Elegies for the Brokenhearted (21 page)

“She'll be back later,” I said. “She said she's coming for lunch.”

Of course,
you said.
Of course she is.

Your tone was peevish, sarcastic, and I hoped Malinda would prove you wrong. But she failed to show up. In the following days you seemed to make a sport of my suffering. A car would pull up to the Bavarian and I'd go to the window to see who it was.
Oh,
you'd say,
it's Malinda this time, I can feel it!
But it was never Malinda, nor was it anyone who intended to stay at the Bavarian. The only people who pulled into the driveway were people who had realized they were going the wrong way, and were stopping to turn around.
You should have seen your face,
you'd say when I returned to my seat on the couch. You'd smile manically, like Jerry Lewis.

“I don't think,” I'd say, “that's exactly the expression I was making.”

You're right,
you'd say.
It was even worse.

 

E
very year, on July 30, Mrs. Strauss threw a birthday party for her father.
Vaterfest,
you called it. It was your least favorite day of the year.
To see someone so caught up in delusion,
you said.
Pining away like that. It's tolerable most of the time, but this is too much altogether.

Mrs. Strauss made all of her father's favorite foods—schnitzel, bratwurst, sauerbraten—and set them on the coffee table in the living room, along with several framed pictures of him. We sat in the living room, on Mrs. Strauss's antique furniture, facing a wall of cuckoo clocks, eight of them in all different shapes and sizes, some simple wooden houses, others elaborate chalets. Outside these houses stood small figures in lederhosen, men chopping wood, women carrying pails—as well as an assortment of wildlife: rabbits, foxes, deer. Normally Mrs. Strauss silenced the clocks, but on special occasions she turned them on to their full, clamoring capacity. She'd set the clocks to sound at four, the hour of her father's birth.

The centerpiece of Vaterfest was a homemade liqueur that Mrs. Strauss unveiled exclusively for the occasion. She served it three fingers high in a crystal tumbler. “My father's recipe,” she said. “Everyone back home used to come to him for it, just everyone, because his spirits were the best.” I took a sip and choked, tears sprang to my eyes. You laughed, high and trilling, and across Mrs. Strauss's face came a look of delight. “Exactly!” she said. “This is exactly what a girl like you needs for your health.”

“Father,” she said, “drank a glass of this every morning with breakfast and every night with dinner, and you've never seen anyone in such spectacular health. He had a chest like a tree trunk.” Here she looked off and started sculpting the air with her hands. “And arms like barrels. Once at a carnival he wrestled a bear down to the ground. Every morning, no matter the weather, he woke and showered outside in the freezing cold, and he sang the whole while. He was absolutely pink when he came back into the house. Absolutely pink, I tell you!” She turned to me suddenly. “Drink!” she said.

I kept drinking as Mrs. Strauss talked of her father. Once, just to amuse her, he'd bent an iron pipe in half; during one Oktoberfest he'd swung the sledgehammer so hard against the platform he'd lifted the weight all the way to the top, ringing the little bell, which was impossible, those games were impossible to win, don't you know. In a blizzard he carried, she said, her dying mother across the village and up to the cottage of a doctor who lived in the hills, three miles uphill he'd carried her, and she was no waif, she was a big German woman, even taller than he was. When he came home, still carrying her, a layer of ice had formed over his hat and jacket and mustache, even his eyelashes had frozen. In just a short while I was a raw, burning kind of drunk, a warmth was going through me, I was absolutely pink.

Through all of this talk, which you'd no doubt heard countless times before, you were bored senseless. You yawned, sighed, yawned again. Your motions were exaggerated as those of a mime. When you yawned you tapped your fingers to your mouth, your eyelids fluttered.

“Once he was run over by a wagon,” said Mrs. Strauss. “The wheels went right over him, and he was hardly the worse for wear. You've never met such a man! It made you happy to be alive, just to look at him!” She paused for breath. And in the pocket of silence you attempted to turn the conversation toward yourself.

I never knew my father,
you said,
and I can count on one hand the number of days I've spent with my mother. On a single hand.
You sat back casually in your chair, as if a guest on
Dick Cavett
. Your legs were crossed, and you circled your foot around and around.
Right after she had me she went off to Hollywood. Thought she was a big star just waiting to be born. The closest she got was being an extra. You can see her dancing in a group, in
Brigadoon,
behind Gene Kelly.

“I always preferred Fred Astaire,” said Mrs. Strauss. “I used to pretend I was Ginger Rogers.” She rose to her feet and went about the room, moving in long, gliding gestures.

You look,
you said,
like you're running a vacuum cleaner.

“I do not!” said Mrs. Strauss. “I had wonderful dancing lessons.”

Were they from your father?
you asked, in the perfectly earnest voice you used when you were being sarcastic.

“Why, yes,” she said.

Mother was bad even as an extra,
you said.
She kept turning her face toward the camera, like some producer would notice and call her up.

“How exciting!” said Mrs. Strauss. “To be dancing in a movie!” She had abandoned her gliding and was now twirling around the room.

It must have been very exciting,
you said.
Apparently in her excitement she could hardly pick up the phone.

“Is she dead?” I asked, surprised at myself.

I don't know,
you said.
But she should be
.

“It's almost time,” said Mrs. Strauss, and pointed to the clocks. We all sat staring at the pendulums, which swung frantically. I was mesmerized by them, exactly as people in movies were entranced by the swinging chains of hypnotists.

“My brother Karl,” said Mrs. Strauss, “made each and every one of those clocks himself. Of course he ended up in a mental hospital. He had predilections he couldn't cure himself of. Obsessions. He'd do nothing but carve little figures all day for months at a time. He became afraid of germs and refused to walk anywhere, he didn't want his feet dirtied. He drew illustrations from the fairy tales he was always reading, all over the walls of the house. He became afraid of the characters in his books, the witches and goblins, and refused to go outside. We had to take him away.”

There was nothing to say to this.

“His clocks, they are all facing east,” said Mrs. Strauss. “Looking toward home. They want to be back home.”

You couldn't pay me enough,
you said.

Suddenly I had theories swirling around my head. Could it be, I said, that this was home, this right here, for all of us? For wasn't home, I said, less of a place than a means of connecting with people? The problem was that we just didn't see it. The problem was that the world was made out of fabric, and it surrounded us so completely that we couldn't see beyond it, it was a prison but it was thin, I was sure of this, and behind what we could see was more—infinitely more, I said—finer things, other realms in which our spirits were free, without bodies, in which we were like floating balls of light or gas, and what we were supposed to do was offer brightness to each other, commingle and make new colors, pass through one another gently, instead of what we were doing now, which was passing one another by and hiding in separate corners. And you had to wonder—I held my finger in the air, here—you had to wonder if the horrible, drifting life we were all living now was all the result of the thinnest fabric. It was only the surface and it didn't matter and we could break through it quite easily if we wanted, if only we tried, to what was beyond, togetherness,
this
mattered, we were all going around making the mistake of thinking that we were alone, and we just needed to stop and pay attention, we could all break through if we tried, our hearts were beating in unison, all of our sorrows and fears were the same, if we stopped and realized it, if we all just stopped for a moment and really looked at it, saw through it, the world would be better, it would come together, it would heal. The barriers between us are as thin as the air we breathe, I said. We're all living at the same time, and right next to each other, but there are different worlds and they don't intersect, they're parallel and discrete, but they needn't be. What matters, I said, is people. What matters is home, that we look at each other, really look at each other, and say to each other, You are what matters to me, you are home.

You stared at me for a second, then burst out laughing. As always you made a show of it, holding your stomach, pitching yourself forward. You sounded like someone instructing foreigners to laugh.
Ha-ha-ha! Oh, ho, ho! Hee-hee-hee!
Then one of the clocks struck the hour, and another, and another, until all of the cuckoos were bursting forth from their doors, then retreating, then bursting forth again. When the birds finished calling, each clock played a little song, and they swirled together in an awful clashing of chimes. As the clocks sounded I saw everything I'd just been talking about—which I'd been entirely convinced of, which was so real to me that I could see it glimmering in front of me—disappear, I could actually see it evaporating from the air. I was crushed.

When it was time to leave for work I was so drunk that it was an effort for me to see or to walk. I spent great concentration putting one foot in front of the other. I was under the impression that I was moving very fluidly, with an uncommon grace, but you said, “My God, look at you. Pull yourself together.”

“I'm okay,” I said, and looked at you very solemnly. “I'm just a little out of my elephant.”

 

L
ater that night, on the walk home, you told me more about Mrs. Strauss. That her father and brother had been deported by the Nazis, had wasted away in a concentration camp and had finally been killed, that she was only alive because her father had sent her abroad to school with the money he'd saved from brewing liquor. As a young woman Mrs. Strauss had been very beautiful and had married a rich American. On their honeymoon they'd returned to her girlhood village, but it was changed beyond recognition, and the house she had grown up in had been demolished. After that Mrs. Strauss had slowly lost her mind. As a consolation her husband had built the Bavarian as a summer home. Each year when the time came to close up the house for the winter Mrs. Strauss cried for weeks on end, and eventually couldn't bear to leave at all. For many years they lived apart, Mr. Strauss in New York and Mrs. Strauss in Maine. She started taking in boarders. When her husband died, two years after you'd arrived, Mrs. Strauss had disappeared completely into her own mind.

The Bavarian, you told me, was a nearly exact replica of Mrs. Strauss's childhood home.
In her mind,
you said,
she's sleeping in her father's room. And you're sleeping in hers. And I'm sleeping in Karl's.

You were telling me this, you said, as a kind of warning.
Family is a fine idea,
you said.
Love is a fine idea. But in the end they're not worth it. Do you think Malinda would sit around waiting for you?
you asked. You said that the Bavarian was a house of convalescence, a resort of last resort, a place for people with nowhere left to go. And though you had no trouble believing, you said, that I would eventually end up in a place quite like it, it wasn't my time. I was too young.

“What about you?” I said. “Why is it the place for you? You're still young, there's still lots of things you can do. You still have time to make a change for yourself. You could find your mother, for one thing. You could finish your symphony, build a new life for yourself, fall in love again. You could do anything you want.”

You rolled your eyes, and used the phrase you'd used with Mark and Addison.
Oh, honey,
you said,
I'm retired
.

 

I
n the days following Vaterfest you grew even more distant, and we began to treat each other with the awkwardness of ex-lovers. If you spoke to me at work, it was only a quip. I'd be mopping the floor and you'd pass by on your way out for a cigarette.
How's that floor coming?
you'd say.

“Fine,” I said. “It's coming along fine, I think.”

Your parents must be very proud
.

After work, and on our walks home, you were surprisingly quiet.” What are you thinking?” I'd say.

Oh, nothing,
you'd say.

“Well let me know if you want to talk,” I'd say.

You'd sigh dramatically.
I can't think of a single thing left I haven't already told you
.

“Well if you do, I'm right here. Ready and waiting. Right here.”

August came and still I didn't leave. In the afternoons I sat in the parlor with Mrs. Strauss, who was teaching me how to crochet. I undertook the making of a bedspread, whose pattern was so complicated that I had to keep undoing my work and starting over. At the rate I was progressing, it would have taken me several years to finish.
I certainly hope,
you said one day,
you're working on a handkerchief.

I was happy when, one night at work, you invited me to join you and Houston on your break. We sat outside by the dumpster, passing a joint around. You were strangely quiet—you simply sat picking lint off your trousers—and so Houston took up the task of filling the silence. “This is it,” he said, “my last year. Can't keep doing this forever, no I can't.” Like most of the people I'd met at the restaurant, Houston talked almost exclusively of the plans he was making to change his life, to leave restaurant work and pursue his fortune. In October, he said, he planned to go to school to be a realtor. “Sell a few houses,” he said, “one, two houses a month, you're set.” He stared at the ground as he spoke. “Take it from me,” he said to me, “you better start saving up and thinking about what you gonna do next. You need a plan. You got any plans?”