Leaving Brooklyn Read online

  “I really do need to keep checking for about another month and a half. After that it wouldn’t be fair… ” He paused for a response, but as usual I could think of nothing to say. “I never know what you’re thinking,” he burst out, dashing his hand over his head as if to smooth something down. Maybe his hair had been unruly, when it was thicker. “You never say anything.”

  He was right. In his office I cultivated a silence as impenetrable as the chicken flicker ’s. Bobby ’s mother. She couldn’t speak, and I wouldn’t. I had always admired her silence, or rather her ability to live and move in silence, while I used words to reassure myself that my life was truly happening. Now, with no effort, I was in possession of that power. It didn’t feel like power. Was the world, I wondered, as stupefying to Bobby ’s mother as the scenes in the eye doctor ’s office were to me?

  “Are you all right, Audrey? What do you think about all this? About me?”

  Thanks to my father and the evening news, I knew what the Fifth Amendment was. You didn’t have to answer if your answer might get you into trouble.

  “Say something. Please.”

  He was pleading. I said the first thing that came into my head. “I ’m still a child. I don’t have to think anything.”

  He froze in astonishment. “Of course you have to think. Everyone has to think. I think about it. I don’t do this with everyone who walks in here, you know. Do you suppose I do?”

  I had never thought about that one way or the other. I never thought of him apart from myself, what his life or habits might be, whether he had been born anywhere and had a history. (Not with everyone who walked in, certainly. That was out of the question.) I thought about me, about how I might escape from Brooklyn and what I would find in the world. Outside of the time we spent in his office the doctor was an abstraction and might not have existed. He simply happened to me. He sprang out of nothingness that day in September when he opened the door and beckoned.

  “Don’t you ever wonder what could make me do this? Don’t you realize this is as bizarre for me as it is for you?”

  It was the word “bizarre” that reached me. No one had ever used it to me in conversation. It was a word from my fantasy conversations with the people I would know in later life, real life. For the first time, I spoke to him in my truthful voice. “Oh, no,” I said. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “Christ, you don’t get it at all, do you? You don’t see… Something happened when you first sat down here, I don’t know what it was, the way you looked, maybe, so far away and contained, yet so frightened. So beautiful, or almost… on the verge of it, any minute you might be beautiful. It was better the minute before. Your cheeks were burning hot, I guess it was terror, I could feel the heat coming off them. I don’t know, it set something off. I swear to you I never did anything like this, I mean with anyone so young. And a patient. You don’t realize the risk—I have a family—you don’t realize I ’m obsessed! I think about you all the time, with my other patients, with my wife… It’s as if I carry you around with me, I can’t get you out of my head and yet in a way I don’t even know you, it’s a kind of madness…” He stumbled into the patient’s chair I usually sat in and hung his head, making an awful gulping noise. “I count the days till you come. Can you understand how humiliating it is for a grown man to feel this way about a—a—practically a child? Do you know there are moments when I want to steal you away, run somewhere with you—there’s something in you I have to have. My God, it’s like some awful thing you read in the papers…”

  On he went, and I sat opposite him, naked, compelled to hear. I wanted to cover my ears but that was infantile and wouldn’t help anyway—the words would keep breaking on me in Waves, only muffled. It was like being possessed, he said, he knew the situation was impossible but he was a prisoner, I drove him wild, he was drowning in it, he even named unmentionable parts of my body and what they made him feel, which made me want to die of shame, for it was one thing to do it and another to say it—all of it in disjointed phrases that I recognized from reading great books as the worst kind of banalities. Had he known me in the slightest he would have prepared something elegant and literary.

  His words assaulted in waves and I was washed under them. I was out beyond my depth, I who had no perception of depth. If I kept listening I would drown with him. I yearned to be home with the blankets around me, reading a book. If only I had some clothes on. My bare skin was the target of his words, absorbing them like accusations. Maybe I was supposed to apologize, but I didn’t know what I had done. I had done only what he wanted.

  “I wish I could do something for you,” he said more quietly. The spurt of madness was ebbing, thank God. His voice got tight, as if it had to squeeze itself out past something impossible to swallow. “I feel I should.”

  In the midst of drowning I glimpsed it, a piece of driftwood. My moment, my plot opening. Something hidden and unsuspected sprang out of me to clutch it. Not the Sorbonne—that would be like asking for the moon. “I want to take another acting class. Scene Study.”

  “Acting class?”

  Naturally he was bewildered. I never told him what I did after school, or in it, for that matter. Or anything at all. But I knew it would make no difference. And I wanted it. I had learned how to want with a vengeance.

  “Yes, I ’m going to be an actress.” I decided that instant, as the words formed.

  I was prepared for an ironic comment of the sort I might get from my father. But he simply asked me how much I would need. As I figured it out silently, my mother stirred within me, her fine housewifely efficiency and grasp of the uses to which things could be put. I named the exact sum, no extras, no carfare.

  “I ’ll write you a check.” He opened his desk drawer.

  “No. What would I do with a check? I told you, I ’m a child.”

  “Sorry. Of course. Cash, then. That way is better for me too.”

  I nodded.

  He reached into his back pocket.

  I accepted the bills but had nowhere to put them. They lay in my open palm, against my bare thigh. Months ago, from our porch, my mother had watched as a boy from down the block gave me two dollars. When I came up the steps she told me never to take money from men on the street. Laughing at her, I explained he had borrowed it to buy lunch, but she stood firm: no matter what it was for, it just didn’t look right. This wasn’t the street, though.

  “I have to go home.” I got up and looked around for my purse.

  “I know you must be upset by what I’ve said. I’m sorry, Audrey. Maybe I shouldn’t have spoken, but—” He reached for me but I evaded him. He might start all over again. I took my things into the bathroom, dressed quickly, and fled.

  On the way to the subway I paused at the church. I had passed it so many times before and never stopped: the spell of the eye doctor’s office began and ended at the subway steps and I could not heed anything else along the way. But today felt different. I paced around it, taking in the curves and planes of the warm stone, squinting a bit to see how the contours would dissolve and reassemble. Through my right eye it looked like the jagged, shakily balanced still lifes in the museum a few blocks away, where my adventurous girlfriend who found the acting class had once taken me. It teetered on its foundations, a sinuous pile of stones strung like beads.

  The message on the signboard said: “The Church is a haven of rest for all. Come in and refresh your spirit.” I wondered if that could mean me too. Wasn’t I part of “all”?

  “All” meant you didn’t have to stop and think it over. I pushed open one of the immense double doors and went in, tiptoeing down the center aisle. I had never seen such high and grand inner spaces except in Radio City Music Hall, where my mother took a party of girls for my twelfth birthday—though what I remembered most about that outing was the man mastur - bating in the little platform between the subway cars, rubbing himself industriously with thumb and forefinger through the fabric of his pants. He had caught my eye but I loo
ked away and pretended I hadn’t seen.

  Late afternoon light filtered through stained glass windows, dappling the marble fonts and great stone pillars and statues along the side walls with patches of rainbow. Up in front was an altar decked with mounds of red and yellow flowers. The bur - nished mahogany pews were orderly and serene. Three people sat scattered far apart. I returned to the back and slid into the last row.

  I had never been in a church before. Entering, actually sitting down, was the most alien and forbidden thing I had ever done. I could sooner have told my mother that I slept with the eye doctor than that I had gone into a church to refresh my spirit. She would have judged it high treason, and somewhere in her rebuke would have come the words “To thine own self be true.”

  This was their holy place, I knew, where people came to worship the man born in that inexplicable way (nonsense, my father said) and then sacrificed in that horrible way, for which we were unjustly held responsible. Therefore you could not trust any of them, my father said, and what they had done to us in the war was too awful even to be spoken of. A riddle: we must keep it in mind always and forever but never speak of it. Why was it that things so real in their savagery that your heart rocked in its cradle of blood at the mere thought of them must never be spoken of?

  Yet here I was in their sanctuary, a traitor and trespasser. It should have felt very wrong; I waited for the familiar Brooklyn shame to prickle my skin but nothing happened. It was so alluring here, and the allure so remote from anything like God or the war. It was simply the place itself, the size, the emptiness, the light. For the first time in memory, I was in a place—a haven—where no one could get at me, and that was holiness enough. It was all the holiness I needed at fifteen.

  I gave my spirit leave to be refreshed. Vast as they were, the vaulted spaces around me expanded, till at last there was space enough to breathe in. I took huge breaths of stillness and calm, as though I had never breathed my fill before. That such a place existed and I had found it, a place to be alone and true to one’s self, made me flush with intimations of possibility. Maybe all of life need not be “getting used to” things I dreaded. Maybe there was another way to live it, some free and unhampered way I could recover from those years before I stood waiting on the ration lines gripping my mother’s hand, before I began school and was assigned a place in the ranks. Like old springs cramped for eons in a tiny space, my feelings slowly uncoiled, and as they uncoiled, spread a blossoming misery through me. Confusions wound out of me like snakes squirming and stretching at my feet. In this vast space I could admit what was not admissible in Brooklyn: how unhappy I was. Had I told my mother I was unhappy she would have replied that I was mistaken, that I, so young and so fortunate—simply to have been born safely on this soil was fortunate—could have no idea what real unhappiness was.

  From the mere naming of it sprang a passionate elation, and I wished never to leave the church. I could sleep in the pews, go out and scavenge for food, and spend the days in blissful contemplation of the miseries I was denied at home. It would be ages before they found me.

  But they would, in the end. I was not free, I was still a child. I had to return to Brooklyn, though I knew, just as certainly as I knew the source of my elation, that the moment I stepped out on the street my confusions would writhe their way back inside me.

  I trudged up the aisle and leaned my body on the great door. In the gathering darkness outside, streaked with white shards from the streetlights, my eye teared under the lens.

  I couldn’t tell how long I had stayed in the church, but the subway was more crowded than ever before—rush hour at its peak. I had to stand on the little platform between the cars, crushed by businessmen in suits, carrying briefcases. I hardly minded, I was so dazed, dreaming of my future life in faraway places that seemed newly attainable and welcoming, glimmering with silvery adventure, when I thought I felt something moving high on the back of my left leg. I stiffened. It circled on my thigh, exploring a small tender area with immense concentration and patience. I tried to move but there was nowhere to go. I glanced furtively at the men near me, to connect faces with hands, but we were packed so tight, sticking together like raisins in a box, that it could have been any one of three or four or, I tried to hope, no one at all, an innocent jiggling briefcase.

  It was becoming an effort to draw breath. I must do something. What would a sensible person like my mother do to make it stop? She would turn to the most likely man and say loudly, “Get your hands off me!” The prospect was appalling; I was not capable of it. What if I picked the wrong one? I would die of shame, with no place to run. I felt guilty already at the thought of a wrong accusation. And all the while the hand, the fingers, moved along my thigh.

  It was an express train. Local stations where I might have escaped whizzed cruelly by. The trip would never end; before it ended I would break into parts like those Cubist paintings. This couldn’t be happening, it was too vile, it was probably not a hand at all, I was imagining it—my own dirty mind, corrupted, while on the outside I still looked like a decent schoolgirl. How on earth could any of these ordinary businessmen wish to do something so pointless on a subway? The very idea was absurd. Unless they could tell by looking at me. Could it show? My parents didn’t see it. Maybe only certain kinds of people… I tried again to force myself through the packed bodies but it was impossible. If only I could faint. I could pretend to faint. In movies fainters closed their eyes and went demurely limp, then people picked them up and fanned them and gave them brandy, but it was so crowded here that no one would notice. I would suffocate under their feet.

  To make the stations move on, I set my mind little goals: the capitals of all the states, the periodic table of the elements, lines of poetry (“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood / And sorry I could not travel both…”), but I had to abandon each one, I couldn’t concentrate; and all the while the hand moved around and around and I sneaked looks at the men near me, ashamed to face them directly, as if I were doing something atrocious. I noticed one on my left wearing a light brown fedora with a dark brown band. His little blue eyes seemed made of porcelain, dainty yet hard, and they stared straight ahead. His tight lips and double chin were lines painted on the rosy blob of his face. But maybe I was doing him an injustice. Would the hand never have enough? How long could it make those same circuits? I knew a bit about men now, the tenacity of their wants, the ecstatic monotony of repetition, but all that knowledge was in Manhattan, while right this minute the train was burrowing its way to Brooklyn where I was just a girl, I didn’t really know anything, please stop, leave me alone, I’m not what you think, it’s all a mistake.

  At last the train dragged into a station and I bored my way out. I shot a fierce look at the porcelain-eyed man. His face didn’t change a jot. On the platform I smoothed out my dress. Surely the fingers had left tracks on my body, grooves that would stay for life and that everyone would see, with their vaunted depth perception.

  AT HOME I FOUND a note, hand-delivered, my mother said, by one of the sorority girls. “We regret to inform you… This is no reflection on… work out for the best, in the long run.” Naturally. I should have known. I had not told the truth at the interview. I had quibbled over words like a Jesuit, to justify a lie, or a rather significant omission. Nor had I been true to myself, and that, I decided, was the real reason I had been rejected. The sorority sisters, with their unflawed binary vision, had seen right through to the depths of me—to my scorn and my secrets—and pronounced judgment.

  My mother tried to console me. Don’t feel bad. It wasn’t important enough to waste my feelings on—as if I had a limited supply. These were ignorant girls who had no right to judge me and anyway could not appreciate me. I was “different.”

  I always shrank in my skin on hearing that word, “differ - ent.” Not because I wanted to be like others—I wanted others to be like me. Yet I was grateful for her loyalty. I was swept by a rush of love. I wanted to fall on her neck and sob and tell her
what had happened on the subway, and be stroked and soothed and assured this would never happen again, and hear her righteous fury at the bad man. But how could I? What happened on the subway seemed connected to my going into the church and to the eye doctor and the money and the acting class, none of which I could ever tell her about. I saw my oracular mother diminish before my eyes and become useless; I could never tell her anything again because everything was connected to everything else in away only my bad eye could grasp. And even though she might understand if I could bring myself to explain the connections, they were gossamer connections, a web that would fall into shreds if I pressed it too hard for logic and meaning, compressed it into outline form. Besides, I wouldn’t know how or where to begin, how to invent a language of connections. There were barriers, thickets of ignorance and confusion in both of us that I would have to hack my way through to arrive at the clearings of understanding. It was simply too hard to do, the distance to cover was too great. I would have to remain alone in the midst of it. We would never see the same thing or occupy the same landscape. In the end, this longing to have her see through my eyes, just once to feel how the world looked and felt to me, would be forever frustrated.

  When she grew old she developed a partial blindness peculiar to the old, though in some cases, her doctor said, it could begin as early as forty. In this ailment, some sadistic metaphor of the gods, the vision dims and blurs at the center, leaving the victims to see a fuzzy sphere of indistinct gray bordered by a brighter, articulated penumbra of reality. They cannot see what is right in front of them, only peripheries; they recognize things by the fluttery outlines. They cock their heads, peer and squint to get around the edge of the central vacuum, catch the bright ring and yank it back to the center by the rays of the eye, but the bright world eludes them, forever on the teasing edge.