And there was more which, if it did not cause me to feel so peculiarly desolated as I did by what I took to be my callow sexual reflexes, gave me still other good reasons to distrust myself. There were, for instance, Monica’s Sunday visits-how brutal they were! And how I recoiled from what I saw! Especially when I remembered-with the luxurious sense of having been blessed- the Sundays of my own childhood, the daylong round of visits, first to my two widowed grandmothers in the slum where my parents had been born, and then around Camden to the households of half a dozen aunts and uncles. During the war, when gasoline was rationed, we would have to walk to visit the grandmothers, traversing on foot five miles of city streets in all-a fair measure of our devotion to those two queenly and prideful workhorses, who lived very similarly in small apartments redolent of freshly ironed linen and stale coal gas, amid an accumulation of antimacassars, bar mitzvah photos, and potted plants, most of them taller and sturdier than I ever was. Peeling wallpaper, cracked linoleum, ancient faded curtains, this nonetheless was my Araby, and I their little sultan…what is more, a sickly sultan whose need was all the greater for his Sunday sweets and sauces. Oh how I was fed and comforted, washerwoman breasts for my pillows, deep grandmotherly laps, my throne!
Of course, when I was ill or the weather was bad, I would have to stay at home, looked after by my sister, while my father and mother made the devotional safari alone, in galoshes and under umbrellas. But that was not so unpleasant either, for Sonia would read aloud to me, in a very actressy way, from a book she owned entitled Two Hundred Opera Plots; intermittently she would break into song. “ “The action takes place in India,’” she read, “ ‘and opens in the sacred grounds of the Hindoo priest, Nilakantha, who has an inveterate hatred for the English. During his absence, however, a party of English officers and ladies enter, out of curiosity, and are charmed with the lovely garden. They soon depart, with the exception of the officer, Gerald, who remains to make a sketch, in spite of the warning of his friend, Frederick. Presently the priest’s lovely daughter, Lakme, enters, having come by the river…’” The phrase “having come by the river,” the spelling of Hindu in Sunny’s book with those final twin o’s (like a pair of astonished eyes; like the middle vowels in “hoot” and “moon” and “poor”; like a distillation of everything and anything I found mysterious), appealed strongly to this invalid child, as did her performing so wholeheartedly for an audience of one…Lakme is taken by her father, both of them disguised as beggars, to the city market: “‘He forces Lakme to sing, hoping thus to attract the attention of her lover, should he be amongst the party of English who are buying in the bazaars.’” I am still barely recovered from the word “bazaars” and its pair of as (the sound of “odd,” the sound of a sigh), when Sunny introduces “The Bell Song,” the aria “De la fille du faria,” says my sister in Bresslenstein’s French accent: the ballad of the pariah’s daughter who saves a stranger in the forest from the wild beasts by the enchantment of her magic bell. After struggling with the soaring aria, my sister, flushed and winded from the effort, returns to her highly dramatic reading of the plot: “‘And this cunning plan succeeds, for Gerald instantly recognizes the thrilling voice of the fair Hindoo maiden-’” And is stabbed in the back by Lakme’s father; and is nursed back to health by her “‘in a beautiful jungle’”; only there the fellow “ ‘remembers with remorse the fair English girl to whom he is betrothed’”; and so decides to leave my sister, who kills herself with poisonous herbs, “‘the deadly juices of which she drinks.’” I could not decide whom to hate more, Gerald, with his remorse for “the fair English girl,” or Lakme’s crazy father, who would not let his daughter love a white man. Had I been “in India” instead of at home on a rainy Sunday, and had I weighed something more than sixty pounds, I would have saved her from them both, I thought.
Later, at the back landing, my Mother and father shake the water off themselves like dogs-our loyal Dalmatians, our life-saving Saint Bernards. They leave their umbrellas open in the bathtub to dry. They have carried home to me-two and a half miles through a storm, and with a war on-a jar of my grandmother Zuckerman’s stuffed cabbage, a shoe box containing my grandmother Ackerman’s strudeclass="underline" food for a starving Nathan, to enrich his blood and bring him health and happiness. Later still, my exhibitionistic sister will stand exactly in the center of the living-room rug, on the “oriental” medallion, practicing her scales, while my father reads the battlefront news in the Sunday Inquirer and my mother gauges the temperature of my forehead with her lips, each hourly reading ending in a kiss. And I, all the while, an Ingres odalisque languid on the sofa. Was there ever anything like it, since the day of rest began?
How those rituals of love out of my own antiquity (no nostalgia for me!) return in every poignant nostalgic detail when I watch the unfolding of another horrific Ketterer Sunday. As orthodox as we had been in performing the ceremonies of familial devotion, so the Ketterers were in the perpetuation of their barren and wretched lovelessness. To watch the cycle of disaster repeating itself was as chilling as watching an electrocution-yes, a slow electrocution, the burning up of Monica Ketterer’s life, seemed to me to be taking place before my eyes Sunday after Sunday. Stupid, broken, illiterate child, she did not know her right hand from her left, could not read the clock, could not even read a slogan off a billboard or a cereal box without someone helping her over each syllable as though it were an alp. Monica. Lydia. Ketterer. I thought: “What am I doing with these people?” And thinking that, could see no choice for myself but to stay.
Sundays Monica was delivered to the door by Eugene Ketterer, just as unattractive a man as the reader, who has gotten the drift of my story, would expect to find entering the drama at this point. Another nail in Nathan’s coffin. If only Lydia had been exaggerating, if only I could have said to her, as it isn’t always impossible to say to the divorced of their former spouses, “Come on now, he isn’t nearly so bad as all that.” If only, even in a joking way, I could have teased her by saying, “Why, I rather like him.” But I hated him.
The only surprise was to discover him to be physically uglier than Lydia had even suggested. As if that character of his wasn’t enough. Bad teeth, a large smashed nose, hair brilliantined back for church, and, in his dress, entirely the urban yokel…Now how could a girl with a pretty face and so much native refinement and intelligence have married a type like this to begin with? Simple: he was the first to ask her. Here was the knight who had rescued Lydia from that prison house in Skokie.
To the reader who has not just “gotten the drift,” but begun to balk at the uniformly dismal situation that I have presented here, to the reader who finds himself unable to suspend his disbelief in a protagonist who voluntarily sustains an affair with a woman sexless to him and so disaster-ridden, I should say that in retrospect I find him nearly impossible to believe in myself. Why should a young man otherwise reasonable, farsighted, watchful, judicious, and self-concerned, a man meticulously precise in the bread-and-butter concerns of life, and the model of husbandry with his endowment, why should he pursue, in this obviously weighty encounter, a course so defiantly not in his interest? For the sake of defiance? Does that convince you? Surely some protective, life-sustaining instinct-call it common sense, horse sense, a kind of basic biological alarm system-should have awakened him to the inevitable consequences, even as a glass of cold water thrown in his face will bring the most far-gone sleepwalker back from the world of stairwells without depth and boulevards without traffic. I look in vain for anything resembling a genuine sense of religious mission-that which sends missionaries off to convert the savages or to minister to lepers-or for the psychological abnormality pronounced enough to account for this preposterous behavior. To make some sort of accounting, the writer emphasizes Lydia’s “moral glamor” and develops, probably with more thoroughness than is engrossing, the idea of Zuckerman’s “seriousness,” even going so far, in the subtitle, as to describe that seriousness as something of a social phenomenon; but to be frank, it does not seem, even to the author, that he has, suggestive subtitle and all, answered the objection of implausibility, any more than the young man Zuckerman’s own prestigious interpretations of his migraines seemed to him consonant with the pain itself. And to bring words like “enigmatic” and “mysterious” into the discussion not only goes against my grain, but hardly seems to make things any less inconceivable.