Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth Page 12

  In order to give either herself or my mother a break, Bubby would not allow my mother to leave the table once we were seated. The serving of this meal proceeded at a leisurely pace, and between courses my mother lifted my feet onto her lap so she could massage them. I felt ridiculously spoiled.

  “Funny in what way?” I asked Rosie.

  “Oh, it’s how he says things. He hates piano, and he’s always arguing with Daddy. Want to hear?”

  We peeked out as Patrick made his way to the music room. Straggly chestnut-brown hair, Nelson Algren sweater, wire-rimmed glasses, hunched shoulders—Patrick seemed to be aiming for as low a profile as he could manage, but he radiated a dark, intense energy that was impossible to ignore.

  Rosie and I slid to the floor and tried to hold back our giggles. From the doorway we could hear without being seen.

  “So, Patrick, here we are again,” said Mr. Michaeli.

  “Yes,” Patrick sighed. A heavy, histrionic sigh, part parody, part resignation.

  “So, let’s hear the Bach.”

  Patrick played a short piece. When he was through, Mr. Michaeli said, “Good, good, the fingers are definitely on the right keys. So what is the problem?”

  Patrick sighed again. “You don’t like it.”

  “And why?”

  “Not in conformity with your concept of aesthetics?”

  “Yes, correct. So maybe today we will conform more and give consideration to bringing out feeling?”

  “How am I supposed to bring out feeling from a box of mechanical hammers hitting a bunch of steel strings?” Patrick protested. It was a stand-up comic’s act: pointing out some essential, absurd injustice with ironic exasperation. But his was an introverted version of a comedian’s routine, and seemed almost involuntary.

  “Ah, yes—maybe it’s the piano. That reminds me of a joke I now forgot.”

  “I wouldn’t mind moving on to a new piece.”

  “Absolutely,” Mr. Michaeli said. “Enough Bach. Adios, Bach. We are tired of you. Here we have some Liszt.”

  “I’m not up to Liszt.”

  “So, who do we play next?”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t want to play Bach,” Patrick said. “You could let me demolish another Bach prelude.”

  “If only you will try, you will not demolish.”

  “I told you, I don’t have an aptitude for this.”

  “You are soon sixteen, no?”

  “In two weeks.”

  “Maybe the time has come to tell your mother?”

  There was a long pause. “All right,” Patrick said. “I will.”

  “I don’t believe it!” Rosie whispered.

  “Good,” Mr. Michaeli said. “We are ready at last to be free. Go home, and come back any time, we can sit and discuss philosophies, and I will pretend I read those books.”

  “I’m sorry I’ve been such a bad student.”

  “Au contraire, mon ami. From you I’ve learned some interesting ideas. And a good ear you definitely have.”

  There was a sound of shuffling as Patrick packed his music books.

  “Now they fight over money,” Rosie told me. “Let’s go watch. Maybe if we’re there, it won’t be so bad.”

  I braced myself for a scene. Mr. Michaeli recoiled from money with even more ferocity than Bubby Miriam on laundry detail. If anyone tried to break through his repugnance, he’d respond with a look of shocked fury, almost of hatred. When his students handed him their crumpled five-dollar bills, he gave them in return toys that had cost three times as much. His salary from Eden was spent as quickly as possible on strange, bumpy fruit from a small, poorly lit Caribbean store on Victoria Street; on stamps sold by an impoverished man who lived in a basement apartment downtown and who kept himself alive by slowly relinquishing his stamp collection, salvaged from the war; and on dinner at The Brown Derby, which recovered for its customers their beloved dishes: schnitzel, borscht, kishke, chopped liver. I was often invited to these urgent sprees. “Order everything! Everything the heart desires!” he’d tell us, though he himself only drank coffee. Obediently, charitably, we stuffed ourselves. What was left after the first round of spending went to Europe, to someone Mr. Michaeli knew there.

  Occasionally, I, too, was the victim of his devastating gifts—usually a record he thought I’d like. My forced “thank you” exhausted me, and I wished there were some way to give him something in return. Rosie was the only one who remained untroubled by her father’s manic saintliness. She laughed at him, sang under her breath, One for my master, one for my dame, and one for the little boy who lives down the lane. “I can’t bear all this generosity,” I told her one time. “Don’t feel bad,” she said. “He can’t help himself.”

  The two of us strolled casually into the music room. Patrick, bizarrely, didn’t seem to see us. It wasn’t shyness; it was deliberate technique. Patrick, I would soon find out, had trained his vision over the years, had by now achieved impressive selectivity.

  He took out his wallet and Mr. Michaeli stepped back, raised his arms.

  But I could see that this was the only part of the lesson Patrick enjoyed. Handing over money was the one safe procedure in Patrick’s vexed life. There was no room here for error, humiliation. Unlike Mr. Michaeli, who gave so he could retreat, Patrick wanted only justice, a moment of glorious simplicity.

  “No, no, keep for this week the money. We made no progress today, my young friend. Buy for yourself a book on theories in aesthetics, yes? Now you are free as a bird.”

  Someone had to lose out. Patrick’s body tensed with predicament. He placed the money on the piano and ran down the hallway and out the door, forgetting everything: his music, his gloves, his cute black beret.

  Rosie and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. We knew at once what we were going to do: if Patrick really wasn’t coming back, we’d track him down at his place. He had no hope at all of getting away.

  We waited to see whether Patrick would yield either to his mother’s wishes or his own morose compulsion and resume his piano lessons. When three weeks had passed and he hadn’t called, we decided to go ahead with our plan, and early in May we set out to return to Patrick the items he had, like Cinderella, left behind.

  It was a chilly day, and the anemic sky seemed determined to sap the colour from everything beneath it. As we waited for the bus, icy gusts of wind swept down on us, and we shivered under our thin spring coats.

  “Alpine rescue vehicle!” I cried out when the bus crawled towards us at last.

  “I think he’s rich,” Rosie said as we slid into a double seat. “He goes to a private boys’ school.”

  “Poor him,” I said. Lindsay Anderson’s If had recently been detonated on impressionable audiences, and I had visions of evil prefects, long echoing corridors, rows of demoralized boys in suits and ties.

  Patrick lived in Beaconsfield, wherever that was. The trip took over two hours, and when the last of three buses drove away, we found ourselves in alien territory—not exactly the country, but unlike any city street we’d ever seen. On one side of the paved road, stately houses had been erected between tracts of forest as if sent by some distant monarch to impose order on the wilderness; on the other side, a silvery lake stretched out to the horizon like the sea. It had only recently thawed, and a shadowy indigo hue skimmed the water like mist.

  “Wow, I didn’t know Montreal had something like this,” Rosie said, casting her eyes on the terra incognita of the upper classes.

  “We don’t get around enough, Rosie,” I said. I consulted our map, and we set off in search of 4 Hillside Road. I wondered why there were no sidewalks; maybe it was because the population was so sparse, or maybe everyone who lived here travelled by car.

  Patrick’s house was immense, but it was only partly visible through the elaborate tree and shrub garden surrounding it. I imagined women in crinoline dresses and men in white suits sipping tea under the willow trees; Lily Briscoe at her easel. A shoulder-high garden wall made
way for double-swing black iron gates with ornamental gratings. One of the gates was ajar.

  Rosie gasped. “Wow, it’s a mansion. I feel like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music.”

  “Or Mary Poppins,” I said.

  “What should we do?”

  I shrugged. “Go up to the door and ring the bell?”

  “I bet a butler will answer. I didn’t think he was this rich.”

  “How did he find your father?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know, one person tells someone else … or maybe Patrick’s mother knew about my father in Europe, before the war…”

  We proceeded through the gate and up the path. The house appeared to be quite old, though it may have been the twined ivy clinging to the rough-hewn grey blocks and the architectural style—arch-happy neo-Romanesque—that gave it an antique look. There was something lonely and expectant about the long rows of window-eyes and copper-green shingles; like the self-sacrificing statue in The Happy Prince, I thought.

  “I’m nervous,” Rosie said. “Maybe we should have called before we came.”

  I rang the bell. “Think of it as an adventure.”

  There was no response at first, and we were trying to decide whether to ring again when a woman’s voice called out: “Just a second!” The door opened and there stood Patrick’s mother—and my one-time psychiatrist.

  I need to backtrack for a moment.

  When I was small, my mother was chronically frantic about my health. I’d been rushed to the hospital several times: I was prone to chest colds, and since from her gallery seat, life was a tragic opera, my mother’s diagnosis was always drastic. The phantom ailment was asthma, and when the doctors insisted that there was nothing wrong with me, she got all huffy—like the rest of the so-called doctors who who can die first—She repeated her macabre accusations on the bus, pulling me closer to her as if I were her accomplice. It was an intimate ritual, and gave me as much pleasure as the cool, gentle touch of the stethoscope against my skin.

  Eventually the asthma fell out of favour. Instead, when I was eleven, my mother decided that I had a bone deformity. I was soaking in the bath when she first noticed my affliction. She asked me to stand up, looked me up and down, and tears streamed from her eyes: my arms, my legs, my shoulders—none of it was quite right. Over the next few weeks we trekked from waiting room to waiting room; no one could persuade my mother that my bones were properly aligned. This was a year or two before our national health plan came into effect, but I don’t think anyone charged my mother—the last thing they wanted was another phone call from her. I didn’t mind these outings. I enjoyed the predictable cycle of hope and dismissal that shaped my mother’s pursuit of physicians, and since her various phobias kept us mostly at home, any excursion was a treat.

  We were rescued, finally, by Dr. Frankel. It was early autumn, and wet leaves lay scattered on the sidewalk like discarded party decorations. I bent down to collect two or three of the prettiest ones—all crimson or all gold, without spots or perforations.

  Dr. Frankel’s office was located not in a medical building or a side extension of his home but behind a restaurant in the East End. To reach it, we had to turn onto a narrow lane that ran along the windowless back walls of stores. Facing these brick walls, on the other side of the lane, were struggling backyards separated by simple wooden fences. I was intrigued by the little fenced yards, with their sprinkling of dandelions, neat rows of garbage pails, a tricycle or two; I felt certain they were portals to a warm, orderly but eventful world to which I had no access, could barely even imagine.

  Dr. Frankel’s door was embedded in one of the brick walls. A hand-written note instructed visitors to walk in and have a seat: the doctor would be back shortly.

  We entered and found ourselves in a room with a coat stand, five folding chairs, a pile of neglected magazines on a stool, and a mystifying tangle of wire coat hangers on the floor. I could see at once that there was something wrong with this setup—anyone could see. Doctors’ offices were supposed to have carpets and smell of disinfectant; a receptionist handed you forms to fill in; there were other patients ahead of you.

  All the same, we sat down as instructed. Looking through the dust-coated magazines I came upon one with the promising title, True Confessions, and soon I was deeply absorbed in the pornographic tale of a girl with a psychotic father. The father, a religious fanatic of some sort, catches his daughter swimming naked in a pond with a boy, and not only that, but on a Sunday morning, when she should have been in church. Enraged, he forces her to walk naked through the town, while he goads her with a switch made of prickly branches. Before long, the girl runs away and marries Rialto, a man with a thin moustache and perverse tastes who wants to show her off to his friends … This bizarre narrative was interrupted by Dr. Frankel’s entrance.

  Although it was a warm day, Dr. Frankel wore an ancient capelike coat, and since I was well trained by then, I knew that he, too, had been there, and that his coat had come with him from Europe. He removed the coat, draped it gently over the coat stand, and held out his hand. “Good day, Mrs. Levitsky. Good day, Mrs. Levitsky’s daughter.”

  We followed him to his office. “Please to sit down, Mrs. Levitsky and Mrs. Levitsky’s daughter,” he said. His hair was spotted with dandruff, his knuckles were hairy, his ears were hairy. His white doctor’s jacket lay crumpled in a heap on his desk. With his large hairy hands he clutched the white fabric and shook it into shape.

  He slid his arms into the sleeves of the jacket.

  “Please to step out, Mrs. Levitsky, and I will examine your daughter.”

  When the door was shut he nodded and asked me to touch my toes. “Very good,” he said. “Would you like a candy?”

  He handed me a lemon lollipop and called my mother back inside.

  —well doctor well well—

  “Bad news, Mrs. Levitsky. Very bad news. Your daughter has a definite bone deformity, as you so well observed. Incurable, I am regretting to say.”

  —Yossi Yossi—

  Dr. Frankel handed her a tissue, leaned forward, and said confidentially, “Listen, if we don’t tell to anyone, no one will know. It will be our little secret.”

  Instantly my mother cheered up.

  —yes thank you yes yes—

  As we walked back to the street, my mother congratulated herself on finding, after so many wrong turns and dead ends, a true doctor, and not only a doctor, but a fine human being as well.

  —here is what you what you call a gentleman—

  To celebrate, we bought chocolate ice cream at the three-booth greasy spoon on the other side of Dr. Frankel’s office. Our waitress spoke only French, and my mother licked an imaginary cone and repeated chocolate, chocolate, which she assumed was a universal term. My mother was resourceful, if nothing else.

  At home, my mother gave Bubby, who listened or did not listen, heard or did not hear, understood or did not understand, her version of our deliverance.

  —such a gentleman such a gentleman—

  My mother decided, after this happy result, that my body didn’t require further medical attention. Instead, under the influence of her card-playing friends, she became preoccupied with my mental health.

  Fanya was devoted to cards, and every Wednesday night several of her friends invaded our flat, eager to gamble and dispense advice. Sitting in the kitchen, I had a clear view of the living room, where the card table was set up. Since my mother and her friends were too poor to risk the loss of a few dollars, they gambled with sunflower seeds. The seeds, along with Mrs. Blustein’s bare feet (she suffered from “heat attacks”) and Mrs. Kaplan’s kerchief, tied peasant-style under her chin (in case of lice), gave the scene a rural charm. With a box of soda crackers by my side and my legs resting on two chairs, I watched these social gatherings and wrote down slivers of conversation, which I transcribed into imperfect haikus. Ai these varicose / the lettuce wrap in a cloth / on Tuesdays is best.

  Other entertainments included my
mother’s transformation into Greta Garbo. Eyelashes sticky, breasts heaving up and down under a dress that drew its inspiration from a wedding cake, my mother was not usually demure. When confronted with a hand of cards, however, she fell silent: not a word, not a syllable. Instead, her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth expressed the intensity of her insights, the wry amusement aroused by her opponents’ benighted moves. When it came to gin rummy, Fanya Levitsky was nobody’s fool.

  It was during one of these visits that my mother’s defeated friends suddenly latched on to me. Whoever heard of a child locking herself in the bathroom in order to sing Harry Belafonte songs at the top of her lungs? And what about my troubles at school—my poor grades, my detentions? Why not schedule a consultation with Dr. Vera Moore? She completely cured the Rothman boy. Of course, she had a waiting list, but in some cases (the women looked at one another knowingly), she took patients right away.

  My mother nodded thoughtfully. Yes, they certainly had a point, these friends of hers.

  My sanity became the new topic of conversation. Was I suffering from a Freudian complex, a trauma, maybe even a split personality?

  —what can I do with my education stopped in the middle—

  After a few days of deliberation, my mother phoned Dr. Moore, and three days later, at seven in the evening, we set out for the medical building on Decelles Street. Dr. Moore had extended her office hours for us, just as my mother’s friends had predicted.

  The building on Decelles was by now a familiar destination; we were well acquainted with the large round elevator buttons, the silent hallways, the oracular names on the frosted-glass door panels: Goldstein, Greenberg, de Vries. But we’d never seen anything like Vera Moore’s waiting room, in this building or anywhere else. You wanted to be early, if you were going to wait in a room like this one: chairs upholstered in velvet, framed paintings, a Persian carpet, a rolltop desk equipped with paper and pastels. I settled into one of the chairs and gazed at a watercolour of imaginary creatures resting in a cool, blue forest. Half-eagle, half-lion. Half-lizard, half-butterfly.