The last thing you see as you leave town is a blue and white sign, Feeling the hurt? Call Lifeline on 13 1114. After that it was dark. I walked home in that dark to the sound of things I did not understand. Nature conducts so much of its commerce at night. A real poet would have understood the semiotics of the nocturnal whisperings that were all around me. In the trees something was waking up. In the long grass something was eating, something was drinking from a dam, something was mating wildly, something was killing. With only the blue light of the moon I saw none of it and heard very little but the sound of my shoes on the road. I thought of Mandelstam, of his poetry, in spite of the danger that waited for me when I thought of him. Verses came into my head as I walked with my pack on my back, verses seemingly at random. True poets, both of us: he for his writing, me for my remembering. I was hoping there was something heroic even in just memorizing his work. Like a narcotic, Mandelstam’s words had a dangerously soothing effect on me, and I breathed them in and took strength from them as I walked.
I’ve many years to live before I’m a patriarch.
I’m at an age that commands little respect.
They swear at me behind my back,
in the senseless, pointless language of tram fights.
“You bastard!” Well, I apologise,
but deep down I don’t change at all.
When you think of your connection with the world
you can’t believe it. It is nonsense. . . .
There is a little light at the gate to show the number of our property. Other than that, there was no light between the gate and the house. I unslipped the chain on the gate and there, at my feet, was some Patterson’s Curse. I left it untouched and quietly closed the gate. The lights of our neighbor’s home looked like fireflies in the distance. From the house I could hear music. Someone was playing my old Louis Armstrong: “Lyin’ to Myself,” it might have been. The light was on in the shed and I saw the back of Andy’s car. Was he getting a taste for Satchmo? Was he inside dancing with his mother? We had danced, the three of us, to my jazz records when he was a little boy.
I stood on the verandah and looked in through the lounge room window to where the music was coming from. Madeline’s shoes were at almost perfect right angles to each other. Magazines were in several piles, unstraightened, probably unread. Something made me continue peering through the windows before coming in. I wanted to catch a glimpse of the way things were without me. I thought of what she might say when she saw me for the first time, and it made me want to delay everything. I stepped off the balcony and back onto the front drive. For a moment I thought of turning back.
I went to the shed and put my pack down at the door. A radio played softly and I knocked before entering.
“Yeah?” I heard him say in a voice I had somehow given him. I entered without answering. He had been varnishing something but stopped when he saw me. He looked as though he had seen a ghost.
“Dad?”
I said nothing. I did not know what to say to him.
“Dad.”
It felt good just to hear the word. He put the brush down on some old newspaper and came over to me. We looked at each other and then he hugged me.
“What are you making?”
“How are you feeling, Dad?”
“I’m fine.”
“Does Mum know you’re here?”
“No . . . no, I saw your light on and just thought I’d . . .”
I wondered what I would need to do just to be able to see him every day, with his permission, day after day, without bothering him. I would be quiet. He need not know I was there. I could promise not to be mad again.
“I’ll take your pack. Let’s go inside.”
We should never have gone inside, or at least, I should have gone by myself. We heard the trumpet solo from the lounge room. Andy called out. Her shoes remained untouched. We walked down the hall. I went first, reluctantly, feeling an eerie nonspecific need to grab him by the hand and lead him away or else to shelter him. On my own they might have missed me altogether and I could have walked away without them knowing I knew. As it was, she looked over me and straight at Andy.
The bedroom door was open. It all looked unplanned. She was sitting on the bed in her slip, facing us. He was kneeling and had his head between her thighs. Andy dropped my pack. Madeline called out our son’s name. I backed into Andy, instinctively trying to push him away as though it was not too late, as though he had not already seen them. She stood up. Neil looked over his shoulder.
“You fucking pig,” Andy called.
“Andy!”
“For Christ’s sake,” Neil said.
Andy lunged at Neil but could not get past me. He tried again and got a little farther but, in doing so, pushed me into the room.
“Andy, take it easy,” I called from under him.
He stood up. Madeline and I were trying to keep him away from Neil. The trumpets played.
“You filthy fucking pig,” shouted Andy.
“Listen, son,” shouted Neil over the top of the music, “you don’t make anything better . . . calling . . . carrying on—”
“You’re fucking vermin, Mahoney.”
Madeline was crying. I felt her tears on my face. Andy and Neil had pushed the two of us together as we tried to keep them apart.
“Vermin. Fucking snake . . . in the fucking grass,” Andy shouted in a voice I had never heard as he ran down the hall and out the back door towards the shed. I stood and looked at them. No one had said my name. Should I have tried to hit him on Andy’s behalf? Should I have hit her? Should I have tried to shake her? What was so wrong with me that I could not share my son’s rage, the rage he felt for both our sakes?
“Oh, what the fuck are you staring at, you lunatic?” Neil said as he brushed past me, putting on his shirt.
“When did you . . . get out? Nobody . . . said anything,” Madeline asked, looking at me for the first time.
“I was . . . a voluntary. I could leave whenever I liked.”
Neil was buttoning himself up in the lounge room. His shoes were beside hers but I had not seen them. Madeline followed him and I followed her.
“It’s not what you think,” she said.
“Madeline, how can it not be what he thinks,” said Neil, irritated, hurriedly putting on his shoes.
“Shut up,” she shouted at him.
“He knows what he saw,” Neil said, now standing with both shoes on. “He’s not an idiot, Madeline,” he said as the screen door slammed and Andy came down the hall, his feet slapping the linoleum.
“Just a poet,” I said as Andy came back into the room filled with the rage of youth and some just for me. His mother saw it first.
“Andy, put it away,” she said as he pushed her to one side.
“Are you mad?” shouted Neil.
“Andy, no,” I called, and reached for him, pushing him off balance.
The first shot went into the wall.
“Andy, it’s not worth it.”
Neil knocked over the upright lamp.
“Someone’s got to fight back, Dad,” and he shot him twice in the chest. The sound rang out over the valley and over our lives.
Neil Mahoney seemed to jump in the air. It was as though he was bouncing between planes of air. Madeline shouted his name. She shouted hysterically, her voice high and mad like that of a bird in the country first thing in the morning. Neil lay on the floor by the wall. His blood was leaving him for a pool on the floor beside him. Seeing her go over to him increased Andy’s fury.
“Get away from him,” he shouted at her.
I grabbed at the gun. I had lost her years ago. Suddenly I could see that so clearly.
“Andy, give it to me.”
He did not resist for very long. Madeline was kneeling beside Neil, crying, saliva and mucus forming bubbles at her mouth. The music was still on.
“You’ve killed him, Andy,” Madeline said.
“No, he’s not dead.”
“
Yes he is, Andy. He’s dead. Come and see.”
Andy walked slowly towards the body but I stood in front of him, blocking his way, still holding the rifle.
Now the night was real to me. I stood with a gun in one hand, the other blocking my son’s approach to the man his mother, yet again, cradled in her lap, the man he had just shot. Andy was breathing heavily. I pushed him back with my body and he obeyed. The two of them looked at me. I looked for any trace of myself in him and they looked at me as if for the first time. There I was, his father, her husband. I looked at her semi-nakedness, at the outlines of her breasts above Neil’s slumped body, for any trace of the shy girl for whom I had written that poem all those years ago. How quickly all this had happened. How quickly everyone had gone mad.
Though none of this could be undone, I knew what to do with a clarity and certainty I had never known before. I turned off the music while they stayed still.
“I want you to listen to me, both of you,” I said. And they listened. They did as I instructed and stayed just where they were while I went to the laundry and got a towel. I took it back to them so they could see what I was doing, all the time holding the gun. With the towel I wiped it down several times, thoroughly, including the trigger. Then I put my hands all over it.
“Andy, you left here before I got home. I found your mother. I got the gun and I did this. Get in your car and go. No one will doubt me on this.”
“Dad, no!”
“Andy, get in the car.”
“Dad, you can’t do this.”
“Andy, the sooner you go the better. Go to Sarah’s, anywhere. One of us . . . your mother will call an ambulance about five minutes after you’ve gone.”
“Dad, I can’t let you—”
“Listen to your father, Andy,” Madeline said.
“But, Dad . . .” He was crying.
“Just go! Get the hell away from here.”
We heard him start the car. Madeline was still on the floor.
“Look at the clock.”
“Why?”
“I want you to take note of the time and call an ambulance in five minutes.”
“Give him five minutes. Tell them Neil’s already dead. Then they won’t hurry.”
I put the gun down and covered his torso with the towel. These were the longest minutes. They were the minutes in which years came to a head. Madeline moved away from Neil’s body and sat down next to me. Her gaze kept shifting from the clock to me to the wall where Neil lay slumped and then back to me. They were the minutes when we could have talked, outside the veil of her dissatisfaction and outside my sense of failure, for the first time in years. They were the minutes when the two young people that had fallen for each other more than twenty years earlier could have met in their older bodies and, together, grappled towards an explanation.
I say this because in those minutes she looked at me as she had not been able to for years, without contempt and without rancor. I was the person she had loved nearly twenty years ago. In those minutes I was not a failed clerk nor a quixotic poet. I was not mad. I was her old lover, her long-lost friend, who had not intended to be a man incapable of living up to his promise. Most of all I was the father of her son and I was saving his life.
There was a time after his first arrest when Mandelstam became convinced that his executioners were going to come for him at a particular time of the day, and each day, at that time, he waited for them fearfully. When Nadezhda managed to find out that the time he expected them to come was six o’clock in the evening, she took to surreptitiously moving the hands of the clock every day, telling him, “You said six, but it’s already a quarter past seven.” Madeline never used to wear a watch. She does now, I am told.
I waited for her to count the minutes, and when she had called for an ambulance, I took my pack which was unopened and walked out of the house down the path to our gatepost, past the clumps of Patterson’s Curse and back into the night. I took the road and kept walking. A long while later I heard the ambulance in the distance. I thought only briefly about what lay in store for me, and when I did I was not too troubled by it. A man who shoots someone is far better understood than a man who is racked by a hopeless addiction to the music in words.
And in the dark, by the side of the road, I realized it was really other people’s words that I heard, not my own. I had made the mistake of thinking that because I could hear, but really hear, Mandelstam’s words, I was myself a poet. It was an easy mistake to make, since real poets say that poetry begins, like music, as phrases played inexplicably in a person’s head. It was just that in my case they were Mandelstam’s phrases. But I heard them, and not faintly, either. I heard them clearly, unequivocally, when I was trying to do other things. I heard them when I was trying to be a clerk, a farmer, a poet, a husband and a father. And I hear them now when I need them most. I am thus still only in a childish way connected to the established order. Perhaps this is a crime.
SPITALNIC’S LAST YEAR
Spitalnic lay in the hospital bed. It was night now, and the reassuring sounds of human activity were scarce. All visitors had come and gone. Even the night nurse had said good night to him. The next time he would speak to anyone would be in the morning when they woke him to prepare him for surgery.
This was the time of night, and indeed of one’s life, when reminiscences, fantasies and fears invade the mind, wreak havoc with it and unbalance one’s usual, if only superficial, equilibrium. He could not sleep. His entire lower body was hot while the torso was cold. Each limb took on a life of its own. His feet told him to get out of bed. His face begged to be washed. His genitals mocked him with recurring itches that could not be satisfied or prevented. Spitalnic was afraid to scratch lest one of the night nurses creep in thinking him asleep, only to find him seemingly arousing himself.
At twenty, Spitalnic, a sometime bon vivant, had enjoyed a better-than-average sex life. His love life, however, had been less spectacular, and in the last twelve months both had been cause for concern. The things that had gone wrong had been small individually, trivial and sometimes even laughable. But collectively the events of the last twelve months had left the undergraduate Spitalnic lonely, more reserved and possessing a deep moroseness that belied his often jovial exterior.
This twelve-month period had begun with his girlfriend of two years leaving him on the day of an exam. When questioned, Spitalnic would concede that he had been in the process of falling out of love with her, but she wasn’t to know this. Celia had large warm green eyes and thick mousy-brown hair. The memory of her smile could now reduce Spitalnic to tears, and often did. But the biggest thing in her favor, from Spitalnic’s point of view, was her love of Spitalnic.
She would read the books he recommended. She adopted his taste in films, drama, music, politics, and was coming around to accepting for herself the high moral code Spitalnic set for himself and others. But she did not come around sufficiently. She began seeing another boy while still involved with Spitalnic. The other boy offered excitement. Spitalnic offered security. For a while she was torn. A body needs both excitement and security, even if the two are almost diametrically opposed. She deceived herself that the relationship with the other boy was purely platonic and that it would only upset Spitalnic unnecessarily were he to be aware of the extent of her intimacy with the other boy. This period of self-deception ended abruptly when the boy grabbed her and kissed her unexpectedly one day on campus. She wanted him to and she let him.
There was a three-week period between the beginning of Celia’s physical relationship with the other boy and her finishing with Spitalnic. During this time she grew cold and sullen. She spoke in a monotone and affected an attitude at best of indifference, at worst of impatience. She kissed Spitalnic as one kisses an elderly aunt at a family gathering. None of this was lost on Spitalnic despite his being absorbed in preparations for the end-of-year exams.
Celia, too, knew what she was doing and hated herself for it. She resented Spitalnic, who looked
so pathetic trying to comfort what he saw as a manifestation of study-related anxiety with demonstrations of his affection. She hated herself for this too.
Her double life, her guilt, her pity for Spitalnic and her anger at herself for letting such a situation arise at so crucial a time in the student calendar led her to break it off suddenly. She did it over the phone with tears and a feeling that her throat had contracted beyond the point where she could continue to breathe. But she did continue to breathe. It was the morning of Spitalnic’s economics exam. He was stunned and said nothing. She hung up. Spitalnic failed the exam.
“Relationships begin and end every other day, especially where young people are concerned,” his parents volunteered. They shared a fear of Spitalnic’s penchant for self-indulgence, despite sharing so little else that their divorce in the year of Spitalnic’s bar mitzvah seemed close to inevitable and their marriage close to unbelievable.
Spitalnic’s father, an academic philosopher, was the son of a rabbi, his mother the daughter of a clothing manufacturer. She married Spitalnic’s father to spite her parents and to get away from them. She was seventeen then. She was forty-two when the divorce came through on the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av. Spitalnic had lived three years with each parent since their divorce by the time Celia had finished with him.
The end of his relationship with Celia and his failing of the exam had a disastrous effect on Spitalnic. He lost interest in his appearance. He would not shave for weeks at a time. His hair was unkempt. He stopped eating regularly. His father accused him of inflicting anorexia on himself and they fought bitterly over this. He swore viciously at his mother and resurrected previously contentious issues from her married life that they had agreed not to discuss.