While Lucy cogitated and napped in the rear, Tom and I talked in the front. He hadn’t been behind the wheel of a car since quitting his taxi job in January, and the mere fact that he was driving again seemed to work like a tonic on his system. I had been with him nearly every day for the past two weeks, and not once had I seen him lighter or happier than he was that morning in early June. After he’d negotiated us through the city traffic, we hit the first of several highways that would take us north, and it was out there on those open roads that he began to relax, to slough off the burden of his miseries and temporarily stop hating the world. A relaxed Tom was a talkative Tom. That was rule of thumb for the ex-Dr. Thumb, and from approximately eight-thirty in the morning until well past noon, he showered me with a torrent of words – a veritable flood of stories, jokes, and lectures on matters both pertinent and arcane.
It started with a comment about The Book of Human Folly, my diminutive, half-assed work in progress. He wanted to know how it was coming along, and when I told him I was charging ahead with no end in sight, that each story I wrote seemed to give birth to another story and then another story and then another story, he clapped me on the shoulder with his right hand and pronounced this astonishing verdict: “You’re a writer, Nathan. You’re becoming a real writer.”
“No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m just a retired life insurance salesman who has nothing better to do with himself. It helps pass the time, that’s all.”
“You’re wrong, Nathan. After years of wandering in the desert, you’ve finally found your true calling. Now that you don’t have to work for money anymore, you’re doing the work you were meant to do all along.”
“Ridiculous. No one becomes a writer at sixty.”
The former graduate student and literary scholar cleared his throat and begged to differ with me. There were no rules when it came to writing, he said. Take a close look at the lives of poets and novelists, and what you wound up with was unalloyed chaos, an infinite jumble of exceptions. That was because writing was a disease, Tom continued, what you might call an infection or influenza of the spirit, and therefore it could strike anyone at any time. The young and the old, the strong and the weak, the drunk and the sober, the sane and the insane. Scan the roster of the giants and semi-giants, and you would discover writers who embraced every sexual proclivity, every political bent, and every human attribute – from the loftiest idealism to the most insidious corruption. They were criminals and lawyers, spies and doctors, soldiers and spinsters, travelers and shut-ins. If no one could be excluded, what prevented an almost sixty-year-old ex-life insurance agent from joining their ranks? What law declared that Nathan Glass had not been infected by the disease?
I shrugged.
“Joyce wrote three novels,” Tom said. “Balzac wrote ninety. Does it make a difference to us now?”
“Not to me,” I said.
“Kafka wrote his first story in one night. Stendhal wrote The Charterhouse of Parma in forty-nine days. Melville wrote Moby-Dick in sixteen months. Flaubert spent five years on Madame Bovary. Musil worked for eighteen years on The Man Without Qualities and died before he could finish. Do we care about any of that now?”
The question didn’t seem to call for a response.
“Milton was blind. Cervantes had one arm. Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death in a barroom brawl before he was thirty. Apparently, the knife went straight through his eye. What are we supposed to think of that?”
“I don’t know, Tom. You tell me.”
“Nothing. A big fat nothing.”
“I tend to agree with you.”
“Thomas Wentworth Higginson ‘corrected’ Emily Dickinson’s poems. A puffed-up ignoramus who called Leaves of Grass an immoral book dared to touch the work of the divine Emily. And poor Poe, who died crazy and drunk in a Baltimore gutter, had the misfortune to select Rufus Griswold as his literary executor. Little knowing that Griswold despised him, that this so-called friend and supporter would spend years trying to destroy his reputation.”
“Poor Poe.”
“Eddie had no luck. Not while he lived, and not even after he died. They buried him in a Baltimore cemetery in 1849, but it took twenty-six years before a stone was erected over his grave. A relative commissioned one immediately after his death, but the job ended in one of those black-humor fuck-ups that leave you wondering who’s in charge of the world. Talk about human folly, Nathan. The marble yard happened to be situated directly below a section of elevated railroad tracks. Just as the carving of the stone was about to be finished, there was a derailment. The train toppled into the yard and crushed the stone, and because the relative didn’t have enough money to order another one, Poe spent the next quarter century lying in an unmarked grave.”
“How do you know all this stuff, Tom?”
“Common knowledge.”
“Not to me it isn’t.”
“You never went to graduate school. While you were out there making the world safe for democracy, I was sitting in a library carrel, cramming my head full of useless information.”
“Who finally paid for the stone?”
“A bunch of local teachers formed a committee to raise the funds. It took them ten years, if you can believe it. When the monument was finished, Poe’s remains were exhumed, carted across town, and reburied in a Baltimore churchyard. On the morning of the unveiling, there was a special ceremony held at something called the Western Female High School. A terrific name, don’t you think? The Western Female High School. Every important American poet was invited, but Whittier, Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes all found excuses not to come. Only Walt Whitman bothered to make the trip. Since his work is worth more than all the others’ put together, I look at it as an act of sublime poetic justice. Interestingly enough, Stéphane Mallarmé was also there that morning. Not in the flesh – but his famous sonnet, “Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe,” was written for the occasion, and even if he didn’t manage to finish it in time for the ceremony, he was nevertheless there in spirit. I love that, Nathan. Whitman and Mallarmé, the twin fathers of modern poetry, standing together in the Western Female High School to honor their mutual forebear, the disgraced and disreputable Edgar Allan Poe, the first true writer America gave to the world.”
Yes, Tom was in excellent form that day. Somewhat manic, I suppose, but there was no question that his rambling, erudite chatter helped cut the tedium of the drive. He would jog along in one direction for a while, come to a fork in the road, and then veer off sharply in another direction, never pausing to decide if left was better than right or vice versa. All roads led to Rome, so to speak, and since Rome was nothing less than all of literature (about which he seemed to know everything), it didn’t matter which decision he made. From Poe, he suddenly bounced forward to Kafka. The link was the age of the two men at the time of their deaths: Poe at forty years and nine months, Kafka forty years and eleven months. It was the kind of obscure fact that only Tom would have remembered or cared about, but having spent half my life studying actuarial tables and thinking about the death rates of men in various professions, I found it rather interesting myself.
“Too young,” I said. “If they’d been around today, there’s a good chance that drugs and antibiotics would have saved them. Look at me. If I’d had my cancer thirty or forty years ago, I probably wouldn’t be sitting in this car now.”
“Yes,” Tom said. “Forty is too young. But think of how many writers didn’t even make it that far.”
“Christopher Marlowe.”
“Dead at twenty-nine. Keats at twenty-five. Georg Büchner at twenty-three. Imagine. The greatest German playwright of the nineteenth century, dead at twenty-three. Lord Byron at thirty-six. Emily Brontë at thirty. Charlotte Brontë at thirty-nine. Shelley, just one month before he would have turned thirty. Sir Philip Sidney at thirty-one. Nathanael West at thirty-seven. Wilfred Owen at twenty-five. Georg Trakl at twenty-seven. Leopardi, Garcia Lorca, and Apollinaire all at thirty-eight. Pascal at thirty-nine. Fl
annery O’Connor at thirty-nine. Rimbaud at thirty-seven. The two Cranes, Stephen and Hart, at twenty-eight and thirty-two. And Heinrich von Kleist – Kafka’s favorite writer – dead at thirty-four in a double suicide with his lover.”
“And Kafka is your favorite writer.”
“I think so. From the twentieth century, anyway.”
“Why didn’t you do your dissertation on him?”
“Because I was stupid. And because I was supposed to be an Americanist.”
“He wrote Amerika, didn’t he?”
“Ha ha. Good point. Why didn’t I think of that?”
“I remember his description of the Statue of Liberty. Instead of a torch, the old girl is holding an upraised sword in her hand. An incredible image. It makes you laugh, but at the same time it scares the shit out of you. Like something from a bad dream.”
“So you’ve read Kafka.”
“Some. The novels and maybe a dozen stories. A long time ago now, back when I was your age. But the thing about Kafka is that he stays with you. Once you’ve dipped into his work, you don’t forget it.”
“Have you looked at the diaries and letters? Have you read any biographies?”
“You know me, Tom. I’m not a very serious person.”
“A pity. The more you learn about his life, the more interesting his work becomes. Kafka wasn’t just a great writer, you see, he was a remarkable man as well. Did you ever hear the story about the doll?”
“Not that I can remember.”
“Ah. Then listen carefully. I offer it to you as the first piece of evidence in support of my case.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“It’s very simple. The object is to prove that Kafka was indeed an extraordinary person. Why begin with this particular story? I don’t know. But ever since Lucy turned up yesterday morning, I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. There must be a connection somewhere. I still haven’t figured out exactly how, but I think there’s a message in it for us, some kind of warning about how we’re supposed to act.”
“Too much preamble, Tom. Just get down to it and tell the story.”
“I’m blathering again, aren’t I? All this sunshine, all these cars, all this rushing along at sixty and seventy miles an hour. My brain’s exploding, Nathan. I feel pumped up, ready for anything.”
“Good. Now tell me the story.”
“All right. The story. The story of the doll… It’s the last year of Kafka’s life, and he’s fallen in love with Dora Diamant, a young girl of nineteen or twenty who ran away from her Hasidic family in Poland and now lives in Berlin. She’s half his age, but she’s the one who gives him the courage to leave Prague – something he’s been wanting to do for years – and she becomes the first and only woman he lives with. He gets to Berlin in the fall of 1923 and dies the following spring, but those last months are probably the happiest months of his life. In spite of his deteriorating health. In spite of the social conditions in Berlin: food shortages, political riots, the worst inflation in German history. In spite of the certain knowledge that he is not long for this world.
“Every afternoon, Kafka goes out for a walk in the park. More often than not, Dora goes with him. One day, they run into a little girl in tears, sobbing her heart out. Kafka asks her what’s wrong, and she tells him that she’s lost her doll. He immediately starts inventing a story to explain what happened. ‘Your doll has gone off on a trip,’ he says. ‘How do you know that?’ the girl asks. ‘Because she’s written me a letter,’ Kafka says. The girl seems suspicious. ‘Do you have it on you?’ she asks. ‘No, I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘I left it at home by mistake, but I’ll bring it with me tomorrow.’ He’s so convincing, the girl doesn’t know what to think anymore. Can it be possible that this mysterious man is telling the truth?
“Kafka goes straight home to write the letter. He sits down at his desk, and as Dora watches him write, she notices the same seriousness and tension he displays when composing his own work. He isn’t about to cheat the little girl. This is a real literary labor, and he’s determined to get it right. If he can come up with a beautiful and persuasive lie, it will supplant the girl’s loss with a different reality – a false one, maybe, but something true and believable according to the laws of fiction.
“The next day, Kafka rushes back to the park with the letter. The little girl is waiting for him, and since she hasn’t learned how to read yet, he reads the letter out loud to her. The doll is very sorry, but she’s grown tired of living with the same people all the time. She needs to get out and see the world, to make new friends. It’s not that she doesn’t love the little girl, but she longs for a change of scenery, and therefore they must separate for a while. The doll then promises to write the girl every day and keep her abreast of her activities.
“That’s where the story begins to break my heart. It’s astonishing enough that Kafka took the trouble to write that first letter, but now he commits himself to the project of writing a new letter every day – for no other reason than to console the little girl, who happens to be a complete stranger to him, a child he ran into by accident one afternoon in a park. What kind of man does a thing like that? He kept it up for three weeks, Nathan. Three weeks. One of the most brilliant writers who ever lived sacrificing his time – his ever more precious and dwindling time – to composing imaginary letters from a lost doll. Dora says that he wrote every sentence with excruciating attention to detail, that the prose was precise, funny, and absorbing. In other words, it was Kafka’s prose, and every day for three weeks he went to the park and read another letter to the girl. The doll grows up, goes to school, gets to know other people. She continues to assure the girl of her love, but she hints at certain complications in her life that make it impossible for her to return home. Little by little, Kafka is preparing the girl for the moment when the doll will vanish from her life forever. He struggles to come up with a satisfactory ending, worried that if he doesn’t succeed, the magic spell will be broken. After testing out several possibilities, he finally decides to marry off the doll. He describes the young man she falls in love with, the engagement party, the wedding in the country, even the house where the doll and her husband now live. And then, in the last line, the doll bids farewell to her old and beloved friend.
“By that point, of course, the girl no longer misses the doll. Kafka has given her something else instead, and by the time those three weeks are up, the letters have cured her of her unhappiness. She has the story, and when a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.”
OUR GIRL, OR COKE IS IT
There are two ways to travel from New York City to Burlington, Vermont: the fast way and the slow way. For the first two-thirds of the trip, we chose the fast way, a trajectory that included such urban roads as Flatbush Avenue, the BQE, Grand Central Parkway, and Route 678. After we crossed the Whitestone Bridge into the Bronx, we continued north for several miles until we came to I-95, which led us out of the city, through the eastern part of Westchester County, and on through lower Connecticut. At New Haven, we turned off onto I-91. That was where we spent the bulk of the journey, traversing what remained of Connecticut and all of Massachusetts until we reached the southern border of Vermont. The quickest route to Burlington would have been to stay on I-91 until White River Junction and then turn west onto I-89, but once we found ourselves on the outskirts of Brattleboro, Tom declared that he was sick of superhighways and preferred switching over to smaller, emptier back-country roads. And so it was that we abandoned the fast way for the slow way. It would add another hour or two to the trip, he said, but at least we would have a chance to see something other than a procession of fast-moving, lifeless cars. Woods, for example, and wildflowers along the edge of the road, not to mention cows and horses, farms and meadows, village greens and an occasional human face. I had no objection to this change of plans. What did I care
whether we made it to Pamela’s house at three o’clock or five o’clock? Now that Lucy had opened her eyes again and was staring out the side window in back, I felt so guilty about what we were doing to her that I wanted to put off getting there as long as we could. I opened our Rand McNally road atlas and studied the map of Vermont. “Get off at Exit Three,” I said to Tom. “We’re looking for Route Thirty, which squiggles up diagonally to the northwest. After about forty miles, we’ll start bobbing and weaving until we get to Rutland, find Route Seven, and take that straight to Burlington.”
Why do I linger over these trivial details? Because the truth of the story lies in the details, and I have no choice but to tell the story exactly as it happened. If we hadn’t made that decision to get off the highway at Brattleboro and follow our noses to Route 30, many of the events in this book never would have taken place. I am thinking especially of Tom when I say that. Both Lucy and I profited from the decision as well, but for Tom, the long-suffering hero of these Brooklyn Follies, it was probably the most important decision of his life. At the time, he had no inkling of the consequences, no knowledge of the whirlwind he had set in motion. Like Kafka’s doll, he thought he was simply looking for a change of scenery, but because he left one road and took another, Fortune unexpectedly reached out her arms to him and carried our boy into a different world.