Those terrible words are from Aeschylus, The Eumenides, the third play of the Oresteia. Orestes has killed his mother, Clytemnestra, and in the play, the murdered woman’s ghost eggs on the furies to avenge her death, to punish the matricide.
Mother still comes to me in my dreams. She is always a ghost now. In the two years or three years after she died, she used to come to me as her old living self, and I would rush toward her and, a couple of times, she took me in her arms and held me, her lips pressed against my neck, and the sensation was warm and happy. But then she began to recede, and now, when I dream of her, I know she is a phantom, a dead person, and I cannot reach her. She is often rattling around in her old studio in Red Hook or making mime-like gestures at me that I cannot interpret. Just a few days ago, I dreamed that she walked into my bedroom at home. She was completely transparent, a real old-fashioned ghost, and when I called out to her, she turned in my direction, extended her arms, and opened her mouth. I could see way down into her lungs, and I heard her breathe once, and then the whole room was on fire. I wasn’t afraid of the blaze in the dream, and I didn’t try to speak to her. I just stood by quietly and watched the room burn.
Bruno Kleinfeld (written statement)
My epic poem. Harry’s grand experiment. Neither one of us could heave the darlings overboard. I sequestered the Meisterwerk over in my slummy digs, which I had retained for the sake of my manly independence, and brought out the twenty-pound MS. (stored in the closet on the shelf above three retired baseball mitts) for brush-ups, revisions, cuts, and additions, unbeknown to Harry, who listened joyfully to MS. #2, the ever-growing Confessions of a Minor Poet, the mostly true tale of one Bruno Kleinfeld, a moody Jewish fornicator from the Bronx, whose adventures hewed closely to mine but were blessed with the gap that inevitably arrives between present-self scribbler and his various tawdry or gallant past selves, a chasm also known as humor, irony, or forgetfulness. I salute Harry for kicking my ass, which in turn loosened up my old knuckles for work on the Olivetti’s sleek keyboard, a machine inherited from dear old Uncle Samuel Kleinfeld in 1958. The story of my life, such as it was, seemed to arrive easily and breezily, a saga of, among other things, cream sodas, gefilte fish, and Doris McKinny’s maddeningly distracting breasts, which were allowed three pages to themselves once I arrived at puberty on page 101.
I am not alone in observing that autobiographies lose interest when the hero leaves his youth, so I decided to give my middle age short shrift: twenty-five pages devoted to my all-around failures as poet, husband, and father delivered in a mock-heroic tone to relieve the reader of realism or maybe naturalism — whatever that grubby genre of rusty sinks and honest squalor is called. After that truncated interim, I arrived at my three grown-up girls, and the noblest of all my seminal offshoots, my grandson, Bran. Yes, my Confessions are shaped like an hourglass. The form of my time on earth eschews the middle for its fat ends, early and late. Bran came squalling into my life as an ugly red-faced little bruiser, but as I write these words, he is running around the diamond and kicking a soccer ball and explicating the ins and outs of avatars to me, and has become, I must say, the shining light of his granddad’s dotage.
The very day after Harry lay on her back and told me the tale of her visit to Rune in a voice as cold as steel in winter, I noticed that her thoughts had been tinted by or maybe sprinkled with paranoia. Harry knew she had struck a Faustian bargain, had made a soul-killing exchange, which had been fraught with risk from the beginning. Rune, once the great white hope, had turned into Beelzebub. She worried that the dead spouse had shared intimate stories with his young “friend.” Hadn’t Rune seemed possessed of an uncanny knowledge of her from the start? Rune’s cleverness began to look paranormal. When Harry loudly proclaimed that four of her works were missing from her studio, my guess was that one of the assistants had mislaid them under a mountain of ready-mades. Between her stints of depth cleaning, Harry let congenial chaos reign in the studio. Arms, legs, heads, wigs, and hairpieces littered the floor. Stacks of lumber, sheets of glass, coils of rope, wire, cable, tools, and mystery machines lined the walls. In one corner, Harry stockpiled “notable dross,” an unsavory collection she had hauled inside from the general vicinity of the docks, various thingamabobs and whatsits that had moldered, withered, languished, or rusted into states so crumbled, mottled, decayed, or lumpish their former identities were no longer with us. Keep looking, I said. Maybe they’re hidden under the notable dross.
But Harry blamed Rune for the missing works. She insisted he had broken through multiple locks and an alarm system to snatch her art. I jokingly asked Harry if she hadn’t mixed up Rune with the Barometer’s fallen angel, a tall man with wings who flew in and out of the lodge as he pleased. It’s just not possible, Harry, I said, but she wouldn’t believe me. One night, her face quashed with misery, she whispered to me, “He’s climbed inside me, Bruno. He’s seen the fear. He knows more than I know.” I hated the S.O.B., but I knew he was human.
Harry hooked her hopes on the letter in The Open Eye. When it’s out, she said, everyone will know. I will be free. But, Harry, I said, it’s a yawner journal, arcane, abstruse. How many people read it? I don’t think Harry had a choice. She had to believe in her imminent triumph. When the magazine finally arrived, she read the letter aloud to me, chortling and crowing, chewing on the quotations that belonged to her, her face as hot as one of her electrified metamorphs. I scolded her for the testicle joke—beanbags, Harry, I said, really. And who is this character Brickman? He’s doing his job, she said. That’s what matters.
I told you so is a phrase for assholes, and since I happen to intermittently find myself in that category, I used it on Harry when Rune screwed her over in the pages of Art Assembly in an interview, in which he was questioned outright about the Brickman letter in The Open Eye. Rune had guts. I have to hand it to him.
Harriet Lord has been really great to me, not only as a collector of my work, but as a true supporter. And I think of her as a muse for the project. Beneathcould never have happened without the long talks we had together and her generous backing. What I can’t understand is that she seems to claim she is responsible for my work. She seems to believe that she actually created it. I simply can’t understand why she would say that. You know, she had a really hard time after her husband died, and she’s been in psychiatric treatment for years. For the record, let’s just say she’s a kind lady, but a little confused from time to time, and leave it at that.
I was on-site in the kitchen when the kind but a little confused lady in long-term psychiatric treatment hurled the offending magazine at the pot rack. I was there when she cursed, roared, went cross-eyed and then blind with rage. Head down, arms flailing, she attacked an open shelf, batting mugs, dishes, and bowls to the floor, where they met their spectacular ends in smithereens. After the crash, I knelt on the floor, wielding brush and dustpan to collect thousands of shards, while Harry sat on the floor and said over and over, “I’ll kill him.” The fact that the man had called her Harriet Lord, not Harriet Burden, had shaken extra salt on Harry’s already open wound.