Leaving Brooklyn Read online

  Table of Contents

  ALSO BY

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Epigraph

  LEAVING BROOKLYN

  Hawthorne Books & Literar y Arts Portland, Oregon

  Copyright Page

  Lines from “The Road Not Taken,” by Robert Frost, copyright 1916 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston and renewed 1944 by Robert Frost. Reprinted from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, by permission of Henry Holt and Company, Inc. Lines from “ What Is This Gypsy Passion for Separation?” by Marina Tsvetayeva, from Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva, translated by Elaine Feinstein, copyright © 1971, 1981 by Elaine Feinstein. Reprinted by permission of the publsiher, E.P. Dutton, a division of NAL Penguin Inc.

  ALSO BY

  LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ:

  Rough Strife

  Balancing Acts

  Disturbances in the Field

  Acquainted with the Night

  We are Talking about Homes: A Great

  University Against Its Neighbors

  The Melting Pot

  The Four Questions

  Fatigue Artist

  Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books

  In the Family Way

  Face to Face: A Reader in the World

  Referred Pain

  The Writing on the Wall

  Introduction

  I HAVE ADMIRED LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ’S WORK ever since I read her gorgeous and unsettling novel Disturbances in the Field (1983). In the winter of 1986, I added that novel to my reading list for my seminar in women’s literature, and in 1988 I invited Lynne to Eastern Washington University for a reading. As she spoke to my students about writing, it became evident that the fierce intelligence, the generosity, and the wisdom in Lynne’s writing also define her as an individual.

  That was the year that Lynne began work on Leaving Brooklyn, an evocative and lyrical novel about the complexities of vision and desire.

  In the years since, Lynne and I have talked often about writing and about our lives as writers, and we’ve become friends. She told me that Leaving Brooklyn first came to her as an essay “in a mood of despair, thinking I had nothing more to write about. I was looking in the mirror and noticed my eye—the description of the eye in the book is indeed autobiographical—and I thought, well, if I have nothing else, I have myself. And this odd eye.”

  This odd and splendid eye veers off toward truth, toward passion, toward outrage against compliance. It follows “its desires. Light and air stroked it.”

  In Leaving Brooklyn, Lynne gives the intricacy of that gaze to her protagonist, Audrey, a young girl who grows up in postwar Brooklyn during the McCarthy era and whose right eye, legally blind, gives her secret images behind the “skin of the visible world.”

  For Audrey, a thinker and a dreamer, Brooklyn is confining, Manhattan mythic and brilliant. Her desire to escape Brooklyn leads her to the words of Euclid and Socrates and Wordsworth. She imagines herself studying at the Sorbonne. She despises Abraham for his obedience to a God who would order him to kill his son Isaac: “Abraham would have been a better person if he refused… Some parent.’ Abraham is a failure.

  And so is McCarthy. Audrey has fantasies of being accused by McCarthy and fixing her right eye on him, demolishing him with her articulate outrage. “You have exceeded the boundaries of civil behavior. Moreover, you’re nothing but a pig.”

  However, she is aware of the boundary between dream and reality: “I was a dreamer with a dream life. Despite what people think, dreamers are very clear about what it fantasy and what is reality—they have to be.”

  Audrey discovers a certain power and joy in her way of seeing: “I had to peel whatever I saw.” But her parents consider her eye a flaw and take her to an eye doctor, who fits Audrey for a lens, a “hard, clear plastic disk with about the diameter of a half dollar… molded like a human eye…and, in the swift sneaky manner of doctors, [he] spread my upper and lower lids with his fingers and slipped it in. I wanted to howl in protest.”

  Painful and irritating, this stiff lens warps what has been precious and freeing to Audrey: “With its confinement, a freedom seemed to have been taken from me.” In her protest against this violation of self, Audrey flushes the lens.

  The treatment of time in Leaving Brooklyn is complex in its fluidity, in its graceful passage from present to future to past. The point of view is equally complex. Readers are within the perspective of the very young Audrey one moment and the next moment in the perspective of Audrey as an adult wondering about her younger self, doubting, evaluating. It’s a brilliant form for telling a story, sophisticated and inventive.

  Audrey’s first childhood crush is on Bobby, whose mother is the local chicken flicker. For a while, he is the focus of Audrey’s strong imaginary life, of daydreams, of long conversations: “In my mind, as always, I told him how things truly were and felt.” Bobby’s mother has a cleft palate and speaks in jumbled sounds, but she is accomplished at pulling “feathers from the chicken, her fingers so swift that they dissolved in a blur… tossed up by the energy in her fingers …while the chicken flicker sat in the midst of them, large, solid, and draped, a Madonna assumed into a cloud.”

  Lynne juxtaposes the sensuous immediacy of the young Audrey’s experiences—external and internal—with the reflective voice of the adult Audrey as she evaluates her experiences, challenges her memories, and separates what happened from what might have happened, sometimes even adjusting the story: “I am confused about who I was: why else would I need to tell this story of my eye? The confusion is that I seem to have grown up into someone who could not have been me as a child. Yet, in the telling the girl grows to sound more and more like the woman I became.”

  I find this border between memoir and fiction mesmerizing, and I trust the voice of the adult Audrey even as she doubts herself: “Even as I recall it, record it, I suspect I really didn’t do such an outrageous thing and memory is falsifying, inventing what I wish I could have done or imagining it from what I have since become capable of doing.”

  Lynne has told me that it was her intention to have this novel “read as a memoir… an autobiographical account, when in truth it is highly fictionalized.” Audrey’s vision—intuitive, daring—mirrors Lynne’s way of writing: going beyond what is apparent; challenging the mysterious border between imagination and memory; rejecting the stiff lens of conformity.

  Some writers, I believe, are born with that odd and magical way of seeing, and Lynne is certainly one of them. For writers, there is no other way of seeing: they’re drawn toward the beauty found in distortion and celebrate the gift and the persistence of this odd vision.

  URSULA HEGI Author of Stones from the River

  He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only.

  —WILLIAM BLAKE

  LEAVING BROOKLYN

  THIS IS THE STORY OF AN EYE, and how it came into its own.

  “You were perfect, when you first came out,” my mother insisted. But between the moment of my birth and her next inspection I suffered an injury to my right eye. How it occurred is a mystery. Some blunder made in handling was all she would murmur—drops, doctors, nurses, vagueness: “These things happen.”

  My mother probably didn’t know the details of the eye injury—if it was an injury—for it would have been sacrilege for her to have questioned a doctor at that time and in that place, Brooklyn on the eve of war, a locus of customs and mythologies as arbitrary and rooted as in the Trobriand Islands or the great Aztec city of Teotihuacán where ritual sacrifices were performed monthly, the victims’ blood coursing down the steps of the great Pyramid of the Sun. In comparison, my damage was minor.

&nbs
p; Her vagueness still puzzled me, though, because her favorite retort, when she suspected me of lying, was “To thine own self be true.” As it happened, lying was not my style; I leaned more towards omission. But she was canny; she knew when something was missing or out of kilter. So did I, and so I found her phrase suspicious. “To thine own self be true,” on her lips, meant that though I might persist in lying to her, I had better be honest with myself. Yet she used it to pry out the truth, the whole truth. Shouldn’t she have investigated the matter of the eye, likewise, to be true to herself?

  (“Not she. Don’t call her she,” I can already hear my father interrupting, not understanding that the “she” is a form of war - like intimacy, referring to someone so close she doesn’t require a noun, someone on the embattled ground between first and third person, self and other. “Call her your mother.” Very well, my mother.)

  Only much later did I find that those words referred to quite a different sort of fidelity, to not bending your identity out of shape to fit the fashion. But by that time I was light years out of Brooklyn. I was becoming an actress. I was playing Polonius’s daughter.

  I never broached the subject with my father, such matters not being, as he might put it, in his “department.” Also, he needed to be right in everything he undertook, and bristled at any hint of error or bungling. His department covered money and cars and going to work. I knew about the money part, for as far back as I could remember he would sit down after dinner at his small desk in the dining room, a desk that looked almost too small for him to fit his knees under, and I would stand beside him, jiggling the metal handles on the drawers, wordless but beseeching, till he pulled me up onto his lap. With arms reaching around me, he would go through mail, tear open envelopes, leaf through papers, and write. What was he doing?

  He explained what bills were. “You should pay a bill the same day you receive it. Why wait?”

  He would write out a check in his gallant, illegible writing—so that forever after I considered illegible writing a sign of masculinity and sophistication—put it in a small white envelope, dart his tongue across the wide V of the flap, pound it shut on the desk with his fist—the vibrations thumped excitedly through my body—and affix a stamp. Then he would tear up the remaining bits of paper littering the desk. Once in a while he even tore up an envelope unopened. He tore it across, then tore two or three more times with fierce gusts of energy, and threw the scraps in the wastebasket under the desk.

  “Why do you have to tear it up?”

  “It’s garbage.”

  “I know, but why do you have to tear it up? Why can’t you just throw it away?”

  He looked at me in startled, confused pleasure, as if I had cunningly put my finger on one of the profound and inexplicable contradictions at the heart of things, as if I had asked why is there suffering in the world or why do men constantly make war if they say they want peace. He tousled my hair and had no answer, which surprised me because he usually did.

  I minded the mystery of the eye more than the eye itself. I craved an exotic story to tell, a label by which I might be known. At school there was Carlotta Kaplowitz, famed for her dark beauty and wondrous name—one of the few girls not named Barbara or Susan or Carol or Judy—who contracted polio. When she returned months later on crutches, scattering true medical tales like favors, she was lionized in the playground. Polio was dramatic, though Carlotta’s case, like Hans Castorp’s tuberculosis, was mild—she would walk again. Another girl, one of the Carols, stayed home for a whole term with an unnamed ailment.

  I brought her the class assignments. How enviously I breathed the musty, invalid air of the shaded room where she sat propped up on pillows, her every need attended to by her scurrying mother, like a Victorian heroine enervated by vocation, like Elizabeth Barrett before she met Browning.

  The iris of my right eye was smaller than that of the left. And at the top of the sphere, the part you couldn’t see unless the lid was raised, was a milky, blurry patch, a scar. It was as if someone had painted an eye and smudged the upper rim, giving it an unfinished look, then was called away from the easel—an emergency, a long trip—and never came back.

  The smudging was not all. Because of a weak muscle, the iris, of its own volition and at unpredictable times, would drift from its resting place to float—I almost wrote “flee”—beneath the upper lid for a few seconds, leaving blank white space. A wand-dering eye, it is aptly called. Restless, bored with the banality of what is presented, it escapes to the private darkness beneath the lid, with the wild dancing colors. Soon it drifts back and attends to its duties, not being totally irresponsible. Much of the time no one would know about its little trip, just as no one knows about the secret journeys or aberrations of anyone else.

  The eye was of scant use in seeing what had to be seen in daily life in Brooklyn. It was made for another sort of vision. By legal standards it was a blind eye, yet it did see in its idiosyncratic way—shapes and colors and motion, all in their true configurations except all turned to fuzz. Its world was a Seurat painting, with the bonds hooking the molecules all severed, so that no object really cohered; the separate atoms were lined up next to one another, their union voluntary, not fated. This made the world, through my right eye, a tenuous place where the common, reasonable laws of physics did not apply, where a piece of face or the leg of a table or frame of a window might at any moment break off and drift away. I could tease and tempt the world, squinting my left eye shut and watching things disintegrate, and when I was alone my delight was to play with the visible world this way, breaking it down and putting it back together. I had secret vision and knowledge of the components of things, of the volatile nature of things before they congeal, of the tenuousness and vulnerability of all things, unknown to those with common binary vision who saw the world of a piece, with a seamless skin like the skin of a sausage holding things together. My right eye removed the skin of the visible world.

  And so the girl I was, the girl I would like to reincarnate here, possessed double vision. Not simultaneous. Alternate. Her world was veiled and then, when she shut the ordinary eye and allowed the other free play, it was unveiled; the act of learning anything was not absorbing or digging out or encountering, but removing a veil, and it was the most dramatic act imaginable. From the start she had a taste for drama, self-dramatization, and her themes, naturally, were secrecy and hiding and revelation, the doling out and manipulation of information. She thought that she too could be unveiled in similar fashion, that like an ocean, she was surface and depths, and she feared this unveiling without knowing what would be revealed or why it might be dangerous. Perhaps it was simply the secret of her double vision that she feared would be exposed, for as her childhood moved along its dual paths she sensed she wasn’t supposed to be seeing what she saw.

  I still see as she saw. With all the advances of optics they have never found a way to fuse the two worlds. As I approached middle age I needed the usual reading glasses: my left eye got a mild prescription for aging eyes. For my right eye, nothing but window glass. That rebel eye refused to be corrected. It clung to what it had seen for her and done for her from the start.

  Telling about her is an attempt at unveiling her, an act of self-sabotage, if one assumes that the woman I am today is that girl worked over and layered by time. The common wisdom holds that the process of growing older involves a toughening of the skin. But it may be the opposite, a gradual removal of layers, a peeling process. The girl has been stripped by time to produce me. I suspect I was there all along, though she is so very tough and layered that when I focus my vision to see her I can scarcely glimpse myself beneath. Before she vanishes altogether from memory—for even now memory threatens to be more invention than recall—I want to make her transparent. I want to expose the mystery of change and recall, peel her story off her the way some people can peel an orange, in one exquisite unbroken spiral.

  MY MOTHER OPENED the broiler door and orange and blue flames leaped out. Inside w
as a chicken we had bought that afternoon from the chicken man on Rutland Road, whose son, Bobby, off fighting the war, was my secret love.

  “Oh my God,” cried my mother, and she ran to the sink and filled a glass with water.

  At last. Something was happening in Brooklyn, our remote little outpost. I put down the Reader’s Digest and watched as though it were a Technicolor movie. My mother poured the water on the flames, which made them leap higher and glow more orange. They brightened, they sizzled and cavorted. She watered the fire and it grew like an overwrought plant.

  My father ran in from the back porch where he was smoking his cigar in the early spring evening, kicked the broiler door shut, and turned off the oven. A few bluish-green flames oozed from the crevices. My mother stood gasping, rubbing her hands up and down her flowered apron, as the escaping flames dwindled to smoke and the rancid smell of drowned grease filled the kitchen. After a moment or two my father bent and cautiously opened the door. The flames were still alive but sizzled in a more docile way. He poured a pot of water over the chicken, and there was a weak dreary noise, a dying sputter. The fire was quenched.

  I waited for some sarcastic insult to come from my father’s lips, for he was compelled to insult people at moments of crisis. But he was so shocked he could not say a word, only glare. His face darkened. A muscle in his neck started twitching.

  “I couldn’t help it,” said my mother. “When I heard it on the radio I was so upset I forgot all about the chicken.”

  Roosevelt was dead.

  This, I knew, had something to do with the war. My earliest years were years of wartime. Someone born elsewhere and writing those words might be recalling carnage and deprivation. At college a student older than I read aloud a personal essay about trudging along a road leading out of Dresden, the bloody bodies of people and horses sprawled in her path. I had never seen a bloody body, not even an ordinary dead one; her essay made me feel innocent, criminally innocent. Earlier, in an acting class I took when I was fifteen, I saw branded on the forearm of a pale girl a many-digited number two and a half inches above the wrist. I had known the girl through the fall and winter, but only in the spring when we wore short-sleeved blouses did the number show itself. I knew it for exactly what it was, though in Brooklyn we never spoke of those details of the war and I did not read the papers much. It was something one knew, that was all, like competition and death. I felt a twinge of envy between my ribs and was immediately ashamed and horrified, for we were trained, in Brooklyn, to feel shame at every wayward emotion, but I forgive her now, that girl I was. She was ignorant and impoverished. I didn’t covet the other girl’s suffering, only her knowledge; I wished it were possible to have the one without the other.