Unknown - The Genius

night, a happy occasion … back to her wedding. Think about her wedding. Think about the liveried footmen and the mighty brass instruments and the dancing legions spinning in her honor; think about her wedding cake, that magnificent tower of buttercream in the shape of a pyramid, the biggest cake anyone had ever seen; they printed a picture of it in the newspaper, and her picture, too. The wedding of Mr. L. I. Muller and Miss Bertha Steinholtz proved undoubtedly the most spectacular event of the season. The bride wore a taffeta gown of surpassing elegance, and the groom his traditional black. The ceremony was performed at the Trinity Church by the Most Reverend J. A. Moffett, and festivities continued… . They called it a fairy tale, and for once they got it right. Her life has been magical.

And now she is old and in a bed and it is 1962. There are things that remain hidden. They should not bother her now, not after so much time. Water under the bridge. But memory, nasty beast, returns again and again.

Not the girl. She can think about the girl without flinching. She has never doubted her decisions and she does not doubt them now. There was too much at stake. Louis could never see that. He told her once that she had no heart but that just showed how deeply he misunderstood the world, how deeply he misunderstood her. She did what she did not because she lacked a heart but because she knew, all too well, how merciless people could be. She remembered being mocked, nightly sobbing, pillows soaked, years of struggle before she came into her own and they could not deny her any longer. Because she was beautiful, and beauty cannot be denied.

But for the girl? An eternity of faux pas. She stood to suffer. What Louis failed to grasp was that Bertha had been acting with mercy.

For David’s tenth birthday she threw a luncheon, hired entertainment, and opened the ballroom. After dessert David played his violin for the guests, most of whom were adults, friends of hers; in those days, he did not have many friends. All told a pleasant afternoon, at least until Louis bolted from the room. She found him on the edge of his bed, face in his handkerchief. It disgusted her: this soft cruelty he had the gall to call mercy. He did not know what true mercy meant. He had never suffered. He had been coddled, fawned over, given a pass on the most vile transgressions. So naturally he assumed that the world would do the same for the girl. Bertha knew better. She knew disgrace. All she wanted was to spare the girl the same.

She wanted to think fondly of him but bitterness seeps through. The girl’s fate began as an argument but grew, over the years, into a towering obstruction between them, a wall of thorns, curling in on itself until they lost sight of each other completely.

It would be easy for a novelist to write And though they continued to live in the same house, they never spoke again. It would be easy but untrue. For the truth is, she still felt kindly toward Louis at moments, and she sensed that he, too, had a kind of lukewarm desire to be in her good graces. In forty years of marriage they laughed many times, shared much mutual pleasure—though not often sexual—and raised a son.

When Louis died, everything came out. By that time the boy was eleven. Eleven years old! Living like a hermit. One old woman to care for him; God knows what sort of perversions took place between them. He barely spoke. The woman, whose name was Greene, said he’d never been one to babble. Bertha told her to be quiet until spoken to.

She wanted to ship the boy as far off as possible, to Europe or Australia, but Dr. Fetchett advised against it, and in a rare moment of equivocation, she had consented to send him to the farthest point in New York state. The problem went away again. This time permanently.

But as she lies high above the earth, full of drugs, wired to electronics, she worries that her efforts have been in vain. The bills come directly to her; she pays them from a personal account. What will happen when she stops? They will come looking for her; they will contact David. With horror, she realizes that they might have done so already.

“David.”

“Mother?”

“How long have I been here.”

“In the hospital, you mean? Six weeks.”

Six weeks sounds like ample time for a bill to come past due. The crisis is upon her, then. David will find out. The story will emerge and everyone will know. She needs to make him understand the need for secrecy. But he comes from a different generation; smugly they call themselves enlightened, without the faintest notion of how quick life is to knock out your teeth. Louis’s softness has found its way into him. She must find a solution. She thinks. Her mind stumbles back and forth between the present and the past. She talks to her husband and her maid. She talks to the television. The room David got her looks less like a hospital and more like a hotel. The walls are wood-paneled; a leaded window in the shape of a star glows gently. She squeezes down on her mind and the answer comes: she will pay the fees now, in advance. She will establish an endowment. She has done that before. At Harvard and Columbia and Barnard people work and learn because of her generosity. She has given money to charities of all stripes, been feted by politicians from every side of the aisle … she squeezes down. A problem at hand, she will solve it. She will call the man at the school in Albany and give him an enormous sum of money. Where is her checkbook. Where is the telephone.

“Mother.”

They hold her arms.

“Mother.”

“Call the doctor.”

No, don’t call the doctor. The doctor is dead. He died in 1857. He died in 1935. He died in 1391, he is nothing but bones. Memories are his flesh and she can burn him up with the blink of her eye. Memories are fickle. Memories taste smoky. They taste like Kirschkuchen. Everything withers and turns to bones. Walter is bones. Louis is bones. Soon she too will be bones. Give enough money and problems turn to bones. She will grind them up and cast them upon the water; she will be remembered forever in the minds of people who have never met her; she will live in their minds the way memories live in hers, the way she so starkly recalls the flood that destroyed their basement; lightning seen from the bow of a ship; the pain of childbirth; the pain of childbirth; the dullness of intercourse; the men who attempted to woo her when Louis died, imagine that, she a wrinkled old woman and men thirty years younger offering her roses; she remembers and remembers and remembers and it is not a flashing of her life so much as a cascade, events superimposed and time seesawing, people who never met shaking hands, conversations a moment ago crystalline now fizzy and roaring like the surf, the frame of her mind creaking and buckling inward, a mineshaft, rivers of dirt snaking down the incline toward blackness.

“Mrs. Muller.”

“Mother.”

Mrs. Muller.

Mother.

Yes, she is Mrs. Muller. She had a husband. Yes, she is a mother. She has a son.

20

t took an afternoon of phone calls, but I managed to track down the New York School for Training and Rehabilitation, right where Joe said it would be: ten miles outside Albany, operating under the name Green Gardens Rehabilitation Center. An assistant director named Driscoll told me that in its previous incarnation, the place had been an honest-to- goodness asylum, of the padded walls and shock treatment ilk. Like many such institutions, it had fallen victim to the civil rights movement, its programs disbanded and its charter revised to reflect a kinder, gentler approach: Green Gardens specialized in spinal injuries. Driscoll took evident relish in recounting all this to me; he seemed to consider himself the unofficial historian.

I asked about the old patient records, and he said, “A couple years ago we had a problem with the boiler, so I go down to the basement with a flashlight. I’m crawling around, sneezing my head off, and I stumble right through a big pile of letters, medical records, all the physicians’ notes. Nobody had touched any of it for twenty years. The paper was disintegrating.”