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The Grapes of Roth
Inside a quiet tea shop in the heart of Ithaca, I shook hands with the poet, Michael Seaport. Here, every Tuesday afternoon — in exchange for a bowl of soup, a chunk of bread, a jug of exotic tea — he would captivate me with a wild story from his life.
His style and approach reminded me of Emerson, who worshiped absolute sincerity, and advised “tell the truth truly,” and “Look into thy heart and write.” After asking for then instantly receiving my nod of approval, Seaport smiled at the waitress, ordered a second bowl of soup, and then began his tale.
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
— Shakespeare, Macbeth
1
MY BROTHER ARNOLD IS A GENIUS. By the time he achieved the perfect age of thirty he had endured four strenuous years at Princeton; survived forty-eight pressurized months in med school; and suffered one thousand four-hundred sixty-one maniacal days trapped in laborious webs of learning about egos, libidos, and ids. He emerged a little higher than angels, a little lower than Cosmetic Surgeon — as a licensed-to-heal Freudian psychoanalyst. A loose translation of the Latin script on his diploma explained it all. He had been trained to chill the will of children, wham the whims of women, and mend the mundane minds of men. For the flagrant fee of five hundred dollars for fifty minutes, the good doctor would smile and smile and smile, then slice your mind-forged manacles with steely swords of patient wisdom, a superabundance of costly medications, and the ultimate in 21st-Century technique.
How completely we depend upon these mental healers, dream masters, dark knights of the soul! And my brother is the best of the very best. His twelve-year apprenticeship had fired the psychiatric world with dazzling glimmers of light. Wittily he edited the journal, Shrink Proof, devoted to enriching his profession with insights from Artificial Intelligence, and the new science of the brain. With swift satire his articles mocked the new age self-help authors, who promised perfect health and everlasting bliss — and lately, even eternal life! — by simply believing in it, and by buying their endless supply of best-selling videos, audiotapes, and books. Arnold’s seminars — which hilariously combined lecture, drama, and mime — were delivered to standing ovations in Boston and San Francisco, London and Moscow, Budapest and Beijing. And in the fertile field of oneiromancy he had surpassed even the yin-yang Jung. This daring doctor had discovered how to pinpoint phallic symbols in dreams where the uninspired psychiatrist would see nothing but innocent mushroom souffles.
Yet despite this sunken treasury of erudition and prodigious personable poise, there existed one person in this Universe who could stir-fry his sangfroid, move the mountain of his equanimity, and in ten seconds or less drive him instantaneously mad.
M for the momentous meetings: every Thanksgiving morning two brothers migrated from the jaded jaws of the dehumanized culture, back to the warm bosom of home.
O for the oasis of oblivious omnivores: oodles of olives, oatmeal, oysters, oranges, omelets, onions, omnifarious junk food waiting on the tables for us when we arrived.
THER for THE Ritual welcoming: “A suppurating pustule,” he insisted, “of various and sundry psychoneuroses.”
2
We traveled in different circles but we revolved around the same point. He counseled the casualties in the rising kingdom of the wealthy; I studied the humble in the falling empire of the poor. These interests — this irreconcilable conflict of values — had strained our fraternal friendship.
Years ago we spoke our hearts freely to each other, and nothing gave us greater happiness. These days, our innermost ideas, when voiced aloud, antagonized instead of joined.
Despite the endless demands of his profession, Arnold had remained an athlete. The first two hours of every dawn, in any weather, he could be found running, biking, and stretching either outdoors, or in his home or office gym. More than once he had told me that a mind which wrestled with the devils needed a body as strong as a god. And does not a godlike body dare demand to be adorned divine? Whereas my second-hand motto was Henry David’s “Beware of enterprises requiring new clothes,” Arnold’s original credo had become: “It is more important to be well dressed than to be on time.” His suits had been plucked from the advertising pages of those gloss-slick politerary magazines filled with European fashion’s latest cries. There was never a moment in his existence when he was not either naked or exquisitely dressed.
On this bright Thanksgiving morning we met on the front steps of the old house we grew up in. Arnold looked prosperous, vigorous, stylish and robust. His tie was worth twice my entire wardrobe; his wallet bulged from underneath his jacket pocket like a second heart; and somebody had done something expensive to his neatly layered hair.
As we met, smiling, I unstraightened his silk tie while he pretended to smooth down the imaginary collar of my wrinkled T-shirt. When we shook hands he crushed the knuckles of my writing fingers until I winced. The timbre of his voice, which no one could distinguish from my own, made me laugh out loud. The sound of the voice moved me more than music while the meaning underneath the words rattled me like noise.
“Let’s sit out here for a few minutes,” he said. “I’m not ready for her yet.” There are times in life to tell your truth, fearlessly, your whole truth — and the greater the man or the woman, the more frequently they find these times. It took me a moment to remember to be myself.
“If you start with that attitude,” I said gently, “then it’s hopeless.” His eyebrows leaped upwards and a sheet of wrinkles waved across his forehead.
“What attitude?”
“Seeing only the hole and forgetting about the donut.”
“I’m seeing reality, nothing but reality” he said. “Look at the house.” Arnold had been schooled to view the old brick building as a sick patient. His sapphire-blue eyes, cooler than a stethoscope, examined each member for symptoms of disease. “The mailbox slot is stuck, the storm window is cracked, the steps are broken, the house-number plate is crooked, the railing rattles, and the doorbell doesn’t ring. Unconsciously, the inhabitants are attempting to cut themselves off from the rest of the world. Why hasn’t anything been fixed in thirty years?”
No, no, no — I distrusted the notion that you can comprehend the soul of a man by the condition of his clothes, his car, his house. “If you’re broke, don’t fix it,” I replied. “Maybe our preoccupied parents don’t notice those kinds of things. Or maybe you’re reading too much into it. Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar.”
He reached into his pocket then handed me a pricey cigaro from Tuscany. “It’s understandable that you would misinterpret things like that. You haven’t been trained in psychoanalysis.” He loosened his necktie then waved his hand as if his to say that my feeble intellectual resistance had just been pulverized by his high-powered degrees. Slyly the slick swords of his savvy science thrust against the lazy lances of my liberating literature. He had absorbed techniques from all the indispensable psychologists; I had abstracted the quintessence from the classic writers. Science is the perfect tool for answering the most trivial of questions. Literature asks the toughest questions then shrugs her naked shoulders to reply.
“Suppose we look beyond the bricks,” I suggested. “Why is this place for me a Rabelaisian sanctuary, and for you a medieval torture chamber?”
He parried that remark with a sarcastic swipe. “For you,” he began, “this house is a sanctuary, because animals like you are an endangered species. Who writes these days for any reasons other than these three: money, money, and money? When are you going to stop scribbling nonsense, and write a novel that somebody wants to pay you for? You’ve lost weight, you’re thinner than a pixel, you look like a brain on legs. If it wasn’t for the ten dollars a week that Dad has been sending you, you would have starved and I’d be standing here like an inpatient talking to myself. And then what would I do: bill myself for the session? Even I can’t afford my own fees.”
I smiled cheerfully at his caricature of my Thoreauvian existence, then instantly replied. “Dad co-signs a loan for nine-hundred thousand dollars to get you through medical school, and I don’t deserve a lousy ten bucks now and then?”
“There’s a difference,” Arnold replied. “You are a charity, I am an investment.”
We laughed together and the laughing thawed the barricade of ice. I explained that I accepted the money from Dad only because it made him feel important to be needed. In the realm of literature, I added, we could find scores of examples of individuals who, by the act of giving, had opened up and been transformed.
But my brother, whose eyes these days were focused upon quickly changing screens instead of same-forever pages, did not agree. “Like fairy tales for little children, literature is a make-believe land of colossal myths.”
“So is psychiatry.”
“Psychiatry,” he insisted, “is a verifiable science.” “
A science of the ‘what is.’ But Art attempts to give us something more elusive. That vast, tremendous, mysterious realms of experience known as the ‘what could be.’ ”
My eyes took aim at our run-down house while Arnold feverishly shook his head.
“Impossible!” he shouted, as he stuffed his tie into an inside jacket pocket. “There can’t be any real communication. She talks incessantly and never listens. She’s irrational. She won’t stop nagging.”
“Arnold, listen. Every year when we visit here you plummet predictably into the same nosedive: Mom starts bugging you, then you over-react, then you reject her, and then you withdraw. Starved for attention, she pesters you ten times more. Dear brother, you are the smartest person I have ever known. Our mother is irrationally nagging? Cure her of that.”
If his eyes could have talked they would have told me bluntly: ‘Your fifty-minute hour is up.’ “Your laymen’s explanation is inadequate,” he said. “The human mind and psyche is too complex. To change a personality is almost impossible. Only by five years of intensive psychotherapy, or by five bottles of overpriced medications with unknowable side effects.”
Gently I shook my head. “Or by profound interpersonal adventures, by solitude and sweet self-knowledge, by moments of insight sublime! … Things are complex, I do agree. But true genius is that leap of understanding that takes a mess of things and makes them simpler and more clear. … One of you has to break the pattern. She can’t. For thirty years our Mother has been practicing and perfecting the arts of nagging, bugging, and worrying. Is she overattached, unrealistic, neurotic, weak? Your reason and logical explanations won’t convince her. You need to —”
He waved his hand at me and grimaced. Gestures signifying that without four years of intensive psychoanalytic training, I couldn’t possibly know what I was talking about.
A wisp of anguish flickered across his face. “Whatever she does this time,” he said, talking more to himself than to me, “I’m not going to show the smallest shred of anger.” “
Arn, it’s not a question of —”
But even on vacation my brother was a busy professional man. He had finished listening, he had formulated a strategy, he had composed himself, he had planned his opening remarks. Now he was prepared to face the arena of gluttonous lions. Pushing open the wooden front door into the living room, he walked into the heavenly hell of his childhood home.
3
Dad was slumping on the sofa in his undershirt, staring at four-inch tall cheerleaders shaking their pom-poms. His bare feet were stretched out in front of him on top of the coffee table, between a bowl of beer pretzels and a mug of ginger ale. A hard-working man with a heart of gold, he worked ten hours every day, six days every week, and his nights — filled with food and rest and family — restored him for the next day’s work.
“Sit down and watch the game boys,” he said slumberously.
A joyful scream burst from the kitchen. Two drinking glasses crashed and smashed against the sink like cymbals, and then a short roundish figure waddled toward us with a face beaming brighter than a thousand moons.
“Are they home?” the woman cried out. “My sons! My darling precious sons! It’s so good to see both of you together! ”
The top of her head just barely reached my shoulder, and she seemed to have grown shorter since I saw her last. A dozen silver strands streaked the garden of her beautiful night-black hair. She smiled effervescently, like a young child, through broken teeth, raspberry lipstick, and dimpled cheeks powdered with three layers of rouge.
Her outstanding feature was her nose, an enormous pyramid-shaped nose which reminded me of clowns, gargoyles, dwarfettes, cartoon gnomes. She had put on a load of weight, her girth was gaining on her height, and she was always promising to start her diet tomorrow — but today she had to celebrate the new diet with a blueberry pie à la mode. The painter Rembrandt would have made her a masterpiece — if only he could have found enough gallons of paint. In her kindness and rotundity she resembled an absent-minded saint who had forgotten to take a vow of abstinence.
“My sons are home! Harry, come in and say hello to the boys! The best years of my life were when you two were growing up!” Her life had one clear and concentrated purpose: to serve, to nourish, to give everything to her husband and two sons. Like an angel — or a vulture — stretching out its wings, she spread her flabby arms wide open in front of us. She paused for a moment, hummed softly, then crushed her eternal little children inside a smothering embrace.
The doctor muttered motley imprecations as he struggled to break free from Mother’s desperate grip. “She still treats us like we’re four years old!”
The Mother answered as she showered kisses on her sons’ smooth cheeks. “When you’re a parent you’ll understand. I will never forget how this house was filled with music whenever I heard the pitter-patter of little feet.”
Arnold’s grinning reply “A few mousetraps quickly solved that problem,” — fell unheard by the transported Mother, but his shoulder felt a jab from my brotherly hand.
The mother now rushed to the dining room table where — due to the rapid turnover — bags, boxes and cartons of food were continually being stored in plain sight and close at hand.
“Have some canned pineapple,” she told us. “It’s fresh — I just opened the can.”
“No thanks, Mom,” Arnold replied, with a tolerating smile. He was wiping his cheeks furiously, trying to erase the mementos of raspberry lipstick, but the harder he rubbed the more he turned the small smudges into larger smears.
“Then have some bananas. Bananas have potassium!”
With unexplainable enthusiasm she pushed a bunch of under-ripe bananas against his shirt. He shoved them away.
“Cheese, we’ve got cheese … How about cold cuts? Bagels? Oh, I know what you like. Ice cream!”
He was simmering, simmering, simmering …
“I’m not hungry, Mom.”
“Cookies?”
“No.”
“Peanut butter and jelly!”
“Nothing!”
Like a human cornucopia, the mother filled her ever-giving arms with fruits, cheeses, ice cream, bagels, cookies, peanut butter, jellies, raisins, and nuts. Charging toward her son, she pushed the foodstuffs to within one inch of the bottom of his clean-shaven chin.
“Damn it, Mom!” he shouted. The room trembled, plates jumped, and forks flipped over as the doctor slammed against the table with his left fist.
“You do this every time! I’m not a little kid! I’m a grown up—”
“Grown-ups are too old to eat?” she asked. “
When I’m hungry, I’ll eat. You don’t have to force feed me like an infant!”
“Close the windows, the neighbors will hear us,” the mother said.
I smiled. The heater was on — one of those newish models that burned dollar bills instead of gas or oil. It was a sub-freezing day in November and all the windows had been sealed shut and would remain that way until the Spring.
“I can’t help it,” she said. I’ve got neighbor-hearus-ophobia.” \The woman laughed at her own joke, and I thought it was funny, too — yet like everything else the Mother said, the remark threw logs on his smoldering frustration. In a flash my brother was yelling louder than the commercials on the TV.
“We grew up with this! Anywhere we were — in the subway, the playground, the car, an airplane — she would automatically blurt out: ‘Close the windows, the neighbors will hear us!’ anytime that anyone was shouting!”
Undiscouraged, the mother quietly waved a box of low-sodium crackers under my brother’s nose. His lightly tanned face turned crimson. “Mom! DO … NOT … GIVE … ME … FOOD!”
Like a caged rodent, he paced four steps to the left, jogged into the living room, then scurried back to where he started from. “She wants to feed me because she still wants me to be dependent on her. It’s a classic textbook case of sublimated —”
“Bread!” the mother shouted, as if she just invented the first loaf. “We’ve got rye, pumpernickel, cinnamon-raisin, and whole wheat. Rye bread has potassium!”
Our wise ancestors pre-envisioned scenes as this, and carved into a stone slab the commandment that thundered: ‘Thou Shalt Not Punch Out Thy Own Mother!’ After pummeling the caraway seeds out of the pumpernickel, the doctor dashed up the stairs.
The Mother sighed. “When you boys were growing up your father and I tried to set a good example by always talking together. Your father and I have a very open relationship.” Smiling, I touched my mother’s hand. “An open relationship. He eats the food and you open the cans.”
For a moment the Mother burst into a fit of giggles, then ceased suddenly as she resumed the full-time occupation of worrying about her kids. Now there was grief in the voice that, moments ago, brimmed with unsurpassable happiness. “Why doesn’t your brother ever talk to me?” the Mother said. “A son who doesn’t talk to his own mother? I never heard of such a thing!”
One man’s poison is another man’s tofu. The top of the dining room table had vanished under the gluts of fruits, vegetables, cheeses, crackers, and nuts. As she served the food the mother sighed and cried out: “Talk to me, Michael.”
“I’m starting a new novel, Mom. It’s about a writer who hasn’t eaten a decent meal in almost twelve months … ‘M assaulted the melange voraciously, with nearly as much table manners as a drift of hogs, and no man of woman born dared stand between the yogurt and his ravenous maw!’ … How do you like it?”
The woman who had always gushed at my diaper droppings could not criticize my literary equivalents. And at the same time her nature demanded that she could only be and say her most genuine self. I wondered how she would escape this perennial predicament of how to be both honest and kind. And again she amazed me, because where I saw an impossible contradiction, she simply spoke her heart with sincerity and profound respect.
“People don’t want to hear about real life, it’s too boring. You’ve got to write something with pizzazz. Something that sells. I say ‘Find a need and fill it’, — give ’em what they want. Why don’t you write about glamour, romance, power, violence, intrigue and — excuse the expression — sex?”
“Sorry, Mom, I’m too young to write my autobiography.”
I enjoyed a few moments of serene feasting, wondering who was deriving more pleasure: me from actually eating the food, or my Mother from watching me eat. At last I paid for the meal by audiencing the inevitably foolish but well-meant motherly advice.
“When are you going back to the university, Michael, and finish that P, H and D? A lot of professors don’t have half the brains in your little finger. You could be a doctor or a lawyer or a professor and write on the side! You’ve got to have a buck in your pocket. Next to your mother and father and brother, money is your best friend in the world.”
I laughed out loud, because my mother had lived her whole life as if there was only time for caring about others, and not a minute to waste on all the variegated endeavors related to money and things. In this way she was thoroughly unique. But in other ways she was no different from parents everywhere.
Were there any parents in the world who encouraged their children to be creative persons mainly — and to be doctors, attorneys and computer programmers on the side? Woe to the artist who yields to the slings and arrows of outrageous parental advice.
“Mom, can you please pass the peanut butter?”
“Wait a minute, precious, you can’t have it plain. Let me toast some English muffins for you.”
My stomach — well stocked for the coming week — bloated like a beach ball, purred like a lion cub, and eventually was forced to cry “Hold, hold, enough!” A long walk through the scenic sights and streets of the City seemed like a marvelous idea.
4
“Technology radically transforms society, yet the human mind is fearfully incapable of responding to too-rapid change.”
He was always working, this brother of mine. As he walked he would talk into a thumb-sized digital tape recorder, spewing random notes for a lecture or an article or a future book. Rare were the moments he was connected to the environment immediately around him.
I too, had my methods of evading the popular culture of sports and juvenile entertainments: into women, into utopian dreaming, into books. But here on these heartwarming streets — where once I had run and biked everywhere, and knew every playground and park and secret alleyway — I had neither the power nor the desire to desert the present place. The mile or so around my home was sacred ground to me, charged with meanings and adventures and relationships, and worlds and worlds of youthful happiness.
My present life, I thought, is in some ways made more difficult by comparing it to the carefree happiness of my past. The neighborhood was made of red-brick, two-story row-houses, all identical, crammed together like boxes of tea on the supermarket shelves. The houses appeared the same, yet since my departure things had changed here — changed for the worse. It struck me that, except for parked cars and Christmas decorations, the little streets between the main highways and avenues were empty, as devoid of human beings as any desert or Arctic region on the globe. Everyone in the modern city worked and played indoors. Terrified of criminals and ashamed of the city’s ugliness, they had fled from the scenes of their own unthinking crimes.
Twenty years ago, in three of the four seasons, these same streets were radiant with children playing, while parents and neighbors gathered to watch their children, to sit, to talk, to laugh and to eat outside in the rejuvenating air. Even winters, which sent the parents indoors, could not stop the children from playing outside.
And now? There was little life and little anything, except traffic and billboards and littered bottles and bags from fast-food restaurants. Despite the urban ambiance I had wanted to saunter here, to recapture the memories of growing up and playing in these now-barren streets. But my brother kept on walking hurriedly, in quick athletic strides. I needed to saunter and savor everything, while he desired to move from one point to another as quickly as possible, ignoring everything in between.
“Wasn’t it under that tree …” I said, slowly, “under that tree we used to sit every night after playing ball all day, and talk about some kind of island? I can’t quite remember what we were talking about with so much enthusiasm.”
Arnold slowed down, turned off his recorder, smiled at me deeply for the first time. “You don’t remember!” he said. “I’m surprised at you, Michael — I remember it like it happened just moments ago. We were always making plans to discover an exotic island, free of crime and pollution and hypocrisy, where we would play all day, grow fresh food, live with friends and raise our families. Once, when we searched the atlases, we found a perfect spot off the coast of Hawaii. But researching further we learned it was inhabited by a colony of lepers. You used to carry a miniature map around with you, all the time, so we could look at the world and make notes whenever we felt inspired.”
He began laughing good-naturedly. “Our island! Our escapist fantasy devised to postpone our disillusionment with the robotic adult world where we would soon play the parts of unthinking cogs. It was so warm, so perfect, so beautiful — and so impossible. Why did I never keep on looking for it? … ”
When he paused I could almost hear him thinking, until at last he spoke to me aloud. “I’m a prosperous psychiatrist,” he told me, “at the dawn of a splendiferous career. Money and more money falls from the sky into my silk pockets, but I work six fourteen-hour days per week. And on the seventh day, when the workers of the world relax to cheer their football teams, I have to read journals and search the Web for ten hours just to stay au courant. On Sundays I look down on my creations, and then I wonder which way my life will spin. Brother, I have everything the world desires except Time. And you have Time and nothing else. No way and no means to transform it into great experiences.”
His disparaging glance cut me open, and then he sewed me back together with his winning smile. “I’ve got unlimited money and no time, and you’ve got all the time in the world and no money. You’ve been writing for one year —”
“Two,” I said. “ — and you’re still eeking out a living like a beggar in Bangladesh. Whenever you get your hands on food you’re like a wild dog. What can you do in this world without money?”
“The best things in life.”
“No, not anymore! Traveling is free? Good food is free? Books are free? A decent pair of walking shoes are free? A quiet house in a safe neighborhood is free? A wife and kids are free?”
“Money often costs too much.”
“Listen, brother. What do you think I’ve done with all the books you’ve been sending to me? The books that you believe might open my eyes to the great wisdom I’ve left behind? Books by your beloved Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Dickens, Goethe, Kazantzakis, Hesse, and the underappreciated Doctor Fromm. Books by the writers with what I call a ‘double vision,’ who cry out that the modern culture is thoroughly debased and dehumanized, while a utopian future is possible for all of us. A new life of passion, deep experiences and undiscovered meanings beyond even the most extraordinary of our perceptions. … I’ve read these books, every single word of those damn disturbing books. And I agree with everything.”
Astonished at this confession, I stopped walking, then rushed to catch up with him. “You understand all these things, you scorn the world, you admire the mission of the artistic souls, and yet you’ve devoted your working life to making as much money as you can?”
He nodded. “The theory of all this is incomprehensible, but the practice is clear as a French white wine. If I didn’t live the way I do then I would be forced to live the way you do. I would have to cut myself off from everything in society that was poisonous to my artistic sensibility — which would be almost everything. And I would be forced — every morning — to think about scrounging for scraps of food, instead of scavenging deeper meanings in the books of Jung and Freud.”
For the first time since we had separated when he had left for the university, I was beginning to understand him.
“Yet Arnold, what about all the art you created during your life’s first twenty years? The paintings, the music, the drama, the literature, the philosophic dialogues, the incredible letters, the miniature ships in the bottles, the fencing matches, the excursions into nature, the mime? Don’t you ever feel called back to that creative way? Isn’t it worth risking all your material things to live for that?”
His eyes said maybe as his words said no. “In the world of Emerson, money was a strong but still a minor deity. That was 150 years ago — and 150 million ‘mental’ years — and the Earth since then has transmogrified into a vastly different planet. Today Lord Money is the emperor of all the gods; each hour his power instensifies. In the old world the autobiography of Davy Crockett was a bestseller, and Charlie Dickens began his career with ‘Sketches by Boz.’ A man might succeed if he had dedication, just a bit of daring, and a simple heart. And your lifestyle of poverty and romance was difficult but possible still. If an artist or a writer had a few friends and a fierce determination, he could meek out a living and survive.”
A car sped too fast down the street, and with his strong arm my brother reached out and pulled me back to the safety of the curb.
“But by the time we reach Henry Miller in the 1920s, then the show is over and the Bohemian lifestyle is pulverized. In his paean to romantic poverty, your friend Henry neglected to tell us how — throughout his Paris years — he was supported by Anais Nin. And now, today, in the land of bilk and money? … It’s this choice: starve or slave, with nothing in between. And if you must slave, then slave like a man and take home everything you can.”
How could I even begin to argue? The last few months had been exceedingly difficult. I was unknown, jobless, still living by my wits. I had enough rejection slips to fill up a mausoleum. My entire worldly assets consisted of an old bicycle, an orange boy-scout backpack, fifty paperback books, two ten-dollar bills in my left pocket, and seven cents in my right.
Yes, I was an idiot in my own way. I had followed the Romantic and Transcendental thinkers, but ignored their inevitable fates. One can hardly hope to make a living warning the King and Queen that his feet stink and her nose is bent. Dollars damned Melville, and despite the decades they damned the modern writers with same irresistible curse.
I lapsed into a self-pitying fantasy until my brother jabbed my arm. Now the solid world was calling: horns honked, engines roared, a bumblehive of murmurs jolted me awake. I smelled gasoline, burning rubber, fried chicken, donuts, chocolate candy, smoke from domestic cigarettes and imported cigars. We had walked all the way to the store-lined avenue.
Arnold led me to the middle of the block where dozens, scores, hundreds of men and women, opulently dressed, stood chattering along the sidewalk. Mortal men, open your eyes! Here were the senior citizens of this great City, each gorged from enough breakfast to feed a family of six, now waiting to descend on the seashore casinos, via luxury-class buses, to gamble their money away. The flower of America’s youth were sitting gorgonized before computer screens, while the harvest of our nation’s seniors frittered away the remainders of their life savings and the last days of their lives.
Arnold told me that he had driven past this intersection a few hours earlier, and observed an unexplainable paradox. He pointed to the restaurant beside the bus stop. “Delly Palace,” he said. “The state-of-the-art, indoor version of the ancient Jerusalem marketplace. All our brother and sister descendants of Adam dying to sink their false teeth into brunches of bagels and lox. It’s been crowded like this since seven in the morning.” He directed my attention to a chorus line of six-foot-tall, calligraphically drawn signs which decorated the store’s windows. “Note the everyday low prices: Every item discounted, reduced, redtagged, slashed, marked down, and on sale with triple coupons. And a free pint of black olives with every five-dollar sale.”
I followed my brother as we squeezed, pushed, grunted, and pardonmeed through the perfumed crowd. At the end of this slow-moving advance we arrived at a small delicatessen wearing a wooden sign: ROTH’S.
Was it open? We pressed our noses against the cold window glass. Forty- or fifty-odd people were sitting in cushioned booths, drinking coffee and eating buns, bagels and cakes.
“The socio-economic status of the clientele?” he asked me.
I breathed on the window pane then wiped a porthole with my hand. “Shabbily dressed senior citizens living on fixed or broken incomes … poor people with no other place to go … students wearing holey jeans …. artists, musicians, and writers ignored by the too-much-with-us world … lovers and lunatics and poets, from Beatniks to Bohemians.”
I glanced at the menu which had been attached to the window with strips of yellowed masking tape.
“ ‘Coffee: ten dollars a cup, no refills. Bagels: thirty dollars a dozen, not including the seeds’ … Everything costs two or three times as much as the deli chain store emporium.” He clapped his hands together. “That’s it! That’s the paradox yet unexplained. Why do the rich people shop at the palace that costs less, while the poor people patronize this overpriced den of schlock?”
The rusted brass latch felt jammed when my thumb tried to press it down. In the half-minute it took us to push open the door, I read and re-read a handwritten sign which boasted: ‘World’s Most Delicious Grapes.’
5
Roth’s delicatessen glowed with an aura of benevolence. Warm but not too hot inside, it sheltered a friendly and laughing crowd of all ages, posters for musical events and literary readings, and a horde of teenagers talking and playing ping-pong in a back room.
On the other hand, Roth’s deli was in sad sad shape. It was a clean, poorly lighted place with shelves of canned goods from the year 1999; glass jars of amorphous gefilte fish; wrinkled fruits, withered vegetables, and rows and rows of shelves covered with bottles and crates of kosher-for-passover sea-dark wine. The furniture was fifty years old and the walls were covered with posters from old movies. I saw the living room of “You Can’t Take It With You;” the mansion in “My Man Godfrey;” and a work camp from the film “The Grapes of Wrath.”
Something wonderful — maybe the run-down earthiness of the place — inspired me. I could see a Shakespeare sitting comfortably here, quill in hand, quaffing a tankard of ale. Or Walt Whitman sipping a clear glass of water with mothers and uneducated working-men. Or the glorious modern author, O. Thoreau, laughing wildly amidst a throng of admiring women, as he guzzles a glass of fresh-squeezed carrot juice.
Nudging my brother, I pointed at the man-high poster from the Steinbeck classic flick. “Arnold, do your ‘Grapes of Wrath’ imitation for me.”
“No, no, no.”
“Come on. There’s nothing like it.”
He rubbed his chin, slapped my shoulder, and then in an old farmer’s voice, began: “Young Tom Joad, you lissen up boy, y’heah. Don’t do it. It won’t do no good. Jus’ a waste. Land you right back in the slammer. We got to get a-thinkin’ before we rock the boat. Do somethin’ that means somethin’.”
We laughed together, and for a few honey-covered moments he was my good brother unrehearsed. But in an instant he stiffened and looked around embarrassedly, then quickly reverted to the role of professional shrink.
“You look like you need something, young man.”
Old Mrs. Roth walked up to us, bent down in front of me, and replaced some linoleum floor tiles that had been kicked out of their squares. Built like a stalk of celery, she was either four-and-a-half feet tall, or standing in a hole. There was something refreshingly familiar about the sapphire eyes under her cloud-white hair.
Because I liked her eyes I decided to tell her everything. “Excuse my curiosity, Mrs. Roth … We … I … ”
“Say anything you want,” she said. “When you get to be my age, it doesn’t matter what people say. If I don’t like what you’re telling me, I’ll just ignore you with a smile.”
“We came in to find out — ”
The old woman placed her hands on her irreplaceable hips. “Why the hotsy-totsy people shop in the big deli down the block, and the poor schleps come in here? I could tell that’s what you were thinking. You both had that look on your faces.”
She raised her bony arm, pointing proudly around her friendly kingdom. “The food here isn’t so great. I used to be a good cook, but I’m too old for all that trouble anymore. And we’re not as fresh as we could be — the big places, they sell more, they can afford to get new merchandise every day.”
Arnold was eager to accomplish his purpose straightaway: get food then get out.
“I’ll have a cup of coffee and a pumpernickel bagel to go,” the doctor ordered.
Mrs. Roth shook her shaky hands. “You don’t want the bagels,” she said. “They’re from last week. With the bagels you could build a house. And the coffee is so weak it’s holding on to the sides of the cup. Look alive, Bernie, it’s a customer. And maybe even a paying one.”
We followed Mrs. Roth’s eyes to a corner of the dining room where a small man stepped out of the darkness. His mis-buttoned shirt had been splattered with globs of borscht. In the three minutes it took him to shuffle across the room he banged into two stools and knocked over a can of stale peanuts. When he finally reached his wife, she clasped his skinny hand.
“A cup of tea, please,” my brother said.
Mrs. Roth would not comply. “I wouldn’t give the tea to my own great-grandson, the lazy bum. That caffeine schmaffeine robs the body of essential potassium.”
She laughed cheerfully, then said to Arnold: “You have brilliant eyes, young man. They question everything: ‘What can I eat here? How, all these years, have these ridiculous old people managed to make a living?’ … Let me tell you what Bernie asked me last night. ‘Darling,’ he said — after sixty-five years he still calls me Darling — ‘How many times can you refry refried beans?’ ”
When I stopped laughing I bent down on one knee before this aged goddess of honesty.
“Why do people come in here, Mrs. Roth?”
She tilted her head toward the countertop.
“If you have to know,” she said, “then why shouldn’t I tell you? … People come in here for one reason, young man. One lonely reason.”
I turned to look at my brother at the same moment he turned to look at me. Old Mrs. Roth pointed to a silver bowl.
“The grapes.”
6
The doctor fished out a fat wallet from his suit-jacket pocket; sifted through a dozen credit cards, then whipped out a crisp five-dollar bill. “One pound of the grapes, please,” he said.
The old woman shook her head as she gazed into the paper Lincoln’s eyes.
“There was a nice Jewish boy, that Abe Lincoln. A real mensch, for all the trouble he went through … We don’t sell them by the pound, doctor. We sell them individually.”
“How much per grape?” I asked.
Casually she glanced at her husband then carefully she looked at me. “A lot of people come in asking about the grapes, but nobody wants to pay the price.”
“How much?”
“The vines that bore them are one-hundred-and-one years old.”
“How much?”
Mrs. Roth squeezed her husband Bernie’s trembling hands.
“You need to give up everything you have, young man — that’s the only way to get the things that matter most. How much in dollars do you have with you right this minute now?”
I opened my tattered wallet. I smiled to myself as I removed a folded, faded, much-marked map of the world. I showed Mrs. Roth the wrinkled map and my last two ten-dollar bills.
Mrs. Roth smiled. “For you, young man, I’ll give you a real deal. For one grape — skin included — twenty bucks.”
7
I peered into the bowl of grapes, half expecting them to sing and dance. They were ordinary-looking clusters of smooth-skinned berries, reddish-purple, hardly bigger than marbles.
Bernie spoke up with the only voice he had, a trembling voice. “You can have a sample, young man, if you want to try one before you decide.”
My shoulders shrugged and as I turned to look at Arnold I could feel his anger seething like the hottest desert breeze.
“Her price is far above rubies,” I told my brother, “but I want the one on the end.”
Arnold’s mouth fell open and his eyes bulged out at me like two accusing fingers pointing to a fool. He gaped incomprehensibly, as if I had just approached a bag-lady — with curler-filled hair and clanging shopping cart — and then insisted she sell me the Martian moon she had stashed inside one of her bags.
Grabbing my arm, he pulled me towards the door.
“Let’s get out of here.”
“Arn, I know it’s insane, but I want one. It’s just a feeling. Don’t ask me why.”
As he verbally abused me he was admirably calm.
“If you’re even considering blowing your ultimate, hard-begged twenty dollars on this obvious boardwalk-style rip-off, then you are a complete schmuck.”
Cupidly I stared at the tantalizing purple cluster.
Arnold turned and faced the door.
“If that’s your decision,” he said, “I’m leaving.”
How do you choose between your flesh-and-blood brother, and a lousy grape? … I let him go.
Mrs. Roth sighed. “Is your grape for here, or should I wrap it up?”
I plucked two foreboding fruits from the gang of their lustrous companions. First I studied them under the dim-witted tubes of phosphorescent light, then I dropped one — the free sample — into my curious mouth. The chewy skin tasted bitter and tart. But as soon as the sweet round pulp slid past my tongue down my throat’s dark road — everything changed.
I saw the world in front of me, and I understood the path that took me there, as I had never grasped these things before. The delicatessen seemed to be moving back through time: it grew younger and brighter as I watched. In my imagination I supposed that for sixty years the Roths had fed the needy, had supported the poor and artistic types, had given thought only to the question of how they could best help the people in their neighborhood. They gave credit to mothers and beggars and working people, wrote the amount owed onto scraps of paper, and then at the end of every day the Roths threw away all the scraps of debt.
The scene changed instantly. Swords of light pierced through the window-glass, glancing the woman’s face with light.
Mrs. Roth was growing older and younger at the same time. Her hair sprouted to the floor like falling feathers, lush white vines of hair that disheveled into the style of a wild hag. The skin on her face aged a hundred years till it resembled the roots of an ancient oak; then a thousand years, as the skin grew indistinguishable from the texture of a deeply furrowed field of earth. Her eyes became burning embers. Flashing meteorites. Blue-white stars. Savage beasts pondering sunsets. Her childlike smile illuminated everything. As she pointed to her forehead I was numb with astonishment and fear.
“Do you want me to kiss you there?” I asked.
Had I acted quickly, I could have saved myself; due to those frozen moments of indecision, everything was lost. A gold knife flew out of my hands and stabbed her. More fear filled me, because I knew I had not killed Mrs. Roth, but someone else — someone even more precious to me. The woman’s face changed; I moved closer. I tried to see the new face, but she was taking off a coat, lifting it above her head.
Who was underneath? I couldn’t see. The mystery person removed another coat, then another and another; each time my curiosity grew more and more intense. After more flying coats, after the desire to discover her identity burned my whole body like fire, the final coat was removed, revealing her true face.
And at last I saw my own journey, like puzzle pieces moving together to make a picture clear. How the pressures of this dysfunctional culture had split me and my brother, tricking him into the notion that money and things are more important than they really are, while deceiving me with the ludicrous vision that money means nothing at all.
How I had lived to follow a voice inside me. How it was now essential for me to change; to solve the perennial money problem of every artist and every man: how to get the living without losing the creative life.
The cash register jingled; my fears evaporated; the delicatessen grew dark and normal once again. The floor was clear of coats. The bagels were molding in the bins. Mrs. Roth looked short-haired, blue-eyed, and happily alive. The old man gazed at his wife then grasped her hand and raised it to his lips. Weary, bloodshot and beclouded were his ancient eyes. Who could say if they were filled with cataracts, or dreams alive, or grateful tears?
8
I came home to our old house and our crumbling front steps. I looked at the lovely bricks, studied the old street, remembered the heart of our childhood and youth.
Grasping the remainder of my entire fortune — seven pennies — I tossed them onto the sidewalk. Some kids who were watching from inside their house ran outside, screamed as they seized the coins, then started playing hopscotch on the sidewalk near. I rushed inside, ran upstairs, banged my knuckles on the bedroom door.
“The doctor is not available,” a voice answered. “You are listening to an electronically reproduced facsimile of the human voice.”
Opening the door I found the doctor lying on a blue-and-white Greek blanket, smoking a cigar and studying an article entitled ‘The Polarization of Xenon Nuclei in the Treatment of Schizophrenic Nympholepsy.’
“Arn! I’ve just seen — ”
“If you bought a twenty-dollar grape, I don’t want to hear anything about it.”
A million years from now, humankind will develop moveable earlids (like eyelids) to prevent the intrusion of unwanted noise. In his present primitively structured condition, however, he was defenseless against my zealous narrative.
“She was young! The whole world was young!”
“Hallucinations,” he said coolly, “caused by general malnutrition and lack of essential proteins.”
“The light was everywhere, every living thing has light inside! You are gods, you are radiant, you are crystalline! And I knew that the Golden Age was all about me, and it had never passed away from the world.”
“CH3O3C6H2CH2CH2CH2,” he said, with his face buried in the magazine. “Mescaline.”
“Does every atypical thing in the world need to be explained? And explained chemically, psychologically, rationally? Why can’t we just appreciate?”
“Megalomaniacal delusions,” he said. “Byproducts of the marriage of sexual frustration and loneliness.”
“Sudden moments of lucid insight!” I shouted enthusiastically.
“Beggar’s ravings. Verbal scribble-scrabble.”
“Whispers from the Muses nine!”
He dropped his pricey magazine. “First visions, soon you’ll hear voices, and immediately afterwards imagine that you’ve seen the ultimate meaning of existence. It’s advanced schizophrenia: one minute you’re a starving author, the next minute you’re a Zen master, holier than dung. First there is a grape. Then there is no grape. Then there is.”
He bowed with mocking reverence and nearly kissed my sandals.
“I killed her because I forgot to — ”
My brother sprang up, pushed me aside with his muscular arm, then jogged downstairs. As he was pouring himself a glass of skim milk, the front door blew open wide. In trudged Mother and Father, red-faced and exhausted from the strain of walking from the car — parked immediately outside — all the way to the living room.
“Three hundred and ninety-nine dollars for food this week,” the father muttered, pushing a button on the remote-control device to turn on the TV. “The pharaohs in Egypt couldn’t eat better than this.”
“And the great pyramids themselves,” chimed in my brother, “wouldn’t be big enough to hold them if they did.”
“Wait until you see what we bought!” shouted the jolly woman, proud of her supermarket conquests. The strong handsome sons unloaded the car in five trips, stacking the twenty paper bags on top of the kitchen table. The perishables — milk, eggs, yogurts, butter, cheeses, TV dinners, cold cuts, slabs of meat, fish sticks, hot dogs, ice cream, waffles, frozen vegetables — all were jammed into the refrigerator-freezer.
The Mother hurriedly prepared two fist-thick corned-beef sandwiches on rye bread filled with pickle slices and Russian dressing. Scurrying into the living room, she placed the sandwiches on the coffee table next to the aroma of her husband’s naked feet. The father stuffed his cheeks with a handful of mixed nuts, then shouted to his wife for a glass of water and ice.
The doctor-son sang out:
“I fear thee ancient mariner!
fear thy chubby hand!
For after all these snacks, behold:
a sadder, and a wider man!”
Back to the dining room the Mother ran to serve us. “What do you want to eat, boys?” she merrily asked.
“Mom,” the doctor said firmly, “don’t feed me.”
“Just a little cream cheese, cucumber and strawberry preserves sandwich,” she said, brandishing the monstrous snack beneath his nose.
Arnold’s nostrils quivered; his shoulders tensed; his voice accelerated into a crescendoing shout.
“Mom, what did I say this morning?”
“Arn,” I said. “Cease striving, then there will be — ”
The Mother would never give up. “Baloney and pepperoni! … Ice cream? Oh, I know — chocolate chip cookies!”
The doctor threw the sandwich against the dining room wall. After smacking against the wall at ninety miles per hour, red jam dripped down like Abel’s blood.
I grabbed his arm and immediately he shook it free. He was too strong for me and I could not hold him back with force. All that I had left were words, words, words.
“The way that Mrs. Roth looked at her bald, toothless, weather-beaten time-toppled disaster of a husband — ”
“Pretzels, potato chips, peanuts, sunflower seeds —”
Each time she named the food, she flashed it ostentatiously in front of him.
“Raisins, roasted soybeans, bonbons, chocolate, cupcakes, cheese—”
“Mom!”
“Close the windows, the neighbors will hear us!”
It looked like a pearl when I unwrapped it. Aiming carefully, I tossed it at my brother’s mouth. It bounded off his stiff upper lip, then fell on the grape-colored carpet.
“Soup? Noodles? Spaghetti? … ”
I dropped to my hands and knees. My fingers went to work like ant’s antennae, groping cautiously through plush polyester strands.
Interspersed between the melody of Mother’s offerings and the disharmony of my brother’s swearing, I heard rhythmic splats, crashes, and thuds. Plastic soda bottles, cracker boxes, carrots, pears and apples — all smacked against the all-forgiving walls.
I found it by feeling behind a walnut. The inexorable mother held up a “Sweet potato?”
The son hurled the orange spud into the living room.
“Cantaloupe?” she said.
He shotputted the melon eighteen-point-five feet.
“Sesame seeds?”
The seeds were scattered to the four wild winds.
The mother looked up to her son and smiled with wide, bright eyes. My brother was yelling at her with clenched fists, arched eyebrows, and arms flailing like an orchestra conductor at the climax of a Rossini overture.
I stepped up behind him and stuffed into his mouth the small still grape.
Light fingers of sunshine poked through the window, gracefully stroking the woman’s face with light. The son’s body relaxed. Ceased moving. Stilled itself. New eyes beheld the perfect Mother.
How can I say for certain what he saw? Maybe the seven thousand days and nights she cooked for him; washed his clothes for him; worked for him; read to him; sang to him; prayed for him; laughed when he laughed; wept when he cried; ran to his infant screams. Maybe he saw the light in her eyes that glowed for him whether he was good or bad; happy or miserable; healthy or sick; kind or cruel; simple or sophisticated; hopelessly foolish or inestimably wise. The same light whether he ate her bread with gratefulness and gladness, or threw it to the carpet-floors with furious disgust.
Silently, watching her, he stood for a long time. The father rose from his soft cushions, turned off the pictures and noise, stepped up behind my brother, then placed his heavy hand on the shoulder of his good son. The small room filled with palatial light. Silence reigned, a warm silence, caressing, becalming, uniting the whole soul. I heard a voice from deep inside me, a voice like oak leaves blowing through a starry October night. “Mortal man, open your eyes! We have all drunk poison from the river of forgetfulness. Only the heart sees truly. We never live tenderly enough.”
The mother was still smiling as her son, my brother, reached out and passionately hugged her.
My heart nearly broke itself with joy.
§
— Michael Pastore
from: The Zorba Anthology of Love Stories