Standard Dreaming Read online

  Yet it was to Rebecca the group owed this custom of visiting each other’s houses, which had so helped their peculiar union. In the end, everybody had owed everybody something. They couldn’t know what Berners owed them; in what words would he tell them? And why? What he suspected might be happening to them was after all not an apocalypse. When would the human race stop thinking that its destiny, good or bad, was a burst of light?

  Crossing 145th Street now, Berners reminds himself that the thin air of his own childhood, angel-imprinted at its four corners of house and village, church and school, has instilled in him that same vision, of people either assumpted or falling, always in impossible medieval positions, dangling their legs over their bas-relief heads, or arched like acrobats, from the breastbone.

  Even that first night at the “Y,” a young divorcee with movie-star hair had said—telling them with gusto of a group like theirs in Carmel—“On the coast it’s a resurrection for everything, great.” In the involved story she had told all the way to Jacob’s house, the name of her child kept changing; by the time they got upstairs, she had disappeared. In the cab over, Berners had begun to suspect there was no child. Once in Jacob’s living room, he found all the others had also; this had united them that evening more than anything.

  “She’s the midtown version of those women who steal babies from in front of Queens supermarkets—gee Jacob, after this place will you come to Harlem?”—Baba Hunter had said in her nonstop rhythm—“but looky, the bus is right outside.” A silk redhead whose high-fashion dress effects were canceled out by her avid need for compliment, she knew all breeds of divorcée from being them, and spoke like a tipsheet for what smart people were onto. “Into,” she said. And liked to be sure of people’s knowing that before being into Harlem, she had lived on the Upper East Side. Her middle child, for whom Baba pathologically neglected the others, was half black, and blamed her mother for both sides. (Yet it was Baba who had lately suggested why not see each other’s kids, or visit them?)

  “Ah, any place is a place,” Jacob had said, answering her “—even the Majestic” and behind him, even that first evening, they could hear his daughter laugh. Actually he saw himself and his life—with that one terrible exception—entirely in terms of buildings, and had only the simplest, routine pride in what he frankly called “my success.” In his hatred of architects, his talk became almost interesting—“A building has to follow people.” They came to know his sighs, which began after five, when the deals and the dumptrucks were stilled. “Ah, you know what—we here’re all remittance parents.” He read detective stories far into the Central Park West night, he told them, when he wasn’t watching the cloud formations stream over the Dakota across the street, on their way from the hi-riser he had built on the Jersey palisades, to a Lexington Avenue “package” he was scheming to acquire. To please his daughter, the construction on it would be small Japanese-style units with shifting-screen walls.

  “So she’s in prison, what else?” Sylvia Fisher had whispered to Berners, using the New York inflection, though she herself had been brought up mostly in Hawaii, a high-ranking army brat.

  When Jacob’s daughter was let out—in a later slip of the tongue he had once said “pardoned”—it was his idea that she could manage these units. “She’s a smart girl, ideal for it. People like her at once.”

  The rest of them had hung their heads without comment, inwardly tallying all their own past placations. And Berners, who up to then had thought he hadn’t placated, but had simply been what he was and changed the tune of it, marveled at the multiplicity with which his own very woe could clothe itself. Though compared to his and Jacob’s concerns, the women’s troubles seemed to him at first merely that—the looseleaf, paper complaints of the female world. He was to revise this; their attitudes—centuries of trivializing—had merely made it seem so.

  Sylvia’s daughter, a beauty who had been given “every advantage of her peer group” including marriage to wealth—“Two at the stables, a chauffeur—at twenty-nine it’s too much,” and was now a fashionable diet-wraith with a long line of miscarriages and her picture everywhere—would not see her mother, nobody professed to know why. Not even the son-in-law, who sent roses when Sylvia had an operation, then came himself, an oldish man “but good-looking,” to lean over his mother-in-law’s bed and tell her, “She says herself she and you never had a fuss. But she won’t see you. I’m ashamed of her—I saw my mother every day till she died. But we’re another generation. No, she’s not disturbed or anything. And she rides. But the doctor keeps telling her to stop that beauty-stuff, or something will happen. She’s too thin. My God, the thin she is isn’t even beautiful.”

  Whereas Rebecca’s son, who taught at a remote college in Maine and had an ulcer from it, never could bear her; she admitted it. She had wanted him to roll in the mud and stop thinking; at fourteen he had demanded she wear brassieres.

  “Both ideas are impossible,” Jacob told Berners privately. “On her, there’s no line of demarcation. And on that coastline I built an army camp. All rock. No mud.”

  She was their comedian. But even against her, cheap wit like that lasted only a few sessions. Nowadays they wept to each other and were relieved. Though it changed nothing. “I’m coming not to trust to individual solutions,” Berners told Jake privately—during the week there was a good deal of private talk now between members. “Against the ages, who do we think we are?”

  That was a week he had gone up to Boston on the sinking arrow of premonition, not even trying the telephone. To visit his still-beloved saint. Who was blessedly still there. Who, being as he was, didn’t throw his father down the stairs to the idlers watching Berners’ try from below, or repudiate him in any of the ways Berners had learned from the group and its occasional visitors. Who had been content to stand there glowing from it, with the luminous skin of the fasting, receding from his father cell by cell. That cellular rejection, Berners could feel it! Of him the father, and through him, life. Which rejection had begun first, one would have to pry out as one would from a foreign organ grafted on a hopeful, intolerant body. Ask, Berners found himself pleading, to that rotunda, nameless as yet, which had already begun to attend him. Ask the cell its knowledge. Cells think.

  Who shall I ask, he had thought, his breath rupturing. Who is there to ask? He had stood there, five-foot-eleven to the six-foot-four of this stubbornly pale boy he had grafted on life. Whom Berners still wanted to help to live. Who wanted to show Berners, his father, how to die. Eye to eye. All faces under starvation return to Christ—the cheekbones high, the mouth in its rictus toward the skeleton, in that special smile which begins to understand—what death understands. Berners wanted to ask it a question, but he didn’t yet know the question. He felt that his son, now on that other side of the room to which he always retreated, was pressing him to learn how to ask it. Over the years they had long since exchanged all ordinary ones. Afterward Berners, going over that long, motionless communion with the same fidelity memory had for love-play, would record it as the borderline, when the science in his own flesh, blending with the biblical, first began to tell him something it knew.

  When he went down the stairs, his son had turned away to the sink and was drinking a glass of water, giving Berners a little hope. But that day, Berners also began thinking that hope might be part of the process too. Deep in its own helix, the dying new graft must itself have a kind of hope.

  Outside, the idlers let their glazed eyes pass over him—a prodigal father, not received.

  Almost at Baba’s now, in sight of that brownstone hung all the way to its top story with signs that catered photographs, permanent waves, insurance, and other body accessories, and on the parlor floor Baba’s own sign, Haute Couture, Berners halted, bought a paper he had already read, a pack of cigarettes, and smoking one, leaned against a marquee. He didn’t want to go in, to that family which now knew him so well. He had had his family, as serene now in their graves as they had been to one another in lif
e; perhaps the process attacks first, or is more protracted in those who, with grandfathers in one civilization and sons in another, can remember such a serenity. Could it be that those beelike civilizations, which are coming on, will reverse the destiny in us, once again? He begs our pardon. Pardon of his amphitheater, which is larger than he thought, able to entrain itself anywhere. Pardon of those graves—for what must be to them the thinking of a miserably median son, not of their spirit, who deals only in flesh and its repair.

  Back at Jacob’s, that first meeting, they’d been watching him with that look he knew. You’re the doctor. Lead!

  “Doctors are mortal,” Sylvia Fisher says again. Her husband had been one. “Here he’s only one of us.”

  But he hasn’t yet confessed, the only one who. They are his patients; it is hard for him. In his mind he applies to his son, who that very day, after Berners had placed a call at every break between operations, has picked up the phone. Has said—with an intonation Berners is hours later still going over for its degree of death, refusal, majesty—“No.” And has hung up again.

  “My son disapproves of me because I’m a plastic surgeon,” Berners said. “Or that’s how it began, with us.” He tells them how through Raoul, because of him, he now rehabilitates only the worst. No more women bringing him wrinkles which should look biblical in the evening of life—to be made smooth as Formica. (Or men.) His son, shortly after entering Harvard, had sent him a copy of a Breughel—the two old women who stare out at the century—any—from the equality of faces which already contain one, tributaried deep. Yet, in the beginning of this reformation, Berners still did such things as taking the parrot nose from a Roman fifteen-year-old and sending her out into the world again like a madonna slightly chipped, or peeling away the liver-colored scar that covered a young clerk’s mouth like a gag—whereupon the young man bought a racehorse with the other half of his inheritance, but still wouldn’t marry. “Father—” Raoul had said, when told of this “—you took half?”

  Whereupon Berners, to Erna’s distraction, began taking in only those birth-torn or life-mutilated who couldn’t pay. The war-torn still went to the military surgeons, who were getting the opportunity of their lives, as they said now to each other, as they had said in 1941 in the hospital at Lievres—how could they have done so much in this war, without the precious learning experience of the last? Nowadays that sounded in his ear for what it was. “Ah, only civilians, what snobbery!” his son said—at that time, though a vegetarian, he was still eating. So Berners gives up what he can, the option of choice, and comes downtown, to work on anybody, anything. And his son, each week casting aside another grocery item as if it is a pearl, begins not eating at all.

  “He keeps me on the lookout,” Berners said to them. “Because of him, I see damage everywhere.”

  They are all quiet then, even Jake. But when Jacob has a maid bring snacks in, though embarrassed at this mixture of plates with emotion, they all eat. None of them, nor Berners, saw as yet that thin thread—that most of terribles, as Job said—which made all their children one. Nature’s hand in this, nature’s claw. They all still could eat.

  Mrs. Taylor, Jake’s wife, wouldn’t come out to meet them.

  “She’s a nothing, a nice woman,” he tells them. “We married at eighteen. She brings the girl eggrolls.”

  Which the girl throws back, like sapphires?

  On the fringe of their chairs, a voice comes timidly. “You ever think—maybe that girl of yours is a nothing?”

  The charity patient. They have forgotten her, in her dead-black, and with the poor’s habit, when applying for help, of preening itself as for a social occasion, and then falling mum. She should have been for the group that stage-set of poverty on which all social problems were supposed to be made plainer. She can say the unspeakable, or do it, as they will learn. But as with many on the ward, Berners notes, she lacks that formal psyche to which the rest of us have been trained. So to the end, these people remain mysterious. Owners of bodies, perhaps, in which one may more truly hunt a disease microbiologically, and find it—in flesh.

  Berners is good on the ward. Or up to then has thought so. “I’m Dr. Berners. You’re Mrs.—?”

  “Killeen, Mimi Killeen. I didn’t mean to insult nobody.”

  The rest have their heads lowered. Jacob raises eyes, shrugs.

  From the Laskys’ corner, his burnished, prep-school voice says, “A nothing. If we could bring ourselves to say that.” He lifts the hand interlocked with his wife’s. “If she could.”

  “But that’s what we’re here for!” Sylvia. “To blame.”

  “Clap hands!” Jacob says. “Round the circle. She’s right.”

  There weren’t enough in the circle; who can hide? What should Berners say?—he has never blamed anyone but himself. Even if these others have done the same, he is still there under false pretenses. For he already feels, has begun to suspect—that no personal blame can be ascribed.

  “Come on, Jake.” Rebecca Ruge, lying on the floor on elbow and mountainous hip. One of those hostile people who like to get to the heart of things. She sits up and assumes the lotus position. “You’re the host.”

  Jacob, opening his mouth, goes through a half dozen gestures, says choked. “She’s not a nothing, no. A moron? With what she did—I could pray for it. She came on too strong in the sex. And I came on too strong for her.”

  “Incest?” Rebecca is gazing between her toes. “I do admire this rug.”

  Rebecca’s no primitive, Sylvia said to Berners later. She just believes that everything should be displayed.

  “Be a slob,” Jake said.

  “Hah. Now we’re getting somewhere. Now we reveal.”

  Mrs. Lasky, next in line, her eyes on them, makes no move. Is she an actual mute? No, Berners thinks. The unused mouth of a mute has less muscular definition, he says; if one probes with the fingers one can literally feel the lack of language. That mouth had spoken and spoken.

  “Alec’s a beautiful boy,” Lasky said, fiddling with his bow tie. “Surprisingly unspoiled for nowadays.” Fourteen schools have said it. “Not a psychopathic personality. The four of us—he has a sister—have been analyzed to a fare-thee-well. I’m broke from it. From all of it. He’s—accident-prone. Things happen around him. To him. When he comes home—really quite bad things. No one’s fault. We interreact. Linda left home because of it—she’s doing all right but she doesn’t visit us. If she does, he will, she says; it’ll draw him back. He hasn’t let us know where he is lately; it’s quite heroic of him really.” He stopped short. Berners had the impression this man never ordinarily spoke so much. “But in the end,” Lasky said softly, “he always lets us know.”

  Sylvia Fisher said—as if in a dream to other gathered dreamers—“I spoiled her. But she spoiled me back—She brought me gifts … like to a shrine. She looked like her father. I looked like her. We were like you know peers.” Her blue eyes were startled; Berners observes to himself that this is the way a human eye essentially looks when tears cover it.

  He thinks that he must begin to look at us this way. Like at any species. Otherwise, if you see enough disease or injuries, you are tempted to believe that the whole world suffers these personally—that every other child on the globe was clocked by his own indigenous little cancers, or stumped on a leg twisted congenitally, yet idiosyncratic to him. Or was born with a hand you could repair.

  While all the while, its natural lot is coming to be. To lie in the mortuary grown and dead of its own lockstep humanity.

  “Mr. Lasky—” Berners asked, “is your son—Alec—is he also—very thin?”

  Lasky looked at him, blank. “As a matter of fact, no. That’s always been his problem. Extremely fat.”

  “I thought she and I should split.” Sylvia said. “He doesn’t know, but I could of. She said ‘Wait ma, till I do.’ So I waited. ‘Let’s split, it’s not good’ I kept saying. ‘A mother and a grown daughter.’ So she married him.” She looked at Berners.
“Help me blame.”

  Baba Hunter, moving her bangles, says, “What helps, honey? I didn’t make my baby black enough.” She smiled at them brightly.

  She’s triumphant with modernity, Berners thought. An American type.

  They had to wait for Rebecca. Other people’s honesty made her sulky. “My son’s ulcer bleeds when he’s with me. But when he’s with me, he makes beautiful pots.”

  Everybody laughed, even Berners—“But Mrs. Ruge, you are an intellectual”—and Baba carols in her silver, supperclub voice, “Oh, kidlings, this could be fun. What say next time we try touch!”

  So that when it comes Mimi’s turn, nobody much notices her colorless answer. She sits stolid, the skirt between her knees like an empty font, in one of those churches with too many of them. “My two?” They recall she is the one with the twins; she hasn’t shown them the picture yet. She gives them the shrugging, slum answer. “They got bad flesh.”

  The ward hears it tossed among them; their diagnosis. The medical interviewers constantly have to write it down—the ward patients’ answer when you first ask them. The amphitheater can hear it any day—no previous case study required. It’s what they say.

  Berners, making a note to have her bring in the babies to the clinic, is intent on his own declaration. He thinks now he might have said, ‘I have no better flesh than my son.’

  But Mrs. Lasky, the telephone wife had leaned forward. “Have you ever wished—?” She has a low, sweet voice. “Have you ever wanted them dead?”

  Suddenly Lasky began struggling with his tie. He left, refusing help, and leaning on her.

  They all secretly decided never to come back.

  He had had to force himself to go, and like tonight, was always late. This had endeared him to the parents’ group without his meaning to—a doctor being that lax. Contrarily he feels his report will be palatable to us, possibly, because he is one of us, a doctor of medicine, not a mystic, and not even one of those who have to reflect; in his specialty the sum of the morbid conditions in a patient is already plain, the pathology spread out for his knife. In the parents’ group he feels as he once had at Monte Carlo, in the gaming company of people one would otherwise never have chosen, pulled in among them by the demonic cards. In both places he has become the leader without meaning to. With the group, because none there suspect they might be in a process. With us because it is his aberration we have cautiously agreed to pursue.