The Melting Pot Read online

  Why not tell your doctor? That might help. In his office after the examination you tell him—quite mildly, compared to what you feel—that he might have informed you more realistically of what this operation would entail. Quite mild and limited, but even so it takes a great summoning of strength. He is the one with the social position, the money, and the knife. You, despite your laugh, are the castrata. Your heart goes pit-a-pat as you speak, and you have a lump in your throat. To your surprise, he looks directly at your face with interest.

  He says: “Thank you for telling me that. But not everyone reacts the same way. We try to anticipate the bright side, but some people take it harder than others. Some people are special cases.”

  X

  A few months later, you read a strange, small item in the newspaper: a lone marauder, on what is presented as a berserk midnight spree, has ransacked the office of a local gynecologist. She tore diplomas from the walls and broke equipment. She emptied sample packets of medication and packages of rubber fingers and gloves, which she strewed everywhere, creating a battlefield of massacred hands. She wrote abusive epithets on the walls; she dumped file folders on the floor and daubed them with menstrual blood. As you read these details you feel the uncanny sensation of déjà vu, and your heart beats with a bizarre fear. Calm down; you have an alibi, you were deep in your law-abiding sleep. Anyhow, you would have done quite differently—not under cover of darkness, first of all, but in broad daylight when the doctor was there. You would have forced him into a white paper robe and onto the examining table, saying, “Slide your lower body to the edge of the table. Feet up in the stirrups please.” Not being built for such a position, he would have found it extremely uncomfortable. While he lay terrorized, facing the painting of common tools, you would simply have looked. Armed only with force of will, you would have looked for what would seem to him an endless time at his genitals until he himself, mesmerized by your gaze, began to look at them as some freakish growth, a barrier to himself, between the world and himself. After a while you would have let him climb down untouched, but he would never again have looked at or touched himself without remembering his terror and his inkling that his body was his cage and all his intercourse with the world was a wild and pitiable attempt to cut his way free.

  XI

  A year after your operation, you will be feeling much much better. You have your strength back, or about eighty percent of it anyway. You are hardly tired at all; the anesthetic must be nearly evaporated. You can walk erect without conscious effort, and you have grown genuinely fond of your new body, accepting its hollowness with, if not equanimity, at least tolerance. One or two symptoms, or rather habits, persist: for instance, when you get out of bed you still hold your hands clasped around your lower abdomen for support, as if it might rip away from the strain inside, even though there is no longer any strain. At times you lie awake blaming yourself for participating in an ancient social absurdity, but eventually you will cease to blame as you have ceased to participate.

  Most odd, and most obscure, you retain the tenuous sense of waiting. With effort you can localize it to a sense of waiting for something to end. A holdover, a vague habit of memory or memory of habit. Right after he cut, you waited for that worst pain to end. Then for the tears, the tiredness, and all the rest. Maybe it is a memory of habit or a habit of memory, or maybe the blade in the flesh brought you to one of life’s many edges and now you are waiting, like a woman who after much travel has come to the edge of a cliff and, for no reason and under no compulsion, lingers there too long. You are waiting for something to end, you feel closer than ever before to the end, but of what, you do not push further to ask.

  The Two Portraits of Rembrandt

  I HAVE BEFORE ME on picture postcards two self-portraits by Rembrandt, one painted in 1629, when he was twenty-three, the other in 1669, the year of his death. I have been eyeing them on and off for a long time, two years, as objects to be decoded. The message would be something beyond the obvious one about experience as registered in the flesh and the trek towards death. They seem to refer to passages, journeys, remote from Rembrandt’s; they suggest something closer to home.

  “The extraordinary phenomenon of Rembrandt’s self-portraits,” the critic Jakob Rosenberg tells us, “has no parallel in the seventeenth century or even in the entire history of art.” Sixty of them, besides etchings and drawings. Years ago, in an introductory art history class, the instructor asked why, in our opinion, did Rembrandt paint himself so many times. Egotism, I promptly thought, and that was the answer a few jocular students gave. Our instructor was disheartened. “Rembrandt seems to have felt that he had to know himself if he wished to penetrate the problem of man’s inner life,” Jakob Rosenberg says. How obvious. How could I not have perceived that, even at seventeen?

  The figure in both portraits is posed in the same way: upper body on the diagonal, head turned to face the viewer. The right side of the face is lit and the left is in shadow, but this contrast is more pronounced in the early work. In both portraits Rembrandt wears something white around his neck, while the rest of the clothing is black, first a glossy, elegant black, then, forty years later, drab and porous. From the young Rembrandt there radiates a willed elegance, an arrogance nearing defiance—youthful softness masquerading as hardness. His soft brown hair billows around his face, a long, smooth face, smoothly painted. The eyes are dark, soft, and unwelcoming, and a shadowy furrow grooves the bridge of the nose, which is straight and fleshy at the tip; the lips are rosy and curled, with the faintest suggestion of a mustache, the chin is prominent, and the space between lips and chin a shade long, a subtle disproportion adding to the general aloofness. It could be the portrait of a youth too clever for his own good painted by a discerning older person. But the painter is the youth himself, appraising his forced arrogance. A faint wonder ruffles the surface—how dare you presume to capture me, know me?

  In the later portrait, all, as one might expect, is changed utterly. Rembrandt is wearing a hat, an amber beret streaked with beige. The hair is wispier, less carefully groomed; the skin has Rembrandt’s characteristic mottled texture. No more smoothness, either in the subject or in the manner of presentation. The nose is fleshier and nubbier, the mouth a thin line. The fine slope of the jaw has given way to jowls and double chin: everywhere paunchy, pouchy fleshiness. He looks sad, weary, a man who has been through hard times. As indeed he has: he has seen his popularity and esteem, at their height in his thirties, gradually wane; he has seen three children die at birth; has suffered the loss of his wife, Saskia, and years later of his mistress and housekeeper, Hendrickje Stoffels; has lost his only son, Titus, at the age of twenty-nine; has been bankrupt and lost most of his possessions—enough to leave pouches on anyone’s face.

  Jakob Rosenberg writes that this last self-portrait exhibits “some decline in the aged artist’s expressive power. His painterly skill has not failed him, but the psychological content shows a diminished intensity. The facial expression here is mild and slightly empty, when compared to all the others in the imposing group of late self-portraits,” which the same critic calls, variously, mellow, tragic, monumental, reflecting “mythical grandeur and dignity,” “philosophic superiority,” “a deep consciousness of man’s fateful destiny,” and so forth.

  True, there is little grandeur or majesty here, but the expression is not so much empty as subdued, in the way of a man who has withdrawn his investment in his face and liquidated it, so to speak, who is in the process of ceasing to care.

  I have before me also two pictures of my father with about a forty-year interval between them, not paintings but photographs. The first is a standard graduation photo, so old that the cap and gown have almost merged with the dark background. I can just make out one sharp corner of the mortarboard floating above my father’s head, pointing forward like a lance. Held flat under the light, though, the photo relinquishes the whole silhouette—gown, hat, and tassel—black eerily detaching itself from sepia. This must ha
ve been taken on the occasion of his graduation from Brooklyn Law School, when he was twenty-two or -three, about Rembrandt’s age in the first self-portrait. My father sometimes said that if he had had the means—money, social class, correct ethnic background—to attend law school at Harvard or Yale, his life would have gone differently. He was not a complainer; this was a simple fact. It seems to me his life did not go so badly as it was, but what can I presume to know about his aspirations? I do know he wanted to make a lot of money and that from time to time, to my mother’s horror, he would invest in risky business deals cooked up with like-minded aspirers, and lose his savings. To the end of his days he kept his dream of striking it rich. Rembrandt, who was a notoriously poor financial manager, as well as hugely extravagant in his youth, was driven in later years to an odd stratagem to stave off creditors. A contract was drawn up in which Hendrickje Stoffels and his son, Titus, were made proprietors of a business, art dealers engaged in selling the works of Rembrandt, who would own nothing himself—save his genius—and be in effect working for them. My father was not a poor manager, in fact he earned his living advising others on prudently managing their businesses, and he was not too extravagant either. But he enjoyed taking risks. Maybe it was not Brooklyn Law School that thwarted him. Maybe he too had entered, tacitly, into a contract wherein his talents were used in the service of his wife and children: an employee of a sort. In any case, the graduation picture is of a man I never knew, who hardly knew himself yet.

  The connection, the curious feature, is my father’s striking resemblance to the young Rembrandt—I should say my father’s graduation photo’s resemblance to Rembrandt’s self-portrait. Even the poses are similar, though reversed—my father’s left side faces the viewer and the right side of his face is shadowed—and the costumes, black relieved by the white collar. Like Rembrandt’s, my father’s eyes are dark, only instead of being aloof and impenetrable they are penetrating—two little glints of light, like lasers, animate the pupils. The nose, like Rembrandt’s, is straight, then fleshy at the tip, the mouth has the same beautiful bow shape and haughty curl, there is the same unsettling length between mouth and prominent chin. An elongated, smooth arrogance, the blank, hard defiance of youth. Both faces are touching in their innocence and at the same time conceal what they might know, as the faces of youth can readily do.

  My father did not age as drastically as Rembrandt; his cheeks remain firm in the later photo; the face is more fleshy and molded, but hardly paunchy. Because he did not suffer the wearying effects of self-scrutiny? But why should there be any resemblance, why should the comparison be symmetrical? Granted that faces in their sixties mirror the trajectory of their owners’ lives, my father’s life had little in common with Rembrandt’s. Their similar faces took dissimilar routes to the same end. Maybe in their eighties, when the uniqueness of individual faces is subsumed under the common fate, they might again have looked alike—but neither lived that long. Meanwhile my father never lost children or wife; he was not a painter and not seeking knowledge of man’s inner life; he neither achieved wide acclaim in his youth nor lost it; his business reversals were not on so grand a scale, and unlike Rembrandt, he always managed to haul his forces together and venture anew. In this late photograph (a group picture including my mother and four friends) he appears to be a calm, wise, contented man. Still handsome, in his white shirt and gray patterned tie he looks straight into the camera, one eye, as always, open slightly wider than the other, and he is almost smiling, on the verge of a full smile—but he cannot quite yield it up, as he could not quite yield up the tear I once saw in his eye. Even so, he emits benevolence. Judicious, good-tempered. Maybe not “mythical grandeur and dignity,” but “philosophic superiority,” yes. Is this the “real” man, sage and mellow? Does he know himself at last? I feel that although dead now, he is looking straight at me, that I am looking back at myself.

  Perhaps the soul does not depart from the body at the last breath, to fly out the window and rise, but begins departing in the late years and takes its leave gradually, puff by puff, which accounts for the shrinking we notice and grieve over, the “diminished intensity” the critic complains of in the last Rembrandt self-portrait. In the late photo of my father, though, I see no diminishment yet; the face is fully alive with the abiding spirit.

  My father’s hand would slice the air dismissively at my analyzing pictures. I myself feel a tribal needling: all this trouble for pictures? He lived by the word. Pictures were a crude, provisional mode of representation and communication, happily supplanted by the advent of language. People who still looked at pictures for information were in a pre-verbal state, babies or Neanderthals. The Daily News, “New York’s Picture Newspaper,” was a publication designed for the illiterate, for “morons.” Likewise Life magazine, which prided itself on its photography; he would not have it in the house. His newspaper of choice, the New York Times, contained pictures, but he probably regarded them as a concession to the occasional lapses of its readers, or proof that certain events took place, for instance that the Big Three—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—really did meet at Yalta. Other printed matter he would not allow in the house were confession magazines and Classic Comics, which retold great books in cartoons with captions. My aunt in Brownsville once gave me two Classic Comics for my birthday. I flaunted them—he wouldn’t outlaw a birthday gift, but he offered to buy me the real books if only I would get the comics out of his sight. In the end I had to admit he was right, they were as nothing next to the real thing, and so for a long time I didn’t value pictures either. Like him, I trusted only things that came in the form of or humbly awaited translation into words.

  Or numbers. In company he liked to announce his age, a habit my mother deplored. “I’ll be fifty-three years old in February!” “I’m fifty-eight years old!” “Sixty-four last February!” he would proclaim, beaming, twinkling, puffing out his chest as if the attainment of such years without showing them deserved a decoration. This was self-knowledge of a kind: he could translate himself into numbers, he kept track. My mother would grumble or slip out of the room. She would never reveal her age. When pressed, she told me she was seven years younger than he—seven must have been the highest number she thought she could offer without suggesting a questionable age gap. But part of family lore was that my parents had met in high school. When I asked how this could be if they were seven years apart, she said my father had been behind in school because he was an immigrant. He must have been very far behind, it seemed to me, maybe even a ludicrous figure?—my own school had some hulking retarded students who turned up in the same classroom perennially, like furniture. ... Mostly I would contemplate their seven-year age difference and their meeting in high school, two irreconcilable facts, then shove it aside like a shoelace you can’t unknot—today, anyway. My mother was two years younger than my father, I learned much later. My desire to know was frustrated by one type of vanity. My father, even in his immigrant state, was not far behind at all, it turns out; his type of vanity would hardly have liked my thinking he was.

  Maybe it was their limitation and finiteness that he disliked about pictures. He loved what was bountiful and boundless and hated anything mean and narrow. (He hated the way he was offered food at the Classic Comics aunt’s house in Brownsville. “‘You don’t want a piece of fruit, do you?’” he would imitate. “What does she expect a person to say? Of course I don’t want a piece of fruit.”) Pictures were circumscribed by their frames. A house, a tree, a cloud, added up to a landscape, and that was the end of it. The space of pictures is inner space, but he didn’t look into, he looked at. Words, though, could go on forever, linear, one opening the door to a dozen others, each new one nudging at another door, and so on to infinite mansions of meditation. Nor was there any limit to what you could say; words bred more words, spawned definition, comparison, analogy. A picture is worth a thousand words, I was told in school. Confucius. But to me, too, the value seemed quite the other way around. And why not ten
thousand, a hundred thousand? Give me a picture and I could provide volumes. Meanings might be embedded in the picture, but only words could release them and at the same time, at the instant they were born and borne from the picture, seize them, give them shape and specific gravity. Nothing was really possessed or really real until it was incarnate in words. Show and Tell opened every school day, but I rarely cared to show anything. You could show forever, but how could you be sure the essence had been transmitted, without words? Words contained the knowledge, words were the knowledge, the logos, and words verified that the knowledge was there.

  Long ago, long before I knew him, my father must have had a foreign accent. I try to imagine how he sounded and hear a stranger. Did my mother, sitting next to him in high school, watch it gradually slip from him, as you watch a swimmer gradually dry in the sun, the drops first showering off, then rolling down slowly, then evaporating imperceptibly? Was there a point at which she told him, “You’ve got it, relax, you sound like everyone else”? One way or another, his command of the language, like Rembrandt’s of his brushes, reached virtuoso proportions. Maybe—and one might suspect this of Rembrandt too, judging from the early self-portrait—he was like those stubbornly perfectionist babies you hear of, who refuse to babble, and speak only when they can produce flawless paragraphs. But fluency alone is not memorable; he was verbally idiosyncratic, selective, in such a way—or to such ears—that he leaves behind most vividly a heap of phrases, as the other left canvases, by which to know him.

  My father spoke of visits to my mother’s family as “going to Williamsburg,” “going to Brownsville,” “going to Borough Park”—the last pronounced as one word with the accent on the first syllable—rather than going to her mother’s or sisters’ houses. This made the visit more of a geographical venture than a personal encounter. His mode of being in the world turned on movement, getting from one place to another rather than being anywhere, something that intensified as he aged and became less mobile. Then on a family visit, immediately upon reaching the destination he would check his watch and the car’s odometer and announce, “We made very good time.” No sooner was he settled in a chair than he would begin calculating when he might start the return trip, plotting, again, how to make the best time. Of course, he was not well in his last years and was most comfortable lying in bed. But all his life he preferred any position to sitting; he lived in physical extremes, either frenetic movement or total repose. After supper he would lie down with the New York Times on the red tufted couch in the living room and wonder why my brother, at seven years old, wouldn’t stop running around making noise and lie down with him. But he would stand to eat breakfast and stand, or pace, to converse. My brother and sister and I do not much like to sit either. We are most comfortable standing or lying down. Something in our genetic structure does not like to bend.