The Brooklyn Follies

  By then, Dr. Weinberg was already at the hospital, about to perform his operation. The surgery lasted a little over an hour, and when he had finished his work, the young doctor washed his hands, changed back into his clothes, and hurried out of the locker room, eager to return home for his belated reunion with his mother. Just as he stepped into the hall, he saw a new patient being wheeled into the operating room.

  It was Jonas Weinberg’s mother. According to what the doctor told me, she died without regaining consciousness.

  AN UNEXPECTED ENCOUNTER

  I have rattled on for a dozen pages, but until now my sole object has been to introduce myself to the reader and set the scene for the story I am about to tell. I am not the central character of that story. The distinction of bearing the title of Hero of this book belongs to my nephew, Tom Wood, the only son of my late sister, June. Little June-Bug, as we called her, was born when I was three, and it was her arrival that precipitated our parents’ departure from a crowded Brooklyn apartment to a house in Garden City, Long Island. We were always fast friends, she and I, and when she married twenty-four years later (six months after our father’s death), I was the one who walked her down the aisle and gave her away to her husband, a New York Times business reporter named Christopher Wood. They produced two children together (my nephew, Tom, and my niece, Aurora), but the marriage fell apart after fifteen years. A couple of years later, June remarried, and again I accompanied her to the altar. Her second husband was a wealthy stockbroker from New Jersey, Philip Zorn, whose baggage included two ex-wives and a nearly grownup daughter, Pamela. Then, at the disgustingly early age of forty-nine, June suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage while working in her garden one scorching afternoon in the middle of August and died before the sun rose again the next day. For her big brother, it was hands down the worst blow he had ever received, and not even his own cancer and near death several years later came close to duplicating the misery he felt then.

  I lost contact with the family after the funeral, and until I ran into him in Harry Brightman’s bookstore on May 23, 2000, I hadn’t seen Tom in almost seven years. He had always been my favorite, and even as a small tyke he had impressed me as someone who stood out from the ordinary, a person destined to achieve great things in life. Not counting the day of June’s burial, our last conversation had taken place at his mother’s house in South Orange, New Jersey. Tom had just graduated with high honors from Cornell and was about to go off to the University of Michigan on a four-year fellowship to study American literature. Everything I had predicted for him was coming true, and I remember that family dinner as a warm occasion, with all of us lifting our glasses and toasting Tom’s success. Back when I was his age, I had hoped to follow a path similar to the one my nephew had chosen. Like him, I had majored in English at college, with secret ambitions to go on studying literature or perhaps take a stab at journalism, but I hadn’t had the courage to pursue either one. Life got in the way – two years in the army, work, marriage, family responsibilities, the need to earn more and more money, all the muck that bogs us down when we don’t have the balls to stand up for ourselves – but I had never lost my interest in books. Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author’s words reverberating in your head. Tom had always shared this love with me, and starting when he was five or six, I had made a point of sending him books several times a year – not just for his birthday or Christmas, but whenever I stumbled across something I thought he would like. I had introduced him to Poe when he was eleven, and because Poe was one of the writers he had dealt with in his senior thesis, it was only natural that he should want to tell me about his paper – and only natural that I should want to listen. The meal was over by then, and all the others had gone outside to sit in the backyard, but Tom and I remained in the dining room, drinking the last of the wine.

  “To your health, Uncle Nat,” Tom said, raising his glass.

  “To yours, Tom,” I answered. “And to ‘Imaginary Edens: The Life of the Mind in Pre-Civil War America’.”

  “A pretentious title, I’m sorry to say. But I couldn’t think of anything better.”

  “Pretentious is good. It makes the professors sit up and take notice. You got an A plus, didn’t you?”

  Modest as always, Tom made a sweeping gesture with his hand, as if to discount the importance of the grade. I continued, “Partly on Poe, you say. And partly on what else?”

  “Thoreau.”

  “Poe and Thoreau.”

  “Edgar Allan Poe and Henry David Thoreau. An unfortunate rhyme, don’t you think? All those o’s filling up the mouth. I keep thinking of someone shocked into a state of eternal surprise. Oh! Oh no! Oh Poe! Oh Thoreau!”

  “A minor inconvenience, Tom. But woe to the man who reads Poe and forgets Thoreau. Not so?”

  Tom smiled broadly, then raised his glass again. “To your health, Uncle Nat.”

  “And to yours, Dr. Thumb,” I said. We each took another sip of the Bordeaux. As I lowered my glass to the table, I asked him to outline his argument for me.

  “It’s about nonexistent worlds,” my nephew said. “A study of the inner refuge, a map of the place a man goes to when life in the real world is no longer possible.”

  “The mind.”

  “Exactly. First Poe, and an analysis of three of his most neglected works. ‘The Philosophy of Furniture,’ ‘Landor’s Cottage,’ and ‘The Domain of Arnheim.’ Taken alone, each one is merely curious, eccentric. Put them together, and what you have is a fully elaborated system of human longing.”

  “I’ve never read those pieces. I don’t think I’ve even heard of them.”

  “What they give is a description of the ideal room, the ideal house, and the ideal landscape. After that, I jump to Thoreau and examine the room, the house, and the landscape as presented in Walden.”

  “What we call a comparative study.”

  “No one ever talks about Poe and Thoreau in the same breath. They stand at opposite ends of American thought. But that’s the beauty of it. A drunk from the South – reactionary in his politics, aristocratic in his bearing, spectral in his imagination. And a teetotaler from the North – radical in his views, puritanical in his behavior, clear-sighted in his work. Poe was artifice and the gloom of midnight chambers. Thoreau was simplicity and the radiance of the outdoors. In spite of their differences, they were born just eight years apart, which made them almost exact contemporaries. And they both died young – at forty and forty-five. Together, they barely managed to live the life of a single old man, and neither one left behind any children. In all probability, Thoreau went to his grave a virgin. Poe married his teenage cousin, but whether that marriage was consummated before Virginia Clemm’s death is still open to question. Call them parallels, call them coincidences, but these external facts are less important than the inner truth of each man’s life. In their own wildly idiosyncratic ways, each took it upon himself to reinvent America. In his reviews and critical articles, Poe battled for a new kind of native literature, an American literature free of English and European influences. Thoreau’s work represents an unending assault on the status quo, a battle to find a new way to live here. Both men believed in America, and both men believed that America had gone to hell, that it was being crushed to death by an ever-growing mountain of machines and money. How was a man to think in the midst of all that clamor? They both wanted out. Thoreau removed himself to the outskirts of Concord, pretending to exile himself in the woods – for no other reason than to prove that it could be done. As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think. To be free to write a book like Walden. Poe, on the other hand, withdrew into a dream of perfection. Take a look at ‘The Philosophy of Furniture,’ and you’ll discover that his imaginary room was
designed for exactly the same purpose. As a place to read, write, and think. It’s a vault of contemplation, a noiseless sanctuary where the soul can at last find a measure of peace. Impossibly utopian? Yes. But also a sensible alternative to the conditions of the time. For the fact was, America had indeed gone to hell. The country was split in two, and we all know what happened just a decade later. Four years of death and destruction. A human bloodbath generated by the very machines that were supposed to make us all happy and rich.”

  The boy was so smart, so articulate, so well-read, that I felt honored to count myself as a member of his family. The Woods had been through their fair share of turmoil in recent years, but Tom seemed to have weathered the calamity of his parents’ breakup – as well as the adolescent storms of his younger sister, who had rebelled against her mother’s second marriage and run away from home at seventeen – with a sober, reflective, rather bemused attitude toward life, and I admired him for having kept his feet so firmly on the ground. He had little or no connection with his father, who had promptly moved to California after the divorce and taken a job with the Los Angeles Times, and much like his sister (though in far more muted form) felt no great fondness or respect for June’s second husband. He and his mother were close, however, and they had lived through the drama of Aurora’s disappearance as equal partners, suffering through the same despairs and hopes, the same grim expectations, the same never-ending anxieties. Rory had been one of the funniest, most fetching little girls I have ever known: a whirlwind of sass and bravura, a wise-acre, an inexhaustible engine of spontaneity and mischief. From the time she was two or three, Edith and I had always referred to her as the Laughing Girl, and she had grown up in the Wood household as the family entertainer, an ever more artful and rambunctious clown. Tom was just two years older than she was, but he had always looked out for her, and once their father left the picture, his mere presence had served as a stabilizing force in her life. But then he went off to college, and Rory went out of control – first escaping to New York, and then, after a brief reconciliation with her mother, vanishing into parts unknown. At the time of that celebratory dinner for Tom’s graduation, she had already given birth to an out-of-wedlock child (a girl named Lucy), had returned home just long enough to dump the baby in my sister’s lap, and had vanished again. When June died fourteen months later, Tom informed me at the funeral that Aurora had recently come back to reclaim the child – and had left again after two days. She didn’t show up for her mother’s burial service. Maybe she would have come, Tom said, but no one had known how or where to contact her.

  In spite of these family messes, and in spite of losing his mother when he was only twenty-three, I never doubted that Tom would flourish in the world. He had too much going for him to fail, was too solid a character to be thrown off course by the unpredictable winds of sorrow and bad luck. At his mother’s funeral, he had walked around in a dazed stupor, overwhelmed by grief. I probably should have talked to him more, but I was too stunned and shaken myself to offer him much of anything. A few hugs, a few shared tears, but that was the extent of it. Then he returned to Ann Arbor, and we fell out of touch. I mostly blame myself, but Tom was old enough to have taken the initiative, and he could have sent me a word whenever he’d chosen to. Or, if not me, then his first cousin, Rachel, who was also in the Midwest at the time, doing her postgraduate work in Chicago. They had known each other since infancy and had always gotten along well, but he made no move in her direction either. Every now and then, I felt a small twinge of guilt as the years passed, but I was going through a rough patch of my own (marriage problems, health problems, money problems), and I was too distracted to think about him very much. Whenever I did, I imagined him forging ahead with his studies, systematically advancing his career as he scaled the academic ladder. By the spring of 2000, I was certain he had landed a job at some prestigious place like Berkeley or Columbia – a young intellectual star already at work on his second or third book.

  Imagine my surprise, then, when I walked into Brightman’s Attic that Tuesday morning in May and saw my nephew sitting behind the front counter, doling out change to a customer. Luckily, I saw Tom before he saw me. God knows what regrettable words would have escaped my lips if I hadn’t had those ten or twelve seconds to absorb the shock. I’m not only referring to the improbable fact that he was there, working as an underling in a secondhand bookstore, but also to his radically altered physical appearance. Tom had always been on the chunky side. He had been cursed with one of those big-boned peasant bodies constructed to bear the bulk of ample poundage – a genetic gift from his absent, semi-alcoholic father – but even so, the last time I’d seen him, he had been in relatively good shape. Burly, yes, but also muscular and strong, with an athletic bounce to his step. Now, seven years later, he had put on a good thirty or thirty-five pounds, and he looked dumpy and fat. A second chin had sprouted just below his jawline, and even his hands had acquired the pudge and thickness one normally associates with middle-aged plumbers. It was a sad sight to behold. The spark had been extinguished from my nephew’s eyes, and everything about him suggested defeat.

  After the customer finished paying for her book, I sidled up to the spot she had just vacated, put my hands on the counter, and leaned forward. Tom happened to be looking down at that moment, searching for a coin that had fallen to the floor. I cleared my throat and said, “Hey there, Tom. Long time no see.”

  My nephew looked up. At first, he seemed entirely befuddled, and I was afraid he hadn’t recognized me. But an instant later he began to smile, and as the smile continued to spread across his face, I was heartened to see that it was the same Tom-smile of old. A touch of melancholy had been added to it, perhaps, but not enough to have changed him as profoundly as I had feared.

  “Uncle Nat!” he shouted. “What the hell are you doing in Brooklyn?”

  Before I could answer him, he rushed out from behind the counter and threw his arms around me. Much to my amazement, my eyes began to water up with tears.

  FAREWELL TO THE COURT

  Later that same day, I took him out to lunch at the Cosmic Diner. The glorious Marina served us our turkey club sandwiches and iced coffees, and I flirted with her a little more aggressively than usual, perhaps because I wanted to impress Tom, or perhaps simply because I was in such buoyant spirits. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed my old Dr. Thumb, and now it turned out that we were neighbors – living, by pure happenstance, just two blocks from each other in the ancient kingdom of Brooklyn, New York.

  He had been at Brightman’s Attic for the past five months, he said, and the reason why I hadn’t run into him earlier was because he always worked upstairs, writing the monthly catalogues for the rare-book-and-manuscript part of Harry’s business, which was far more lucrative than the secondhand-book trade downstairs. Tom wasn’t a clerk, and he never operated the cash register, but the regular clerk had gone off to a doctor’s appointment that morning, and Harry had asked Tom to fill in for him until he returned to the store.

  The job was nothing to brag about, Tom continued, but at least it was better than driving a taxi, which was what he’d been doing ever since he’d dropped out of graduate school and come back to New York.

  “When was that?” I asked, doing my best to hide my disappointment.

  “Two and a half years ago,” he said. “I finished all my course work and passed my orals, but then I got stuck with the dissertation. I bit off more than I could chew, Uncle Nat.”

  “Forget this Uncle Nat stuff, Tom. Just call me Nathan, the way everyone else does. Now that your mother’s dead, I don’t feel like an uncle anymore.”

  “All right, Nathan. But you’re still my uncle, whether you like it or not. Aunt Edith probably isn’t my aunt anymore, I suppose, but even if she’s been relegated to the category of ex-aunt, Rachel’s still my cousin, and you’re still my uncle.”

  “Just call me Nathan, Tom.”

  “I will, Uncle Nat, I promise. From now on, I’ll
always address you as Nathan. In return, I want you to call me Tom. No more Dr. Thumb, all right? It makes me feel uncomfortable.”

  “But I’ve always called you that. Even when you were a little boy.”

  “And I’ve always called you Uncle Nat, haven’t I?”

  “Fair enough. I lay down my sword.”

  “We’ve entered a new era, Nathan. The post-family, post-student, post-past age of Glass and Wood.”

  “Post-past?”

  “The now. And also the later. But no more dwelling on the then.”

  “Water under the bridge, Tom.”

  The ex-Dr. Thumb closed his eyes, tilted back his head, and shot a forefinger into the air, as if trying to remember something he’d forgotten long ago. Then, in a somber, mock-theatrical voice, he recited the opening lines of Raleigh’s “Farewell to Court”:

  Like truthless dreams, so are my joys expired,

  And past return are all my dandled days,

  My love misled, and fancy quite retired:

  Of all which past, the sorrow only stays.