag over her head. The bag was misted from within with moisture that hid her face. Time stopped and my mind expanded to fill the vacuum with crazy and shameful thoughts like, She's dead and it's my fault, and What a wonderful body she has from the waist up, and What's that on the floor is it really a yellowed clipping from the New York Times headlining a "Young Cellist's Stunning Debut"?

"Shit!" I cried out and was at her, Henry beside me, ripping the bag off, feeling for a pulse and-hurrah! — finding it! She was drugged and drunk but she was not dead. Henry and I took the moaning Hannah out of the tub and dried her, the towel snagging on her puffy skin. We fed her full of coffee and brought her back.

"Christ," she moaned, "I can't do anything right."

We sat up with her all night long. She talked about losing Blair's love.

"But the final straw was when I was on call Sunday night. I got a ride with Security way over to Geriatrics, in the Roki-tansky Building, to see an old woman who'd fallen out of bed. The guy from Security-the Ukrainian with the lisp-he tried to kiss me, and I said no and he kept on and on-I thought he was going to rape me or shoot me. I finally broke away. So

yesterday I went to talk to Lloyal von Nott, to make an official complaint, and you know what he said?" She paused, and then went on, bitterly, " 'Be a man,' he said, 'If you can't take it here, get out.' " "Shithead!" I said. "Let's kill him, man?" Solini said.

Hannah was staring into space. Then she clicked back in. She looked around the bare-walled room as if seeing it for the first time. Suddenly her eyes came alive. "That's it! All these men, all my life-fucking me over. And I try to kill myself? Kill me, for them! For these pricks, these Nazis? Give up my cello, for psychiatry? I must have been insane! In-fucking-sane!" She stood up. "That's it. It's over. I'm out of here. No more psychiatry. No more men!" She picked herself up and, with a fresh energy, got out her Vuitton valises and started packing.