News from the World (2 page)

On Fridays there were no personnel to run the elevators. Adam operated one to the first floor so I could have what had become my daily outing. But what I really liked was wheeling myself to the windows on my floor and looking out upon the Judean Hills.

On the last day but one of my stay at the Hadassah, two large policemen came to question me. Linda, my daughter, was at my side. I stammered and stumbled in attempting to answer their questions about the assault. I knew nothing, only what I had heard others say. I was required to sign papers; I made what seemed to me to be endless circles on the paper, pressing the pen point hard. When I saw what I had done, I smiled apologetically.

The next night we were driven to Ben Gurion Airport to board an airplane that would fly us to New York. Ben Gurion looked to me like a vast exhibition hall. Ilana was there to say goodbye; she was staying on in Tel Aviv a few more days. We passed trunks, drifting people. The ceiling was so high! I felt suddenly alarmed, razor cuts of nameless anxiety. Ilana looked at my hands as they gripped the wheelchair arms. “It will be all right,” she said over and over. What was
it
?

I was chairlifted into the airplane, then carried down the aisle by Linda and Gabe, my younger son, to my seat. Next to me sat Martin. Everywhere in the airplane there was a crush of people.

Adam, who had gone ahead to New York a few days earlier, was to meet us at Kennedy Airport. In a wheelchair, I was the last to leave the airplane, preceded by what seemed an escort of bearded young men wearing hats. Hasidic Jews, Martin told me days later.

Adam drove us to the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where I was to spend another week. As I was wheeled through the lobby, I felt I was about to faint from fatigue.

I found myself in a large room. A silent nurse dressed me in hospital attire. I noted there was a bathroom with a shower. As soon as I felt the touch of sheets, I fell asleep. At some point an aide woke me. She was standing across the room looking down at a little wheeled table. Why, she asked, in an admonitory voice, hadn't I marked down what I wanted for supper on the menu she was holding up? “I—” I began but was unable to go on. She left the room, casting a dark look at me as she went.

I made a decision then, the first one I had ever made, it seemed to me. I would take a shower. I walked fast—to overcome my unsteadiness—to the bathroom and turned on the taps, letting the water wash over me, not bothering with cloth or soap. It was a taste of freedom, those two minutes or so while I stood there, not aware of the water temperature or anything else except that it seemed the first choice of my life.

On a weekend day, I was wheeled to the lower floor of the hospital by an aide. A young man who seemed drunk told me I was going to have a CAT scan. I was instantly terrified—by the thought of claustrophobia. But he laughed and told me I would suffer nothing of the kind. And it turned out to be so—a sliding in and a sliding out.

Our Dr. McCormick came to visit me. I was glad to see him, explained I'd had an accident in Havana, Cuba, realized at once the error I had made and apologized to him. He smiled amiably and said, “I'm used to it,” meaning, I thought, states of confusion.

Martin drove us home to Brooklyn five days later. I looked intently out of the car window at the traffic, the buildings, buses like bumblebees, people's faces in car windows bent over the steering wheels, or blank-faced passengers staring straight ahead. Out of some faces poked white narrow tubes. Cigarettes. I smelt (I suppose I imagined) cigarette smoke. I felt revulsion—to my astonishment. Till that moment the thought or the wish to smoke hadn't crossed my mind. I realized I had lost any impulse to light up. We were home. I was helped up the stairs and went right to bed.

The next day I woke up feeling an obligation to finish all the medicine I had been given in vials and boxes. I couldn't read, for months it seemed. I couldn't speak directly about anything; I avoided subjects as if they'd been land mines. I wandered around my room like a doleful animal and spoke like one, painfully aware of my speech as being nearly without meaning yet unable to be silent, and singularly conscious of the mess I was in.

I spent over a month in bed. Except for trips to the bathroom next door, my life was without sense. Friends visited with flowers. Often they wept, staring down at me.

One day I ventured down the stairs and surprised Martin and Gabe in the kitchen. I looked at the stove and the refrigerator as they scolded and congratulated me.

I managed the stairs with more and more confidence and spent a few moments of each day with my friend Sheila who lives next door. I heard myself stammer and stumble and blunder.

A look at the
Times
and I found I could read. A book about the human brain was hard going. All I recall was a case about a composer who had been assaulted on a street in Paris. When he regained his physical strength he discovered he could no longer read music. I began to read Trollope's novels.

The time came for me to see a neurologist, Dr. Robert E. Barrett, whom Martin often and I a little had gone to for years. By then I had started a memoir. It took me three months to write nine pages.

The brain is an organ of endlessly changing borders. It is so unknown. Yet when some function is gone, we are likely to know it at once. In my case, after the Jerusalem assault, it was the geometry of the house I had lived in until I was six years old that I could no longer reconstruct in memory.

I couldn't explain or write about the relation of the attic stairs to a narrow corridor that passed a bedroom on the way to a staircase that led to the kitchen below.

I told Dr. Barrett that I no longer had the least desire to smoke cigarettes.

Dr. Barrett was a handsome man in his sixties, an engaging, charming conversationalist. I found him easy to talk with despite my trouble with speech. I told him about the assault as well as I could, although I knew that he'd had an earlier report from Martin.

He smiled at me with great tenderness, great sympathy. As I climbed up and down over verbs and over nouns, trying to keep subjects in order, I spoke about my new aversion to tobacco.

The years rolled away like a handful of marbles before my staring eyes. I saw my father's face over mine, his fingers forcing my first cigarette into my mouth.

“That's a hell of a way to quit,” Dr. Barrett said.

CLEM

I
ACCOMPANIED
M
ARTIN
with some timidity to meet my future father-in-law, Joseph Greenberg, in his apartment on Central Park West. He and his wife, Fan, Martin's stepmother, looked at me, I imagined, with some surprise—I wondered what they had expected. Joe brought out a bottle of Chivas Regal. (In all our future visits he would greet me in the same way.) He was a harsh man with an ironical wit; so Martin had described him and so he seemed. But he was cordial enough to me. After a few minutes of awkward greetings, he began to tell stories of his early years in Russo-Poland. Martin said later that his father had told me more about himself than he had ever told him in all the years of his childhood and youth.

It was a different story with Clement Greenberg, my future brother in-law. I met him and Sol, also a brother-in-law-to-be, at an evening party that I had anticipated would be noisy with people talking and drinking and looking me over with curious, perhaps not very friendly eyes. As Martin and I pushed open the door to a flat in an Upper West Side loft building, a man's voice boomed out, “Here, finally, are all three Greenberg brothers!” Whatever that meant, it made me uneasy.

I still find it painful to recall those two or three hours forty-nine years ago and the distress they were filled with for me. I was blind to the presence of other guests. Why was I there, I asked myself with grim self-commiseration, in that big room filled with strangers, flinging their arms and legs about, picking up and setting down drinks, one man carrying a nearly empty bottle of Jack Daniels, some arguing, some whispering? Why had I chosen to wear such a low-necked sweater? I hunched my shoulders so as to hide what the sweater did not.

Curiosity gradually displaced my self-preoccupation. Was something going to happen? Or nothing? I heard sudden loud laughter, Sol's, a rising wave that broke seconds later into soft groans—his characteristic laughter, as I learned over the years. He leaned forward from a chair in the corner, looking at me. Was it me he had been laughing at? My face creased with an automatic smile. He stood up, threading his way among groups of people, some in loud, intense conversations, to reach my side.

“That's a lovely sweater you're wearing,” he observed with what seemed to be amusement, as though he had recognized the source of my discomfort. He seemed good-humored. At once I felt that it was false; I suspected him of being clownish rather than tolerant. He showed a faintly affected scorn (or so I imagined later). Perhaps it was for what his younger brother might do next, after turning up with a half-naked woman not his wife.

Over the years I discovered that there were moments of real kindness in him that would flash out suddenly like a beam of sunlight falling on a floor. But not always. I knew there was a fourth Greenberg child, a half-sister, who was not at the party. She was never at such parties—she inhabited a different world.

Sol had been a Trotskyite before World War II. Both his brothers, the oldest and the youngest, had followed him into Trotskyism. In time Martin and Clem turned away from all political ideology, without ceasing to be anti-Stalinist. Sol, however, became a militant neo-con.

In spite of his stony political severity, it was easy for me to make him laugh.

Later in the evening, finally, we encountered Clem, to whom Martin formally introduced me. Martin had spoken of him often, describing him as a brilliant brute. Clem had been twenty-nine when he had published an essay, “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” in the
Partisan Review.
It had attracted a great deal of attention and started him on his career as a celebrated—and furiously denounced—art critic. He seemed as much interested in literature as in art. It was clear to me that he knew a great deal.

Clem was nine years older than Martin and had been a forceful, if sometimes cruel, presence for his younger brother during the latter's boyhood and beyond, though Martin's going off to the University of Michigan at sixteen had helped him escape from under his brother's shadow—partly.

When I stood face to face with Clem that evening, I had the impression that he had more important things to do than converse with me. His voice was indifferent, dismissive, cold. As were his words. I feared him and his judgments. He resembled Martin physically, I saw, but, as was quickly evident, not otherwise. In those few minutes I sensed in him an enormous vitality of interest, as well as an opposing capacity for boredom. His heavy drinking blurred both qualities in his later years.

When he said hello, his lips curled at the corners like two small commas, then his face resumed its indifferent expression. At that moment I thought of a large oil painting he had done, a copy of a nineteenth-century French work, I guessed, that hung on the living-room wall of my future father-in-law's West Side apartment. It depicted a narrow dirt road leading through a thick forest, mostly in shades of blue and green, empty of human figures. Remembering it, its art student's earnestness as I thought, restored an elusive balance for me, as though the painting revealed something hidden about Clem that I couldn't put a name to, and I was able to reply to his hello with a neutral one of my own.

One evening, at a time when I and my two small sons were living in a large apartment on Riverside Drive near Columbia University, I gave a small dinner party. Anxiously, I invited Clem. Martin was there, of course, and a writer friend of mine, James Purdy. During Martin's stint as acting editor of
Commentary
he had published a Purdy story whose appearance in a Jewish magazine had little point, as Martin well knew. A year or so earlier, Martin, after consulting with another editor because he did not trust his own judgment—we had just become acquainted—had turned down one of my own stories as not being suitable for
Commentary.
I feel a little pinch of resentment every now and then at having had a story of mine rejected by the man who became my husband.

The evening was stiff, clumsy, but it did not lack talk. What it lacked, perhaps, was mutual curiosity. I served dessert and coffee, after which we repaired to the living room. Clem sat down at once in a big armchair that appears to me in memory as magisterial: because Clem in his husky voice had soon launched out into one authoritative disquisition after another. My nervousness made it difficult for me to follow him. Jim Purdy spoke less, but with his outrageous, often comic contempt for the whole world, especially for other writers. Clem was in the middle of delivering still another pronouncement (I wish I could remember on exactly what); they had become heavier and heavier; then I heard Martin's voice intone, “Yes, Lord.” Clem stood up and without looking at anyone left the room. We listened in silence as the front door closed with a bang. Purdy laughed briefly.

Clem had suffered a nervous breakdown after being drafted into the army during World War II and had been given a medical discharge. Martin said he had refused to put up with being in the army; his soul had simply rebelled against it. Martin told me that he rather admired Clem for it. He himself had fitted too well into the army for four and a half long years. Clem had a second breakdown when the two brothers were editors at
Commentary.
Martin and his first wife had taken him into their Great Neck home for quite a while until he recovered.

After we were married, Martin and I usually met Clem, though not often, at my father-in-law's apartment. At our first encounter there, he walked over to me purposefully and, speaking with grim emphasis—obliged, it seemed to me, by his personal, special commitment to speaking truth under all circumstances—declared the ineradicable gratitude he felt toward Martin's first wife. I fell back a step under the admonitory force of his words, shocked. Why would I ever dare to question his feeling of gratitude toward one who had sheltered him? It was his feeling; it had originated long before we had met.

Clem's brief first marriage had produced a son, Danny. His second, to Jenny, lasted, with interruptions, for the rest of his life. They had a daughter, Sara, who now has two children of her own.

Jenny visited us once in Manhattan, mainly, it seemed, to convey Clem's resentment of Martin's apparent neutrality in the war Clem was waging with their father. But Martin seemed hardly neutral to me in his attitude toward his father. I had suggested to him that he try to make some kind of peace with Joe. Fathers and sons notoriously don't get along for many reasons, of which the oedipal one has proven to be of no special importance. A fog obscured the Greenberg battlefield for decades. Joe died at ninety-six. I had found him interesting, often amusing, but the filial visits were, after all, tedious. His sons' struggle with him was hardly affected by his death.

We saw little of either brother during our first years together. In 1963 we traveled on Martin's Guggenheim Fellowship and lived on the island of Thasos off the Thracian coast for six months. I don't remember any correspondence from them. When we returned, Sol had left his painter wife and taken up, as it turned out permanently, with Margaret. She had a large apartment on Fifth Avenue with a grand view of the city, expensively furnished but dull, lacking in individual taste.

On one evening visit I told an anecdote that caused Sol to spill over with laughter throughout the hours afterward. A girl I had heard of at second hand had attended a coeducational boarding school. She went with a boy she had recently met but whom she adored to the school's ice-skating pond. The youth was elegantly provided with two dachshunds, which wandered, sniffing, around. He removed his boots to replace them with ice skates. He was wearing thick brown socks. The girl, searching for some flattering thing to say, came up with: “I like your dogs!” (In those days,
dogs
was a slang word for feet.) Sol exploded. I liked his readiness to
laugh, which could dilute his ideological fervor.

We went to dinner at Tavern on the Green in Central Park one
evening. Seated at a round table, the four of us talked of many
things. Sol spoke harshly—with “let's tell the truth” coldness—about black youths. I replied, “There has to be justice.” All his
facial tics began to work; for a moment he was transformed into a
creature from the Grand Guignol.

He bent his head over his plate and in a low voice said, “You're
right.”

A few years later I published my fourth novel,
The Western Coast.
It caused trouble with Sol. He telephoned me in Brooklyn, where we had moved. To my hello he responded in a grim, accusatory voice. Part of the novel concerned Communists in California in the 1940s. Sol said, “As if they merited the space you gave them! How could you have written in so mild a tone! What! What!”

Slowly we mended what had been torn between us, returning to an unquestioning if narrowed trust. He often sat at our Brooklyn dining table of an evening.

Years passed. We rented a house in Maine. Sol was in his seventies. He liked the nickname acquired on the tennis courts of Easthampton, “Ace-bandage Greenberg,” bestowed on him by the younger people he played with, for the bandages he wore around his ankles.

One afternoon the phone rang in our Maine rental. Sol was calling from New York. He told Martin that what had been diagnosed earlier as anemia had been determined to be cancer. He died not many months later.

Clem died at the age of eighty-five. He wished, with the counterevidence staring him in the face, to outlive his father's ninety-six years. When I think of him, I see him at a party, drinking and smoking and holding forth. In 1961 he had published a collection of essays,
Art and Culture,
which defined the heart of modern painting as visible on the surface, no deeper than the paint on the canvas. The book represented a historic event in the criticism of art, and he was on his way to becoming famous—something he thought would never happen because of his father's discouraging early influence, and which he never realized had happened.

He went abroad often to lecture. From reports, he was not a fascinating speaker. He was not a man who tried to please. He did not, I feel sure, think that he could please. Defiantly he turned his indifference to pleasing into a refusal to please, into surliness and gracelessness, which he thought a virtue in a world dominated by commercial pleasingness and all the questionable personal smiling. He was sharp about people, but I think he didn't understand personal relations. He understood himself and he didn't—true of most of us, I suppose.

We went to see Clem and Jenny off on their way to Europe. It was in the 1960s, still a time of traveling by ship. Their stateroom was crowded with people, among them Danny, his son; it was my first sight of him. He was tall and gaunt, with strawlike reddish hair covering his head, his look hangdog. His eyes peered guardedly out from under his brows. A few weeks later, I walked into our living room to find Danny with my eleven-year-old son, Gabe, and Danny asking him, “What do you think about sexual intercourse?”

Some years later Danny went to England with a group of young men, dressed like beggars, who believed they were working to foment world revolution. The English authorities ushered them out of the country at once. We haven't heard anything about Danny since.

We were invited by Clem to visit him in his apartment, like his father's located on Central Park West. A small reason for the visit was to meet a high Austrian prelate who was interested in modern art. A man in his fifties, he wore black gaiters on his long, storklike legs, was narrow-featured and sharp-eyed, and made an elegant, spidery presence among the ordinary furnishings of the living room, from whose walls shone down the glittering colors of paintings by Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and, I think, a small one by Jackson Pollock. Clem scurried about, bringing water or wine and an ashtray; his face was strained.

On the subway back to Brooklyn, Martin said he had been astonished by Clem's obsequious behavior toward the priest. What was the reason for it, I wondered. The latter acted with the confidence, touched by hauteur, of a man high in office and in his own estimation—but still, why was Clem as nervous as an altar boy?