Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

I looked at each of them for a moment and, on a sudden impulse, burst out singing. I sang them Brahms’s lullaby in German: “ Guten Abend, gute Nacht, mit Rosen bedacht…” I don’t have a sweet voice but my ear is good, and I let the vibrato go so it sounded suitably absurd. The look of surprise and confusion on their faces made me laugh. They did not laugh with me, but at least they had been rattled out of their fatigue. It was time for my speech, and I made it. The gist of it was that a single story with seven characters can also be seven stories, depending on the identity of the narrator. Every character will regard the same events in her own way and will have somewhat different motives for her actions. Our task was to make sense of a true story. I had given it a title: “The Coven.” This was met with a round of wordless murmurs. We would meet every day this week to make up for the lost classes. Today each girl would read her text and we would talk about it, but in the following four days, we would trade places and write the story from the point of view of someone else. Jessie would become Emma, for example, and Joan, Alice, and Jessie, Ashley, and I, Nikki, and so on. Eyes widened, worried looks exchanged across the table. By the end of the week, we would have a story authored by the entire class. The trick was, we would have to agree, more or less, on the content.

To be honest, I had no idea whether this would work. It was not without its risks. Note: The now famous psychology experiment at Stanford in 1971. A group of young men, all college students, took on the roles of either prisoners or guards. Within hours the guards began tormenting their prisoners and the experiment was stopped. The theater of cruelty made real? Performance becomes the person? How malleable were the seven?

I began with a short summary of my experience: my suspicions during class, my bafflement about the Kleenex, and my dim awareness that some plot was cooking. I also mentioned my involvement in a similar story as a girl. I did not say which role I had played. You, friend out there, will mostly be spared the tedium of early adolescent prose; it is worse than the poetry. (Not one child chose to describe the hex scandal in verse.) Suffice it to say that the clumsy and often ungrammatical narrations were not harmonious. After every reading, the refrains “I never said that!” “It was your idea, not mine!” “That’s not how it was at all!” rang out loudly. Some of the tiffs were of no importance, when and where and who. “You put the dead cricket in the formula, not me!” “Ask my mom. She saw you coming out of the bathroom with blood running down your arm, remember?” Nevertheless, there were recurring justifications for the plot: They had all liked Alice at first, but then, as time went on, she had distinguished herself in ways they didn’t like. She had been Mr. Abbot’s “pet” in history class and was always raising her hand with the answer. She bought her clothes in Minneapolis in a department store, not at the Bonden mall. She read all the time, which was “boring.” Ashley’s synopsis included the fact that Alice had been given a starring role in the school play, and after this “lucky break,” she had metamorphosed into “a big snob.” What had begun as a “little fun” among the conspiratorial witches to “get back at Alice” had somehow, mysteriously, run wild, of its own accord. There were no agents in this version of the story, just currents of feeling, very much like spells, that had pulled the girls hither and yon. Bea and I used to have a phrase when we were growing up that described such actions well: “accidentally on purpose.” When I mentioned this, there were sheepish smiles all around, except of course from Alice, who was hard at work scrutinizing the table’s surface.

She read last. Despite the ugliness of the tale she had to tell, the girl had cast herself as its heroine in the mode of Jane Eyre or David Copperfield, those wronged orphans I had loved so much when I was her age, and she had worked hard on the story. Heavily adjectival and hyperbolic though it was, and not free of diction errors (“torturous” for “tortured”), it articulated both her intense need to be inside the group and the agony of being an outcast. Listening to her, I guessed that although her dramatis persona would not endear her to all the members of the Coven, finding it had been a boon for her. The victim came out well in her version of events, if only because Alice had dressed up her alter ego in gothic conventions that had been conveniently aided by the memorable storm that had cracked the heavens as I lay in bed that night in June. Apparently, while “hanging out” at Jessie’s house, the girls had jointly decided not to look at or answer Alice when she spoke, to behave as if she were both invisible and inaudible. After half an hour of this treatment, our heroine had escaped into the “pelting rain, weeping violently, her hair whipping in the wind” while “lightning flashed crooked in the sky.” When she arrived home, this tragic creature was “soaked to the skin and frozen to her bones with crazily chattering teeth.” Although Alice may not have enjoyed the Coven’s version of Meidung, she had certainly taken pleasure in writing about it. Alice the literary character served a redemptive function for just plain Alice, who was going into the seventh grade. Her narrative ended with the words “Never before have I felt such deep, unbearable despair.”

I did not smile. I remembered.

Poor Peyton, whose remorse was already in full bloom, cried and blew her nose.

Jessie did not look at Alice, but she apologized in a mortified whisper.

Nikki and Joan wriggled with unease.

Ashley and Emma remained implacable.

I sent them off with their assignments. I gave Ashley and Alice to each other, paired Peyton and Joan, Nikki and Emma, and because seven is uneven, I took Jessie for myself, and she was given the task of writing as the mostly ignorant poetry teacher.

* * *

Boris wooed.

Mia,

I was just a fat-headed guy full of pain.

Boris

(Reference: T. R. Devlin, played by Cary Grant, to Alicia Huberman, played by Ingrid Bergman, near the end of Notorious . The hero is, if I remember correctly, carrying his drugged-by-poison beloved down the stairs when he makes this remark. Boris and I had seen the film at least seven times together, and every time B.I. had become tearful over this succinct explanation for Mr. Devlin’s genuinely wretched treatment of the divine Miss Huberman. I was not unmoved by this bit of wooing. No, I won’t hedge: I was moved. It would never do to replace Cary with Boris or me with Ingrid. When I imagine my slightly rotund in the middle, bespectacled neuroscientist puffing and groaning as he bears frizzy-headed fifty-five-year-old versifier down enormous Hollywood staircase, the illusion is lost. But that is not the point. We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives some polish to our tarnished lives, and sometimes we may choose one dream over another, and in the choosing find some respite from ordinary sadness. After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self.)

* * *

From Bea, after having been informed of the Boris/Mia developments:

Just remember, Baby Huey, we all screw up. Love, B.

* * *

From Nobody, finally:

Kidney stones.

Poor Mr. Nobody, my high-flying partner in dialogue, had been brought down by those excruciating pebbles. I wished him a swift recovery.

* * *

I had learned to wait for some time after knocking for Abigail to appear at the door. My visits had been fairly regular. I had gone either alone or with my mother, and we had both worried about our mutual friend since her fall. She seemed to dwindle daily, and yet, the force of her personality remained strong. In fact, what attracted me to Abigail was her rigidity. This is not usually regarded as a desirable feature in human beings, but in her it seemed to have developed as resistance to a particular midwestern ethos of frightened conformity. Abigail had sewn and embroidered and appliquéd in quiet but adamant insurrection. I now knew the story of Private Gardener. She had married him on an impulse just before he headed off for the Pacific, but when he returned after the war, he brought the war back with him. Plagued by nightmares, fits of rage, and bouts of ferocious drinking to the point of unconsciousness, the man who had come home bore little resemblance to the boy she had vowed to “love, honor, and obey,” but then, as she put it, “I didn’t really know him from a hole in the wall to begin with.” One day, to her immense relief, her spouse went AWOL. A year later, she received a letter of contrition from the ex-soldier asking her to join him in Milwaukee. Because the very thought of it turned her “cold as an ice cube,” Abigail refused, asked for a divorce, and the grade school art teacher was born.